How Useful Is The Vagus Nerve, Really?

It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!

Have a question or a request? We love to hear from you!

In cases where we’ve already covered something, we might link to what we wrote before, but will always be happy to revisit any of our topics again in the future too—there’s always more to say!

No question/request too big or small 😎

❝I keep seeing more and more things that vagus nerve stimulation is supposed to improve but I suspect not everything can really be just hummed away, so… How much is science, and how much is more in the realm of healing crystals?❞

The short answer is that there’s a lot of both!

For example, we’ve written before about how vagus nerve stimulation has been researched and found potentially helpful for managing:

• Depression, inflammation, and heart disease
• Diabetes and glycemic issues in general
• Multiple sclerosis and autoimmune disease in general
• Alzheimer’s disease and dementia in general
• Rheumatoid arthritis (we already mentioned inflammation and autoimmune diseases, but this is an interesting paper so we included it)

You can read about these things and more, here: The Vagus Nerve (And How You Can Make Use Of It)

However, at the same time, the vagus nerve cannot necessarily be used to “reset” everything from your anxiety to your reputation at the local pot-luck.

The McGill Office for Science & Society described it thus:

❝The vagus nerve is a great example of what I would call the boogeyman/panacea myth: everything wrong with you, they claim, is due to the vagus nerve, and every cure passes through the vagus nerve as well. In an ever-complex world, believing a simple story of good and evil can bring clarity, but this lucidity is a mirage.

What the wellness community recommends for stimulating the vagus nerve—eye movements, meditation, massage, cold-water immersion, and singing and humming—, if it works, is likely to be beneficial through a very simple concept: relaxation. Taking a moment to yourself to pause a stressful situation and focus on your breathing can, indeed, temporarily help with feeling unwell. The vagus nerve trappings are just scientific dressing, meant to transform common sense into a cutting-edge, all-natural body hack.

Faced with so much vagal hype, the best response is to rouse ourselves from our parasympathetic state and fight the temptation of easy answers with a healthy dose of skepticism.❞

Read in full: Resetting the Hype Around the Vagus Nerve

There are also, hitting the market these days, a plethora of devices to do the vagus nerve stimulation for you, rather than using massaging or humming techniques. Some have already been given FDA approval, but only for certain uses (including: epilepsy, migraine, depression, rheumatoid arthritis, stroke rehab), though wellness practitioners of various kinds may recommend them for countless “off-label” purposes.

However, research in such technology is slow and patchy, because studies use widely different stimulation settings (e.g. frequency, intensity, waveform, and location) which makes it difficult to compare results across devices or from one RCT to another.

You read more about this here: Using the vagus nerve to treat disease: Review maps today’s science, points to tomorrow’s therapies

And also here: Ethical Issues in Vagus Nerve Stimulation and Deep Brain Stimulation

Want to learn more?

For a much more comprehensive exploration of the topic than we have room for here, you might consider:

Accessing the Healing Power of the Vagus Nerve – by Dr. Stanley Rosenberg ← this is a clear, easy, practical guide. Some of the benefits claimed in here are reaching a bit, so do be aware of that, but on the other hand we’d encourage you to not write the rest of the book off because of it. It’d be a bit like someone extolling the (genuine) virtues of kale and adding in a few things that might be true but science doesn’t support—the overly bold extra claims don’t mean that kale isn’t healthy and doesn’t have the other actually-proven benefits.

The Polyvagal Theory – by Dr. Stephen Porges ← this on the other hand is for if you want a really deep understanding of the topic, and are not afraid of dense, technical language (don’t worry, new terms/ideas are explained the book progresses, so a layperson can benefit just fine if you read it cover to cover, it simply means you might not be able to open it at a random page and immediately understand what’s going on).

Enjoy!