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4 Ways to Activate Your Vagus Nerve That Aren’t Meditating

Sarah Kat
3 min readMar 3, 2024

Photo by Bishka Nguyen on Unsplash

For stressed people who cannot stay still

I’m sure you have heard the hype about vagus nerve activation – it’s the wellness movement of the moment.

In brief, the vagus nerve is a trigger for your parasympathetic nervous system to kick into gear.

Your sympathetic nervous system is in control of your stress response. It keeps you working when you are tired, and keeps you wired when you need to be sleeping.

In our modern world, we are all living too much in our sympathetic nervous state. And despite its soft name – it is not soft on our systems.

Too much stress is a major contributing factor to poor physical and mental health. That might be a bold claim, but I am a healthcare worker and I do see a lot of stressed people on my patient list every day.

On the other side of the coin, we have the parasympathetic nervous system. This is our rest and digest mode.

Suffice to say that most of us spend far too little time here. Hence the attention that vagus nerve activation is getting lately.

Activating your vagus nerve directly switches your mode from sympathetic (fight or flight) to parasympathetic (rest and digest).

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Sarah Kat
Sarah Kat

Written by Sarah Kat

Self help, neuropsychology, small business and marketing. An Elective Orphan and abuse survivor. https://bit.ly/highlights-email

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