We function with a two party system. One system is all about survival in the moment. It wants to fight to make things right and preserve safety. It focuses on strength, rational thought, and preparedness while pulling away the energy from supportive pursuits and considerations about tomorrow.
The opposite party would rather make love, not war. It is all about supporting everything and making sure everything is getting the nurturance it needs to be ok.
Those who don’t know me might think I am talking about politics, but I have no interest in politics whatsoever. What I am talking about is the body. It is a two party system. Those systems are known as the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous systems. Both of these systems send nerves to every organ and gland in the body. In each area, one system increases activity while the other decreases activity.
Most folks have heard of the sympathetic nervous system, as this is the system associated with stress. This is the fight-or-flight system that pumps out adrenaline that revs us up. It increases heart rate, opens lungs up, increases blood flow to the muscles and brain, and opens the pupils to increase our peripheral vision. It prepares us for emergency action; fight-or-flight. These nerves come out of the spine wherever there are ribs.
This is all well and good, but to do this it steals energy and blood flow from all the other parts of the body. It shuts down digestion, kidneys, sex drive, reduces feeling/pain awareness, immune function, hormone production, and cellular growth and repair. In an emergency situation this is all fine, as we can do without these functions for brief periods of time. But we cannot be healthy if this suppression continues for a long time.
The health creating nervous system is the one that most people know little about: the parasympathetic nervous system. For most of the body, this system exists in just one nerve, the Vagus nerve, which comes out of the skull under the ear and follows the big blood vessels in the neck down into the body proper to all the organs and glands, except the adrenals. It is parasympathetic nerves that control your digestion of food, elimination, kidney and bladder function, slowing down the heart and decreasing blood pressure, increasing immune function and hormonal function, decreasing inflammation, as well as stimulating growth and repair of all your tissues. And yes, it is parasympathetic activity that stimulates your sex drive.
The Vagus nerve is your health nerve. Most of the health issues we concern ourselves with are a consequence of an imbalance between the “two parties” – the Vagus nerve and the sympathetic nerves. Like breathing, the body is designed to have a rhythmic flow back and forth between the two parties to keep everything healthy. When things get stuck, as happens in chronic stress, this rhythmic flow gets stopped and ill health results.
It is stimulating and reestablishing this balance that is the bread and butter of Chiropractic. This has always been the core of how and why Chiropractic works at improving health. Adjusting the neck stimulates the Vagus nerve and adjusting the rest of the spine stimulates the Sympathetic nerves. A lot of Chiropractic research in the early days was all about just what bodily functions each vertebra affects.
What stimulated this article was a crowd-funded project for a way to stimulate the Vagus nerve whenever you got too stressed to help you reestablish balance. The system involved a phone app that was supposed to somehow measure your stress levels and then at times of high stress signal a vibrator you wore on your breastbone to start vibrating. The idea was that the vibrations would transmit through bone conduction to the Vagus nerve and turn it on. As near as I can tell, this concept is based on previous studies that show vibrations in the throat from chanting, humming, swallowing, yodeling, and similar activities stimulates the Vagus nerve.
Electric Vagus nerve stimulators are used in the US as implantable devices similar to heart pacemakers, except they wrap around the Vagus nerve in the neck. They are very effective for digestive disorders and depression. External devices are approved for use in Europe, but are not available here in the US except for one device found on Amazon called Nervana (Link Here). The field of transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation is just taking off in the US and Europe based on the first research papers on the subject I have been reading.
If you have fibromyalgia, or inflammatory conditions in the gut or systemically, this is a huge area of potential benefit. One researcher discovered that stimulation of the vagus could prevent septic shock, something that affects hundreds of thousands of people every year. The stimulation reduced the release of the inflammatory cytokine TNF alpha by 75%, preventing the collapse of the gut lining that allows the massive infiltration of gut bacteria into the blood stream producing the toxic shock. Read about this here.
Bottom line: anything we can do to increase our Vagus nerve outflow is going to be good for us in these overly stressed times. Stress over-stimulates our sympathetic fight-or-flight nerves, and Vagus stimulation reverses the effects of this. There are many things we can do to stimulate our Vagus nerves ourselves, such as can be found in this article on 32 ways to stimulate your Vagus nerve.
Health is all about balance. It does not matter whether we are talking about society or the human body. Too much of one thing is never good for our overall health. This is especially true of our health controlling nervous systems, the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nerves. Life is designed to be a gentle swing back and forth between opposites. This is the yin and yang of life. This defines health in a thousand systems in the body producing self-correcting feedback loops. Life is supposed to be wiggly, that is how it survives and adapts to a constantly changing universe.