The importance of the vagus nerve in restoring health

A re-visitation of my first ever post on Substack, about the vagus nerve and the bug, and why there is still too little interest in the vagus nerve.

When I left hospital after 14 days in solitary confinement, I could not understand how every system in my body collapsed simultaneously, and how most of those systems recovered simultaneously on day 11 of my confinement in ICU. I asked a retired nurse how that could be possible and she answered in two words. Vagus nerve.

The very first article I published on Substack was about the vagus nerve. I have been working on this idea, and my own vagus nerve, for 12 months now, and this is my conclusion.

Various pathways to good health have been investigated over the years, and the current “fad” is the gut microbiome. And sure, the gut microbiome is a NECESSARY component of good health, but what if it is not a SUFFICIENT component of good health?

The importance of the vagus nerve

Sure, we have to get our gut microbiome working correctly, as we do every system in our body, but they will all soon mess up again if our autonomic nervous system is not ALSO working correctly. This is not an either/or. The autonomic nervous system controls messaging throughout the body, particularly the vagus nerve component of it (but also multiple enzymes and hormones). The vagus nerve carries messages between the brain and every responsive part of the body, including between the gut and the brain. If that messaging gets scrambled somehow (for example by 5G), then even a perfectly functioning gut is going to start giving and obeying bad orders, transmitted and delivered via the malfunctioning vagus nerve, and eventually that perfectly functioning gut microbiome will go out of whack in some way. The same goes for every other bodily system. A perfectly functioning heart, liver, pancreas etc will struggle bravely to obey orders being sent to it from another part of the body, via the vagus nerve (and the rest of the autonomic nervous system). They will all look as if they are malfunctioning but they are really just struggling to obey impossible orders.

If you look at the range of long term issues being experienced by those who have been beset by what is called covid (whether vaxxed or not), you will see that the vast majority of the symptoms are controlled by the vagus nerve (I think, from my own observation only). For example, there is a spate of T2 Diabetes post covid. The sugar metabolism system is controlled by the autonomic nervous system which tells the pancreas, the liver and the muscles just what to do with the sugar in the blood. And it’s getting it wrong, giving bad messages. There are many with a racing heart, when no malfunction can be found in the heart. So is it the vagus nerve mistakenly telling the heart to beat at over 100 thumps a minute when resting? This theme comes up time and time again on the long covid support groups. An organ or system is malfunctioning for which medicine can find no cause. To me the answer is simple. The body is valiantly obeying scrambled messaging from the autonomic nervous system.

This is not so hard to see once you start looking specifically for it. So why is medicine not addressing it? The answer to this is simple. Allopathic medicine CANNOT address it. Allopathic medicine is ONLY and EXCLUSIVELY interested in managing symptoms with drugs, and the vagus nerve can apparently not be drugged. Allopathic medicine has no idea how to intervene once the vagus nerve malfunctions.

Strangely, the vagus nerve is fairly easy to "reset" so that it carries more reliable messaging, but to do so we have to ditch all of our lifetime training in how to "treat" the body. And that is the hard part!

Ditching our allopathic mind-set

There is no drug you can take. First hurdle to get over mentally. No drugs will help.

So OK, let's replace a drug with a neutraceutical. Yes there are vitamins and minerals we can take that help our bodies repair damaged nerves, very slowly, particularly B vitamins and magnesium. But they are just repair. And repair is NECESSARY but is not SUFFICIENT. Repair does not imply reset. The messaging is still scrambled.

So we might pay attention to electrical conductivity. We might be convinced to start drinking water with some good salt in it which helps electrical conductivity. OK, not so big a leap. It makes sense that the conductivity of our body’s electrical system might be compromised. (Video embedded at the end of this article about salt and water) But we still have a hurdle to leap over, the one that has told us for a lifetime that salt is bad for us. The wrong salt IS bad for us, but not all salt is the wrong salt. Repairing the electrical conductivity of our cells is NECESSARY, but is it SUFFICIENT? No.

Second hurdle to get over mentally, there is nothing we can take, drink or eat that will fix vagus nerve messaging.

Ditching our idea that anything that works must hurt

We still have to reset our vagus nerve to transmit the right messages between all those essential parts of our bodies, and just how do we do that?

The Wim Hof technique resets the vagus nerve, but by god, it hurts. I am never going to jump into freezing water to reset my vagus nerve, even it is does work. And it can’t work that well or people trying it (normally manly men who are the only ones brave enough, masochistic enough and obsessive compulsive enough to do it) would not have to keep doing it. If you think you are tough enough, just run a search on the internet for Wim Hof to learn all about this technique. It will probably work for you. Sorry if I have the Wim Hof method wrong. I just know I can never do it, so I have to find excuses.

It really is this easy

The best excuse for not using the Wim Hof method is that punishment is not necessary to reset the vagus nerve. This is where it gets too easy, and at the same time, impossible for the western medicine mindset. We find it easier to substitute neutraceuticals and even salted water as long as we "take" them as we do drugs. And at a push we can substitute some horrendously painful physical exercise regimen.

But to substitute something else that does not involve taking something, (or does not involve some form of pain) is a much bigger leap. The simple fact is there are many quick and easy exercises we can do to re-set the vagus nerve. That’s the problem. They are too quick and easy and we simply cannot believe that our entire body can go from sickness to health with one 3 minute exercise a day. Can you?

My Achilles heel, my need for complexity

This was and still is my Achilles heel. The third hurdle we have to get over mentally is that fixing our health is as quick and easy as a simple daily stimulus of the vagus nerve. And I simply forget. There is a simple exercise I have done which has reset some aspects of my vagus nerve, in that my hair stopped falling, my skin stopped peeling off, my ears stopped ringing and my sense of smell came back (all vagus nerve functions). But, without these nagging reminders, I forget to do the exercise, and the symptoms all creep back until I notice them and start doing the exercise again. So like the Wim Hof diving into ice cold water, the effect is not permanent - yet.

The exercise I do when I remember is the Basic Exercise by Stanley Rosenberg. If you check it online you will see that most of the information on vagus nerve is about emotional health. But believe me, it is critical also for physical health.

The trick is to find something physical to do that stimulates the vagus nerve naturally

So what would be permanent? Well, the right kind of exercise. Exercise should be an integrated part of human life. Once we did not go horse riding or cycling for exercise; we got on our horse or our bike to get somewhere. In the process we accidentally exercised in a way that stimulates the vagus nerve. Once we did not dig a vegetable garden or prune a fruit tree for exercise, we dug a vegetable garden and pruned our fruit trees for food, and in the process we accidentally exercised. As we get older and physically more limited, and as our lives become increasingly unnatural, it is increasingly difficult to get exercise that is not “exercise”.

Then we mop up

Fixing the signalling of our vagus nerve, presuming we CAN do it, does not mean we are suddenly well (particularly if our bodies are full of man-made toxins) but we will not get well without it. There are lots of things we have to do that are each NECESSARY, but none of which is SUFFICIENT alone. And this is where the complexity floods back into the picture. Here is my slightly modified list from my post of yesterday, linked below:

1. Start to do vagus nerve exercises. You cannot get well without a well functioning vagus nerve.

2. Boost your immune system to help you resist anything contagious.

3. Reduce intake of all toxins including all drugs and never have another vaccination of any kind ever again.

4. Detox, detox, detox.

5. Support your gut microbiome to fix itself if possible.

6. Treat any disease that is manifesting, no matter what is causing it, with natural and food based products. Learn how to research and administer these yourself.

7. Learn to protect yourself from 5G, and anything else that messes up the body’s electrical and messaging systems.

8. Integrate natural exercise that stimulates the vagus nerve and keeps your body’s messaging system healthy - to replace needing to remember to do exercises out of context.

9. Push your intuition ahead of your knowledge to find re-purposed healing methods to deal with man-made health issues. I will talk about what I am doing in a separate post.

So, who can help me (and everyone else)?

I have mentioned a few activities that probably stimulate the vagus nerve naturally such as horse-riding, cycling, and gardening. Even singing or humming loudly will do this too. But for many of us it is difficult, if not impossible, to integrate these into our natural daily life, in such a way that we do not need to remember to do them.

What physical activities can be made part of every day life, that will also, as it happens, stimulate the vagus nerve?

References

Vagus Nerve and Underlying Impact on the Gut Microbiota-Brain Axis in Behavior and Neurodegenerative Diseases

Vagus Nerve Exercises

For the salt and water body hack.

My most recent article on what we are confronting, ongoing, to sort out the covid mess.

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