Hi Friends,

Nope, this is not a reference to my last trip to Sin City...

It's about the vagus nerve that thinks it's way more special than all the other nerves. I mean, just look at all the attention social media gives it and all the fancy gadgets humans have invented to keep it happy. Sheesh! You must admit, we've turned vagus into a bit of a narcissist.

Rather, this is your nerdy lecture about the parasynaptic and sympathetic nerves.

The parasympathetic nerves include four cranial nerves - nerves that go from your brain directly to your body without traveling through the spinal cord first (and vagus is only one of them) and the nerves that exit out the sacrum (S2-4).

On the other hand, the sympathetic nerves exit from thoracic and lumbar segments of the spine (T1-L3).

But if you look at the graphic below, you'll note that all the organs are always being innervated. What is different is by what system and the activity it produces. If I am on the sympathetic side of the coin, all the things on the right occur. If I am operating on the parasympathetic side of the coin, all the things on the left occur. You'll also note that the vagus nerve is again so special. Because it is the nerve that innervates your organs when functioning in the parasympathetic state. These 2 systems work together to act as a checks & balance system to keep us in the Goldilocks zone of just right.

So why do I roll my eyes when asked about all those gadgets and breathing exercises that supposedly stimulate the vagus nerve? Wouldn't that be good for us? Make us be parasympathetic? Which is what everyone tells me I am supposed to be.

Maybe...

Many of these tools help you calm or soften the symptoms of sympathetic activation. For some of you, they were essential—true survival strategies. But even with all that effort, the symptoms keep circling back. Those tools don’t change why that email from your boss lit up your system in the first place. They don’t create new vagal motor patterns. They don't change the signal from your brain to the vagus, even with its ability to send messages to the brain. They don’t shift the predictions your brain is making or stop it from defaulting to the old, familiar ways it learned to keep you safe.

They help you cope, but they don’t change the default.

Body mapping does.

It retrains and rewires your nervous system to respond to the reality you’re living in now, not the one you survived before. Instead of managing your reactions, your system learns—slowly, organically, sustainably—to stop returning to the past for instructions. It becomes able to recognize, “This moment is not that moment,” and to choose a different response without you having to wrestle yourself into calm.

Onwards, Amy

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This content is for entertainment and education. Not medical advice, not therapy. Every topic here is basically crowdsourced from your lives, your stories, and your “please explain this chaos” requests. Thanks for all the brilliant newsletter ideas.