Vagus Nerve Exercises To Rewire Your Brain From Anxiety

Whether you have a diagnosis of generalized anxiety disorder or you're just feeling stressed and overwhelmed, here's what you need to know about how to rewire your brain from anxiety. Anxiety is really just a nervous system state. Under normal circumstances, anxiety is essential to protect you, to keep you safe, and ensure your survival. But unfortunately, your body can become frozen in a state of anxiety even when you're totally safe. In these instances, your brain believes you're in danger when you're not. And lots of things can cause this to happen. It can result from accidents and injuries, surgeries, physical pain, chronic stress, emotional shock, not having your needs met, or even trauma. The thing is, most of us can't pinpoint the exact cause of our chronic anxiety. And we actually don't need to because we can reprogram your brain to reduce anxiety through the magic of neuroplasticity. In this video, I'm going to show you three vagus nerve exercises that you can use any time to rewire your brain from anxiety. Hey, beautiful humans. I'm Suki Baxter, founder of Whole Body Revolution, where I help you to rewire yourself for greater health, happiness, and success. If you're new here, make sure you click that subscribe button and hit the bell to get notified every time I release a new video. And anything that I mentioned in this video, you can find linked in the description box below. Let's get into it. Okay, so I'm going to give you a few exercises that you can use to reprogram your brain and reduce anxiety. But before we get into that, I want to take a quick second to talk about what anxiety actually is and what causes anxiety. Most people that I talk to believe their anxiety is coming from their thoughts. And most therapies geared toward anxiety relief focus on changing your thoughts to reduce anxiety symptoms. Here's the thing, anxiety is an emotion. And emotions are not thoughts, even though most of us have been taught that this is true. Emotions are the subjective interpretations of sensory data sent to the brain from inside your body. And this is called interoception. Interoception tells your brain when you're safe and when you're not. And here's a key point. Thoughts do not directly cause emotions. They cause shifts in the internal state of your body that then change the sensory data sent to your brain, which in turn shifts your emotional state. However, there are parts of your biology that are so ancient, they predate human language and they don't respond to thought-based therapies. This is why anxiety often persists even when you've tried mindfulness training, affirmations, or other brain-based self-help practices. It's not that these therapies don't work at all, it's that they can only affect so much of your biology. I'm going to tell you what to do about that in just a second. But first, let's talk about what does anxiety feel like. Most of the time when doctors describe symptoms of anxiety, they focus on what's going on in your mind. They talk about anxiety symptoms such as hypervigilance and inability to concentrate, maybe racing thoughts, or a sense of impending doom. However, anxiety produces physical symptoms as well. In fact, all emotions do. This is how you know what emotion you're feeling, by how your body feels. Typically, the feeling of anxiety in your body consists of tightness in your chest, a racing heart, inability to take a deep breath, maybe sweating, shaking, trembling, tension in your feet or lower legs, tight hips, or maybe a clenched jaw. And the posture of anxiety can vary, but I've observed in my clients that often they have a tendency to lean their weight back to their heels as though they were pulling away from something. Many people lift their toes off the ground and clench the muscles of their lower legs as though they were stopping themselves from running away from a real or perceived threat. It's very common to see anxious people express tightness around their eyes and a forward head posture with rigid neck muscles. Clenched fists are another frequent symptom. If these symptoms are chronic and habitual, we tend to not notice them. They just become our default posture, how we are, and how we move through the world. We don't know we're tight until we try to move in a way that our bodies don't allow. And even then, we don't typically relate muscle tension and poor mobility to chronic and habituated emotional states like anxiety. We stretch more, we get massages, and when our muscles don't let go after much physical practice, we give up and we just assume we're getting old. Not true. Muscle tension is dictated by your nervous system, by your brain. If we put you under anesthesia, you'd be so limber that we could tuck your feet behind your head easily. Doctors would have to be super careful when moving you so as not to dislocate a joint, but when you wake up again, that tension returns just as it was before. So if you're wondering, what do I do when I feel anxiety? I'm going to explain that now, plus walk you through three exercises to reduce anxiety symptoms. Life is full of challenges, threats, and dangers. To expect that we'll never have to rise up to meet these demands is just unrealistic. And anxiety is a normal part of your stress response. It tells you when you're safe and when you're not so that you can mobilize to protect yourself. But we don't want to get stuck there, and the way to not get stuck in anxiety is by helping your autonomic nervous system to become better at regulating. One of the ways that we can do this is through body-based practices that discharge stress from your nervous system by sending signals of safety to your brain through the proprioceptive system. So that's what we're going to do right now. Click like if you're ready to try some vagus nerve exercises for anxiety relief. Inspiration for these exercises comes from the book Accessing the Healing Power of the Vagus Nerve by Stanley Rosenberg, which is a great book if you want to learn more about polyvagal theory and anxiety. So let's get started. For this first exercise, you can sit in a comfortable position either on the floor or in a chair if that's better for you. And all you're going to do is simply bring your right hand to the top of your head and tip your right ear towards your right shoulder. So you're going to be side bent to the right. And then what you're going to do is just shift your eyes only, so your head's going to stay in this position, and your eyes only are going to go up and towards the left. So they're going to move towards the left side of your vision. And we're just going to hold this for 30 seconds. Just keep your head in that same position. There's no need to strain. You may notice a sigh or a swallow or a breath that's a little bit deeper than your other ones. And go ahead and release that. And now we're just going to do exactly the same thing on the other side. So take a quick break if you need to. And then when you're ready, you're going to bring your left hand to the top of your head, bring your left ear towards your left shoulder, get a little side bend in there, and then move your eyes upward and towards the right. And we're just going to hold this again for 30 seconds. And this is helping us to break up these habitual patterns of tension and to shift out of an activated state to one where we're a little bit more calm, a little bit more present. Go ahead and release that. Now, if you don't notice a sigh or a swallow, you can certainly hold that for longer. 30 seconds is the minimum, but you can definitely do a minute or even longer than that. For the next exercise, we're going to do a very similar movement, but we're going to take it a little bit deeper. So that was really focused on breaking up any tension in your neck and relaxing all the neck muscles. We're going to bring it down into your rib cage. So your vagus nerve actually goes, it's a cranial nerve, and it goes down your neck and into your torso and comes all the way down into your viscera. So we're going to do a little bit of movement in your rib cage to help break up the tension there. So you're going to do a similar thing with your hand. So right hand to the top of your head, but then you're going to take your left hand and reach around to put it on your side on your rib cage here. And then what you're going to do is as you bring your head down, so your right ear goes towards your right shoulder, you're going to make that bend a little bit deeper. So you're going to bend through your rib cage using your left hand to pull your ribs away. So you should feel them closing underneath your hand and your whole spine will bend into a C shape. And then we're just going to do the same thing with our eyes. You're going to bring them up and to the left. And again, don't strain. There's no reason to be an overachiever. So if this is uncomfortable for you, make the movement smaller and then go ahead and release that. And you may notice your breathing is a little bit easier. You might feel a little more calm. If you have some emotions come up, sometimes that'll happen. If you need to take a break, go ahead and do that. With these exercises, less is actually more. I really base a lot of my work on a concept called titration, which is a word that comes from chemistry. It's something that chemists will use to mix two substances that when you pour them together in large quantities, you have like maybe half a cup of this one and half a cup of that. When you just pour them together, they don't mix. But if you do it drop by drop by drop, then they'll start to blend and mix together. So the same is true for these exercises. Large doses can be hard for your system to integrate, whereas little drops can help make cumulative changes that over time are much more impactful. So if you need to take a break, take a break. If that was enough for you, that's totally fine. If you're ready to continue, we're going to do the other side. So you're going to bring your left hand up to the top of your head. Side bend your left ear to your left shoulder. Your right hand goes onto the left side of your ribcage, and you're going to create that nice C-shape through your ribs. And then your vision is going to go up and to the right. Your eyes are going to go up to the right, remembering that it's okay to make this a small movement, particularly if you have had any injuries to your ribs. If you've had surgeries, heart surgeries where ribs have been cracked, abdominal surgeries, any kind of trauma, physical trauma to your torso, and of course, any emotional trauma. If this needs to be a smaller movement, that's totally fine. Go ahead and release that. And really, when I'm doing exercises for myself, I don't count repetitions and I don't count time. I wait until I feel a shift in my body. But it's great when you're starting out to have a set amount of time so that you kind of know when you're starting and when you're going to end. That can make it feel a bit safer, especially if it's unfamiliar. But if you want to just hang out there until you feel like your body has a shift, that's also fine. For this next exercise, you're going to want to find a place where you can lie face down comfortably. So a yoga mat is a great thing to use, or if you have a carpet that's comfortable, you can lie on that. So on your stomach, what you're going to do is you're going to bring your elbows under your shoulders, hands flat on the floor, and your shoulders should be supported by your elbows. And what you're going to do is turn and look over your shoulder. And you're lifting your head using the muscles along the side of your neck here. And we're just going to hold this one again for 30 seconds. And this will really help to recite your SCM muscle or your sternocleidomastoid, which is that thick muscle along the side of your neck that can get really tight. A lot of people who have migraines have a lot of tension in this muscle, so it can be helpful for migraines or tension headaches. And go ahead and release them. And then we're just going to do the same thing to the other side. So go ahead and come up with your elbows under your shoulders. You're going to turn your head to the right. You're going to lift your head and look over your right shoulder. And we're going to hold reprogram your brain from anxiety. If you found these exercises helpful, please click the like button and let me know in the comments below. Remember to subscribe and hit the bell to get notified so you never miss a video. And I will see you in the next one.