192. The Vagus Nerve, Anxiety & Tools to Manage Stress [Podcast with Jessica Maguire]

“It’s about getting to know our nervous system and recognizing those different states. And then having a range of tools that we can use that attune to where we’re at.“

Resources mentioned:

Jessica’s website

Instagram

Transcript:

PCOS Diva Podcast – Jessica Maguire

Amy Medling

If you suffer from chronic inflammation, long term fatigue, or if you’ve experienced trauma, high levels of stress or adversity, if you have insomnia, chronic pains, aches or muscle tension digestive issues like IBS or constipation or bloating, if you are depressed feel stuck, or lack motivation or have anxiety, you need to tune in to today’s PCOS Diva podcast. I’ve invited Jessica Maguire. She teaches people how to repair their own nervous system via the vagus nerve. To restore their innate capacity for inner resilience and self regulation and to recover from chronic and traumatic stress. So I’m just really thrilled that you agreed to come on to my podcast Jessica, I’ve been following your work for a while and for women with PCOS, all of those symptoms that I mentioned, really parallel symptoms of PCOS and we tend to have up regulated nervous systems and I think what you offer is a great solution to help women manage some of the symptoms. So welcome to the PCOS Diva podcast.

Jessica Maguire

Thank you, Amy. I’m really excited to be here.

Amy Medling

So I think I will go ahead and give listeners a little bit about your background. Just to kind of frame the work that you do. Your passion for health first led to a degree in Health Science studying the use of electro Cardiography how the hearts electrical impulses are amplified and recorded. Then you went on to complete a Masters of physiotherapy and spent over 14 years helping people improve the health of their brain and body. You’ve also studied neurophysiology, and you’ve learned from pain researchers, professors and neuroplasticity neuroscientists and psychologists on how the brain and the nervous system changed from stress, trauma and chronic pain. And your Postgraduate study has led to further qualifications and clinical mindfulness, trauma sensitive biofeedback polyvagal theory and the use of Transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation. And you believe that knowledge is power and that we are empowered when we have autonomy in reshaping our mind body system. And your specialty now is teaching patients about the vagus nerve and their nervous system and how stress related illness such as anxiety, depression, that disorders, autoimmune issues, all of those symptoms that I mentioned can arise from dysregulation after chronic or traumatic stress. So that’s so fascinating. It tell us, I guess, just to start off, what is the vagus nerve, if you’ve never heard about that before

Jessica Maguire

The vagus nerve is like a series of connections really starts out at the brainstem. If you ran your hand down the back of your head you probably feel that already reached the base of the skull. So if we went in from there, it starts out there. And there’s two parts. There’s a left and right side so it runs down and it’s got a lot of connections that go into the heart and the lungs and then it’s got connections that go down under the diaphragm into the gut, and it touches through its connections, almost every organ all the way down to the colon. And then part of its connections run from the heart up to the face. So we really do wear our heart on our face or our expressions. It will often hear the sound in somebody’s voice as well as to watch the nervous system, what state it’s in. And a lot of the fibers of the vagus nerve. Most of the information runs from the body up to the brain. So 80% of the fibers run that way. But why it’s so important is because it really is the epicenter of the mind body connection, and it tells us that what’s happening in the brain will be reflected in our organs, and vice versa. So it really helps to make sense of why things like stress and trauma or a dysregulated nervous system can lead to things like irritable bowel syndrome.

Amy Medling

That’s It’s so interesting to me. And we hear a lot about the brain gut connection. And we think of it I think in terms of like your microbiome, and this idea of the vagus nerve is being a real connection kind of from like the brain stem to that that really takes it up a notch. Or, as you said, like Knowledge is power. I know I was working with a client and she she finally really made the connection, that stress is what is leading to a lot of her gut issues. And I was wondering if you could explain a little deeper. How would our nervous systems become dysregulated so that it would lead to these kind of chronic conditions?

Jessica Maguire

Absolutely. So we can look at the different states of our nervous system that we have, and we can look at it a little bit like traffic lights. So when we’re in the green state, that’s where our vagus nerve is working well, and it’s regulating our nervous system. So when it does this, it’s slowing our heart down to the pace where we can connect with people. We don’t feel you know, like a racing heart or anything like that. And then I don’t just you and it’s functioning well when we’re in this stage, but we’re also primed for connection. So we’ll hear somebody’s voice has porosity, which basically means there’s variation in rhythm and pitch and, you know, parents intuitively do this with your babies, they talking nothing standing vise like this. And that is actually a tool for CO regulation. So they’re providing that regulation for their baby’s nervous system. Using their voice. People dealt with them, perhaps as well. And you’ll see them talking those funny voices. And we also in this state, the muscles of our middle ear prime us to detect the sound of human voice so we will hear even in the crowded room we can pardon you know somebody’s voice. And a face has a lot of expression especially in the upper face. So you can see when somebody’s smiling with their eyes to genuine really heartfelt smile. So when we’re in the state, we’re praying for connection, we feel calm, because our physiology is being regulated. And we will think and feel our best. But if we face a stressor, typically what happens if we don’t feel we’ve got the tools to face that challenge. We may move up into fight or flight.

what happens is the vagal brake, which is the branch of the vagus nerve that runs from the brainstem to the sino atrial node of the heart, which is basically the heart pacemaker. The vagus nerve comes off, adrenaline is released and we feel our physiology speed up. So energy is mobilized to help us deal with what’s going on now. When our energy is loyal to us, we have the black move away from our dash and short term or long term projects get put off so this might be relevant to your listeners when we look at things like keeping sex hormones balanced and things like that. They’re not important jobs, when we are thinking about needing to escape or fight or something. And so, this is where we can start to see other chronic health issues come into play. So for example, we could look at things like we might have an increase in inflammation because we don’t move into the state where rest and repair happens. But particularly we can see changes in hormones. And we can see changes in the digestive system. So when the blood moves away from the gut, for example, motility or movement of food through the gut slows down. So if we’re in the state for a long period of time, that’s where we can start to see allostatic load. So this is the the wear and tear on our mind body system. Some people can also move into another state, which if we’re still picturing the traffic lights, that would be the red state. And this would be an immobilization system, which can drop us down into feeling slapped Nam depressed. We may cut off from the sensations in our body because they’re uncomfortable. And long term if we spend a long a lot of time in this state, we may end up feeling burnt out exhausted, and they can also be other types of chronic health issues too. So because our nervous systems our brains are always changing and learning. We may find that after periods of chronic and traumatic stress, we don’t come home to that green state as often. And that that would be when we have low vagal tone or the vagus

nerve isn’t functioning as well. And so we spend a lot of time in either that mobilizing, mobilization state where we’re anxious, or we’re in that flat, or Sarge ik state or we might oscillate between the two

Amy Medling

so you know, I have definitely experienced both that flat state and that place of, I think, post traumatic stress when something can sort of set you off really quickly. So that is, so you’re saying that that is a low vagal tone can contribute to both of those states?

Jessica Maguire

Absolutely. Yes. So what we’ll see, you know, and just to frame this stress isn’t actually bad for us, if we get to recover from it. That’s that’s really what I think we we can say that we have this innate system that can recover really well. So like I said, the vagal brake comes off. So when we faces a stressor, our vagal tone lowers a little bit. We have that mobilizing energy coming to our system, and we can feel it with that, you know, heat through our shoulders or tension, or our heart speeds up. But then after it’s over, we feel that thank goodness that’s over. And then we’ll try and we’ll come back up to where it was. So it’s a little bit like a thermostat in a house. You know, we move away and come back but it’s around a setpoint. But when stress is relentless, so we don’t get the opportunity to recover. Let’s say we’ve just keep having, you know, scenes piled on top of us that’s, that’s, that’s more than just daily stresses, let’s say, you know, it’s it’s significant events, or we have a one time traumatic event where we might get overloaded. Too much nervous system. What happens is the Babel or Babel turn reduces so much and it doesn’t come back to that same point. And we continue to have this activation of that mobilizing energy in our system. So we say it gets re tuned to a new setpoint. So that’s where we see a lot of dysregulation.

Amy Medling

So I I’ve always said that stress wreaks havoc on PCOS and you did allude to the fact that it can really lead to dis regulating hormones and hormone balance. And, you know, I think it’s really important for women with PCOS to have a stress reduction toolkit sort of speak. And I you know, we cover these topics often on the PCSD of a podcast. A couple episodes ago, I had Dr. Mark Halpern on and we were talking about Heart Math. And what I was hearing you say is how the vagus nerve connects your heart to that brainstem. And so I’m thinking that the Heart Math would help to tune the vagus nerve by kind of syncing your breathing with your heartbeat is, is that something that helps the vagus Tone

Jessica Maguire

It does? Yeah. So we can look at, we can look at, as you said, having a range of tools and I would say the most important question I get asked is, what’s the number one thing that helps improve the function of the vagus nerve and definitely, breathing is something that’s been shown we can bring in. But we really need the tools that attune to the state of our nervous system that we’re in. So for example, if I was in a state of panic using breathing, that could make me feel worse, because I start paying attention to anger, I start trying to breathe deeply, and that’s been shown to make panic exaggerated. So it’s more about getting to know our nervous system and recognizing those different states. And they’re having a range of tools that we can use that attune to where we’re at. So it’s a little bit like, Amy, if you said to me, I feel so sad. I’m having this really hard time. Things have been so challenging. Home, and I just said, you’ll be right, come on. Yo, let’s get ready. Lots of energy. It would feel horrible. It would be like a missing shipment to where you’re at. So sometimes if we’re if we really flat will use different tools and say if we’re really wound up, we can look at ways that we can bring in a daily practice, but really,

it’s about in the heat of the moment. going okay, well what stayed away. What works for me here, what can I use to help me come back to having my baby stuff working?

Amy Medling

So really checking in with yourself and figuring out where you’re at and then kind of matching that state to the tools in your toolkit that will help rebalance you.

Jessica Maguire

Exactly, exactly. You know, parents often do this beautifully with toddlers or babies because babies don’t have the ability to self regulate. They’re completely dependent on parents to co regulate for them, which means to attune to the nervous system, and then the baby’s inner world will come to mirror that but also that is the foundation of them developing that self regulation for themselves. So it actually leads to the healthy development of the brain and the vagus nerve. So it’s thinking as adults, how do we attune to our nervous system? And that’s why I often say knowledge is power in this area. We need to we need to have a framework to understand it. Get to know what from the past tends to still trigger us today because we respond in ways that we have learned and this is outside of conscious awareness. So sometimes we just find ourselves feeling anxious and we say, Gosh, what caught me to this feeling. And you know, that can be outside of our awareness. So the more we realize what patterns we have in different environments, situations and how it’s it’s not as choosing. It’s just our nervous system responding. And then we have tools and help and, you know, lots of other things to like our community and relationships affect our nervous system, but just having that awareness and having tools as you said, that we can use in the heat of the moment.

Amy Medling

So why is it view as a mother who had three three babies It was after a while you kind of get a hang of it and you know your your baby’s cues, and it’s easy to help come for them. But why is it so hard to do this for ourselves?

Jessica Maguire

I know, it’s such a good question. So I guess these are the part that I see a lot of people where it gets in the way is there’s this self aversion or self criticism for responding in certain ways. So, you know, we might find ourselves anxious about something. And what we find is that if we think of the lowest centers in the brain, that are lower down, we can call this our survival brain. But then the outer part of our brain, which is more recently evolved, is called our thinking brain. When we feel stressed, we activate most or most of that activity is in our survival brain, lower down and it communicates with us by releasing neurotransmitters and hormones that create sensations in our body, you know, like that mobilizing energy. We really strongly feel that often a way that we try to make ourselves feel better. Is that the thinking brain likes to create a story or clan or try to out sink our way through these strong sensations. So for example, let’s say I have something at work coming up tomorrow. A meeting with my boss got really nervous about it, and I could feel that in my body, but as a way to try and cope with that. I started thinking about ruminating about the ways that I could space that meeting tomorrow until we might find ourselves thinking about it over and over and over again. And that’s our thinking brains strategy to try and carve. Well, people often minimize or suppress or deny what’s happening and tell themselves not to be silly. They just need to get on with it. They often tell themselves not to be so sensitive. And although these are strategies we try to use to cope. They don’t actually help to reduce stress. arousal, they actually can just make it worse. But I guess what happens is the thinking brain and that survival brain get into a bit of a tug of war. And so when we come into the body, and we use what you call interoception, and pay attention to our sensations, and use them to help us understand what’s happening. It does bring a regulation forever the system. So this can be one of the best ways to utilize our vagus nerve is to begin to to read off know these sensations. Recognize the different patterns of how we respond in the body. And and try to uncouple them from the story. So research has shown that people who are depressed or swing towards depression sometimes have a low interoceptive awareness so they find it hard to feel sensations that it’s like bags, turn down the sensations from reaching their awareness because they’re too painful. And that’s a very clever adaption of our body that’s useful for the short term, but maybe long term not so helpful. And then research has shown that people who have anxiety tend to be less accurate at tuning into sensation. So when sessions sensations travel up to the brain from the body via the vagus nerve. There’s other pathways to the reaches an area in the brain called the Sol, and for people who have anxiety. It’s been shown that there’s increased connection with fear circuitry areas in the brain. So sometimes people might feel a sensation and immediately assume that something really Bad’s about to happen. So it might be waves of nervousness. And immediately it triggers in that fear circuitry, that there’s a threat, when really it might not be a threat. Although that feels very real. So learning to uncouple sensations from story can be really useful. And that’s a really good way to build resilience.

Amy Medling

Where as you are talking about that i It reminded me of that question that through the Work of Byron Katie, I don’t know if you’re familiar with her her work. She she tells you to ask yourself this question, is it really true and you know, when you’re when you’re anxious about something all I can think of is this client of mine who really wanted to go to the why to go swimming as like a way of exercising but she was so anxious about being seen in a bathing suit because she felt like everybody was going to you to think that she looked awful. And I think asking yourself that question of is it really is that really true? It kind of snaps you out from that sensation into like that thinking part of your brain, or at least that does for me.

Jessica Maguire

That’s a wonderful example of uncoupling.

Amy Medling

So, many women listening that have PCOS deal with anxiety as you described. Could you give us some practical tips on how to kind of deal with anxiety, some tools for our toolkit?

Jessica Maguire

Yeah, sure. So I think what we just started to say there was developing skills to begin to flex out interoception muscle, but starting this rather than feeling the sensations that might be too much, and particularly for people who have a history of trauma, we want to be trauma informed with that and not just, you know, begin to pay attention to things that are very overwhelming when it comes to sensations we need to be skilled in this way. I’m a big believer in CO regulation, although we hear a lot now that being co dependent to rely on other people. I really feel in times of stress. This is our most, you know, powerful tool we can use. So, can we might begin by looking at improving interoception which is really what the vagus nerves job is by when we’re with other people who we feel really good about. We might bring in things that help us feel playful and joy. So if there’s somebody where we begin when we’re around them, we feel happiness we feel alive inside that connection. And really achieved to notice system. So we can begin that way and then start to pay attention to sensations that we notice inside. And that could be tingling, joy, ease, and then we can begin over time. To practice this on our arm, doing small amounts. So it’s basically learning to feel at home inside our body again, because for a lot of people, whether it’s having anxiety, or whether we suffer more from the burnout flatness side, by the way, they’re taking us out of our body. Or we may have dissociated from our body, because it’s too painful if we have chronic pain. So if we’re looking at things like dysregulation, and looking at things like chronic pain, these are body based things. So we need to learn to come home to our body and feel comfortable there again, so that might be with other people or learning to cultivate tools where we feel safe to practice things like what you said we breathing before as well but interoception is the main the main training for this type of work.

Amy Medling

And I think feeling those feelings is so important. So many of us, myself included have done this stuffing them down back down with food or, you know, other diversions, I guess, but that that getting back in touch with your body was so integral to my healing, and I really didn’t know that that was part of increasing vagal tone.

Jessica Maguire

Yeah, it’s it’s very useful. Again, it’s just that we may have cut off because it was a clever adoption at the time. The sensations were too overwhelming. So for people who feel like some people pay attention to sensations and then they feel more dysregulated and this is where we really need to lean into the support of other people. So whether that’s family members, or a health professional, just to recognize that we don’t want to just dive headfirst in if we have had some pretty serious adversities happen.

Amy Medling

Tell us about the work that you do and how you, you know, help women with women and men, I assume with you know, kind of regulating their vagus nerve show.

Jessica Maguire

We have a two hour vagus nerve masterclass that we run several times a year. And this goes through those frameworks in a lot more detail and how to match them with the right tool. But mostly it’s learning how to attune to your own nervous system and to really become that securely attached friend to your own distress self. And then for people who get excited about that masterclass, which happens a lot after pico finishes. We then have a six week program that goes into a lot more depth on each part of the masterclass and we have some theory module every week and a live calls well.

Amy Medling

Can you kind of explain some of the results that folks who have gone through the program have experienced as it relates to some of those symptoms that I mentioned, which really parallel PCOS symptoms?

Jessica Maguire Absolutely. The main thing is people notice that they have the capacity to do more in their life. So things that they might have avoided before because of fear, anxiety, which can bring make our world a little bit smaller because we’re too scared to do things. People found that they were able to to go and do the things that they didn’t think they were able to, which is really what brings us so much joy because that’s what life’s about. It’s about being able to reach your potential. We’ve had a lot around so people will often report improvements in pain, insomnia, and definitely not reacting with as much anxiety with certain environments or challenges or they have the confidence that when they go into certain situations, even if there are those waves of nervousness, or worry, they have the skills and the tools to gently guide their nervous system back to a state where they can cope. So we certainly know that healthy nervous system is not always calm. It has you know, it can move into being angry or we can move into being you know, feeling flat or disappointed. But what we’re really teaching people is to learn automatic patterns of responding that came from the past, and to meet the present moment as it is, and respond with a flexible and adaptable nervous system.

Amy Medling

This This work is so interesting. I am going to have to you know, I have not attended your masterclass so I am going to have to do that. I found you on Instagram so when I can you tell us what your your social media handles are and your website address so people can you put out some great social media content.

Jessica Maguire

Thank you, Amy. My Instagram handle is repairing underscore the underscore nervous underscore system so repairing the nervous system, where you can just look up my name Jessica McGuire, and all of our classes are on the website Jessicamaguire.com. And I will also post all of those links in our podcast PCs diva podcast show notes as well. Well, thank you so much, Jessica, for coming on and enlightening us about vagus nerve health and how that really impacts so many of our PCOS symptoms. Thank you Amy. And I just wanted to say congratulations on putting together such a thoughtful podcast on a very important topic.

Amy Medling

it’s my pleasure. It’s definitely something that brings me a lot of joy and in turn probably helps helps my stress level even better. Well, thank you everyone for listening. And thanks again, Jessica. And I look forward to being with you all again soon. Bye.

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

vagus nervous system, PCOS, state, body, brain, people, feel, stress, mobilizing, lead, connection, tools, traumatic stress, hear, anxiety, trauma, anxious, dysregulated