A Deeper Dive on Stress: Vagal Tone and How To Prevent Burnout
Improving Vagal Tone To Manage Your Overall Wellness
The Common Buzz-phrases of Longevity Are Starting To Get Old
“Keep your cortisol low” or “stress reduction” are just blanket phrases for trying to calm people down, which seem to have the opposite effect.
Telling someone to meditate more or do more deep breathing can stress someone out more because it feels like it’s adding something to someone’s plate.
However, understanding why meditation helps and the mechanisms behind breathing, relaxing activities like showering, giggling, and vegging out with friends can help break down the walls that hold someone back from truly relaxing.
I’ve previously written about allostatic load, which is the culmination of each day’s activity that contributes to your total stress load. If we think of stress as every event that occurs throughout the day, then by proxy, the more events/activities that are on your calendar, the more “stressed” you may become.
Some of us are naturally better at clearing the stress of the day than others.
That’s why some of us can become successful pediatric surgeons, lawyers, and entrepreneurs while others need more streamlined day jobs that have hard stops at 5 pm.
Regardless of where you fall on the stress management spectrum, though, everyone could benefit from learning about vagal tone.
Vagal tone is the level of calmness your body can self-regulate when stressors are high.
Without being too redundant, let’s remember again that even events that are considered leisure by nature — like hanging out with friends and possibly having a drink or two — are stressors, and have an effect on vagal tone.
Your vagal tone is a direct byproduct of your vagus nerve’s activity throughout the body. It’s the vagus nerve’s job to send signals of relaxation throughout the body when activity has disrupted its naturally calm disposition.
Why am I writing about this?
Most people don’t feel their vagus nerve. They just feel stressed, overwhelmed, low-energy, or inundated with tasks. All of those feelings are byproducts of low vagal tone.
Wearing an Oura Ring has helped me hone in on my vagal tone more, but even I have trouble discerning what’s stressful for me versus what’s relaxing.
What Oura and other wearables are getting better at are sensing events that:
Elevate heart rate
Elevate body temperature
Elevate breathing rate, and thus
Activate your autonomic nervous system (or stress you out)
All of these things are symptoms of a “strain” affecting your bodily processes.
Don’t worry, these strains are part of a normal life, but if they persist for too long, they can cause the feelings mentioned above — distress, overwhelm, and frantic energy.
Having a strong vagal tone, however, can clear that feeling.
Make no mistake, though. I know we talk a lot about “training” here at High Performance Health, but vagal tone isn’t something you should try to “train.”
Sure, the deliberate action of relaxing can be a practice, but sometimes it involves an element of letting go and taking a foot off the gas pedal.
How You Feel Vagal Tone
“Vagus actually translates to wanderer, and that’s exactly what it does,” says Dr. Sara Szal, medical advisor at Oura. “It wanders through your body, relaying signals that slow your heart rate, boost digestion, reduce inflammation, and even influence mood by affecting neurotransmitters like serotonin,” Szal says.
A responsive, active vagus nerve keeps someone calm when stress occurs, well-rested even on high-output days, socially adept, and in a state of good digestion.
On the other hand, a low vagal tone (or inactive vagus nerve) might look like constant sickness, high reactivity and mood swings, difficulty winding down, and restlessness even after a long night of sleep.
First, before learning how to tame your vagus nerve, you need to be able to identify these patterns.
It’s very possible that after you read this newsletter, you won’t immediately change the makeup of your nervous system.
Finding the right balance of activities to balance your stress load and have a positive impact on your vagal tone can take weeks, and without an objective third party (friends, wearables, or your doctor) to assess your stress, you might not know what’s affecting you positively or negatively.
Lessons On Improving Vagal Tone
Pictured above is my “resilience” score from Oura, which takes into account three main factors affecting vagal tone — sleep, daytime relaxation, and daytime stress load (both indicated by fluctuations in resting heart rate (RHR)).
As of today, I’m trending back toward “exceptional” resilience from solid just a week and a half ago. Paradoxically, being on vacation for two weeks actually dropped my resilience to stress.
This is why it’s important to have an objective view of what is good and bad for your body. Without indications of what’s raising my heart rate (and possibly blood pressure, too), it can be tough to say what’s positively impacting my vagal tone.
My resilience dropped the longer I was on vacation because I:
Had too many days over 20,000 steps and not enough rest days
Had at least one alcoholic drink per day, tanking my nervous system despite “feeling relaxed”
Did not sleep on a regular schedule, despite getting 8 hours per night
The ironic takeaway here is that the things we’re told to prioritize — steps, 8 hours of sleep, and tame alcohol consumption — didn’t work in my favor. I felt like I was moderating my life, but in actuality, this short burst of abnormality threw me out of moderation.
Had I stayed in Europe permanently, I’m sure resilience and my lifestyle would have adapted to those things. But because I’m used to the same bedtime every night, typically not drinking at all, fasting in the mornings, and occasionally having a 2-4,000-step day, my resilience to stress dropped and my vagus nerve was saying “nuh-uh.”
In short: Vacation is not going to “reset” you like you think it will — a long period of relaxation does not necessarily guarantee improved vagal tone. Instead, slowly but surely working things into your routine (not all of the below, but the ones that work best for you) is a way to start.
Keep in mind: My vagal tone took two weeks to repair after vacation, and I’d consider that fast. Fixing your own nervous system could likely take even longer.
Connecting with friends
If you haven’t seen people you care about in a while, find time to be with them and possibly put the phones down while you do it. Our hormones signal calm when we’re with people we enjoy spending time with, and it’s good to maintain friendships and hangouts throughout life for general relaxation and stress management
Move slowly
Eating, breathing, and even walking slowly when there isn’t a rush to get to the next thing is of the utmost importance for “hacking” your body into feeling more relaxed. If tasks are done for the day, don’t rush through anything you don’t need to. Chew the food slowly. Play a relaxing tune on the dog walk. Take a moment to silence the phone and listen to the speed of your breath, and slow it down.
Book a massage or acupuncture
Two activities that (I’m a bit biased toward, but) seem to have a universally calming effect for the nervous system are acupuncture and massage. Almost every time you see someone after one of them, they look and feel lighter. There’s something unmistakable about it. If you’re a busy-body who thrives on appointments, make this one more appointment on your calendar and watch how your mood changes when you have one a month planned.
Laugh or Sing
Two natural vagus nerve-inducing activities that are pretty readily accessible at all times are laughing and singing (or humming, if you’re not confident in your voice). All three activities have chain reaction effects from the vocal cord down to the vagus nerve that signal to the body, “it’s okay, we’re safe, let’s decompress.” If it’s turning on a show at night to giggle, your favorite song to sing along to (bonus points if it’s in the shower), or just humming a rhythm, you can dramatically improve your vagal tone with these activities.
Lots of longevity advice feels like more work.
I hope these vagal tone ideas feel less like tasks and more like a return to the human you’re supposed to be.
Vagal tone is skewed today by our need to constantly be busy, impress our peers/superiors, and parade ourselves either in the workplace or on social media.
Taking a break from those things — even if just for an hour a day — is the first step toward a lifelong path of improved wellness.