Part-Time Mother Teresa

I liked this idea that we have something like a secret piano key, under our skin, to press internally to calm us down. Or like a musical string to pluck.

I Now Suspect the Vagus Nerve Is the Key to Well-being – The Cut

TLDR: There’s this huge nerve that goes through your whole body, connecting your amigdala (the primal part of your brain that goes into fight/flight/freeze) to your lungs, your gut, your heart — all kinds of things. So when you find yourself freaking out, this is the magic link to get allllll your shit calming down a little faster. Breathing slowly is the best way to kickstart the vagus nerve. That’s why you see breathing on every single health and wellbeing advice article ever.

For a more scholarly overview of the vagus nerve, take a look at Vagus Nerve as Modulator of the Brain–Gut Axis in Psychiatric and Inflammatory Disorders. The article starts with, “The vagus nerve represents the main component of the parasympathetic nervous system, which oversees a vast array of crucial bodily functions, including control of mood, immune response, digestion, and heart rate. It establishes one of the connections between the brain and the gastrointestinal tract and sends information about the state of the inner organs to the brain.”

So if you’re in the throes of an anxiety attack, you hit each of those spots: your mood is crap. You feel like you might be getting sick, fatigued, overtired. You might have an uncomfortable feeling in your gut (for me, when it’s really bad, I feel like I have to poop). Your heart pounds. Sound familiar? And if you stay in this state for too long, you can actually catch a cold, compounding the problem.

The health or “happiness” of your vagus nerve is measured by something called vagal tone. By exercising the vagus nerve and manipulating your vagal tone, you can get yourself out of an activated (aka “real messed up”) state. Here’s a chart of how you can go up and down the ladder, from calm and happy, to activated and angry, to blank, numb and empty.

Ok, enough air quotes. I think you get it. Here’s the actual stuff you can do:

• Deep breathing.
  • See this worksheet, there is actually a bit of nuance to this. Rise and repeat.
• Singing, humming, gargling.
  • Anything that stimulates the back of your throat (use your imagination? lol).
• Move your body.
  • Exercise: the mother of all fix-it solutions, really. Yoga, running, lifting weights, surfing, dancing, sex, going for a walk, even massage. Anything that moves your body.
• Cold exposure.
  • This is why you see people in movies splashing their faces with cold water. A brisk walk also works. Or a cold shower, or an ice bath if you’re brave.
• Laughing.
  • My personal favorite. Watch a comedian, funny animal videos… etc.
• Taking care of your gut.
  • Taking probiotics, eating well. Lots of info out there about the gut-mind connection.

I have a confession to make: I’m jealous. A lot of the time. And I hate it. I have jealousy over people doing their jobs better than I do mine, jealousy over mad skills, jealousy of engineers who make it look so easy to jam code into stuff and make it work. Jealousy about people who have clean houses and no kids. All kinds of things.

And you know what? It never goes away. It’s just a feeling that intrudes every once in a while and I’ll tell you what — sometimes I’m good at crushing it, and sometimes I’m not. I always get there eventually, though.

So here’s what I do when I have that unwanted jealous feeling come up: I think about what’s behind it, trace it back to the source. Jealousy, like anger, is one of those surface level emotions that always belies something underneath.

For me, it’s always about insecurity in some way, so what helps is to lean into what makes me awesome. I write. I call people and ask about their day. I go check on my plants, and my pets, and I sing. Sometimes I paint, or run, or try to capture photo moments. Then I blaze through 100 pages of a book in an hour. These are things that *I* think make me awesome, so the more I do them, the better I feel.

At work, I have a folder on my desktop called “Awesome” and every time someone gives me kudos or makes me feel good, I take a screenshot and put it into that folder. I’ve realized that I need a life equivalent – a list or folder or art piece somewhere that reminds me of all the uniquely ‘me’ things that I genuinely like about myself.

This doesn’t just apply to jealous feelings, either. It applies to any feeling you don’t want to feel. Maybe you’re bored. Or angry, or unhappy.

The more we turn inward, the more peace we discover.