It’s wild—most humans today are unknowingly sabotaging their health. They walk around with chronic issues they’ve come to accept as “normal.” One powerful, often overlooked tool for healing the mind, gut, and body is to fix your vagus nerve.

I’d estimate that more than 90% of my clients with health issues, especially gut dysbiosis, typically have an origin tied to disrupted vagal tone. Optimizing the vagus nerve can lead to huge improvements in health. This thread will provide a deep dive into the mechanisms and applications of optimization, including biochemistry, quantum health, biomechanics, nutrition/supplements, and various biohacks.

The vagus nerve serves as the main connection between the brain and gut, as well as various other organs—the heart, lungs, liver, pancreas, and spleen. The brain exerts top-down control over the rest of the body, influencing vagal tone, but there is also bidirectional communication from all organs.

The vagus nerve (cranial nerve X) originates in various nuclei in the medulla oblongata of the brainstem, and it then descends through the neck into several autonomic ganglia to innervate several organs. These branches spread out like a tree, which allows the vagus nerve to influence the organs in a parasympathetic (rest-and-digest) manner—this is the state we want our biology to be in >90% of the time, as opposed to a sympathetic (fight-or-flight) tone.

Proper vagal tone leads to optimal gut motility, absorption, digestion, and excretion, while breathing, heart rate, and blood pressure also run correctly. 90% of parasympathetic fibres derive from the vagus nerve.

Beyond the gut/enteric nervous system (esophagus, stomach, intestines, etc.), heart, and lungs, it also innervates the liver, kidney, pancreas, gallbladder, and spleen. Therefore, addressing vagal function should be prioritized as a potential root cause, especially when health issues emerge from multiple systems. Vagal tone is crucial for setting your neurochemistry up for adaptation, learning, and retaining information. It innervates neurogenesis, LTP/LTD modulation, and neuroplasticity, whilst also being neuroprotective.

The vagus nerve comprises two nerves—the left and right vagus nerves, each containing about 100,000 fibres. Cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), which is made up of 99.8% water, is also found here in proximity to them, which is fundamental to the flow of energy/information. Acetylcholine is the primary neurotransmitter that influences vagal tone. It also ties in with various chakras on the spiritual level.

Unfortunately, the modern world often keeps us in a chronic sympathetic state and destroys vagal tone. Here are the main ways to mitigate this & repair your vagus nerve.

1. Mindset & vagus nerve

Nothing disrupts optimal parasympathetic-sympathetic tone than a compromised mindset—consisting of chronic stress, buried trauma, negative emotions, and entrenched thought patterns. This alters hypothalamic-pituitary-brainstem signalling towards a chronic sympathetic state. This impairs your vagus nerve from running optimally, it also induces mitochondrial dysfunction, raises cortisol, and degrades melanin into the catecholamines.

Whenever you’re in this state of sympathetic drive—heart rate increases, breathing patterns change, and discomfort/anxiety kicks in. What’s interesting is the fact that focusing on your breathing during this can lead to re-calibrating your autonomic nervous system towards parasympathetic tone.

Much like light is the main driver (zeitgeber) of circadian rhythms—slow and long nasal breathing is the #1 zeitgeiber for innervating the parasympathetic nervous system, and driving vagal tone. Whenever you feel not at ease and/or stressed — use it to override the sympathetic nervous system. This works faster and more efficiently when done under sunlight, whilst grounded.

Buried trauma is also huge, as it causes energy deficits throughout the whole system—our body is investing as much energy as possible to never “wake up” that trauma. So it’s important to optimize your health through addressing all fundamentals, to set your biochemistry up to enable you to release, face, and process that trauma to aid in further improving vagal tone.

Water stores memory, and water networks are found all throughout your body—we are literally 60% water by weight, and 99 out of 100 molecules in our body are H2O. Understanding that water stores memory/information is crucial to understanding how it ties in with stored trauma.

Sometimes you may need to give it an extra nudge to release trauma—these are some further recommendations. What’s interesting is that D-serine may act as a gatekeeper of trauma release in the brain via its interactions with the NMDA receptor [2]. From my standpoint, it seems that d-Serine may be the key to unlocking buried trauma, processing that trauma, and then leading to fear extinction. Of course, combine that with emotional processing/therarpy, support from loves ones and a focus on optimizing health.

To think that any form of stress or buried trauma—even a negative thought—alters your biochemistry towards a sympathetic (fight-or-flight) state. Which leads to a pro-inflammatory state and causes dysregulation in every organ if it becomes chronic. Mindset is everything.

Further address your mindset by: mindfulness practices (gratitude, meditations, journalling), butyeko/pranayama breathwork, myo-fascial release/massages, heat/cold therapies, talking to someone you trust, therapy (CBT), emotional freedom technique (EFT), and EMDR therapy.

2. Biomechanics & posture

The more I learn about this topic, the more I value its importance. The modern world robs us of collagen tensegrity, as well as dehydrates us and destroys the quantum properties of water/fascial networks. When we add poor posture/biomechanics on top of this, it creates a recipe for disaster.

Tying it in with the vagus nerve: issues like a ruptured spine, head-forward tilt, TMJ dysfunction, and chronic neck tension can all compress or irritate the vagus nerve, impairing its signalling. Beyond this, poor breathing can cause poor biomechanics, just as poor biomechanics can lead to poor breathing patterns. Connecting with what I mentioned earlier about breathing being the main driver of vagus nerve stimulation—this relationship is incredibly significant.

We need to address this carefully, especially in modern life. Our posture can be negatively affected by daily activities, particularly in indoor office jobs where computer screens are poorly positioned. Looking down at phones with hunched shoulders, sitting incorrectly, lacking mobility/flexibility, improper breathing, and performing typical bodybuilding exercises incorrectly or chronically are all issues.

The best way to achieve optimal biomechanics is to start by improving your posture. If you work at a desk, make sure you’re using tools like a laptop stand, a standing desk, an adjustable chair, and proper desk height to avoid straining your neck and back. It’s also important to incorporate regular breaks to move, stretch and reset your posture, preventing the buildup of tension that can lead to chronic misalignment and further downstream issues.

This one will ruffle some feathers—but 99% of people doing normal weightlifting exercises are actually worsening their postural issues. A lack of core engagement, lifting ridiculously heavy weights driven by ego or competitiveness, and poor technique further exacerbate these problems. This approach often reinforces you to continue to head down the path of poor biomechanics.

This can be optimized by a postural assessment, with specific recommendations around myo-fascial release, as well as a balance of mobility, flexibility, and strength-related exercises using correct technique. These adjustments, in addition to addressing all the fundamentals of our health, create a foundation that supports collagen integrity, hydrated fascia, optimized biomechanics/posture.

It’s also important to note that dehydrating and collagen-degrading effect of blue light/nnEMFs. The problem with these in the modern world, along with other factors mentioned above; including stress, trauma, and poor biomechanics/posture, is that sympathetic tone is often overactivated, leading to chronically high cortisol levels.

Elevated cortisol unzips collagen’s triple helix and induces swelling—this is something we actually want to happen to help us wake up. However, we need to rezip those collagen networks through sunlight exposure throughout the day, especially IR light. If we fail to mitigate the modern world’s impact, we can severely damage collagen, and cause dehydration of our fascia. This further destroys vagal tone downstream. Copy nature, and get outside.

Beyond this, both your light environment and biomechanics being optimal are fundamental to your lymphatic system flowing nicely. This acts to remove metabolic debris, neurotoxins, and various chemicals out of your brain and body. If this doesn’t work properly, and there’s accumulation of these—then your vagus nerve won’t be functioning correctly. Melatonin plays a huge role here, but also your water/collagen networks are optimized via addressing the above. Lymphatic massage is also excellent to incorporate.

3. Light environment

Sunlight stimulates the vagus nerve, while artificial light does the opposite. The light that hits your eyes and skin dictates the activity of hormones and neurotransmitters released in your body. In other words, light shapes your brain and body.

A well-known effect of excessive blue light is the fact that it drives excess cortisol release in a non-quantized fashion; which leads to suppression of your vagus nerve due to its downstream effects on the sympathetic nervous system. Here are more details on this and POMC biology.

This also drives excess inflammation, mitochondrial dysfunction, loss of melanin/melatonin, and dehydration—as mentioned previously. It also causes an imbalance of sex hormones with lower testosterone/DHT and DHEA levels; causing something known as pregnenolone steal syndrome.

The effects of nnEMFs beyond the above also directly effects Ca2+ channels within our biology. This leads to excitotoxicity, most important to note is the effect it has on GABA/glutamate balance. Chronic Ca2+ influx results in glutamate overactivation, which prevents the ability to shut down neural circuits, ultimately causing neurotoxicity, inflammation, and increased sympathetic tone coupled with vagus nerve suppression. Address all of this by optimizing your light environment: Daily sunlight exposure (sunrise, UVA, UVA/UVB, sunset), block artificial light at night with blue light blockers and red light/candlelight, get outside regularly throughout the day, grounding, connect to nature, avoid late-night eating and exercise, and embrace your environment (hot/cold).

4. Diet, Nutrients & Supplements to support your vagus nerve

When it comes to optimizing your vagus nerve, you can take advantage diet, nutrition, & supplements. However, it’s important to note that the above are more important, and you’ll be pissing in the wind if none of that is addressed. Let’s start with diet.

When it comes to diet, you want to be eating seasonal with an emphasis on a variety of animal foods, eggs, seafood/shellfish, fermented foods, dairy, fermented foods, fresh herbs/spices, and then a seasonal variation in fruits, vegetables, and starches. This ensures that you’re providing your body with the right information regarding your nutrition—as food is not only energy, but also information about your environment. This leads to overall optimization in your whole biology, allowing your mitochondria to run efficiently, and ensure you’re providing your body with the right energy, information, and biomass required for the season you’re currently in.

Regarding nutrients & supplements—it’s important to support acetylcholine, GABA/glutamate balance, neurosteroid/sex hormones, gut/liver/kidney support, neurogenesis, and optimizing redox.

For acetylcholine, we require choline, B1, B5, zinc, vitamin A, sodium, and a few others. Choline can be obtained through egg yolks and beef liver. If you have a MTHFR/PEMT SNP, you will require additional choline (and its derivatives). B1 is activated with magnesium & ATP—so optimal mitochondrial function and hydration status is key.

Vitamin A is absorbed, activated, and utilized by NAD+ (thus, optimal bioenergetics), zinc, and molybdenum. It enhances choline acetyltransferase (ChAT) to increase acetylcholine production. I have summarized the mechanisms here for vitamin A cycles.

It also works hand-in-hand with vitamin D, and optimal light-dark cycles yoked to nature. Vitamin A toxicity is a light story. BTW, if you lack sunlight and get too much blue light, then you are at risk of developing toxicity. Vitamin A cycles are destroyed by excess blue light/nnEMFs and this impairs our biochemistry to properly make vitamin D.

Beyond the mindset/light side of things—GABA/glutamate balance can be optimized by optimal mitochondrial function, magnesium, taurine, and l-theanine. Any herbs/supplements that support GABAa receptors, antagonize NMDA receptors, and have adaptogenic properties in general are also key: magnolia bark, chamomile, skullcap, bacopa, saffron, polygala tenuifolia, CBD oil, apigenin, creatine, agmatine, oolong tea.

Other neurotransmitters & neurohormones influence this neurochemistry in this fashion: 3β-diol, oxytocin, allopregnanolone, progesterone, estrogen, testosterone, and anandamide.>Supporting gut/liver/kidney health, as well as the detoxification pathways associated with it are also key to optimal vagal tone indirectly.

Gut microbes, short-chain fatty acids, neurotransmitters, and cytokines found throughout the gut communicate directly with the brain and innervate vagal tone. Fermented foods and resistant starches are key in providing prebiotics and probiotics can help maintain gut health and support the vagus nerve, for all of the above to be optimal. Important nutrients for the gut: vitamin A/C/D/K, all B vitamins, magnesium, iodine, zinc, chloride, sodium, potassium, various fatty acids (seafood/plant/animal fats), and more.

Liver and kidney health are key for detoxification, which indirectly innervates gut health and the vagus nerve. For the liver, optimize nutrients that support bile acid synthesis/release, CYP450 enzymatic pathways, and mitochondrial support: —heme iron, B1, B6, B9, B12, magnesium, FMN/FAD, NADPH, copper, cholesterol, cysteine, choline, taurine, glycine, sulfur, manganese, zinc, and bicarbonate.

For the kidneys, these nutrients are key as well as: optimal hydration status, deuterium:hydrogen, potassium, calcium, and phosphorus. Other things to incorporate: black seed oil, milk thistle, ACV, pu-erh tea, rosemary, organ meats, holy basil, saffron, green tea and garlic.Touching on neurogenesis/neuroplasticity: anything that supports this (BDNF, GDNF, etc.) will ensure that your brain has the ability to adapt to its everchanging environment. This ensures everything is working correctly from the top-down, and thus will improve vagal tone. Another thing to note that NGF may aid in supporting vagal nerve fiber architecture—so lion’s mane, ginseng, and muira puma can be used here.

Redox status is directly tied to inflammation status; the higher the redox, the better your bioenergetic systems are working, as well as your ability to neutralize free radicals (ROS/RNS), regulate cellular signaling on a biophotonic/magnetochemical level, and maintain optimal mitochondrial function, and bioenergetics in general. A high redox environment supports redox modulation/antioxidant defense, reduces excess oxidative stress, and promotes efficient energy production, ultimately enhancing your overall health and resilience. An optimal redox state is closely linked to vagus nerve function. Enhance your redox by: supporting mitochondria by using sunlight, grounding, optimal sleep, limit blue light/nnEMFs, and everything else mentioned above.

5. Lifestyle Hacks for your vagus nerve

Beyond what’s already mentioned. I’ll quickly touch on some lifestyle hacks you can do to stimulate vagal tone.

Cold exposure: increases parasympathetic tone if done correctly and sensibly, take it slow via face dunks, ice packs on neck, or chewing ice. Actual cold thermogenesis should be done in a natural body of water if possible. Note: only do this if you, and your nervous system can handle it.

Humming: Humming at a frequency of ~100-200 Hz is often cited as beneficial for stimulating the vagus nerve. This frequency can create vibrations that resonate through the throat/neck area, promoting vagal tone. It also increases endorphins and oxytocin. Singing or chanting also works.

Sounds: Sounds of nature stimulate vagal tone. The soothing sounds of flowing water, crashing waves, waterfalls, rainfall, or splashing rivers can enhance your parasympathetic tone, lower stress hormones, and promote relaxation. Incorporate a water feature at your home. This also influences something called the Lenard Effect; allowing us to absorb negative ions in the air.

Laughter: Laughter is a natural way to stimulate the vagus nerve. Hang out with funny people—as these activities can promote vagal tone and relaxation. On top of that dopamine, oxytocin, and endorphins are released.

Putting it all together

It’s astonishing how a single thread of wiring—your vagus nerve—holds the keys to unravelling so many of the chronic imbalances we’ve come to shrug off as “just life.” From gut dysbiosis to foggy cognition, disrupted vagal tone quietly undermines our health, even as we push through in a perpetual state of stress. When your parasympathetic drive is sidelined, digestion falters, inflammation surges, and neurochemical harmony dissolves. Yet, by recognizing the vagus nerve as the grand conductor of rest-and-digest signaling—from the gut, heart, lungs, liver, and beyond—we uncover a powerful lever for restoring balance across body, mind, and spirit.

Reclaiming that parasympathetic dominance means addressing the core pillars that either crush or cultivate vagal tone. First, mindset: chronic stress, unprocessed trauma, and negative thought loops shove us into sympathetic hyperdrive, sabotaging acetylcholine production and mitochondrial function. Learning to breathe—slow, nasal inhales under sunlight, ideally grounded—becomes our first frontline rhythm for resetting the autonomic scale. Next, biomechanics and posture: an aligned spine, freed fascia, and hydrated collagen networks ensure the vagus nerve can cascade its signals without kink or compression. Pair that with a light environment that mimics nature—embracing sunrise, UV exposure, and shielding from artificial blue light at night—to recalibrate circadian chemistry and quell neural excitotoxicity. Finally, diet, nutrients, and supplements serve as the biochemical equivalents of oil for this neural machinery: choline, B vitamins, zinc, magnesium, and a rainbow of seasonal, whole foods supply the building blocks for neuroplasticity, gut health, and redox balance.

Beyond these foundations lie the practical biohacks that provide extra sparks to vagal activation: cold exposure to nudge parasympathetic tone, humming or chanting to vibrate the throat’s mechanoreceptors, and laughter or natural soundscapes to bathe us in parasympathetic-friendly frequencies. Every element—from the water we drink (and its memory-storing capacity) to the gentle tension of lymphatic massage—intertwines with vagal function. In weaving these strategies together, we craft a tapestry of healing that reaches far beyond symptom management. When the vagus nerve thrives, we reclaim not just our digestive resilience or stress tolerance, but a deeper capacity for adaptation, learning, and genuine flourishing.