Vagus Nerve Hacks: Powerful Techniques to Enhance Health and Well-Being

You know, the trouble with us is that we are all too broken into specialties and subspecialties, and one specialty never speaks to another specialty. As a result, nobody really puts the whole thing together when, actually, we are one big, complex organism. Today, I want to show you—or try to show you—that one thing that brings everything together in our physiology, cardiac and general health, is the vagus nerve. We've kind of ignored the vagus nerve for so many years; nobody talks about the vagus nerve, and even when they do, it's just in a way that doesn't

grasp your attention. It's important stuff, and I'm going to show you why it's important. Hopefully, when we're done, you should be motivated to realize that the vagus nerve is very important, and a lot of the ancient wisdom revolved around the vagus nerve and keeping it healthy and functional. Whether it is exercising, breathing exercises, slow breathing, inspiration, expiration, yoga-type postures, holding your postures, diving in cold water, or resting and sleeping, what's the vagus nerve doing during all this time? What can you do? This is a clue to hack your vagus nerve. Today, hopefully, I'll teach you

a few tricks to hack your vagus nerve, and if you hack your vagus nerve, you'll get a lot of good benefits. We need to hack the system here. If we can hack the internet, can you hack the internet for me, please? So, if we can hack the system, we’re going to hack something. Okay, so the vagus nerve is the 10th cranial nerve. It starts all the way in the midbrain. What's its function? It's called 'vagus' because it's everywhere; it's a vagabond. It goes all the way out, gives branches, and you don't know this, but I'm

telling you today: it gives branches to your eyes! Did you know it goes to your eyes? It goes to your throat area, your voice box down here, your facial muscles, and then it goes all the way down towards your esophagus, to your heart, to your lungs. Then it goes down through the diaphragm into your stomach, your small intestine, your large intestine, and your pancreas. It goes everywhere! What's it doing? It's collecting information and delivering information, telling everything what to do. It's your software. Your vagus nerve is your software; this is your hardware. Your hardware doesn't

know what to do unless it has software, right? Am I right, engineers? Your vagus nerve is your software—it's telling your hardware what to do. It's telling your intestines what to do, your heart rate what to do, and it's instructing your blood vessels to constrict or vasodilate. You can't have the same software all the time; how can you? You can't have one operating system all the time because your environment is changing. I walk into that room, I come back over here—it's a different environment; everything changes. My body has to react, and who's making all these instantaneous

changes that are happening in your body? Nobody thinks about this. It's your vagus nerve that is doing a lot of the orchestration of the moment-to-moment, minute-to-minute, second-to-second changes in your body. This is being done by your vagus nerve because it's sensing and sending out information. It's one of the few nerves that actually has both sensory function and motor function. So, you all know that if you take a deep breath in, and then you take a deep breath out, when you breathe out, your heart rate slows down. You know about this because on your smartwatches, it'll

tell you what your heart rate variability is. What is heart rate variability? That means when you breathe in and you breathe out, there's supposed to be a change in your pulse. Your pulse doesn't stay the same all the time. If I'm at 80 beats per minute, it’s not 80 all the time; it’s 78, 80, 82, back to 78, 80, 82. It fluctuates; it's called heart rate variability. That's because when you breathe in, the sympathetic fibers go up to the brain, and then when you expire, your vagus nerve gets stimulated, and it slows down your heart

rate. So, your heart rate changes according to your vagus nerve and your sympathetic system. That is why, if you want to hack your body, I'm going to start straight away by telling you how to hack yourself. If you want to hack your vagus nerve, take care of that right there. Don't tell someone who's stressed out to take a deep breath in; tell them it's time to take a deep breath out. Look at yourselves when you are stressed out—you're holding your breath; you are like this. No, take a deep breath in—fine—but take a deep breath out.

Breathe out slowly. Long, prolonged expiration is what you need. So, the trick is, if you're feeling stressed out, breathe in to the count of four or five, breathe out to the count of ten. Breathe in again to five, breathe out to the count of ten. When you're breathing out to the count of ten, you're stimulating your vagus nerve. When you stimulate your vagus nerve—I’ll come to the chemistries of everything else in a minute, but basically, you want vagal activity; you want your parasympathetic nervous system. You don't want sympathetic; there's enough sympathetic stress out there in

this world already. All of us are stressed out to the hilt, right? Too much adrenaline all the time. Our heart rates are there at 80, 90, 80, 90. All the time, never goes down. There's no heart rate variability going on; you're constantly making adrenaline all the time. When are you healing? If you're getting the yin, where's your yang? I know I'm stressed out right now. See, I just need your password. You see what I mean? Just need your password; should be good to go. Yeah, yeah, yeah, there you go. But you see, when this is

done, I'm going to tell him not to take a deep breath in. I'm going to say, "Take a deep breath out." Very different. Breathe out nice and slow. And immediately, so what happens? Your body—think about this—your body is all stressed out; all the adrenaline's running inside you. But now you're breathing slowly out. The brain gets confused. "Wait, wait, wait, wait! How can you be breathing in a parasympathetic mode when actually you're supposed to be in a sympathetic mode?" In a sympathetic mode, you're supposed to be breathing fast. Right? So, let's say you see a lion;

you're supposed to see the lion, your heart rate goes fast, right? You're stressed out. But here, you're in a lion situation, but you're breathing only ten times per minute. That doesn't make sense! So, automatically, your brain shuts off your sympathetic machine. Did you get it? You see, you just hacked your nerve; you hacked your tenth nerve. Because in that situation, you turned off the chemistry. You cannot have the yin and the yang at the same time. So, the trick I'm teaching you here on hacking that nerve is just on the breathing, because we started talking

about the breathing. I'm a little off my slides right now, but that's fine. Because when you're breathing out like that, it's incongruous with what's going on. It doesn't make sense. You're supposed to be breathing fast; you're stressed out, but you're not. You're breathing slow. So, I'm telling you that in any stressful situation, you can change your chemistry in your body. You can turn off that bad stress chemistry by doing prolonged slow expiration. So, you breathe into the count of five, then breathe out to the count of ten. And when you're doing this, don't breathe into

your chest; you're doing abdominal breathing. So, your diaphragm is moving down, and the diaphragm then moves back up again. So, when you're breathing in, your belly button must come forward and meet your hand outside. So, you'll become pregnant when you breathe in, and when you breathe out, the stomach goes in. Look, the chest doesn't move; that's the breathing I want you to do. Because now you can hack yourself. You're going to hack your vagus nerve. Your vagus nerve is very important; it's the yin and the yang. The vagus nerve is what's going to repair you.

The vagus nerve is going to put you back where you belong. You need the sympathetic for stressful situations. When the lion comes, don't just sit there! You better do something; you need that sympathetic. But as soon as the lion's gone, then you need to be relaxed. Look, to take for example the sable: when I went to do my safari, the sable would run crazy because the lion's chasing it. But after the lion stopped and gave up, then what does the sable do? What does he do? He starts eating grass; he's relaxed. He's not burnt out

of shape for the rest of the day, which is only a human trait that we continue to carry. What just happened? For the rest of the day, he's now parasympathetic. If you look at his heart rate, it shot up to probably 200 beats per minute, and within a couple of minutes, his heart rate is back down. So, let's hack this situation. In another situation I'm going to give you: I'm exercising. So, how does that—the J exercise? I do very fast speed exercises and then I completely lie down and rest. Why? I said, "Wait, wait a

second! This guy was on the machine just now, and now he's lying down on the ground!" Right? Why? Because it's incongruous to my sympathetic. I'm turning off my sympathetic system real fast and I'm bringing in my parasympathetic system real fast. Got it? So, I'm training my nervous system to say, "Okay, bring on the yin! Fine, no problem; but bring on the yang as well—quickly! Bring on my parasympathetic system very quickly!" And when I teach this to my patients and they actually do it, they feel great because it's like recovering much faster from that acute state

of sympathetic. You are now bringing in that parasympathetic and bringing it on real fast and real hard. So, what I do? Well, I don't like to see people doing exercises; they jump onto that treadmill and they're doing it for a good 45 minutes non-stop all the time, and then when they finish, they kind of just slow down for a little bit. No! Wait a second! You don't do that. If the lion was chasing you, you run real fast and then you slow down—stop completely! The lion's gone now; now you just sit and you just relax.

And that's what you should be! That's how I like to exercise, too. I like to exercise fast and then nothing—just lie down, nothing happening, and breathe real slow. And the slow breathing doesn't mean slow in; it's slow out. Because what are you doing to your vagus nerve? You're hacking it, right? So, you all need to learn how to hack it, because your vagus nerve is very important. It's the rest and relaxation nerve; it restores and repairs. It's anti-inflammatory, because everything else is inflammatory. Anything you do is inflammatory. Eating—eating is very inflammatory. I just happen to

see someone eating in the audience, so—right? After eating, you need anti-inflammatory support. I told you eating is dangerous. You want to restore all that muscle that you tore from all that running around. All that chemistry running around — your platelets became sticky; they need to become unstuck. When platelets become sticky, you get stressed out. Of course, you're going to be at risk for a heart attack because your platelets are going to get all sticky. In the parasympathetic state, the platelets start flowing around again; they are no longer sticky. Studies have shown that acute stress causes

degranulation of your platelets, making them sticky. So what makes them become unstuck? What prevents the platelets from degranulating? It's your parasympathetic system. That's why it's so important to do this. Then, there is relaxation — all that tone has to change. You can't stay in that tone; it has to relax. That's your parasympathetic digestion. You need to de-stress when you are digesting; it's a parasympathetic process. So if you're stressed out, can you digest your food? Look, when you're stressed out, how is your parasympathetic system going to send out signals to say, "Okay, let's get the juices

going"? When you're stressed, all the juices are squeezed inside, and all the glands are working hard, but now let's get that bowel moving a little. Let's close the path for a while and let the stomach fill up. Who's doing all that? Who's sending out all those instructions? It's the parasympathetic nervous system. You cannot be stressed and eat at the same time; it's a yin and yang situation. You can't do that. That's why you shouldn't eat when you're stressed out. If you come to a lecture, you're going to get stressed out; don't eat. Don't eat in

the car. Eat in a restful state because then your parasympathetic system will help you digest food and break it all down, sending all the right signals and doing all the right things. You cannot have the parasympathetic and sympathetic systems working at the same time. Stop it! You think you can do it, but oh, I'm a multitasker? You're not a multitasker. Your body is not trained to do that. It's a human trait. Your body is not made to do that. You cannot have two things on at the same time; you are either AC or DC. I

mean, you can't be both at the same time; you'll get a short circuit, right? You'll get a short circuit. Reproduce! After all, at the end of the day, what does nature want you to do? It wants you to reproduce. Just remember that. What's the goal of life? To reproduce. Yes, nature wants reproduction. So what does the vagus nerve do? It prepares you for that. Well, in order to do that, you have to be a good specimen. You have to be a strong specimen. You have to be an attractive specimen, right? You have to be a

healthy specimen. So just think about it: the vagus nerve kicks in, preparing you to reproduce. It's going to make the best specimen out of you because, after all, it wants only the best to go on to the next generation. You need to understand this. When you look at people who are really stressed out and having a hard time conceiving, let's say — I'm just giving you an example — part of the problem is stress. The moment they de-stress, suddenly the test comes back positive; it's fantastic, right? Sperm counts go down with stress, of course they

do. You all know that. The cycles of ovulation also change because of stress — sympathetic, sympathetic, sympathetic all the time; no parasympathetic. So you're out of sync — too much yin and no yang. The two-way inflammatory pathway is not inflammation; it's information. Sorry, that's a typo — it's the information highway to the brain, and it's instructing the biochemistry in your body in every moment of your day. You have to look after your vagus nerve; it is the most important nerve in the body. It's a survival strategy because you cannot be in one mode all the

time. I already told you that homeostasis depends on the vagus nerve. What do I mean by homeostasis? This is a term that I want you all to become familiar with. Homeostasis is keeping you within a certain range. You cannot be only in one. There's a little range; you can go to this side and then a little bit to that side. That's called resilience as well, right? That means I can tolerate some stress, but then I come back to the midline. I tolerate some stress and return to that midline. The ability to do that is your

vagal tone. If you have good vagal tone, you're going to have good resilience. That means that if you missed a meal and five hours have gone by, you're going to be okay; nothing bad is going to happen to you. Conversely, the one who doesn't have resilience is going to be really out of shape because he didn’t have a meal. Whether you're in a high temperature, a cold temperature, or you don’t have the right kinds of food, for example, or you're in a very stressful situation for many hours, you’ll be able to tolerate that better if

you have greater vagal tone. It also controls the inflammatory pathway. What does that mean? You cut yourself; of course, there’s going to be inflammation because everything has to be repaired. Now all those dead cells have to be cleared out, and the bacteria need to be eliminated. You're going to create some water there, which is going to cause swelling. In, but then it's going to start healing. Now, the vagus nerve orchestrates a lot of that. See, that's why we know certain people heal faster than others. How come? How come? It's because of all these pathways. Hesis

is another term I want you to become familiar with. Hesis! What do I mean? I'm always talking about hesis. Hesis means stress. You need to stress yourself out. Why? Because after that, you'll get parasympathetic, and that's going to make you stronger. So, hesis is a stress that doesn't kill you. What kind of stress am I talking about when I talk about this? One is fasting. When you fast, that's a hesis on your body. That's a stress on your body. It's my favorite hesis of all. I’ve talked about that a lot. That's my favorite hesis. Everyone

must fast; everyone must do time-restricted feeding because we’re supposed to do time-restricted feeding. Then, depending on your goals, whether you do a 3-day water fast or a 5-day water fast, it depends on your goals. Do you want to reverse your diabetes? Do you want to get rid of your blood pressure? Do you want to get rid of your inflammatory bowel disease? Or are you just doing this to be healthy? Well then, that's fine; you can do 18:6 or you can do OMAD if you want to do that. So, it just depends on your goal. Do

you want to come off your insulin? It all depends, but I love hesis because after the stress, what happens next? It makes you stronger and better, and that process is orchestrated by the vagus nerve. The vagus nerve! The vagus is going to get you there. Another form of hesis is heat, like infrared sauna. You sweat like crazy; you're getting there. And it's really sweating like crazy. That's a form of stress. And then, what happens afterwards? Why come you feel so good afterwards? Because your vagus nerve just kicked in. While you were inside there, you were

all sympathetic, sympathetic, sympathetic. You were sweating like crazy; your temperature went up, your heart rate went up, right? Your vaso-dilated like crazy, and then when you got out, hopefully you took a cold shower. That's even better! Now, the cold shower kicks in and that really stimulates your vagus nerve. All of a sudden, your heart rate, which was up, comes down real fast, and you start feeling so exhilarated, so much better. Of course, there are lots of reasons why infrared makes you feel good, part of it being the photon energy particles and your electron chains—all that

is fine and dandy. Bottom line is, it's a form of hesis. Cold immersion is also a form of hesis, and it stimulates your vagus nerve big time. Anytime you're stimulating your vagus nerve, you're going to get the repair process and more resilience. So every day, turn on the shower, take a shower—it's fine, nothing wrong with that—but then make it cold or ordinary temperature for at least a minute, two minutes if you can. Go a little bit longer; do it for a little bit longer. And then, if you want to make it warm again, you can.

I don't mind, as long as you went from hot to cold or hot to cold and then out. It's fine with me. But when you get these temperature variations, what's being affected in your body? It's the vagus nerve. At that point, it's all about the vagus nerve. So you're stimulating the vagus nerve. In a natural way, resilience depends on your vagal tone. I already said that. It's very important that you have resilience in your body. This is a vagus nerve. Look how big it is! It’s massive; it's the largest nerve in the body. It comes

out of the brain and there are two branches—one on the right side alongside your carotid. Okay? It goes along your carotid on both sides, comes out, and gives all the branches I told you about. So why did I mention the eyes? Because if you rub on your eyes, your heart rate will go down; you're stimulating the vagus nerve. So guess what? If you're sitting somewhere—don't do this while you're driving—but if you're sitting somewhere, you can put your hands on your eyeballs and just give it a gentle massage—not a rub, just a gentle massage. You just

stimulated your vagus nerve! Then, looking to the left, looking to the right, using your eyeballs to move them from side to side, keep that position for 5 seconds, look to the right, and keep it there for 5 seconds. Those eyeball movements stimulate your vagus nerve. See the hacks I'm teaching you? I'm teaching you hacks on how to hack your vagus nerve. The next one! I told you the vagus nerve goes along the carotid. How can I hack it? Well, take an ice pack—those little plastic things you put in your freezer, the blue ones, right? Take

it out or take it to work. Hey, take it to work! Put it along your neck there. Just breathe it for 5 minutes. Five minutes will stimulate that vagus nerve. Do it on the left, then do it on the right. And I'll say, "What did you bring the ice pack for?" It's not for food; no, it's for my neck. It's for my vagus nerve, that's why I brought the pack. Put it back inside, take it home, put it back in the freezer. Great idea! Now, there are stimulators for this as well, so you can do

that too. You can pay a couple of thousand dollars, or maybe less, to buy a stimulator. It’s a long one here, and you stimulate gives a little weak electric current. Some people feel it, some people don't feel it. Now, would I advise all of you to do it? No. Who is it approved for? Right now, it’s approved for—now watch this—it’s approved by the FDA for migraines, seizures, and bad headaches, and they do it only for five minutes in the morning and five minutes in the evening. They stimulate the vagus nerve, and migraines get better, headaches

get better, and stress levels go down. This is amazing stuff. This is available today. It’s available today, but that stimulator, as I said, I have no data for it to show that your blood pressure will come down with that. I have no data for that. Who wants to do that data study? Who's going to fund it? You see, a lot of what I'm saying makes a lot of sense. We know from animal studies, but who’s going to do this randomized double-blind controlled study? Nobody's going to do it. So, are you all going to wait for

that? I’m saying no, don’t wait for that. Just start working with your vagus nerve now. Don’t go and buy a stimulator; just get an ice pack. Do that, all right? We now know that if a patient is having SVT and you want to increase the parasympathetic tone with SVT (supraventricular tachycardia), we tell them to do gentle carotid massage, and that slows the heart rate down. So, we know this already in cardiology. I am saying do that for cardiology, fine, but also use it in your day-to-day life for stress management, blood pressure management, and all-around better

health. I'll show you more data on that. So, here’s another hack right there. Another one is humming. If you just sit for ten minutes and go, that vibration stimulates the vagus nerve. If you measure people's heart rates when they're doing that, it goes down. Measure their blood pressures; it goes down. Humming does that. Another one is laughter. Start a laughing club. The more you laugh and get good belly laughs, you’re stimulating your vagus nerve; pulse rate goes down, blood pressure goes down. So, who doesn’t have early hypertension? Everyone today is having hypertension. Well then, go

on and start laughing. Start laughing, start humming, start singing, even gargling! So, I told you that goes to the glossopharyngeal muscles. Take some saline or even plain water and gargle. Gargle loud, like you really mean it—not just a little gargle, but gargle hard so a couple of tears come out of your eyes. Now you're really stimulating your vagus nerve, and that is going to definitely give you a lot of benefits. So, right there, there's another hack I just taught you. Now, the biggest hack is the breathing that I already mentioned right at the beginning, where

you breathe in, but you breathe out long, prolonged expiration. That’s because you have a very large amount of representation in your lungs. Your lungs have a huge representation of the vagus nerve, so hack it. That’s a big nerve! Because you know there are small nerves that can be hacked as well. There’s one that you’ll read about, because now I know you’re going to go home and start looking up the vagus nerve, blah, blah, blah. But there’s one called the tragus nerve, which is right here on your ear, right at the front. This little piece sticking

out here—that one. If you press on it hard enough and massage it, sometimes you can even put your finger on the inside and massage it too. In that way, it does trigger your vagus nerve, but I think I’d look funny if I’m doing that and someone’s walking by. But there are instruments you can buy that actually stimulate this. What I’m trying to tell you is that yes, those things do work. There are easier, cheaper, free ways to stimulate your vagus nerve starting today. Start hacking it today! So then it comes down here, and then it

comes into all the gut area. Okay, so in the gut, it breaks down, by the stomach, into two branches—one goes to the front, one goes to the bottom and out, and it goes down to your colon. So why am I so interested in what’s going on in the gut down here? Well, you all know I’m very interested in the gut. Why am I interested in the gut? Because there’s another huge representation that my vagus nerve in my gut will affect my brain and can affect my heart as well. My vagus nerve over here is going

to affect my leaky gut and my microbiome as well. And I already told you all that I believe that all inflammation starts in the gut. All inflammation starts in the gut, so anything to do with the gut, including the vagus nerve, is of interest to me. If I can hack your vagus nerve and make your gut work better, you will have less metabolic endotoxemia. That means your leaky gut will be less; therefore, things that should stay in the sewer will stay in the sewer and not get into your bloodstream. If you have a leaky gut

as a result of dysfunction of the vagus nerve or if your vagus nerve is not working properly for multiple reasons (which I’ll show you in a minute), you’re going to get more leaky gut. If you get leaky gut, you get lipopolysaccharides and interleukins and other inflammatory molecules getting out from your gut into your bloodstream and then going to your whole body, causing inflammation. Chronic inflammation—most diseases today are chronic inflammation. Look, you guys… are not dying of dysentery or leprosy and all those bad things, right? So it's very important I said this: chronic inflammation. Where does

it come from? Where does most inflammation come from? It comes from your gut. Now, sometimes we all do bad things, you know; we put things on our bodies and whatnot. What comes from your gut? That's the biggest threat you have. You have 100 trillion bacteria in your gut, and not only that, but you have the wrong bugs in your gut. Fine, you have 100 trillion, but you have the wrong ones there. Why? Because you killed off the good ones, right? So when the bad ones are in your gut, what are they doing to your vagus

nerve? They are stimulating it; they're making it dysfunctional. So when those bacteria produce bad substances, neurotransmitters, they'll go up the vagus nerve, and they can travel all the way into the brain. Now, that should scare you. Do you want your bacterial products to travel all the way to the brain? There’s a strong correlation between what's going on in the gut and some of the neurodegenerative diseases, which is a whole new topic we can talk about, such as Parkinson's and also with other movement disorders. So, Parkinson's is huge; a lot of Parkinson's going on. Everyone knows

somebody who's got Parkinson's: dementia, inflammatory conditions in the brain. How did they get there? Well, these things can get in through the blood, and they can cross the blood-brain barrier, but they can also get direct entry into the brain through your vagus nerve. Did you know that you can actually get direct entry into your brain through the vagus nerve? There are studies now showing that particles that were found originally in the intestine ended up in the brain via the vagus nerve. So, I say that the vagus nerve here is very important. Plus, you have to

remember, when you have the wrong bacteria or you have inflammation in your gut—or let's say you have food sensitivities, like you’re allergic to wheat, wheat germ, glutenin—oh, it's horrible! Wheat germ glutenin is the number one thing that I'm finding in my patients who have either got autoimmune diseases, coronary artery disease, or hypertension, metabolic syndrome. The one thing I'm finding is a wheat germ glutenin allergy. So, it's really a sensitivity; it's not gluten. Only people think of celiac disease. Now, what happens with wheat gluten is that it causes inflammation here in the gut. So, the first

thing that's going to get affected by that, or one of the first things that's going to be affected by the inflammation in the gut is the nervous system in your gut. It's called the enteric nervous system, right? That's the nervous system of your gut. After the brain, the second largest neural network is in your gut. Now, if it is supplying your intestines and your intestines are all messed up, what’s happened to that vagus nerve, that enteric nervous system? It's messed up. So, it's sending wrong signals to the brain from the gut, and those signals—remember, it's

a two-way channel—so they're going up and down. Up and down. In between, there's your lungs, there's your heart, there's your heart rate. No wonder you get all sorts of vasomotor and vagal symptoms when you have gut problems. I'll give you an example: a patient came to see me the other day, and she had what is known as POTS. So, she had a very high heart rate all the time, and when she stood up, her blood pressure would just drop all the time. Why? Because you’ve got autonomic dysfunction. Because look, when you stand up, your autonomic

nervous system is supposed to fix everything, right? It's supposed to fix everything by ways of constricting you. Well, she had inappropriate sinus tachycardia all the time. She also had POTS. So, in talking to her, I started concentrating on her gut, and she said, "Excuse me, I thought you were a cardiologist." I said, "I am," but it turns out that she had classic symptoms of small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. I treated it; I gave her some of my herbal preparations—no antibiotics. I just gave her the herbal preparations, and she came back a month later saying, "Oh my

God! I finished this!" And I, of course, put on some cumin and some other special essential oils, and she got better. She said, "I’m no longer fainting; my heart rate has come down. I feel like I did before. It's so good!" I fixed her heart rhythm through her gut. And I'm saying this all the time: I’m saying this all the time that, and it’s blood pressure anomalies, especially orthostatic autonomic dysfunction, because the autonomic nervous system starts in the gut. You fix the gut, you hack your vagus, and your autonomic nervous system will reset itself back

to where it should be. So you’re no longer running sympathetic, sympathetic, sympathetic all the time. So, the gut is really, really important: your enteric nervous system. So, when the enteric nervous system goes wrong, the nerves of your gut, what symptoms are you likely to get? Constipation, because it’s just not working, or diarrhea, where it’s working too hard? It's dysfunctional. You want to fix that; you need to fix your gut. The enteric nervous system will get better, and when the enteric nervous system gets better, your bowels come back to normal, and your diarrhea goes away; constipation

goes away. You’ve got to fix the enteric nervous system. The nervous system in your gut is the vagus nerve coming down and spreading it. These nerve, this Vegas nerve, it is such a vagabond. Every, literally every millimeter or so in the gut has one of its endings, so you’re going to ask yourself, “What’s it doing there?” It’s feeling everything out, and it’s sending back signals to the brain, and we just underestimate this whole thing. We definitely underestimate this whole thing. Hack your vagus nerve; those autonomic nervous systems will get better, and your gut will get

better too. If you’re having any type of GI symptoms, start hacking your vagus nerve today and tell me if your gut symptoms didn’t get better. Now, of course, some gut symptoms are not only due to the autonomic nervous system; they are due to bacterial overgrowth. Like that girl I was telling you about, right? She had SIBO, and others have food sensitivity issues where they need to stay away from certain foods. So, we do the blood test to see which foods you are sensitive to. We do that if they're having really bad bowel problems, and then

I check their stools to see which bacteria are missing, which ones are in excess, or what can I do to rebalance them. Then we give them fermented foods, we give them high doses of fish oil. So wait a second, what does fish oil have to do with all this? Well, fish oil is omega-3, and guess what all these neurons are made up of? Omega-3! So wait a second, if you’re not having omega-3 in your body—or enough of it—and I know you don’t right now; I’ll tell you, you don’t! You’ve got a vagus nerve that’s not

working optimally. I’ll just tell you that right now. You see, our omega-3 levels today are so low it’s unreal. I have yet to see maybe one out of 40 labs that come back with omega-3 levels that are optimal; it’s called Omega Check. Nobody even checks for it. And the worst part of it, it's not just omega-3; they have too much omega-6! So, it’s not just omega-3; it’s the ratio of omega-3 to omega-6. If you have a relatively low omega-3, it’s okay if you also have very low omega-6 because it’s the ratio that really matters more

than anything else. But these days, we are all toxic with omega-6 because we’re all eating vegetable seed oils, and then we eat nuts that have been roasted in vegetable seed oils. We go out and eat too much, and all they use is vegetable seed oils. And you’re paying for it too, and tipping them on top of it—too much omega-6, too little omega-3. Omega-3 is needed especially for one big nerve in the body, and that’s your vagus nerve. You’ve got to have omega; you have to take omega-3 supplements. Now, if you’re totally vegan and you can’t

take fish oil, but where does omega-3 come from, by the way? Oh, it comes from fish. Well, actually, it doesn’t even come from fish; it comes from algae. And the algae get eaten by small fish, sardines, all those, and then they get eaten by bigger fish. The bigger fish eventually gets to you. The farmed ones have no omega-3 in them because I don’t see algae down there. Anyway, you’ve got to be careful about just hoping that you're getting all your omega-3s from fish. Good luck! Unless you’re really eating only wild-caught salmon every day, and then

you also have to eat a lot of it. But then, you know, that’s not my advice. My advice is, look, it’s easy: hack the system, just go and get omega-3 supplements and make sure that it doesn’t contain PCB, dioxin, or mercury. So, you get a high-quality fish oil. If it smells bad, it’s no good. If it tastes good, it’s probably okay. It mustn’t be rancid, and once you get it, put it in your refrigerator so it doesn’t get rancid. Rancid means what? Oxidized! Because if fatty acids get oxidized, they’re really bad for you, right? They

cause small dense LDL, cause lipid peroxidation, blah, blah, blah—all the things we talked about on other shows. But the bottom line is you want a healthy vagus nerve; a healthy vagus nerve is full of omega-3, and you must hack it frequently, constantly hack your vagus nerve, then that pathway will be facilitated, as we call it. So, here we go—so it stopped here. Oh yeah, okay, I saw another girl the other day; she was having gallbladder issues. So, her gallbladder wasn’t working. So, what innovates the gallbladder? The vagus nerve, right? So, with her, we did the

same thing; we worked on her gut and they said they were going to take her gallbladder out, and I said, “Yeah, well, you’ve got to follow the instructions, but just try this.” And she did, and her symptoms got better. So, she didn’t have a gallstone. So, why? What was the problem? She had a lazy gallbladder, so they give you this little medication, and then they look at your contractions on your gallbladder, and the gallbladder just wasn’t contracting properly, and sure, that’ll cause a lot of problems, right? So, my solution for that was, “Listen, just wait

a month, try this.” And we worked on her gut, and we worked on her motility and vagus nerve function, and she did vagal nerve exercises, and she still has a gallbladder. So, I just think that it's very important. Now, I’m not saying that all gallbladders must stay, even with stones—no, I’m not saying that. I’m just saying that there’s a lot more that meets the eye. Let’s just be a little sensitive about those too. The kidneys are important, and the coronary dimension, and the heart and lungs, of course. IN CAPITALS BECAUSE THAT'S THAT'S THAT'S TO ME

THAT IS REALLY IMPORTANT: INFLAMMATION. SO, THE VAGUS NERVE HAS A TWO-WAY TRAFFIC. I ALREADY TOLD YOU, AND YOU MUST HACK IT. IT IS THE SOFTWARE THAT'S RUNNING YOUR SYSTEM. LOOK, IF THERE'S ONE THING YOU MUST TAKE HOME TODAY, IT IS TO UNDERSTAND THAT YOUR HARDWARE REQUIRES A SOFTWARE. THAT SOFTWARE IS YOUR VAGUS NERVE. YOU MUST HAVE A HEALTHY VAGUS NERVE; IT TELLS EVERYTHING WHAT TO DO. OOPS, I WENT TOO FAR AHEAD. SO, WHAT IS THIS? THIS IS HEART RATE VARIABILITY, RIGHT? IT'S JUST SHOWING THAT BEAT TO BEAT THERE'S A SLIGHT CHANGE IN YOUR HEART RATE,

AND THAT TELLS YOU YOU HAVE A NICE HEART RATE VARIABILITY. THAT'S GOOD! THAT'S GOOD! THAT MEANS YOU HAVE A LOT OF VAGAL TONE. SO, SYMPATHETIC SHRINKS, PARASYMPATHETIC, THE INTERVAL GETS LONGER. I LIKE THAT! THIS WAS A STUDY THAT I WANTED TO SHOW YOU ALL: LONG-TERM EFFECT OF DEVICE-GUIDED SLOW BREATHING ON BLOOD PRESSURE REGULATION AND CHRONIC INFLAMMATION IN PATIENTS WITH ESSENTIAL HYPERTENSION USING A WEARABLE DEVICE. SO BASICALLY, WHAT THEY DID IN THE STUDY IS THAT THESE PATIENTS HAD BREATHING EXERCISES THAT WERE GUIDED BY A CELL PHONE APP. SO THE CELL PHONE APP TELLS THEM, "OKAY, BREATHE

NOW; DON'T BREATHE NOW; EXPIRE NOW; TAKE A DEEP BREATH IN." SO, IT GUIDED THEM THROUGH A BREATHING PATTERN. OKAY, NOW WHY WAS I INTERESTED IN THIS? 'CAUSE I TOLD YOU THAT ALL HE'S DOING WHEN HE'S DOING THIS IS HE'S HACKING THE VAGUS NERVE; THAT'S ALL HE DID, RIGHT? RIGHT! AND LOOK AT THE RESULTS. THERE WAS A SIGNIFICANT DECREASE IN BLOOD PRESSURE AFTER ONE MONTH OF EXERCISE. HOW DID THE BLOOD PRESSURE COME DOWN? 'CAUSE BRINGING DOWN THE BLOOD PRESSURE IS THE JOB OF THE PARASYMPATHETIC NERVOUS SYSTEM: THE VAGUS. AND A SIGNIFICANT CONTINUOUS DECREASE IN TNF ALPHA

WAS ALSO NOTED. WHAT DOES THAT MEAN? A SIGNIFICANT CONTINUOUS DECREASE? IT KEPT GOING DOWN! TNF - WHAT IS TNF? T NECROSIS FACTOR ALPHA, SO THAT'S AN INFLAMMATORY MARKER! SO, WHEN I'M DOING YOUR ADVANCED LIPID PANELS, STARTING NOW - I'VE BEEN DOING THEM - IT'S THE CLEVELAND HEART LAB STUFF THAT I'M LOOKING AT. I'M LOOKING AT INAN SIX; I'M LOOKING AT T NECROSIS FACTOR. UNFORTUNATELY, SOME OF THE INSURANCES DON'T WANT TO PAY FOR IT, BUT THIS TELLS ME THAT IF YOUR TNF LEVEL IS HIGH, YOU HAVE A LOT OF INFLAMMATION IN YOUR BODY. AND DIDN'T THE

STUDY JUST SHOW ME THAT I CAN DECREASE IT JUST BY BREATHING? HOW CHEAP IS THAT? SO WHO'S GOING TO PAY FOR THE STUDY IN THE FUTURE? NOBODY! BECAUSE YOU DON'T GET PAID BY TELLING SOMEBODY TO TAKE A NICE DEEP BREATH IN, BUT A LONG BREATH OUT. SO, THERE YOU GO. THE BAROREFLEX INDICES WERE ALSO SIGNIFICANTLY INCREASED. HEART RATE VARIABILITY DID NOT SHOW DIFFERENCES AT THIS TIME; THAT'S BECAUSE THERE WERE OTHER FACTORS STILL IN THE PATIENT. AND THE POSITIVE CORRELATIONS BETWEEN SYMPATHETIC INDEX AND... THERE YOU GO. SO THE SYMPATHETIC ALL WENT DOWN, AND TNF LEVELS ALSO

WENT DOWN. SLOW BREATHING EXERCISES HAVE A BENEFICIAL EFFECT ON BLOOD PRESSURE AND CHRONIC INFLAMMATION. YOU BECOME UNINFLAMED WHEN YOUR VAGUS NERVE IS STIMULATED AND HACKED BY YOU, BY BREATHING. SO JUST PAY ATTENTION TO YOUR BREATHING! YOU SEE, THE AUTONOMIC NERVOUS SYSTEM IS AUTONOMIC; IT WORKS ON ITS OWN, BUT YOU CAN ALSO CONTROL IT. YOU CAN OVERRIDE IT, AND THE BEST WAY TO OVERRIDE IT IS YOUR BREATHING. SEE, IF YOU DON'T PAY ATTENTION TO YOUR BREATHING, YOU'RE STILL BREATHING, RIGHT? IT'S AUTOMATIC! BUT I CAN HOLD MY BREATH; I CAN BREATHE OUT HARD. SO I CAN ALSO

OVERRIDE IT! SO, I'M SAYING TO YOU: DO IT! DO IT WHATEVER IT TAKES! DO IT! I DON'T CARE WHAT FORM; I DON'T CARE WHICH YOGA CLASS YOU GO TO, OR WHETHER YOU JUST DO IT AT HOME, OR WHETHER YOU DO TAI CHI, OR WHETHER YOU DO POSTURES, OR WHETHER YOU USE A MACHINE TO GUIDE YOU, OR WHATEVER YOU WANT - JUST DO IT! THIS ONE IS A DEVICE VERSUS NON-DEVICE GUIDED SLOW BREATHING TO REDUCE BLOOD PRESSURE. THIS IS ANOTHER SYSTEMATIC REVIEW ON MODEST BLOOD PRESSURE REDUCTIONS. LOW LEVEL VAGUS NERVE STIMULATION SUPPRESSES POST-OP ATRIAL FIBRILLATION AND

INFLAMMATION. I LOVE THIS STUDY! WHY? SO, IN PATIENTS WHO HAVE SURGERY - OPEN HEART SURGERY - THEY OFTEN GO INTO ATRIAL FIBRILLATION. AT LEAST 20% OF THE PATIENTS GO INTO ATRIAL FIBRILLATION. NOW, MY INTEREST IN ATRIAL FIBRILLATION IS: WHY DO THEY GO INTO ATRIAL FIBRILLATION POST-OP? THEY SAY IT'S THE IRRITATION OF THE PERICARDIUM, AND THERE'S BLOOD AROUND THE PERICARDIAL SPACE, AND BLAH BLAH BLAH. BUT I’M SAYING THERE'S SOMETHING MORE FUNDAMENTAL AT THE BIOCHEMICAL LEVEL. THERE'S SOMETHING ELSE, AND IT'S AN IMBALANCE BETWEEN THE SYMPATHETIC AND THE PARASYMPATHETIC SYSTEM IN THESE PATIENTS THAT THROWS THEM INTO ATRIAL

FIBRILLATION. SO, SURGERY IS SYMPATHETIC, OF COURSE! SURGERY IS VERY STRESSFUL; YOUR ADRENAL LEVELS ARE HIGH, YOUR INTRA-MYOCARDIAL CATECHOLAMINE LEVELS WILL BE REALLY, REALLY HIGH. SO, IF A PATIENT GOES INTO SURGERY WITH HIGH VAGAL TONES, HE'S HEALTHY, HE'S BEEN DOING ALL THIS STUFF - HE'S LIKELY GOING TO HAVE LESS ATRIAL FIBRILLATION POST-OP. BECAUSE HERE, WHAT THEY DID IS THAT THEY DID LOW LEVEL VAGUS NERVE STIMULATION. SO, WHAT THEY DID AFTER THE SURGERY WAS DONE, THE SURGEON IMPLANTED A LITTLE DEVICE RIGHT ON THE VAGUS NERVE AND GAVE IT A LITTLE ENERGY - THE VAGUS NERVE POST-OP! AND

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE INCIDENCE OF ATRIAL FIBRILLATION? LET'S LOOK! CONCLUSION: THIS LOW LEVEL VAGUS NERVE STIMULATION (LL VNS) SUPPRESSES POST-OPERATIVE ATRIAL FIBRILLATION AND ATTENUATES INFLAMMATION. WOW! INFLAMMATION TOO? NOW YOU'VE GOT MY ATTENTION! BECAUSE I'M ALL ABOUT INFLAMMATION. WHAT CAUSES CORONARY ARTERY DISEASE? INFLAMMATION! WHAT CAUSES CHRONIC DISEASES IN HUMANS? INFLAMMATION! WHAT IS IT THAT WE'RE ALL SUFFERING FROM TODAY IN THIS WORLD? INFLAMMATION! RIGHT? THERE YOU GO! YEAH, SO THERE YOU GO. THAT'S WHAT I'M ABOUT! SO LET'S SEE IN THIS GROUP... What happened? Okay, so we saw that serum tumor necrosis factor—there he shows up again—interleukin six

is significantly lower in the group that had vagal nerve stimulation. So how is that possible? Well, the vagus nerve, I told you, is a two-way traffic. It sends the signal from here to the brain; the vagus nerve got stimulated, says, "Ah, that's good! Everything is hunky-dory." The signal it got back, the king is sitting in his chair and his scout went out and checked it out and came back. And who's the scout? The vagus nerve is coming back, right, telling it everything is hunky-dory. How did he know that? Because the vagus nerve was being stimulated,

right? The electricity was coming good. Good vagus stimulated—that's great. So the king said, "Oh, that's all right. That's great, bring back the horses and bring back the men; stop the inflammation." If that signal was not coming, you'd say, "Oh my God, there's no vagus activity! Oh Jesus, this is terrible, terrible news. Inflammation will be ongoing—ongoing inflammation." So it turns off the inflammation. Next, these are the ex... I think I already told you some of these. Oh, by the way, this balloon blowing; I didn't tell you about the balloon blowing. So when you blow a balloon,

you're raising the intrathoracic pressure—that stimulates your vagus nerve. I'll show you some slides later on to show you how people take advantage of that and will sell you a little machine. Well, wait a second! Get a balloon, do it yourself, play with the balloon, do something useful, play with it, then laugh. Now you get a lot of vagus nerve activity. So, the Valsalva maneuver—when you take a breath in, you breathe in and then you pretend like you're going to breathe out, but you don't; you close your glottis and you strain. When you strain, what's happening?

You're increasing the abdominal pressure, and the vagus nerve that supplies all the intestines gets squeezed, and you get an intense increase in your vagal nerve activity. That's Valsalva. We do that in patients who have SVT (supraventricular tachycardia) when they go into that runaway rhythm. We say, "Okay, now sit down and push," and they do that and boom, the SVT breaks because you increase the parasympathetic. You can do that too—not because you're getting SVT, but just do it for fun. So you're at home feeling a little stressed out; you don't have a balloon? Then just do

a couple of Valsalvas—see, a couple of those rounds. Fine! People say, "What are you doing? You're having a bowel movement!" No, I'm not! It’s okay; do it! Yoga postures, meditation, humming, gargling—I mentioned all these, cold water shock... Now this hit I put at the bottom that says intense activity. I really like this; I think this is because that's what I do. I look; I don't have time to go to the gym for an hour. I don't know how many people got time to go to the gym or get on that treadmill and do all this.

I don't have time for that! So I do short bursts of activity, real fast. It takes me literally minutes, but as soon as I'm done with that rapid activity, then I just totally rest—no one's even around. I just do it on my own. It only takes me a few minutes every day; every day, just takes me a few minutes to do—that's it. And that’s how I like to do it—with intense activity and intense rest. Intense rest! See, nobody ever told you that; they just told you to do intense activity, didn't they? Why don't they tell

you to do intense rest right after the intense activity? That's what I like to see. I want to see that you facilitate the yin and the yang. Do intense fast activities with maximum ability that you can, and then just lie down and rest. One of the ones that I do which I like is the hands on the knees. You know, when you jump up real fast and just do that for about a minute or so, and then you're really huffing and puffing—your heart rate probably goes to about 150—and then just lie down. Lie down, and

you'll find that you'll be able to hack your system much faster and better. So, the autonomic nervous system... I already talked about dysbiosis. I'm coming back to this because I put the slide up—look, I'm telling you, the gut is huge! Yeah, it is huge! Most of us have a big gut, and the nervous system in the gut is very important. So you can hack that—it can hack you. That is why if you've got a gut problem, your life is miserable. Just think about it: if you have a gut problem, your life is miserable. Why? Why

is your gut so, so important to you? Because it's the home of the largest nerve in the body—your vagus nerve! That's why your gut is important. That's why you need to make sure what you eat is right, when you eat is right, how much you eat is right, and what you eat in terms of fiber and your bacteria is very important. Probiotics are really important; if you're missing them, fermented foods are very important; fiber is very important—right, right, right? So, there you go. So, CNS inflammation—I already mentioned mental fog, depression... Oh yeah, look at this

one: mental fog, depression, and anxiety. Do you know how many people that we have? An epidemic right now of what? Of depression, of mental fog, of anxiety. Heck, everyone's anxious! You noticed everyone's a cat on a hot tin roof, huh? Everyone's going through so much stress in their day-to-day life for whatever reason. We're just going through all this. You need to start hacking your life so that you can get rid of all that, and the best way to get rid of this is by watching your diet, fixing your gut, and regulating your autonomic nervous system.

Hacking your vagus nerve is very important, and you need to do this now. Of course, I always talk about my insulin levels and sugar—that's a different topic. That's very important too, along with your hormones, but this is very important as well. So, there you go. Now, about the parts I told you about—Inappropriate sinus tachycardia, syncope, and fainting spells. How many young people am I seeing every day fainting all the time? Fainting, fainting all the time. You do a tilt table test on them, and they faint. Blood pressure goes down to 70, heart rate goes to

50—they all have vasovagal symptoms. The vagus nerve is not working properly; it's too active in them. An overactive vagus nerve is also no good. You see, when a nerve becomes dysfunctional, it can stop working, or it can become really irritated, leading to problems such as diarrhea or constipation. Both ways can happen. So, your vagus nerve can cause both problems: too much or too little. PVCs and PACs, palpitations—the balance of your electrical system in your heart is based on yin and yang, the sympathetic and parasympathetic. If I give you a shot of adrenaline, you're going to

get PVCs. But if I give you a shot of adrenaline and stimulate your vagus nerve at the same time, you won't get PVCs, because the balance is there. So, who's not having palpitations? I see them in my office every day. "Oh, palpitations, Doc! I'm having palpitations!" It's because you're imbalanced; your yin and yang is off. Now, about orthostatic hypotension, constipation, and gallbladder dysfunction—I already mentioned all this. So, buy this little gadget here. You can buy this gadget, and it allows you to dial up how much resistance you want for inspiration and how much resistance you

want for expiration. And, yeah, you can buy these little gadgets, but my favorite gadget is this one here: the Respirate. It is my favorite gadget, and you can buy this on the internet. It's been approved by the FDA for lowering blood pressure. So, what am I interested in? I can give you a drug, right? No, this is really good; this is equivalent to at least one medication. What it does is very simple. You see these little words here? You pull them out and put them in your ears, and it gives you a tone and then

a separate tone. You just follow it with inspiration and expiration. So now you have a teacher basically telling you how to breathe. First, there's a strap that goes on your chest; it listens to your own breathing pattern of what you are doing right now. Then, over the course of the next 10 minutes, the machine slowly, slowly increases the inspiration, but more so expiration. By the end of this, you hopefully should have a breathing rate of about 8 to 9 times a minute. When's the last time you breathed only eight times a minute? You see my

point? Breathing eight times a minute more effectively by following inspiration and then prolonged expiration is far more effective in doing gas exchange, and at the same time, it's stimulating the vagus nerve. So, blood pressure comes down when you do this. You only need to do this for 10 minutes in the morning and 10 minutes in the evening. Now, I like it not just because it lowers blood pressure. I actually think that this—no tests have been done on this, meaning nobody's gone in and measured interleukin-6 levels or TNF-alpha levels with this. Nobody's measured heart rate variability

changes with it, but those studies exist in smaller studies and in animal studies. We need bigger studies, but the problem is: who's going to fund those studies? But this is so good, and basically, it's doing what we talked about earlier—it's hacking your system, but it's a machine-guided hack. So, I do like this very much. I think this machine will help your gut as well, but this machine costs, I think, about $100 to $200 to buy. Yeah, yeah, I know it’s exactly been an hour since I started, but I think that the vagus nerve is very

exciting. It's exciting because nobody's done much with it. I'm saying it's the most accessible nerve because I can't hack my trigeminal nerve; I can't hack all my other cranial nerves. This one, I can hack. So, happy hacking! Thank you. Okay, yes, sad to say, yes, it's true. You must have heart rate variability. If you don't have heart rate variability, you have inflammation going on somewhere. You need to find it and eradicate it. Super high levels—super high methane levels. Yeah, super high methane levels mean that you have the wrong bacteria in your large bowel, and they

need to go because they are either producing noxious agents or not producing the anti-inflammatory ones that you should be producing. The wrong bacteria will not produce short-chain fatty acids. The short-chain fatty acids are butyric acid, acetic acid, propionic acid. They are not being produced, and because they're not being produced, they are anti-inflammatory, which will increase your heart rate variability. Or these guys are producing bad stuff, so I'm versus your natural. I prefer the natural always, you know. So, there's one called, um, Candibactin A and Candibactin B; it's a 14-day course that you take. And because

this is colonic, you need to be a little bit stronger. You also need to take Curcumin every day, and you must take, um, cumin 300 mg twice a day. Then, once you finish the 14-day course, you must take essential oil of, um, clove one drop, oil of, uh, oregano, and oil of cinnamon three drops—so one drop of each once a day. After about a couple of weeks, you go to two drops of each, and then you end up at about three drops of each. That's it! The way I do that is I would tell them

to just take a little bit of olive oil, just a teaspoon, and just put the drops in it, and then take it and put it in your salad or just take it yourself. That'll help you too. The last thing you need to make sure of, if you're still having a problem, is to check for fungus; you could have a fungal infection too. There’s a category of herbal treatment for that as well. Now, the Rifaximin you can do, but, um, it’s very expensive, and I just don't like to kill bacteria. It kills the good and the

bad and the ugly, all of them, so I prefer not to. Yes, ma'am, yes! So, let me tell you about sleep apnea. People think, you see, now I’m going to ask you if you think that sleep apnea is only because of obstruction. Right, now that is true. If you have a big epiglottis here and you’re snorting a lot at night, that’s sleep apnea. Your brain thinks that you’re choking; you’re going to die. So instead of letting you go into deep sleep, it puts you into shallow sleep. When you’re only in shallow sleep, guess which nerve

is shut down? Your vagus nerve, right? So, yes, it does affect sleep apnea, but your question was: does this cause sleep apnea? That’s right. You want to get rid of your obstructive sleep apnea, but I’m going to tell you something else. Patients who have sleep apnea can reduce the fat in the tongue and the glossopharyngeal muscles and all that by fasting. So if you fast and lose weight from fasting, the muscles in the tongue shrink first because the tongue is very full of fat; the tongue is 90% fat. It just fades away, and snoring gets

better. They start sleeping better right away. So fasting is number one for that. The other thing I want to tell you is that when you do have vagus nerve dysfunction generally, when you do sleep, you’re not going to sleep as well either. You’re not going to go into good deep sleep because your vagus nerve is not kicking in. So yeah, the vagus nerve kicks into just about everything. Let’s say you have a really dysfunctional vagus nerve: you will wake up fatigued and tired in the morning because even though the brain said to turn on the

vagus nerve, it just didn’t turn on properly. So there you go. Sleep apnea is very important; you’ve got to get that treated. You’ve got to get rid of sleep apnea. So temporarily you may need a mask, but after you’ve lost the weight, then the sleep apnea is gone. Now, there are two other forms of sleep apnea you need to know about. One is bruxism. If you’re grinding your teeth a lot at night and the dentist looks at your teeth and says, “Oh my God, these mountains are all now flattened out, all the peaks are gone,”

you have to get a mouthpiece and work on your bruxism. There are ways to get rid of stress-related issues, so you should be doing meditation, relaxation, blah blah blah. That is very important because that interrupts your sleep upset. Then the second thing is restless leg syndrome. Restless legs also cause sleep disorders. If you’re iron deficient and you have restless legs at home, for example, then that will keep your brain awake all night. So even though you slept for eight hours, you wake up in the morning fatigued and tired, having the same effect as if you

have obstructive sleep apnea. It’s also Central sleep apnea. Central sleep apnea is a category in itself. Patients with central sleep apnea usually have either congestive heart failure, severe left ventricular dysfunction, or they’ve had a stroke. These patients breathe, and then they just quit breathing—not because they’re obstructing; it’s just that they’re not getting the message from their medulla telling them to take a deep breath in and out. They just stop breathing, and the pH in their body and the senses are all messed up, and therefore, the stimulation to breathe is gone. Central sleep apnea is a

problem, but it can also be partly treated sometimes with low-dose sleep medications, and sometimes there are some medications they can give you for simple sleep apnea. Yes, yes, yes, yes! You know, medications often cause Central sleep apnea as well, so you’ve got to really look at the patient as a whole to see why this patient is not breathing at night. Why do they quit breathing at night? Central sleep apnea can also occur if someone has obstructive sleep apnea and they’re using a mask, and the settings are not right. Then they can go into a situation

where low serotonin can play a role. It's more related to just your general A-F-F effect. It affects you in your ability to get to sleep, stay in sleep, and go into deep sleep, because you need serotonin to go into deep sleep. You see what happens with tryptophan? Why do I give tryptophan to everybody? Just about every patient who comes to my office gets it, because tryptophan gets converted to serotonin. Serotonin then gets converted to melatonin at night. Melatonin is very good for your mitochondria as well—melatonin is fantastic for the mitochondria. So, I give that because

of serotonin. When you have a good serotonin level in your body, you're going to sleep better, and in the mornings when you wake up, you're going to even feel better. You get uninterrupted sleep; you feel so much better. That serotonin! What a great question! I love the question. The question is: How come these people working all day long, living in a big crowd with everybody, are yet living well into their 90s without significant health problems? Because remember this—and actually, I should have said this in my lecture earlier on—that the vagus nerve starts in the midbrain,

right? But it has lots of rostral connections from the front: the prefrontal cortex, your frontal cortex, your hippocampus—all that has connections to your vagus nerve. So, if I am stressed out all the time because I have a certain philosophy in my life about relationships, how children should be, how parents should be, for example, living in that family situation, if I'm stressed out all the time, then my cognition, my ideas, are going to affect my vagus nerve, and then I'll get vagus nerve dysfunction, right? And then you get chronic diseases. These people don't get those diseases

because they have a life philosophy—a life philosophy that allows your vagus nerve to function uninterrupted and let it be what it needs to be. So, your life philosophy is very important. Now, I'm going to name the important aspects of life philosophy. Number one, living in the moment: they live in the moment. Number two, they don't drive looking in the rearview mirror—they don't look at the past, and they don't hold grudges. Number three, they don't worry about the future; they do what they can in this moment and they move along with that. It's very important. Number

four, they have meaning in their life. This means they bring meaning into their life. They do certain things they know are meaningful to them. To this person, something might seem meaningless, like just watching a car, but to me, it was something meaningful; it brought me a lot of pride and joy, and I felt good about it. They bring meaning into whatever they do—it brings meaning into that. Having a good friend circle and social support is very important when you have social support. Now, let me tell you about the vagus nerve. Okay, so here I am,

and when I touch someone—well, you touch me! Let us have you touch me. When you come to touch me, that means you're not my enemy, right? You caress me, you hold me; I'm now saying, "You are not my enemy." So, which one do you think is working—my vagus or my sympathetic nervous system? My vagus! You just turned on my vagus nerve. Therefore, when you have pets and you pet a dog, who’s getting the benefit? The dog? No, you’re getting it! Because your dog is your friend; you love it. You're getting meaning out of it, and

when you pet that dog, your vagus nerve goes up. Your vagal nerve stimulation is good. What I'm saying is that your whole life affects your vagus nerve. Everything from what you think to how you, as I said, touch, love, and feel being around people, the music you hear, the language that you hear, the tone of somebody speaking—let's say you came and you talked to me and you were really screaming your head off at me; what happens? My sympathetic nervous system goes up, and my vagus goes down, right? All of a sudden! But if you came

to me with a nice demeanor and you were no threat to me, my vagus nerve stays activated. So, what is this? This is very interesting. This is called "you are not presenting an existential threat to me." I feel safe. Similarly, existential threats come from society, from the government. If you get your Social Security taken away, now your vagus nerve is going to be dead for months, because you see an existential threat. People who live in societies like the ones you’re talking about, a household, don’t perceive these existential threats. The psychology of the household is such

that it strengthens each other; it is consolidative. It holds people together. They know that even if they make a mistake, they're not going to be thrown out on the street. See, there's no existential threat. We must not pose an existential threat to each other because the moment you pose an existential threat, your vagus nerve shuts down right away. Now you only have sympathetic activation, and you only have inflammation. Welcome to modern living! Because every day—bet you—a sense of existential threat arises. Are you not having feelings of existential threat every day? Or are you having a

lifestyle where you know you're safe and going to be okay? I get existential threat when I go shopping. I don’t know what I’m buying; I don’t know what’s in it. Well, no, now I know better. I know better. I know how to read labels. I know what to stay away from. I know what to eat and what not to eat. But, you know, it is this existential threat that we are all facing every day, whether it's rules, regulations, or whatever it is, or relationships, or expectations, or monetary concerns, or whatever it is — there’s too

much existential threat today. And that connects to your vagus nerve. So the difference is: if you get sick, how many people are going to come visit you in the hospital? Two people or twenty-five people? Twenty-five people. Your vagus nerve is flourishing; you'll be out of the hospital in four days instead of thirty days, and you'll have fewer complications. You'll recover from your surgery faster. Those studies have been done. Your recovery rate is clearly related to how many people came to visit you. They didn't give you medicine; they did — because when they came to visit

you, they gave you a dose of vagus nerve stimulation. They just bumped up your vagus nerve. So we should be dishing out vagus nerve function to each other. That’s what we need; we need vagus nerve stimulation. That’s what it’s all about. So, yeah, you're right. What we didn’t talk about here is what I call the psychosocial predictors of health. For example, I'll give you another instance: let’s say you’re at work and you’re at the lowest ranks, and people are trotting on you all the time. But you have access to the same health care as the

boss because the company has the same insurance. You’re going to die sooner and get more diseases than your boss because you have no control. So that causes an existential threat in you as well because you have no control over your circumstances. You can’t say what you want, you can’t do what you want, and you're not in control of your time or your environment. That’s huge. This was illustrated in the Whitehall study that was done in England, so it's been shown. Your whole life is affecting your vagus nerve every day in every way you look at

it. It's not just what we're putting in or our physical environment or the air we're breathing in, or the chemicals — blah blah blah, all the things I talk about — and your gut and everything. That's just the things that you can hack, but ideally, you also want to hack your psyche. Change your mind about everything. Live in the moment, release the past, be forgiving, forgive and forget, and you will be well. Get a pet; you’re going to live longer; your vagus will be fine. Really! Yes, ma'am! For perimenopausal women, okay, so women will not

tolerate fasting right before their period. So in women who are not menopausal, I'm just saying for them right before ovulation, you should fast; you should fast after your period. You’ll tolerate it better. That’s one rule. The second thing is that in the perimenopausal phase, fasting is actually beneficial because when you’re fasting during this phase, you’re going to get lots of good physiological changes. BDNF, which is brain-derived neurotrophic factor, increases brain plasticity; your brain actually works better. So you are less susceptible to the symptoms of vasomotor activity. Number two: what is vasomotor activity? That’s flushing. You

suddenly flush, feel hot, and start getting sweaty — all the perimenopausal symptoms that you get, right? Those are all controlled by the sympathetic nervous system. Now you can offset that with parasympathetic activity; more vagal activity is needed for perimenopausal symptoms. Do more vagal activity because now you’ve got to overcome regular stuff plus the vasomotor symptoms as a result of the drop in your estrogen levels. You know, estrogen drops in my 40s. So is it advisable to fast after the period, like a week after my period, and then continue back to eating regularly? Correct. As long

as you’re still having periods, I wouldn’t fast right before ovulation, which is the first 14 days of your cycle. After ovulation, then you can fast. So you should know when you're kind of ovulating, and then you fast after that. If you liked this video, here's one that I would recommend. If you want to see my latest video, please click here.