Daily vagus nerve stimulation to help you snap out of survival mode.

As a GP, I understand the science behind vagus nerve stimulation. I know the vagus nerve is the body’s master regulator, that it connects the brain to the body, and that it governs that all-important shift from ‘fight-or-flight’ into ‘rest-and-digest’. I know the mechanism, but I don’t think I really expected the impact.

I definitely wasn’t prepared for how much of a difference I would feel.

How I yōjō

My routine is simple.

Every night, when I go to bed, I grab my yōjō. I apply the gel to the earpiece and pop it in my ear. I find a comfortable intensity and then just let the gentle electrical pulses do their thing.

I also use it during the day when I remember. This is becoming more frequent because the benefits have become harder to ignore.

The sensation took a little getting used to — little electrical zaps that you have to set to your comfort level — but it quickly became something I looked forward to rather than something I had to remind myself to do.

What surprised me most

Sleep. Sleep. Sleep.

I’ve always been someone who can lie awake, mind whirring, tossing and turning for hours before finally dropping off. In the first few days of using yōjō, I noticed I was falling asleep faster.

At first, I put this down to coincidence, a good few days, or a placebo effect. But now, several months in, I can say with confidence that it is none of these.

On the nights I use yōjō versus the nights I don’t, there is a noticeable difference.

My Garmin data backs this up, too: sleep quality has genuinely improved, not just my perception of it. And that matters to me as someone who values having objective data alongside improvements in how I feel.

Getting to sleep faster has been the biggest win.

Anyone who knows that particular frustration of lying in the dark, wide awake, brain refusing to switch off, will easily understand just how significant this has been.

A shift in how I think about my nervous system

Something I didn’t anticipate was how using yōjō would make me more intentional about my parasympathetic nervous system more broadly.

Understanding something intellectually and actively working on it are two different things. yōjō has brought vagal tone into my daily awareness in a way that’s spilled over into other habits.

I now use the physiological sigh regularly — a double inhale through the nose followed by a long exhale — which is one of the fastest ways to manually activate your parasympathetic nervous system. It’s the kind of technique I’ve always known about, but yōjō has made me more motivated to layer these practices together.

I feel more in control of my own nervous system regulation, and that feeling of agency is something I hadn’t expected to value as much as I do.

Would I recommend it?‍

I started this journey curious. I’m continuing it as a genuine convert.

Whether you’re someone who struggles to wind down at night, feels chronically overstimulated, or simply wants to feel more grounded in your own body, yōjō offers something that is both accessible and, in my experience, genuinely effective.

The science was always there. And now I’ve felt it for myself.

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By André P. Boezaart, MD, PhD, FASRA

It helps to think of the human nervous system as four connected parts, each with its own job.

The central nervous system (CNS) is the brain and spinal cord. It is the command center. It handles thoughts, feelings, and decisions.

The autonomic nervous system (ANS) runs the jobs you never think about but can't live without: your heartbeat, your breathing, digestion, and blood flow.

The somatic nervous system (SNS) controls the movements you choose to make and facilitates your senses. It is your link to the outside world.

The enteric or "gut" nervous system (GUT) lives in your digestive tract. It has more nerve cells than your spinal cord, and it acts like a mind of its own, talking to the brain all day through nerve and chemical signals.

Together, these four systems work like a piece of music. Each part matters. Harmony is the goal. When one section plays too loudly, the whole piece falls out of tune.

When the stress system gets stuck

Inside the autonomic nervous system are two branches that keep each other in check.

The sympathetic system is the accelerator (fight-or-flight). The parasympathetic system is the brake (rest-and-digest).

In modern life, the accelerator often gets stuck. Alerts, deadlines, and worry keep the sympathetic system running hard, all the time.

What was meant for short bursts of alertness becomes prolonged hypervigilance. What was meant to be a useful alarm turns into slow harm.

A gland called the adrenal medulla releases catecholamines (stress hormones like adrenaline) and doesn’t stop. And another system, the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal (HPA) axis, releases cortisol, and doesn’t stop.

The immune system slips into a low, simmering, inflamed state. Inflammatory signals called cytokines rise, blood vessel linings work less well, and the gut wall becomes leakier and weaker.

The nervous and immune systems, which are meant to be partners, start working against each other.

Calming the body through the senses

You wouldn’t think it, but your senses play a role in spreading calm throughout your nervous system. Each of the five senses offers a direct path to the parasympathetic system. These paths evolved to tell the body one thing: you are safe.

Sight. When your eyes rest on something wide and open, like mountains or the ocean, the visual part of the brain sends calming signals inwards. This lowers activity in the amygdala, the brain's alarm center. A soft, wide gaze actually slows your heart.

Hearing. Gentle, patterned sounds calm us. Think of a mother's sing-song voice to a baby, a soft hum, ocean waves, or soothing music. These sounds work the tiny muscles in the middle ear and activate the vagus nerve. Your body tunes toward connection instead of defense.

Smell. Scent has a direct line to the brain's emotion centers. Aromas like lavender, bergamot, and frankincense lower stress activity and lift vagal tone (the strength of the calming vagus nerve).

Taste. Eating mindfully wakes up taste nerves that run along cranial nerves VII, IX, and X. This releases feel-good chemicals like dopamine and endorphins and gets digestion moving, which is part of the vagus nerve's territory.

Touch. Massage, firm pressure, and gentle skin contact switch on special nerve fibers called C-tactile afferents. These signal safety and belonging. They raise oxytocin (a bonding hormone) and boost the calming system.

Put together, these signals tell the body you are safe and free to heal.

The vagus nerve: the body's anti-inflammation highway

At the center of all this calming is the vagus nerve, the tenth cranial nerve. It is a two-way highway linking the brain, the organs, and the immune system.

About 80% of its fibers are afferent, meaning they carry information up to the brain. They send sensory signals from the organs and body, including from parts of the outer ear called the cymba and cavum conchae, back to the brainstem.

Its efferent fibers carry signals the other way, down from the brain. They switch on the cholinergic anti-inflammatory reflex.

Here's how that works: the vagus nerve releases a chemical called acetylcholine. It attaches to receptors on immune cells called macrophages. This lowers inflammatory signaling.

This link between the nervous and immune system is what allows thought, emotion, and inflammation to "talk" to each other in real time.

Bundling the senses at the ear

When we stimulate the part of the vagus nerve in the outer ear, in the cymba and cavum conchae, we tap straight into those calming afferent (sensory) pathways.

Transcutaneous auricular vagus nerve stimulation (taVNS) sends gentle electrical pulses to the very same circuits that music, touch, scent, and beauty stir up on their own.

It's as if all five senses were bundled into a single clear signal, all arriving together at a hub in the brainstem called the nucleus tractus solitarius.

Then, using the vagus nerve, the brain sends calming signals back down into the body. It steadies the heart, settles the gut, and quiets inflammation through that same acetylcholine pathway.

taVNS does not replace the senses. It amplifies their message. It reminds the nervous system what safety feels like.

Closing thought

At its heart, the path from stress to healing is a shift from sympathetic noise to parasympathetic calm.

Beautiful views, gentle sounds, soothing scents, delicious meals shared with loved ones, and a caring touch all send the same message the vagus nerve carries in every heartbeat: Be still.

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You slept. Properly. Not just an hour or two, but a full night. You canceled the meeting that was draining you, and your bloodwork came back fine, yet your body feels like it's bracing for something.

There is a reason you're feeling “wired but tired”, and it is why almost everything you try to fix the problem fails.

Let’s look at the wired part, then the tired part, before moving on to sleep.

Wired

Over time, chronic stress not only keeps the stress response going, but it also damages the mechanisms that are supposed to end it.

The stress response is managed by a system in the brain called the HPA axis.

Under normal stress, this system releases cortisol — a stress hormone — and then switches off. Under chronic stress, the off switch stops working.

Cortisol levels stay elevated. The nervous system keeps producing alerting chemicals, keeping the brain on edge even when there's nothing to be on edge about.

The nervous system can't easily tell the difference between an active threat and a habitual one. After enough time on high alert, it starts to treat that state as normal. The alarm doesn't turn off because the system has decided quietly and incorrectly that this is just how things are now.

This is the wired part.

Tired

There's a second consequence of sustained stress: low-grade inflammation.

Your fight-or-flight response evolved to prepare the body for injury. So stress primes an inflammatory response just in case you get hurt. Under chronic stress, that response never fully switches off. Inflammatory signaling proteins called cytokines stay elevated in your blood.

These pro-inflammatory cytokines talk directly to your brain, and their message is simple: there is an emergency, and we need to save energy for it. The brain responds with a set of changes that we all associate with being sick: deep fatigue, low mood, reduced motivation, social withdrawal, and difficulty thinking clearly.

What these days is often taken for weakness is merely an energy-saving strategy. Your body is doing exactly what it is built to do. It has just incorrectly decided that the threat is still active.

This is the tired part.

Why sleep doesn't fix it

Sleep can’t resolve this problem because sleep happens on top of this high-alert state.

In a healthy system, cortisol is highest in the morning and lowest at night. This helps regulate when you feel awake and when you feel sleepy. Under chronic stress, this rhythm gets disrupted. Your nervous system stays activated into the evening, making it harder to fall asleep and less likely for sleep to feel restorative.

Getting out of this loop requires nudging your body out of stress mode and into recovery mode.

And your vagus nerve is key here. It helps manage inflammation and is the pathway your body uses to switch from stress to rest.

What the target actually is

The underlying issue is an imbalance in the autonomic nervous system. The alert system is stuck and becoming sensitive to threat signals while the recovery system has lost its grip. The fix, then, has to address that directly.

The target is vagal tone.

Not a one-off reset, but a consistent practice that gradually shifts the nervous system back toward balance.

Evidence suggests that regular activation of the recovery system — through breathwork, vagus nerve stimulation, and structured recovery practices — can build resilience against chronic stress. It can reduce the inflammatory signals driving fatigue and help the nervous system relearn what calm feels like.

Wired but tired has a specific mechanism and specific target. A binge of sleep will help in many other ways, but for this dysregulation, small, repeated inputs matter more than dramatic resets.