What Is the Vagus Nerve, and What Does It Do?

Your body is running a thousand background processes right now — pumping blood, digesting food, healing microscopic damage, and adjusting hormones — all without you thinking about it.

That’s the autonomic nervous system (ANS) at work: the silent regulator connecting your brain and spinal cord to every organ, tissue, and cell.

It keeps you alive — and in balance — without ever asking for your attention.

What is the ANS?

The ANS is your body’s autopilot.

It maintains vital functions like heart rate, breathing, digestion, and immune response — automatically and continuously.

It’s made up of three main branches:

• Sympathetic nervous system – your body’s stress responder (fight-or-flight).
• Parasympathetic nervous system – your recovery and repair mode (rest-and-digest).
• Enteric nervous system – your gut’s independent control center.

The enteric system manages digestion. The other two are constantly balancing each other — one energizing, the other calming — to maintain homeostasis, your internal equilibrium.

The sympathetic nervous system

When things get intense, this system takes charge.

The sympathetic nervous system prepares you for action. It’s the one that saves you from danger, sharpens focus, and floods your body with energy.

Once activated, it:

• Releases adrenaline and other stress hormones.
• Raises heart rate and blood pressure.
• Shifts blood flow to your muscles and brain.
• Reduces blood flow to the gut and skin.

This is the fight-or-flight response: essential for survival, but harmful when it stays switched on too long.

Chronic activation can lead to high blood pressure, inflammation, poor digestion, and fatigue.

The parasympathetic nervous system

Once the danger has passed, the parasympathetic system steps in.

This is the body’s rest-and-digest network: it slows things down so you can repair and replenish.

When active, it:

• Slows heart rate and lowers blood pressure.
• Increases digestion and nutrient absorption.
• Dilates blood vessels, improving circulation to vital organs.
• Balances inflammation, promoting healing.

The star player here is the vagus nerve — the longest cranial nerve in your body. About 75% of its fibers are parasympathetic, connecting your brain to your heart, lungs, and gut. Through this nerve, the parasympathetic system influences everything from mood and immunity to metabolism and sleep.

Sympathetic vs. parasympathetic

Here’s how these two systems work together — and why that balance matters:

When the stress response dominates, as it often does in modern life, your sleep, digestion, and mental clarity begin to suffer.

Why it matters

A well-balanced autonomic nervous system is essential for resilience — your ability to recover from stress and maintain health.

When the fight-or-flight response and the rest-and-digest response work in harmony, your body adapts efficiently to challenges and then returns to calm.

But when stress wins out, inflammation rises and chronic imbalance sets in; the physiological foundation for burnout, anxiety, poor sleep, and chronic disease.

The takeaway

A lot of what keeps you alive happens automatically. But that doesn’t mean you’re powerless to influence it.

Through tools like breathwork, movement, biofeedback, and vagus nerve stimulation (VNS), you can help your nervous system rediscover equilibrium, the state your body was designed to live in.

The vagus nerve is a key part of the body’s system for calm and regulation. It helps influence heart rate, digestion, immune responses, and how the body adapts to stress. Vagal activity is associated with resilience and recovery.

In today’s fast-paced world, ongoing stress can place extra demand on the nervous system. When the body struggles to shift out of a constant “on” state, this may contribute to challenges such as poor stress regulation, inflammation, or digestive discomfort.

There are clinically studied ways to stimulate the vagus nerve, including non-invasive vagus nerve stimulation (nVNS). Alongside these, there are also simple, natural practices that may help support vagal activity as part of everyday life.

Embrace the cold

Brief cold exposure can encourage activation of the parasympathetic nervous system. This might include a short cold shower, a dip in cool water, or even splashing cold water on your face. These experiences can prompt the body to shift toward a calmer, rest-and-digest state.

Breathe mindfully

Breathing is one of the few automatic bodily processes you can consciously influence. Slow, deep breathing that engages the diaphragm can help signal the body to relax, supporting heart rate regulation and parasympathetic activity.

Try this

Place one hand on your chest and the other on your stomach.

As you breathe in through your nose, allow your belly to rise while keeping your chest relatively still.

Exhale slowly through your mouth.

This style of diaphragmatic breathing can help support vagal function and encourage a calmer physiological state.

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Sing, hum, chant … or gargle

The vagus nerve has branches that connect with the muscles of the throat and vocal cords. Activities such as singing, humming, chanting, or even gargling can create gentle vibrations in this area, which may help stimulate vagal pathways.

Get moving

Physical activity supports the nervous system as well as the muscles. During exercise, the body becomes more alert, while recovery afterward relies on parasympathetic activity to restore balance. Over time, this process can help train the nervous system to move more efficiently between states of activity and rest.

Regular movement is associated with better stress recovery and overall nervous system health.

Socialize and laugh

Social connection plays a meaningful role in nervous system regulation. Spending time with others, sharing positive experiences, and laughing can support parasympathetic activity and are linked to lower stress levels and improved heart rate variability.

Supporting your vagus nerve doesn’t require dramatic lifestyle changes. Small, consistent practices can help create the conditions for better balance and resilience over time.

For those seeking a more targeted approach, non-invasive vagus nerve stimulation (nVNS) is a clinically studied option designed to stimulate the vagus nerve safely and effectively.

Burnout is a state of emotional, physical, and cognitive exhaustion caused by prolonged stress. It’s marked by depleted energy, reduced motivation, and a sense of detachment from work or life.

Most conversations about burnout circle the same three ideas:

• You’re no longer aligned with your work.
• The cult of productivity won’t let you rest.
• Your mindset needs a reset.

All true — but they miss the real point.

Burnout feels philosophical, even spiritual, but at its core, it’s biological. Down-and-dirty, animal biology. It’s what happens when your body’s survival systems forget how to stand down.

Your stress response was built for short bursts of action. A chase. A threat. A deadline. When those bursts never end, the stress never stops — and your body forgets how to switch off, and it’s “all systems go” all the time.

At first, it’s just overdrive. Then, it becomes dysfunctional.

Cortisol floods your system. Your immune response activates. Low-grade inflammation spreads quietly through your tissues. Your brain reads this chemical chatter as a sign of danger. Even when you’re sitting still, your body’s braced for attack.

That’s burnout: a body in fight-or-flight, running on fumes, trying to save energy for life-saving tasks that never come. Your mood drops, your focus fades, you start conserving — not because you’re weak, but because your body thinks it’s protecting you.

And because the stress keeps coming, the inflammation keeps burning. The stress-inflammation-stress cycle loops and loops.

The good news? Low-grade inflammation is manageable — even reversible — when the nervous system is taught how to regulate again.

That’s what yōjō helps people do.

We use science-backed tools — vagus nerve stimulation, biofeedback, and personal coaching — to restore balance to your nervous system and help it remember how to rest, recover, and reset.