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February 13, 2026

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Can vagus nerve stimulation improve sleep?

Research suggests that if your sleep troubles are linked to stress and nervous system imbalance then non-invasive VNS may help. Here’s what the science says.

If you’ve been searching for new ways to get better slumber, you may have heard of vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) and, because you’ve tried a lot of things in vain, dismissed it.

But non-invasive vagus nerve stimulation (nVNS) is proving helpful for certain types of sleep disturbance. It’s not a universal cure, though. Details matter.

Here’s what the science says.

Why the vagus nerve affects sleep

The vagus nerve is the main arm of your parasympathetic nervous system — the system responsible for rest, recovery, and downregulation. It helps you shift out of fight-or-flight, slows your heart rate, reduces alertness and mental overactivity, and stabilizes breathing — all things you need to get good sleep.

If your nervous system stays subtly activated at night, if you go to bed in even a low-grade fight-or-flight state, you may feel that familiar tired-but-wired feeling.

One of the vagus nerve’s primary functions is to keep you coming back to rest-and-digest all through the day, especially before bed.

By stimulating the vagus nerve, you can enhance your body’s natural ability to find rest.

While vagus nerve stimulation has been studied for decades, the focus for a long time was on implanted stimulators. More recently, non-invasive vagus nerve stimulation (nVNS) — stimulation that happens through the skin — is growing in popularity as a promising tool to improve sleep quality.

Let’s explore what research shows about nVNS for sleep.

taVNS for post-stroke insomnia

One published case study using transcutaneous auricular VNS (taVNS) treated a patient with post-stroke insomnia.

After two weeks of receiving stimulation twice a day, not only did the patient’s sleep improve significantly but the patient was still getting better sleep at their three-month follow-up.

Brain imaging (fMRI) showed decreased activity in the default mode network (DMN) — a brain network often hyperactive in insomnia and rumination.

While this was only a single case, it supports the idea that vagus nerve stimulation may calm overactive brain networks linked to poor sleep.

Migraine-related sleep disturbance

People with migraines report more trouble sleeping than others.

A prospective observational study found that nVNS helped:

Prevent migraines
Treat acute attacks
Improve migraine-associated sleep disturbance

This suggests vagus nerve stimulation may be particularly helpful when sleep issues are tied to nervous system dysregulation.

Ear stimulation and insomnia

Cranial electrotherapy stimulation (CES) — low-intensity electrical stimulation applied to the earlobes — is FDA-approved for insomnia, anxiety, and depression.

Although the earlobe has limited vagal innervation, brain scans show CES produces activation patterns similar to vagus nerve stimulation. The concha, cymba concha, and tragus are innervated by sensory branches of the vagus nerve.

These sensory nerve fibers carry the electrical signals of the stimulation into the brain, particularly the nucleus ambiguus, dorsal motor nucleus, hypothalamus, amygdala, and cortex. The hypothalamus controls your shifting between sleep and wakefulness.

The brain may be more receptive during sleep

Animal research shows that the brain’s response to vagus nerve stimulation changes across sleep stages.

Vagal-evoked brain responses are largest during non-REM sleep, suggesting the brain may be especially receptive to vagal input during deeper sleep phases.

We also know that vagal regulation differs across sleep states in newborns, highlighting the vagus nerve’s natural role in sleep architecture.

Are there risks?

Non-invasive VNS is generally considered safe.

However, implanted VNS devices (used for epilepsy and depression) have been associated with sleep-disordered breathing, increased obstructive apnea, snoring, and rare reports of insomnia.

These effects likely relate to stimulation intensity and influence on upper airway muscles.

Importantly, these findings do not automatically apply to modern non-invasive devices like your yōjō — but they do show that stimulation parameters matter.

So, can vagus nerve help me sleep?

Sleep isn’t just about melatonin levels. It’s about nervous system regulation.

Because the vagus nerve influences heart rate, inflammation, breathing, and brain network activity, stimulating it may help the body shift into a recovery state more effectively, beckoning sleep.

For people whose sleepless nights feel like a stress-response problem, vagal modulation could represent an important emerging option.

A parent prepares breakfast in a sunny kitchen while children sit nearby, suggesting a calm morning routine.

VNS

Article

February 6, 2026

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Do vagus nerve stimulators work for anxiety?

For those living with anxiety rooted in the constant stress of everyday modern life, here’s how vagus nerve stimulation can get you feeling more grounded more of the time.

If you’re curious about vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) for anxiety, chances are there’s some hesitation on your part. So much about VNS is new, unclear, and unfamiliar. It’s sort of stressful.

This article is here to slow things down.

To begin with, yes, VNS works for anxiety. And there is loads of evidence to back us up here, but that’s not enough is it?

“Does this work?” is quite abstract.

Let’s look at the real reasons others hesitate when it comes to VNS for anxiety, reasons you might share with them. And let’s explore the relevant science.

Is this safe?

For many people, the first thing that comes to mind with vagus nerve stimulation is surgery.

That’s understandable. Invasive VNS has been used for years as an implanted treatment for drug-resistant epilepsy and depression. Hearing that can trigger fear around medical procedures, side effects, and long-term changes.

What often gets missed is that non-invasive vagus nerve stimulation (nVNS) also exists — yōjō’s VNS device is a non-invasive, ear-based stimulator.

Non-invasive VNS works through gentle stimulation through the skin. It does not involve surgery. Several studies show that these types of stimulators are safe, and come with very few side effects.

For people already living with anxiety, simply knowing that stimulation can be external, adjustable, and non-surgical removes a major barrier.

I don’t really understand what it does

“Stimulating a nerve” can sound vague or intimidating.

Without a clear mental model, it’s easy for VNS to feel abstract or even questionable.

Here’s the simple version:

The vagus nerve is a major communication pathway between the body and the brain.
It plays a key role in the parasympathetic nervous system, which supports calm, safety, and recovery.
Anxiety is strongly linked to overactivity in the body’s fight-or-flight response.
A vagus nerve stimulator sends gentle electrical current along the vagus nerve, activating it.
These bottom up signals travel from the body to the brain, helping shift the nervous system out of constant alert — supporting the body’s ability to regulate itself.

Doing this regularly helps improve vagal tone, which improves the vagus nerve’s ability to function properly.

I’ve tried so many things already

Supplements, meditation, apps, therapy. The more of these we try that don’t land, the less hope we have of finding anything that will.

Burn me once…right?

The thing is, VNS research seldom starts with anxiety as the main target. Anxiety is always a secondary outcome in studies on depression or headaches. But it’s almost always recognised as an improvement.

For example:

In a clinical trial using non-invasive VNS for depression, anxiety scores dropped significantly alongside mood improvements.
Patients treated with VNS for certain pain and headache conditions also showed meaningful reductions in anxiety.
A form of acupuncture that stimulates the vagus nerve has also been used to successfully reduce anxiety before surgery. Yes, this isn’t nVNS, but it uses the same mechanism.

The pattern is consistent: when the nervous system shifts from a sympathetic, fight-or-flight state, anxiety eases.

Unlike some of the other things you may have tried, ear-based vagus nerve stimulation is consistently accurate and convenient. You can yōjō while doing the cleaning up or commuting to work via train or bus, or while in a meeting. That makes it easy to do regularly.

Some of the things we try fail through inconsistency more than anything else.

What if nothing happens?

This sort of caution is perfectly normal. Uncertainty about something like vagus nerve stimulation raises the perceived risk.

The truth is VNS doesn’t always create dramatic changes right away.

It works through regulation over time — improving balance, recovery, and stress tolerance.

This is why yōjō created a nervous system care platform.

We know vagus nerve stimulation works best when it’s done daily. Irregular use makes it much harder for the nervous system to adapt.

And we’ve seen changes in our members’ heart rate variability, stress index, and parasympathetic activity scores. Better sleep and mood are two of the first things members notice a few weeks after starting with yōjō.

Changes are gradual. Consistency is key.

There’s no reason vagus nerve stimulation can’t work for you — especially when it’s used consistently and with guidance.

What if it changes or numbs me?

Vagus nerve stimulation does not work like medication. It doesn’t blunt or override your nervous system. Instead, it supports vagal activity, which naturally reduces excessive threat signalling.

Your body and your mind relax because there’re no immediate dangers. Your personality and emotional range have nothing to do with it.

Studies show that vagus nerve stimulation:

Reduces activity in the amygdala, the brain’s fear center
Lowers activity in the hippocampus, involved in emotional memory
Increases activity of GABA, a calming brain chemical that reduces overstimulation

I don’t want to do it wrong

Without guidance, even simple tools can feel overwhelming.

When should I use this? How often? How do I know it’s helping?

Unlike some cervical VNS options (devices that target the vagus nerve through your neck), ear-based vagus nerve stimulation for anxiety has simplicity on its side.

The earpiece fits snugly and stimulates the branches of the vagus nerve that sit very close to the surface of your ear. Either ear is fine.

A yōjō session lasts 30 minutes, and you can adjust the intensity.

Relax Mode for relaxation, Stress Mode for resilience, Energy Mode for vitality, and Sleep Mode for, well, sleep. Each mode is carefully engineered to provide the appropriate stimulation.

The only way you can go wrong, really, is by NOT using your yōjō vagus nerve stimulator at least once a day.

So a VNS stimulator will work for my anxiety?

Yes. The evidence shows that vagus nerve stimulation can reduce anxiety by:

calming overactive fear circuits in the brain
increasing neurotransmitters that calm signalling in the brain
shifting the body out of chronic fight-or-flight and into rest-and-digest
supporting a physiological state of safety

A good stimulator works by calming your body’s stress response and changing how certain parts of your brain behave. Changes take time, so you may want more than just a device. A support system that helps you stick to vagus nerve stimulation like a ritual you can’t live without, perhaps?

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Frankenstein’s monster with a vagus nerve stimulation device and a frog on his head

VNS

Article

October 28, 2025

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Frogs, Frankenstein, and VNS

The inspiration for Frankenstein is worse than fiction, but instrumental in understanding how nerves work.

A steel table, metal probes, and life-giving lightning are the images accompanying the creation of Frankenstein’s monster. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is a glimpse into very real scientific pursuits of the 18th century that formed the foundations of our understanding of nerves and muscle tissue, including the vagus nerve.

While 8-foot human scrapbooks weren’t plaguing Europe, scientists in the 17th and 18th centuries were experimenting with animal reanimation, using electricity. Shelley spent years studying these scientific breakthroughs and took inspiration from the findings when writing Frankenstein.

Science seems to have a fascination with frogs, and the history of understanding nerves has amphibians to thank for their role in early experimentation.

Jan Swammerdam was a 17th-century naturalist and philosopher known for creating the Bybel der Natuure (Bible of Nature) — a collection of studies on insects which, at the time, included frogs. Swammerdam’s interest in frogs had theological and scientific goals: he wanted to prove that all creatures were created by God and governed by the same biological rules. Swammerdam used similar muscle experimentation methods on frogs as those used on larger animals like cats and dogs. He exposed the leg nerves and used sharp instruments to stimulate contractions, showing a closer link between frogs and humans than was previously thought.

Luigi Galvani’s inquiry into reanimation started with a frog, a static electricity machine, and a scalpel. A frog’s leg nerves were exposed near a charged electrical machine when Galvani’s wife touched a nerve with a scalpel, causing the leg to spasm. Noting that the scalpel had been near the static electricity machine shortly before his wife had used it to touch the frog, Galvani formed and tested his theory that electrical force could travel along the nerves to the muscles, causing them to contract. He called this “animal electricity”.

Galvani also found that nerves from one frog could be attached to the muscles of another, and that the muscles from the second frog responded when the nerves were stimulated.

Shortly after Galvani published his findings, another professor of physics named Allesandro Volta disputed the notion of “animal electricity”, causing controversy in the field. By repeating Galvani’s experiments with frogs, Volta concluded that the key to nerve stimulation was in agitating them with two differing types of metal. The more dissimilar the metals, the more intense the reaction. Galvani would later disprove this by using two rods made of the same type of metal to cause muscle contractions. The result of their scholarly dispute? Both were partially right and wrong: there is no “animal electricity”, but nerve stimulation doesn’t require two differing metals to achieve.

Galvani’s nephew, Giovanni Aldini, continued his uncle’s work by publicly animating the corpses of executed criminals. Aldini inserted metal rods into the corpses and stimulated muscle movement with electricity, demonstrating a macabre display of galvanism and leading to questions about bringing back the dead.

These galvanist pursuits weren’t the only inspiration for Shelley — the author cites Erasmus Darwin (grandfather to Charles Darwin) in two editions of her work.

Erasmus Darwin was a physician, botanist, and poet, and amongst his publications on plants and evolution, he wrote on reanimation in dead microorganisms.

Arguably, the most influential figure in crafting Frankenstein was Sir Humphry Davy, a friend of Shelley’s father who allegedly inspired the character Victor Frankenstein.

Davy was a professor of chemistry at the Royal Institution in London, with crowds overfilling his lecture hall to watch his experiments. Davy used Volta’s invention—the electric pile—to investigate and prove that electricity generation depends on a chemical reaction. Shelley used some of Davy’s lectures as dialogue for Victor Frankenstein and tried to capture the professor's passion for understanding nature and his drive to master it.

Non-invasive vagus nerve stimulation (nVNS) is a form of mastery over nature. Short bursts of electrical energy are passed through the vagus nerve to relax the stress response, improve nervous system function, recalibrate certain regions in the brain, and control inflammation. What scientists learned about the effect of electrical impulses on nerves from their experiments hundreds of years ago, we use now to regulate the digestive system, improve mood, and manage chronic pain disorders via the vagus nerve.

Fortunately, nVNS can be done at home, sans steel table and metal probes.

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