The vagus nerve is a darling of the all-natural healing crowd. Its complex arborescence makes it the ideal nerve on which wellness teachers can hang a multitude of claims. Online, it is feted as “the key to well-being,” “your superhighway to health,” and even “the physical manifestation of the soul.” Resetting this nerve through a series of routine interventions is professed to overcome anxiety and depression, improve your memory, and increase your altruism and success in life.
The vagus nerve is real, and there are genuine ways to treat medical conditions by tapping into our body’s information superhighway. But those all-natural interventions hyped up online? A closer look unravels them back into murkiness and wishful thinking.
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When Simon Cork, Ph.D., a senior lecturer in physiology, was shown one of the most popular exercise videos on vagus nerve stimulation, he told Inverse that the recommendations the video made were not based on science. Our understanding of anxiety is still muddy. The invocation of the vagus nerve and of neuroplasticity—reshaping our malleable brain—may sound scientific and thus reliable, but it is pseudoscience in this context.
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What the wellness community recommends for stimulating the vagus nerve—eye movements, meditation, massage, cold-water immersion, and singing and humming—, if it works, is likely to be beneficial through a very simple concept: relaxation.
