How to Stimulate Your Vagus Nerve for Instant Calm

A 5-minute practice that’ll change your day (and maybe your week)

I taught a live class yesterday and the biggest takeaway came from it:

Nervous system restoration is really damn simple.

And it’s this simple magic that shifts the way you see the world. When you’re stuck in fight-or-flight too much (and you probably are, we all are), life presents itself as stressful. When you’re able to get back to rest-and-ease, it all softens and gets calmer.

It's like giving yourself a real advantage; helping you make good decisions really quickly, stopping you from piling on the stress so hard you end up getting cracks in your teeth from the all the grinding…

So how do we get back there? And how do we do this regularly?

First of all, you need to learn how to feel again.

Once you've felt it, then we melt it. Vagus nerve stimulation is your way in, and we do that in one simple, accessible, do-it-in-secret way:

Make your exhales longer than your inhales.

That’s it.

Breathe in for 3, 2, 1…

Breathe out for 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1…

And if you want a little extra with that, add a hum as you exhale, or vocalise the word ‘voohum’. Turns out, the yogis and their ‘oms’ were onto something — this vibration of sound stimulates the vagus nerve even more, which is why The Welsh National Opera recently discovered how amazing singing is for mental health issues and chronic pain.

Try this for 2 minutes today and notice what happens. Yesterday’s class, an hour focused around this simple idea, left us feeling like we'd slipped a little something in our tea — the chill was so big, neighbourhoods for miles fell asleep (at least, that’s how it felt).

Ready to practice?

Here's some of that theory alongside a breathing practice from yesterday’s class:

Let me know how this lands for you — I always love hearing your experiences.

Did this resonate?

If you’re craving more of this goodness in your days, this is exactly the deal inside my paid Joyful community.

Joyful is the only newsletter that teaches burned-out and overwhelmed women how to feel genuinely better through easy-going nervous system regulation.

And inside the full tier, classes like this one don’t just give you ‘something to try’, they give you the exact tools to turn joy into your default setting.

Life won’t hand you calm, and ease, and joy. You claim it. And Joyful is here to show you how. Learn more about it and upgrade here or click the button below.