Control Your Vagus Nerve to Improve Mood, Alertness & Neuroplasticity
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In this episode I explain how your vagus nerve—an extensive neural pathway linking your brain and body in both directions—powerfully regulates your mood, digestion, alertness and even certain food cravings, and I explain how you can activate certain vagus nerve pathways to improve your heart rate variability (HRV), a key marker of health and longevity. I also explain how to control vagal pathways to enhance your focus and alertness to improve learning and neuroplasticity. And I explain how your vagus nerve controls levels of serotonin in both your gut and brain, impacting your mood and emotional resilience and how to keep that pathway robust.
Articles
- Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation-Induced Heart-Brain Coupling: Implications for Site Selection and Frontal Thresholding-Preliminary Findings (Biological Psychiatry: Global Open Science)
- The mind-body problem: Circuits that link the cerebral cortex to the adrenal medulla (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America)
- Cortical map reorganization enabled by nucleus basalis activity (Science)
- Gut-microbiota-targeted diets modulate human immune status (Cell)
- Interaction of the Vagus Nerve and Serotonin in the Gut-Brain Axis (International Journal of Molecular Sciences)
- Probiotics and magnesium orotate for the treatment of major depressive disorder: a randomised double blind controlled trial (Scientific Reports)
Books
Other Resources
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