Podcast - Dr Carrie Rigoni with Steph Lowe on Health, Happiness and Humankind

This blog post is a transcript of the podcast interview between Kirsty Wirth and Carrie Rigoni. It was created for those of you who prefer to read rather than listen (please forgive any grammar mistakes, it may have come across differently verbally vs in written form).

Find the podcast here, if you prefer to listen!

Optimizing your Vagus Nerve to thrive in our current times with Carrie Rigoni (Episode #335 )

Hi, I'm Steph Lowe and welcome to Health, Happiness and Human Kind.  Each week I speak with experts from all over the world in the areas of nutrition, microbial health, environmental sustainability, psychology, meditation and more.  Together we will teach you the answers to becoming healthy, happy and a more conscious human and why your contribution to the planet truly matters.  If you love the show please rate and review us on iTunes and hit share to send todays episode to a friend or two.

And now, without further ado let's dive into today's episode.

In today's episode we meet Dr Carrie Rigoni, passionate Chiropractor, with a brain focused chiropractic practice working with babies, children, pregnant women and chronic diseases. 

Today, we discuss the role of the Vagus Nerve for babies, children and adults, the significance of sympathetic dominance or our fight, flight or freeze response, how to improve your vagus nerve and what gargling has to do with it and so much more.  This is such an important episode that has never been more relevant than in our current times and we hope it inspires you to take action to thrive instead of just survive.

Hi Carrie and welcome to the show!

Hello, and thank you for having me.

Thank you!  This is a topic I am so interested in and one I talk to a lot of my clients about so I'm very much looking forward to getting your experience and knowledge today but before we do dive into the specific topic, I'd like to hear more about you, more about your background, your passions, whatever you want to share. 

So, I am a Chiropractor in Perth, and I do a particular chiropractic technique called applied kinesiology and I kind of stumbled upon the vagus nerve in my own healing journey and id been in the position where I had tried so many different modalities and diets and supplements and it wasn’t until I started stimulating my vagus nerve and getting it to work more optimally that I saw a big shift in my health.  I shifted my whole healing journey into what I do now in practice so I have a really huge focus on the vagus nerve.  I work with babies, children, adults alike and my big passion is to support families in helping them raise happy, healthy kids and I do that via the vagus nerve just so we can prevent these chronic illnesses and long-term illnesses that we maybe get as adults that we don’t want to see our kids to experience as well.

Yeah, I'm all for that preventative health care rather than a reactive model that’s for sure.  So, for the benefit of the listeners, let's talk about exactly that, what is the vagus nerve. 

So, the vagus nerve is the largest nerve in the body and its part of the sympathetic nervous system so this is what keeps us out of the stress response.  The power of the vagus nerve is that it's not about stress it's about being able to regulate after the stress and pull ourselves out of that sympathetic state.  So, what the vagus nerve does is that it tells our body and the whole nervous system that you are safe, you don’t need to maintain that heightened stress response, that hypervigilance, you can calm back down into a more generative coherence state and we know that if we spend too much time in that sympathetic state with our sympathetic nervous system activated that can lead to a range of health issues and so we really want a vagus nerve that can help us regulate our stress response.

Yes, sounds no more important than the time we are living in but we might talk about that a little bit later! So yeah, our listeners are very familiar with the fight or fight, that dominance that's something we have discussed a number of times on the show but yeah, we haven't specifically gone into detail I guess about the mechanisms behind that.  So, you mentioned that was part of your healing journey but also that it can present in a number of different ways so I would love to hear maybe if you can share your personal experience then of course what you see in your own clinic and your clients around what presentations I guess for vagus nerve health could look like.

So, for me, my own personal experience was through 8 years of chronic fatigue syndrome, a label that I never fully accepted, and searched to find answers why my body was so tired all the time and for me a big part of learning about the vagus nerve was that there was this portion of the vagus nerve called the dorsal vagal response and this is kind of that freeze response where your life stress feels so big to your nervous system and this I subjective this is not actually an indication of how big the stress is but for your nervous system it feels so big that your body goes into a complete freeze response and this is kind of the primitive nervous system saying its safer for me to play dead than try to fight and get out of this stress that I'm currently in.  For me personally I spent a lot of time in that dorsal stress response without realising that’s where I was as you say, in these times I think a lot of us are stuck feeling paralysed you know that uncertainty and not really knowing why our bodies feel so fatigued or paralysed and this is that stress response, it’s a very natural stress response that we all have the ability to dip into.  The vertical part of the vagus nerve which is what pulls you out of the stress response and into a more coherence state, this needs to have a certain amount of strength or tone to be able to do so, so if your nervous system doesn’t have that foundation you can fall into a fight or flight or even potentially a dorsal vagal paralysed response but you cannot then pull yourself out of and this is where people kind of get stuck.  Most people who come into my practice, I'll go through some symptoms for babies, kids and then adults, most people who come into my practice it's kind of a spectrum, a lot of hovering in that sympathetic dominance state but then the ones who feel like they have tried everything you know, seen every practitioner, and probably been told its just depression of something like that from their GP, they tend to be stuck in that dorsal vagal response and are unable to get out of it.

So in babies, a common presentation is that a baby who needs extra comfort than average, now again there is a whole spectrum when it comes to babies you know and their personality and everything else but I'm talking about the baby who you know if you transfer them they wake up within a couple of minutes, they need that constant contact, they need extra safety from their caregiver, they often only like one caregiver and you can see they feel uncomfortable in social settings so you know the toddler who walks into a room full of people and just stops and stares that's kind of like that freeze response where their body is going well I don’t feel safe but I don’t know what to do so I'm just going to stop and freeze.  These babies and toddlers tend to wake a lot overnight, want that contact all the time, possibly have some digestion issues because the vagus nerve is linked with digestion and the ability to process food. 

When we move into toddlers and school age children the most common thing I see is more an emotional regulation problem, not problem, a struggle with emotional regulation so often these kids will still have some digestion issues maybe some immune issues similar to a child who is stuck in a sympathetic dominance state, you know we know that when that cortisol goes up your immune system goes down so these kids often have this you know lower immune system maybe catch things easy, maybe get eczema you know those sorts of things but they just seem to be and what I say to parents is you also need to trust your intuition because there is a spectrum when it comes to behaviour, you know in your gut if your child's behaviour is within normal limits so to speak or if you feel like its excessive and they really can't regulate like they are really very much struggling to regulate themselves and those are the kids that I support with getting their vagus nerve working well, getting them to feel more settled and safe in their own bodies so getting their vagus nerve to tell their body your safe and comfortable and these kids shift into a state where they just seem more comfortable in their own skin.

Beautiful. 

And then with adults, gosh, it’s a huge array of presentations that can come through.  I do see a lot of people who just say I've tried everything and I've heard you do something different, can you just see if you can help me and its more digestion issues or headaches or migraines like physical presentations rather than the regulation and impulse control issues that we may see in children. 

Yeah I can certainly appreciate that the reason it became,  I guess, more relevant to my world is that I do a lot of microbial work but equally you can get someone to do all the work and even spend you know $300 or $400 on testing their microbial and everything comes back perfectly and what you can't see from those tests is what's going in the nervous system level but getting a result like that for me often highlights the missing piece is exactly that, that they need to be doing chiropractic care and looking at their vagus nerve, we can certainly give them some strategies on how to do that and that’s important for someone to see because it's very easy to think something is wrong with the gut eco system with all the knowledge that we have about the microbial these days, we have got to make sure that we don’t miss the role of the nervous system in gut upset of digestive symptoms.

Yes, 100% and I very much work a gut health naturopath and other practitioners over here because I do have patients are that are the complete opposite where their nervous system is working beautifully and their gut is still not right, I'm like ok, we have got some work to do here so it's definitely a very holistic approach and collaborative approach with a group of practitioners for sure to get it all right.

Yeah, absolutely as always, we love that.  We briefly touched on the current circumstances but I would like to talk more broadly to start around say, how we eat and some lifestyle factors that affect our vagus nerve.

There are 2 big things that affect the vagus nerve from a biochemical point of view.  Number one is the food we eat, so anything that is happening in the gut really, so if we have a high inflammation load in our gut, that can negatively impact the ability of your vagus nerve to work so the nervous system cannot tell the difference between different types of stress, so high levels of inflammation in the body can be as stressful to the nervous system as say a big emotional stress, it can't tell the difference and it shifts it into a sympathetic dominance state no matter what that stress is.  Working on a low inflammation diet, you know high variety whole foods, removing all those inflammatory foods that I know your followers will already know how to do so I won't mention them and then ensuring that the gut microbial is optimal as well, as optimal as possible, very important for the vagus nerve. 

And the other thing that is super important is the level of cortisol in our body.  We know that higher levels of cortisol tend to start to shut down the stress regulation areas, the vagus nerve and also in the brain because if we have these high levels of stress hormone then our nervous system says there must be a threat and I need to remain in this state so naturally those stress inhibitors start to decrease in function so we can maintain that level of stress so any form of cortisol stress hormone trigger that is happening in the body you really need to be working on managing your stress load to be able to be able to activate your vagus nerve.

Yeah for sure, and so of course that’s very relative like you said it could just be something that doesn’t look like on a global scale to be a big stressor but if its impacting you especially if your resilience is quite low you are going to be triggered far more frequently and by far more I guess by smaller scale things so then of course we think about what's happening globally, a lot of people are experiencing some form of depression and anxiety and even those of us who are pretty consistent meditators are finding it even harder to sit still in a world that’s very I guess wound up with what feels like a bit of a war sometimes for some of us, I'm just curious what you have noticed in the past 18 months and how you are seeing the impact of our recent times on our nervous systems.

Yeah, as a general whole, I'm seeing many people, it's harder to activate that ventral vagal, that feeling of safety in their body and as you say it's hard to sit still in that meditation state so whatever you do to activate that ventral vagal response so whether that is meditation, or yoga or just some alone time people are finding that they can't shift, their mind is still going and this is their sympathetic nervous system saying hey there is actually like a global threat happening right now so you can't meditate, you're not safe so it's that extra extra work to be able to activate it at the moment and I think everyone in my practice needs that extra care at the moment just to support them.

I couldn't agree more, and I think the irony for a lot of people is, especially for those of us having, that have had to have been doing home schooling or completely changing their worlds there has been less time for some people so I think its perpetrated that vicious cycle whereas now is the time where we need to be doing more so whether it's more mediation or more yoga, more time in nature what have you, but I guess we probably spend more time online than we should so it is certainly a reallocation of priorities within reason.

Absolutely, even just the expectations in terms of working online, a lot of us are probably spending a lot of time on screens and less time face to face and the vagus nerve works, it activates when...there is this whole part of the vagus nerve called the social engagement system and its about how we engage socially and how we interact with humans and we are losing that and then you add on masks and we are losing half of our facial expressions and the vagus nerve works on looking at someone's face and saying oh they are a safe person or they make me feel unsafe, so we have kind of lost another area of input that would ordinarily tell our vagus nerve hey you are safe or hey this person is ok to engage with socially so we are getting less positive input and we are getting more negative input I the sense that we are spending way too much time at home and so we are not activating our far gaze, we are not looking into the distance we are looking close up which again regulates the part of the brain decreases the vagus nerve working, so just in the current circumstances with many of us being stuck at home, the circumstance alone makes it harder for us to even try and activate our vagus nerve. 

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, and then of course with certain parts of Australia having this roadmap out of lockdown, quote un quote, we are hearing about people, young children, adults, feeling like they have got this overwhelming level of social anxiety like they have forgotten how to interact and I can totally imagine how that would feel for a 6 year old or even a younger child who has only seen masks or who can only remember masks like that’s a real tragedy of this global situation that I feel requires a lot of work to undo.

Yep, absolutely.

So, what can we do?  You have mentioned a few little things but I'd love to hear from you about some real specifics on what we can all be doing to start to prioritise our vagus nerve health?

First thing in regards to children if they are feeling that anxiety is being their safe person, being the one that if they seem uncomfortable or anxious then acknowledging and validating those feelings and being that safety net that their vagus nerve is not providing them with, that is going to help kids drastically and that's whether they have been in lockdown or not to be honest like even if your child has never been in lockdown, you know in WA we haven't had these extended ones and these kids here still feel anxiety but as a caregiver being that safe person for your child is going to activate their vagus nerve and regulating yourself as a parent is going to help your children, it's all about that vibe you know kids can pick up on that.

Now as an adult, some really simple things that you can do are simply, number 1, if you are spending a lot of time looking at blue light, looking at screens, looking at anything close is to start making sure that you look into the distance, finding something that you can look at, it doesn’t have to be anything in particular you can look down your street if you wanted too just activating that far gaze is going to start to unwind the part of the nervous system that gets too activated when we look at close up things for too long and that’s going to give your vagus nerve just a bit of room to breathe so to speak and you might find it naturally starts to activate just a notch and then you can try whatever your choice is whether its meditation, or yoga and you might actually think oh that felt like I can actually kick in a little bit easier.  Other ways too specifically activate your vagus nerve include gargling, now most people don’t gargle to the extreme that you need to activate the vagus nerve so you kind of want to be gargling to the point of gagging, it's not a pleasant gargle! I've heard that tears should occur at the same time so that gives you a little bit of an indication of the strength required!  Yeah, so it's not like, lots of patients go oh gargling is easy and I'm like no, you really really need to gargle!  Singing if you don’t want to gargle you can sing at the top of your lungs naturally activating your vagus nerve!  Splashing cold water onto your face I mean you could have a cold shower if you wanted too but you don’t have too, most of the benefit in terms of activating your vagus nerve from a neurological point of view actually come from cold water on the face so if you're feeling a moment of stress, you could just try and splash some cold water onto your face and the other thing that works really well is in terms of regulating yourself is expressing gratitude.  A lot of the research suggests that if you are trying to meditate or drop into some breath work and you are really struggling then the nervous system can shift into a more coherent state if you add in some gratitude and you tend to stay regulated for longer if you combine gratitude with slow deep breathing so if you feel like you mind is going a thousand miles an hour and you can't shift into that deep breathing then work with your body and not against it and start with something simple like gratitude and then just notice what happens to your nervous system and you will find it naturally start to recalibrate and come out of that stress response just a little.

They are beautiful I think that they are all wonderful that they all are simple techniques its just about allocating time but I also think that having that extra bit of detail because it's all well and good to tell someone to go and breathe deeply but they just don’t know how for a start and the gargling one does come up a lot but like you said I think that that specific instruction is important to create the desired outcome.  What would you prioritize for say a toddler, a 3-year-old or even a 5-year-old out of those strategies?

Regulating yourself first.  I personally use the heart math program in my practice which is basically a vile of feedback, it measurers your heart rate variability and anyone can purchase that and it has little computer games for kids so I've just started my son on a game which basically, the game to work is you only succeed in the game if you're regulating your breathing, so the better your heart rate variability the better score you will get in the game, he is 6.  So, when you get to that age, they can kind of understand what you are trying to get them to do, they are games, you can gamify it to help them to learn to regulate, anything younger than that the best thing you can do is number 1 regulate yourself even when you feel like you're about to snap and the quickest way I regulate myself and my kids, I have a 3 year old as well, when my kids are you know struggling with their emotions is that gratitude.  So, I visualize them sleeping, and they are so beautiful and then I feel like I can stay in that you know I can be that safety for them while they are expressing without it triggering me.

I don’t think I'm quite there yet, I've got a bit of work to do with regulating my emotions around my toddler!  Try the visualizing one!  Hopefully most of us understand the concept of that, like being their safe person so that obviously having to regulate your emotions first but there is this primitive reflex that tends to override in the moment so it’s the constant work to make sure that it can be overridden by something else in time.

Yes, it is constant work!

Fascinating, one of the things I thought would be interesting to discuss is, I know you work in the pregnancy space as do I and I get asked a lot of questions and I think more so than ever now, a mum who is stressed and being concerned about how that would impact the baby.  Have you got any thoughts there or what we might do from a, maybe it's no different, but to acknowledge the importance of that through pregnancy?

There is some research to suggest that stressed mums do make stressed babies.  They have done some research regards to measuring a mothers cortisol levels throughout their pregnancy and then monitoring the baby after using the heart rate variability and they have found that babies do tend to take on a more stressed state if they have been marinated in stress so to speak but the beauty of the nervous system is that we can change that, we can shift that, it's not a forever thing it doesn’t do us any long term damage not that any research has said so it's not a guilt thing, you know sometimes I don’t like bringing that research up because it can bring up a lot of guilt for mums but we know that the nervous system is very adaptable and changes and the vagus nerve kind of works like a thermostat you know, you've got a threshold or a set point and that can shift all the time and that’s for adults and kids and babies alike so it's just one piece of the puzzle.  The best thing that pregnant women can be doing is prioritizing their stress response.  You know, even pre covid we live in these times where pregnant women would come to my clinic and be like oh, I'm so busy at work because I'm doing my job plus training someone who is taking over my job and I need to work until the last minute to cover bills or access maternity pay you know, we culturally have this hustle pregnancy culture where we are trying so hard to fit everything in before the baby arrives so we can relax once baby is here but if we can do anything it would be to prioritize that stress response during pregnancy so that once baby is here we know that baby will be more calibrated, more coherent, it will have a higher or stronger heart rate variability so it will be less in that stress response.

Yes, so important and yeah I think your right around the guilt conversation like I don’t know how normal it is for babies to have a startle reflex, you would know more than I would about this but I did notice Grace had quite a strong startle reflex for some time, and I often wonder how that plays out now and she gets, my husband is a chiro but we don’t get enough chiro, that classic example of me asking him to give me an adjustment at 8 o'clock at night and getting death stares so you know I wanted to make that more of a priority in my life which is quite ironic right, but yeah is that something that you see with the startle reflex as well?

Yeah so, a retained morrow beyond around 12 weeks of age would indicate some heightened stress response’ in their system yeah so I would work on reintegrating that in conjunction with this little best friend that doesn’t get talked about much which is the theo paralysis reflex so those two reflexes should really start reintegrating so that stress response can unwind.

 Fascinating, yeah little Rose doesn’t have it anymore and she's 5 months now so it's just interesting to see the contrast between the bubs.  Now is there anything else that you wanted to add on the topic today otherwise I'd like to hear more about your offering, I know you have some beautiful courses and services that you can tell us more about.

Yeah, so I am trying to make the vagus nerve education accessible to everyone even people who can't see my in practice whether that’s location or financially so I have a vagus nerve for babies mini-series which is a 3 part course and a vagus nerve for kids 5 part series and they are designed to give you all of the information so that you can work out where your child sits on that spectrum so you can kind of try and hone in on what you feel your child may need whether that is gut work you know maybe it's their microbial or maybe it is their stress response or maybe the need some body work and chiro, it's kind of designed in a way that gives you, I hope it will give you clarity so that you know what to work on with your body and your kids health.

Thats beautiful, thank you for creating that for us.  So yeah, feel free to add anything else into the conversation otherwise can you tell us please where our listeners can find more about you online. 

I have a website drcarrierigoni.com.au and my instagram handle is @drcarrierigoni

Beautiful, well thank you so much for sharing your knowledge today, i absolutely found it so fascinating and I hope our listeners feel inspired to do more gratitude practice, gargling, meditation, all of the above.  Yes, I want to hear how that goes and all the hard-core gargling!

Alright Carrie so great to connect and we will be in touch soon.

Thank you.

Wondering how your vagus nerve is doing? Carrie offers 1:1 vagus nerve coaching to help you gain resilience and vitality.