779: Emotions and Their Impact on the Vagus Nerve With Diane Ducarme

Child: Welcome to my Mommy’s podcast.

Hello and welcome to the Wellness Mama podcast. I’m Katie from wellnessmama.com and this is round two with my guest, Diane Ducarme and another absolutely fascinating episode. We had a whole episode about the mind-body connection and the relation of emotions to physical health, especially through the lens of migraine sufferers, but so much relevant information for all of us.

And Diane’s back today talking about the emotions and how they impact the vagus nerve. And I feel like the vagus nerve in general does not get enough talk time in the health community. And she makes this extremely practical and actionable. And I love her approach. She is so impressive in her own right. She’s the founder and CEO of Nectar Health, which is a company that adds years to the lives of those suffering from migraine disease. But she also has an MBA from Harvard Business School. She’s a Fulbright Scholar and an Edmund Hillary Fellow. She has a master’s in science, engineering, technology, and mathematics from Europe and has studied traditional Chinese medicine, as well as speaking seven languages. And I very much love her approach and how she unites things that are certainly not talked about enough in general, and certainly not talked about enough in relation to each other. And I am excited to keep learning from Diane. So let’s join her now. Diane, welcome back.

Diane: Thank you. Thank you for having me again, Katie.

Katie: And if you guys missed our first episode, I will link to it in the show notes and definitely encourage a listen because absolutely fascinating info on certainly for migraine sufferers, but really for all of us on the physiological importance of letting go and how our emotions directly impact our body and how that cycle back and forth of resolving our emotions can change our biology and in reverse as well. And after that first conversation, I’m even more excited to learn from you on a topic and a word in particular that gets talked about a lot in the health world, but I don’t feel like is completely understood or that we’re maybe doing the most effective things to help, which is the vagus nerve. And so building on our last conversation, I would love to jump into talking about emotions and their impact on the vagus nerve, especially. So to start off broad, can you sort of define for one, what the vagus nerve is for anybody not familiar and for two, how it relates to our emotions?

Diane: Yes. So in your body, you have about 100 billion nerve cells. And all of these nerve cells are orchestrated by the vagus nerve. So the vagus nerve, imagine it like a big tree that is going to plant its roots around your heart, around your liver, around your stomach, around your kidney, around your gut, okay, around your large and small intestine. And it’s going to all gather in a trunk, which is sort of along your spine. And your neck, and it’s going to plug in like a Tesla in your brain. And so from a Western scientific point of view, from the moment it attaches itself to the brain, we’ve kind of lost the signal. And so that nerve has been discovered in Western science in 1872 and has been researched a lot more in the last 10 years. In traditional Chinese medicine, in Ayurveda has been part of medicine for about 2,000 years. And so a lot of the acupuncture and what you see as a result of acupuncture is namely playing along all of that vagus nerve.

Now, vagus comes from the Latin for vaga, which means to wander, so to go around in the body. And so that incredible nerves, is going to do a ton of jobs of things that you don’t even think about consciously. Okay. For example, it’s going to help to regulate your heart rate. Okay. It’s going to remind your heart to beat, to have a beat. It’s going to slow down your heart’s during because of relaxation. It’s going to promote a caloric steady pulse, when it needs to. It’s going to also balance your blood pressure. It’s going to promote your respiratory function. Like the thinking, you don’t need to think in order to breathe. You know, you’re doing that subconsciously. Well, this is the vagus nerve again. It’s going to enhance your digestion. It’s going to play a significant role in the digestive process, stimulating, producing stomach acid and digestive enzymes. It’s going to help us reduce inflammation. We talk so much about inflammation. It’s so important. Support stress management. And so many other things. But it’s going to support your emotional regulation. Okay, so it’s going to help reduce anxiety. And reduce depressive symptoms when it’s really operating optimally.

Katie: What are some of the things that get in the way of the vagus nerve operating optimally?

Diane: So imbalances. Imbalances in different parts of the body will prevent the vagus nerve from operating optimally. So we’ll start with the emotions. The emotions in Western science are still only scratching the surface. This is a very new concept for us to accept that a certain emotion might lead to an imbalance. And even there, we like a one-to-one relationship where things are very black and white, but things have a lot more nuance. For example, if you look for the correlation between stress and cancer, they’re going to say, oh, there’s no scientific evidence that stress provokes cancer. But in Western folklore, people can feel it. They’re like, well, it can’t be stressed for too long. It’s really not healthy.

And what we’re going to do for emotions, we’re going to go down to traditional Chinese medicine. Because you see all of the knowledge that we have on the vagus nerve, and God knows like in the West, we’re very sort of male mindset, you know, guerrilla crowds of all of the stuff we know. And so all of these descriptions are from the neck below. There is no massive understanding of how do all of these cables and these wires plug in the brain, and how can they move different parts? So in the West, when we analyze emotions, we might say, Let’s look at Katie’s stressed. Let’s look at Katie doing math. Let’s look at Katie, you know, doing a memory game. Let’s look at Katie’s side. And we’re going to identify which part of the brain are active, but we’re still completely unable to link those parts of the brain and understand what activated them in the first place from the nervous system perspective. We’re not really there yet. So therefore, we’re going to accept that and accept how sophisticated also Western science is and incredible at proving these things. But I’m referring a bit to traditional Chinese medicine and Ayurveda to understand it.

Now, in Ayurveda and traditional Chinese medicine, the moment I’m going to have an emotion, I’m going to impact different parts of my vagus nerve. And so the emotion is going to go in my brain somewhere and it’s going to impact the vagus nerve. So let’s imagine I have a job where I do a lot of ordinary thinking, okay? I think all the time or there’s a situation. I’m at work or in my life where I’m just constantly, my brain is switched on. Okay, so it’s going to be here. I’m pointing to my forehead. My forehead’s constantly active. Well, that is going to be linked in my vagus nerve to my stomach spleen. And so my stomach spleen, my ability to produce digestive enzymes and to break down food is going to be altered. And so my stomach spleen system, which links my forehead to those digestive enzymes, is compromised because I’m having that emotion of just I’m constantly thinking. So I’m going to struggle to fully sleep. I may have ADHD. But also I’m going to not digest really well. I might feel bloated. In an extreme case, I’m going to have a leaky gut. This is where now we’re going from I obsessively think about something to having a leaky gut.

Katie: And it sounds like this is a much more well-known idea in Eastern medicine than Western medicine, but are there areas where Western medicine is aware of or scientifically recognizes that connection?

Diane: It’s interesting. I start with who did their investigation on the vagus nerve. It’s actually our children. I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed anyone of your child, and I know you have six, do this thing where they eat an ice cream super fast. And they say, brain freeze. Have you ever seen this? It’s not their forehead. It’s not their forehead. So they eat the ice cream super fast. And I find it really odd because they eat something really cold. And it lands on their stomach. That it goes on their head and says, brain freeze, but then it dissipates because the body is going to obviously warm the ice cream really fast. It can’t enter the rest of the body. It’s so cold. And so they have found that connection, which the traditional Chinese medicine doctors have found a long time ago.

I find in Western science, it’s really in the sleep science that you will find it the most. So, for example, we will notice in the sleep science that as we go into deep sleep, the basal temperature of the body is going to decrease and the liver system, the liver organ is going to detox at the same time as the brain, okay? So we’re going to start to see a relationship between the liver and the brain. Also, if there’s too much toxicity in the liver, people are going to wake up between 1 to 3 am, constantly. And so in that part of the science, we see it. Now, if we go back to the Western folklore, I think anyone can agree that if you have a lot of alcohol and you intoxicate your liver, you’re going to start to be very funny in your brain. And then you have a hangover. When you have the hangover, you don’t slap your forehead like a child with a brain freeze. You go, oh my God, I have a hangover. Because of all systems, the liver system is the most linked to the brain and is also the one that does the hormones. So yes, so you can see it in parts of Western science, so sleep science and parts of Western folklore.

Katie: That’s so interesting. And it brings the question, so if these things can negatively affect our vagus nerve and lead to these problems, how do we best support the vagus nerve? Or how can we optimize it so that it’s functioning optimally, especially when we take into account that perhaps this helps us to have a more joyful emotional experience as well?

Diane: Yeah, completely. So let’s imagine, so women who suffer from migraines, for example, most of them will stop having alcohol. Because they’re like, oh, my God, when I have alcohol, you know, it’s not 100% of the time, but oh, my God, this gives me a trigger. And the pain that I’m experiencing in my brain is so immense that it, you know, removes the joy. And so what they’re going to do is going to go into a bit of an elimination diet. They’re going to start to say, okay, no more wine, no more cheese, no more chocolate. They’re going to start to stay away from these foods. And so a lot of what we do in Western science or Western world, we start to stay away from foods that would be really tough, so really tough and toxic to digest for the body. And so we do that.

Now, what we also do really well is, you know, a lot of us are going to go gluten-free. And that’s when the stomach, the gastric juices are no longer able to do a really good job. One of the first things that is going to be hard to digest is going to be gluten. So we remove them. So by removing them, we allow for more focus, more concentration. More steady emotions. But what we are meant to do, in my opinion, is we don’t look at deficiencies. And most women are more deficient than they’re in excess. And so depression or anxiety or inability to focus can also come from, you know, being depleted of nutrients, right? And yes, we can take supplements and we do that a lot. But, it will still take time before we’re completely able to understand how the body absorbs these nutrients and how they get action on the body. So by having a really healthy diet and seasonal and, you know, plant-based, et cetera, like we can really help the body and support the body functions and therefore, have a mood which is a lot more homogeneous.

Katie: And are there ways to physically stimulate or benefit the vagus nerve as well? So for instance, I’ve heard anecdotally the recommendation that even things like singing can help stimulate the vagus nerve because the vibration of the vocal cords. And I noticed for me, ironically, when I started taking voice lessons and singing, it seemed to help process emotions. But also that was around the time when my thyroid issues started resolving. And I always wondered if there was a connection because I was stimulating my vagus nerve more.

Diane: Completely, completely. So one thing to share with the moms is like a good, you know, just singing to your children before they go to bed. I have like a small, short list of songs that they really love, and I sing to them. And that is a complete way to stimulate your vagus nerve and get the kids in bed happily and peacefully because it’s going to impact theirs as well. And their stress level is going to go down. So singing, definitely. A lot of yoga posture, right? When you think of the sun salutation is a massive massage to the vagus nerve. Then when you look at Pilates as well, it’s going to help. And so there have been scientific studies that show that the brain architecture of someone who does a lot of yoga is going to be slightly different. And the suspicion is really along that vagus nerve, different things are going on. Yeah. So all of those can be done. A really good massage as well with someone who really knows what they do, a traditional Chinese medicine massage would also really help.

Katie: And based on what you said, it sounds like some of the Eastern modalities might also be just naturally more helpful for the vagus nerve as well. Things like acupuncture or traditional Chinese medicine, do those have an impact on the vagus nerve as well?

Diane: Yes, completely. And so taking things end to end. So if you think acupuncture is going to take one point and alongside all of these nerves, it’s going to help to restore the balance that the nerve just performs where it needs to perform. And so it’s quite interesting. In traditional Chinese medicine, you’re going to see each time you have pain, pain is a blockage. So if you’ve ever experienced a method with a traditional Chinese medicine practitioner, they’re going to go towards the pain. You’re like, whoa, this hurts. Like, stop doing that. Well, it hurts. Let’s just go for it. And so you’re like, why is this person insisting? It’s hurting. And they’re trying to undo the problem at hand and trying to really follow where is your body complaining? Where are there blockages along your vagus nerve? And, you know, can we undo them?

Katie: And you mentioned deficiencies as well. And I think this is also probably very common in modern society. And I’ve often thought, you know, we’ve heard that we’re getting overfed and undernourished or that we’re consuming plenty of calories, but not enough micronutrients. And I think if maybe we just shifted our mindset to focus on amount of nutrients per food instead of calories per food, we might get a little closer to the goal there. But are there common deficiencies that you see show up, especially for women and especially related to the things we’re talking about?

Diane: Absolutely. This is a grand question. Thank you, Katie. What I do observe is a lot of women can lack what is called in traditional Chinese medicine, blood volume. So they will either donate their blood or they have a copper IUD for a couple of years. They bleed a lot. Or they have just a lot of blood loss, or they don’t make the blood that they lose fast enough. So in her fertility years, a woman is going to lose, the average woman is going to lose 23 to 28 liters of menstruation. So you take the guy next to her, it’s the nothingness happening for him. For her, she’s going to have to re-reproduce 23 to 28 liters of menstruation. That’s massive. And that’s even the average woman. The woman who bleeds more might lose double that.

And so what I see is a lot of women just lacking blood. And let’s imagine that for a minute. So we can have two types of women, one who has a genetic predisposition for migraines, and she’s going to have her brain complain. Her brain is like, mayday, mayday, we don’t have enough oxygen, we don’t have enough blood. Can you send us more? You take a triptan, it’s going to contract your blood vessel, it’s going to force the blood into your brain, and you might feel sort of okay. If you don’t have migraines, you will feel extremely weak. You will feel you have like a really dry skin that you can put, you know, oil and butter and it’s always dry. You will feel you have a lot of sugar cravings, sugar cravings before your menstruation, sugar cravings when you’re stressed. Sugar cravings when you’re tired. And you might also lose your hair.

And all of these are signs that the body is just trying to optimize where do we put the blood because we don’t have enough. You’re going to be either able to think or to digest or to exercise, or to you know, like, you know, digest. So your body is going to be a little bit like a computer that doesn’t have enough internet. It’s going to start to close a number of tabs. It’s going to keep one open loaded. And then once it’s done, close it, open a second one. And so this is your body now.

Now, if you eat sugar, the sweet flavor is going to send the blood to your limbs, okay? And so for a moment, you’re going to have an impression of energy. So you’re able to get the laundry done and the lunchboxes and, you know, clean up the house. You have that moment of energy because the blood is concentrated in your limbs. You decided to reprioritize for your body. But afterwards, you crash, and all of that blood goes back into the liver for digestive purpose. And you feel really tired again. So now we have again an excess of junk food that we ate, and we have still that deficiency of blood volume, that is going to have a massive impact on the vagus nerve and can give symptoms to women that are completely gaslighted and unseen in Western science. I think in Western science, we might say that a woman has anemia, it’s kind of a proxy for it, but it’s not, you know, you look at a pound of iron, it has little in common with, you know, like a liter of blood, like you can’t make one from the other overnight, you need other material to fabricate that blood. Does that make sense?

Katie: That does make sense. And I would guess many people listening and myself in the past included have had sort of that medical gaslighting and been told that things were “normal on labs” or that nothing was wrong when your body’s telling you something completely different and kind of having to become our own health detective to figure out what actually was going on and what our body actually was asking for separate of our lab results.

Diane: Yeah, completely, completely. And so what’s going to happen is that the woman’s going to have issues and she might take medications. And the more she’s going to take medication, the more she’s going to intoxicate her liver, the more her emotion will be anger emotions. And the more, the less the liver system is going to have enough room in order to produce the blood that it’s in charge of producing. Does that make sense? And so she’s going to be more and more tired. She’s going to eat more and more sugar. She might need to medicate more. And now she has, you know, anger feelings where she feels really, really terrible. And she also feels still lethargic. Also, her mood hormones, which also are produced by the liver system in traditional Chinese medicine, are going to be all over the place. And so she’s going to start to have a really little impression of herself, you know, diminished self-confidence. And when her kids become teenagers, she’s feeling really, really all over the place.

Katie: That makes sense. And back to the emotional side as well. And to tie all this in, I would love to kind of get an idea from you of what would optimal, like our optimal way to exist to protect our vagus nerve function and to stimulate it optimally and to deal with our emotions, our negative emotions to have the better vagus nerve function and, or even daily habits. What would that look like if we were going to sort of live in an optimal way for supporting vagus nerve function?

Diane: Okay, I love your question. So you’d wake up. And I know that sounds really unrealistic, but you might do a few sun salutations, just waking up, stretching your spine with your arms left and right. And then going in a downward dog, and then in a cobra position. And just do that three times. And you might feel really stiff, but it’s okay. Just letting that vagus nerve be able. You might have a routine that involves a bit of yoga or Pilates. And then you will eat foods that are in season, that are really, really varied, like different colors. But you will also have optimal gastric juices meaning you’ve learned to master how to have really strong gastric juices and you’re able to fragment the foods to actually access it. We say that, we are what we eat it’s actually we are what we eat, comma and absorb. And then we’ll have emotions that make us human. Sometimes we’ll feel a bit angry. Sometimes we’ll feel a bit sad. Sometimes we’ll feel a bit joyful. But we’re never going to have that, we’re never going to let ourselves stay in that emotion for a prolonged period of time. Yeah, and so we’re able to just cruise along.

There’s this incredible metaphor that I’ve heard recently, which is called Be Water. And so it’s the idea that water is very powerful. If it goes in a cup, it’s a cup. If it goes in a bowl, it’s a bowl. And when the water goes as a river and it meets an obstacle, it’s not going to go and make a boiling or just go upwards or go crazy. It’s going to circumvent it. And if there’s a hole, it’s going to fill the hole all the way it needs to fill it and then pass over it. And if there’s a small mountain or a large mountain, preventing it to reach the sea, it’s going to go around it. And so it’s the idea of life can be really, really tough. And you can feel in those moments of the obstacle thinking, why me? Why again? We can just be like water and go on with it and just, you know, flow. And I think that’s a, sometimes when you’re in those situations, just thinking that’s be water, it just really brings your senses to a level of calm and brings your vagus nerve back to being grounded and to figure out, therefore, to liberate the energy for your brain to figure out what to do next.

Katie: Oh, that’s such a good metaphor. And I know we talked in our first episode about I love that you said emotions in themselves are positive. It’s that when we get stuck in any of them for too long, that it’s a negative experience. Is that also true for what we would traditionally call positive emotions? In other words, is it somehow bad to get stuck in joy or to get stuck in gratitude or happiness?

Diane: Absolutely. Being stuck in joy in traditional Chinese medicine can be very much associated with a heart attack. And so being stuck in joy is very dangerous. Joy is part of the heart system. And you should have some level of joy, but not a constant level of joy. Absolutely. Yeah, if you also, you know, let’s imagine you have danger coming at you. There’s real things in life, right? And you’re very patient or very still. You’ll be eaten, right? Take the metaphor of, you know, being in the jungle or take the metaphor of having your kids being threatened by all sorts of social media things. If you’re very still and you don’t take action, you’re very contemplating and positive, still your child’s going to get really hurt.

So there’s really a need for intervention, a need for getting angry at the situation, a need to be slightly stressed or slightly worried. And that’s what’s going to get you to take the right course of action. If things stuck again, like we talked in the last podcast, things stuck in the emotion is going to be very negative and it’s going to plunge the vagus nerve into a massive level of imbalance, okay? So, let’s imagine if we compare it back to the tree, or you can compare the vagus nerve to an orchestra, right? And if the controller of the orchestra only focuses on the drum, that’s all you hear, and the music doesn’t play well. And so that’s what not allowing to stay stuck in that emotion at is. And so, yeah, that relationship is really important.

Katie: Well, I think even that acknowledgment of emotions not being bad themselves and then that they will, they’re universally positive also can help avoid that trap of feeling guilty if we have a negative emotion or that like fear, guilt, shame cycle related to emotions that we’re having and also helps us view them as more transient in realizing it’s not the emotion that’s bad, it’s being stuck in it. So we’re already in a mindset of emotions being transient and being able to move through us. But I also know from having done some of this work in my own life that even being aware of it, sometimes it’s a little hard to learn to rewrite our stories internally or to ask ourselves better questions or to give ourselves better mental statements. Do you have any tips for people on learning the inner work of the emotions?

Diane: Can you deep dive on your question a bit more?

Katie: Yeah. So for instance, I became aware of how I would have emotions related to when I was having thyroid issues and I would feel very negatively about that. Or I would be asking what I would view as negative questions like, why is this so hard or why can’t I get better or why is it so hard to lose weight? And I slowly learned to sort of rewrite those stories in my head to say in a more positive sense, like, how can I get better? How can I make it easy and fun to heal or whatever the question may be? But I know it wasn’t an overnight process either, that I was at least a slow learner in learning how to consciously shift my emotional states. So do you have any tips for people who are wanting to begin to learn to rewrite that process and have a healthier relationship with their emotions?

Diane: Yeah, I think sometimes just fixing yourself on something else. It’s really hard if I tell you, think of a banana and don’t think of a banana. In both cases I’ve said the word banana. And so it’s, you know, immediately that yellow thing pops up in your brain. But if I say, think of a banana, instead of saying, don’t think of a banana, I go cherries, cherries, cherries. You know, like it just sounds very simple, but it just rewires what you think about. I think a lot of people are talking about, you know, manifesting in the universe. And I think manifesting something else really helps to transition in that emotion faster.

Another one I find is, you know, how you can do, you know, gratitudes at the end of the day, and you’re supposed to maybe have a book and write them down, like realistically as a mom, you don’t have your gratitude journal necessarily next to your bed if you do, amazing. But most likely, at least on holidays, you won’t have them. One trick is to take a beautiful moment and put it on an organ. So you can see, I had that wonderful walk with my son on the beach, and we had this, you know, profound conversation I was just not expecting. And I’m going to put that incredible memory on my thyroid. And just a moment to associate maybe that organ with another sensation and another memory and sort of rewire it like that.

Katie: I love that tip. That’s a great idea. And I’m going to play with that in visualization and see how that goes. I love everything we’ve gotten to talk about today. And I know that you have so much more beyond what we’ve been able to cover in these podcast episodes. Where can people find you online and keep learning from you and work with you directly if they’re experiencing migraines or truly anything that they’re working on resolving?

Diane: Yes, so migraine, mynectarhealth.com is the website. Or @mynectarhealth is the handle. We also have a podcast that was inspired by the work called Migraine Heroes. And so you can take the test online. And from the test, you can really put all of these symptoms that you have and these disease you have in your life that are not making sense. And that’s in sort of a 97 questionnaire, which is quite incredible. And then we debrief on, okay, explaining to you and understanding, okay, what are these imbalances and what do they mean? And how to tackle them or to restore that balance so that all of these symptoms that appear from all of these emotions and facts of life can dissipate.

Katie: I love it. I’ll make sure all of that is linked in the show notes because you have been a voice of explanation to something that I’ve observed in my own life and that I think so many people can benefit from and, of course, already have through your work. And I’m so grateful for the work that you do and especially for all that you’ve shared with us today. So thank you for being here.

Diane: Thank you so much for having me, Katie.

Katie: And thank you, as always, for sharing your most valuable resources, your time, your energy, and your attention with us today. We’re both so grateful that you did. And I hope that you will join me again on the next episode of The Wellness Mama Podcast.

If you’re enjoying these interviews, would you please take two minutes to leave a rating or review on iTunes for me? Doing this helps more people to find the podcast, which means even more moms and families could benefit from the information. I really appreciate your time, and thanks as always for listening.