Need to Calm Down ASAP? Here’s How to Activate Your Vagus Nerve in 3 Minutes or Less and Keep Stress at Bay
I can usually tell when my anxiety has crossed from “I’m worried about this” into “I can’t seem to let this go” because the logic stops logic’ing. I might know, rationally, that whatever I’m spiraling about probably isn’t as catastrophic as it feels, but I still end up fixating on it until I’m dizzy and hyperaware of every thump in my chest.
That disconnect is frustrating … but it’s also potentially useful. The thing is, anxiety isn’t just spinning thoughts or sweaty palms; it’s happening in both your mind and your body at once. And that means you may be able to work on the physical side of the response instead of simply waiting for your brain to magically become reasonable.
The vagus nerve is one of the key players in that mind-body connection, helping your brain communicate with organs throughout your body and playing an important role in shifting you out of a stress response. If anxiety can send that whole system in one panicked direction, there’s a lot of interest in whether you can work from the body up to help steer it back toward calmer waters, and there’s some pretty convincing science behind it.
To learn how to stimulate the vagus nerve, I spoke with Richard Gevirtz, PhD, a psychology professor at the California School of Professional Psychology at Alliant University, and Christopher Austelle, MD, a board-certified psychiatrist and a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University. Read on to learn how to work with your nervous system to calm down a whole lot faster.
Get Reader’s Digest’s Read Up newsletter for more wellness, science, humor, cleaning, travel, tech and fun facts all week long.
What is the vagus nerve, exactly?
The vagus nerve is one of the body’s major communication routes. Though we colloquially refer to it in the singular, we actually have two vagal nerves. They travel from the brainstem through either side of the neck and then into the chest and abdomen, passing the heart, lungs and digestive tract along the way.
Comprised of more than 200,000 nerve fibers, the vagus nerve is also the primary nerve involved in the parasympathetic nervous system, explains Gevirtz. Quick biology refresh: Your sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems help manage many of the things your body does automatically. The sympathetic side helps mobilize you when something requires action, while the parasympathetic side helps bring things back toward rest and recovery afterward. Gevirtz describes the parasympathetic system as the “rest, digest and restore” side.
You need both: The goal isn’t to stay relaxed all the time—it’s to be able to ramp up when you need to, then settle again.
What does the vagus nerve have to do with anxiety?
The vagus nerve can help calm some of the physical changes that happen when you’re anxious. As a major pathway of the parasympathetic nervous system, it helps regulate heart rate, breathing and digestion, as well as helps your body return toward rest after a stress response.
During stress, Gevirtz explains, sympathetic activity normally increases while parasympathetic activity temporarily drops, a process sometimes called vagal withdrawal. That shift helps your body gear up to respond; once the demand has passed, the balance should move back toward rest and recovery. You can see part of that process with every breath. Your heart rate naturally rises slightly as you inhale and falls as you exhale, a pattern the vagus nerve helps regulate. Those beat-to-beat differences contribute to heart rate variability, or HRV.
A 2022 meta-analysis published in Psychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences found that people with anxiety disorders tended to have lower parasympathetic activity at rest. In other words, the part of the nervous system that helps you wind down may be less active in people with anxiety. But that doesn’t necessarily mean the vagus nerve itself isn’t working properly.
Why doesn’t the vagus nerve always do what it’s supposed to do?
For the most part, it does. Your vagus nerve isn’t a muscle that becomes weak because you forgot to exercise it, and it generally doesn’t need to be “reset.”
The problem, Gevirtz says, can be spending long stretches of time in that withdrawn state when life—and let’s be honest, the world—feels like a lot. He compares the nervous system to a thermostat: What matters isn’t making it stronger, but how readily it can shift when circumstances change.
How can you stimulate your vagus nerve?
The things you can do at home don’t directly stimulate the vagus nerve in the same way medical treatments do. (More on that below.) Dr. Austelle, who researches vagus nerve stimulation, says these techniques are better understood as behaviors that “influence” vagus nerve function.
That influence can happen in a few different ways. Here are five techniques to try.
Slow down your breathing
“One of the techniques with the most evidence and the most convincing evidence is slow breathing,” Dr. Austelle says. A 2022 systematic review and meta-analysis published in Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews looked at more than 200 studies and found that slow breathing increased signs of parasympathetic activity—the “rest, digest and restore” side of the nervous system—both while people were breathing slowly and afterward. The effect was also seen in studies where people practiced slow breathing over time.
Gevirtz generally recommends slowing to about four to seven breaths per minute. That works out to one full inhale-and-exhale cycle roughly every nine to 15 seconds—not holding your breath, just breathing more slowly and continuously. “It has to be effortless breathing,” he says.
Dr. Austelle says the exhale may be particularly important. To try it, sit comfortably, gradually slow your breathing and let your exhale last a little longer than your inhale. Don’t force enormous breaths; if you feel lightheaded, return to your normal breathing.
Try cyclic sighing
Cyclic sighing gives you a more specific pattern to follow. Inhale slowly through your nose, take a second, smaller inhale to fill your lungs a little more, and then slowly and fully exhale through your mouth. There isn’t a specific number of seconds you need to hit; the emphasis is on that double inhale followed by a longer exhale.
A 2023 study published in Cell Reports Medicine had adults practice cyclic sighing, two other breathing exercises or mindfulness meditation for five minutes a day over about a month. All four groups reported less anxiety, but the breathing exercises led to bigger improvements in positive mood, with cyclic sighing also producing the largest drop in respiratory rate.
Hum through a long exhale
Humming has a plausible connection to vagal activity, but the research here is considerably thinner. Gevirtz says some yoga practices pair humming with slow breathing, and the extended exhale may be doing much of the work. While it’s possible that humming adds something on its own, especially due to the proximity of the vocal cords to the vagus nerve, there isn’t enough evidence to say for sure.
A 2023 study published in Cureus measured HRV in 23 people during Bhramari, a yoga breathing technique that involves a humming exhale. Researchers found HRV changes consistent with lower physiological stress, but a study that small can’t tell us whether humming reliably reduces anxiety or offers benefits beyond slow breathing.
If you find it soothing, though, humming through a slow exhale is easy enough to try.
Cool your face
Cold exposure can trigger vagal activity, but its effects are more complicated than “cold equals calm.” Dr. Austelle points to the diving reflex, a response that kicks in when your face is exposed to cold and eventually helps slow your heart rate. A 2023 systematic review and meta-analysis published in Psychophysiology found increased cardiac vagal activity during facial cooling and water immersion, although the included studies were small and the quality of evidence was limited.
There’s a catch, though: Dr. Austelle says very cold temperatures initially activate the sympathetic nervous system, so your heart rate and blood pressure can actually rise before the diving reflex begins to have its slowing effect. In other words, an ice bath isn’t simply flipping on “rest and digest.” If cool water feels calming, briefly splashing or cooling your face is a less dramatic place to start.
You may also see advice to put something cold over the center of your chest. There’s much less research on that approach. In a small 2025 study, applying a cold pack to the chest for 20 minutes lowered participants’ heart rates and changed some measures of HRV, but it also raised blood pressure, and the study didn’t establish that stimulating the vagus nerve was responsible. For now, the connection between facial cooling and the diving reflex is much better established.
Try HRV biofeedback
HRV biofeedback is essentially slow breathing with real-time feedback about how your heart is responding. A sensor tracks your heartbeat as you breathe, which can help you find the breathing pace that produces the strongest HRV response for you instead of simply following a one-size-fits-all pace. And it isn’t limited to a clinician’s office. Consumer sensors and phone-based tools can be used for HRV biofeedback at home, though Gevirtz cautions against treating the numbers from a smartwatch or other wearable as gospel. These devices tend to be better at measuring heart rate than HRV, he says, and day-to-day scores can be noisy enough that they’re not worth fixating on.
Gevirtz helped develop the HRV biofeedback approach with Paul Lehrer, PhD, a professor of psychiatry at Rutgers University who studies biofeedback and psychophysiology. With practice, Gevirtz says, that feedback can help people learn what the pattern feels like well enough to reproduce it without watching the numbers every time.
There’s also some evidence those changes can last. In a 2024 randomized controlled study published in Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback, people who completed HRV-biofeedback training showed greater improvements in resting HRV than an active control group. They weren’t significantly less anxious overall, suggesting that the improvement in HRV didn’t necessarily translate to less anxiety, but it did show that the intervention changed how their bodies were responding.
How quickly can these techniques calm you down?
“It definitely has an effect for most people very quickly,” Gevirtz says. In his clinical work, patients who have practiced slow breathing can produce noticeable changes in their heart-rate pattern after only a few breaths. At the four-to-seven-breaths-per-minute pace he generally recommends, that means those physiological changes can begin within about a minute, although how quickly you actually feel calmer can vary.
A small 2026 pilot study suggests even one minute may be enough to make a difference in how anxious you feel. Researchers had 47 university students use either cyclic sighing, box breathing or no breathing exercise during real-life moments of acute stress. Five minutes later, both breathing groups reported larger drops in anxiety than the control group.
Will stimulating your vagus nerve reduce your anxiety and stress levels overall?
Regular practice may make it easier to get that calming effect over time, particularly with slow breathing. In his clinical work, Gevirtz has patients practice for about 10 minutes a day so the technique becomes more familiar before they need it during a stressful moment.
The 2023 Cell Reports Medicine study offers another clue: Participants practiced cyclic sighing for five minutes a day for about a month, and researchers measured their mood before and after each daily session. The more consistently people practiced, the bigger the mood boost after each session tended to be.
So when you see advice about how to stimulate the vagus nerve, it may be more useful to think about practicing ways to help your nervous system shift back toward calm rather than “toning” one specific nerve.
What about vagus nerve stimulators?
Actual VNS is different: These devices stimulate the nerve directly with electricity. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, implanted VNS is used for certain medical conditions, including treatment-resistant epilepsy and depression. Noninvasive, or transcutaneous, VNS delivers electrical stimulation through the skin and is being studied for a range of psychiatric and neurological conditions.
For everyday stress management, though, Gevirtz says evidence for commercial noninvasive devices remains mixed, particularly when researchers compare them with sham devices that feel similar but don’t provide the same stimulation.
For now, slowing your breathing is a much cheaper place to start.
When is anxiety bigger than a breathing exercise?
These techniques can be useful when anxiety is making your whole system feel revved up, but they can’t address every reason you might be anxious. If you’re anxious most of the time, having panic attacks, losing sleep over it or starting to avoid parts of your life because of it, that’s worth bringing to a health-care or mental-health professional.
And sometimes the problem really is the problem. Breathing more slowly may help you feel steadier before a difficult conversation, but it won’t make the conversation disappear. It can, however, make it easier to walk into that conversation without feeling like your body has decided it’s an emergency.
That’s really the point for me. I’m not trying to breathe my way out of having problems. But it’s powerful to know I can use something as simple as my breathing to actually turn down the volume on anxiety when it starts taking over.
About the experts
|
Why trust us
At Reader’s Digest, we’re committed to producing high-quality content by writers with expertise and experience in their field in consultation with relevant, qualified experts. We rely on reputable primary sources, including government and professional organizations and academic institutions as well as our writers’ personal experiences where appropriate. For this piece on how to stimulate the vagus nerve, Miranda Manier tapped her longtime experience as a journalist and health editor to ensure that all information is accurate and offers the best possible advice to readers. We verify all facts and data, back them with credible sourcing and revisit them over time to ensure they remain accurate and up to date. Read more about our team, our contributors and our editorial policies.
Sources:
- Richard Gevirtz, PhD, distinguished professor of psychology at the California School of Professional Psychology at Alliant University; interviewed, October 2026
- Christopher Austelle, MD, clinical assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University; interviewed, October 2026
- Cleveland Clinic: “Vagus Nerve: What It Is, Function, Location & Conditions”
- Psychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences: “Heart rate variability in patients with anxiety disorders: A systematic review and meta-analysis”
- Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews: “Effects of voluntary slow breathing on heart rate and heart rate variability: A systematic review and a meta-analysis”
- Cell Reports Medicine: “Brief structured respiration practices enhance mood and reduce physiological arousal”
- Cureus: “Humming (Simple Bhramari Pranayama) as a Stress Buster: A Holter-Based Study to Analyze Heart Rate Variability”
- Psychophysiology: “The diving response and cardiac vagal activity: A systematic review and meta-analysis”
- Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine: “Impact of Cold Chest Pack on Cardiac Output, Stroke Volume, and Total Peripheral Resistance: A Counterbalanced, Randomized-Crossover Trial in Healthy Individuals”
- Scientific Reports: “Standardized massage interventions as protocols for the induction of psychophysiological relaxation in the laboratory: a block randomized, controlled trial”
- Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback: “Methods for Heart Rate Variability Biofeedback (HRVB): A Systematic Review and Guidelines”
The post Need to Calm Down ASAP? Here’s How to Activate Your Vagus Nerve in 3 Minutes or Less and Keep Stress at Bay appeared first on Reader's Digest.
from Reader's Digest https://ift.tt/xEIDeL6
Comments
Post a Comment