The Experience Miracles Podcast

Stimulate the Vagus Nerve: Why it Matters and How to Do it

Sep 24, 2024

How to Stimulate the Vagus Nerve in Kids: Why Holistic Methods Alone Aren’t Enough

Episode 39, Experience Miracles Podcast | Host: Dr. Tony Ebel, DC, CACCP, Pediatric Chiropractor & Founder of PX Docs | Published: September 24, 2024 | Duration: 39 min

Key Takeaways

  • The Vagus Nerve is far more than a “rest and digest” nerve, it controls stress response, inflammation, sleep, digestion, speech, socialization, and emotional regulation, making it the body’s single most important healing nerve.
  • According to the CDC, over 40% of school-aged children currently struggle with at least one chronic health condition, and Dr. Tony Ebel argues that suppressed vagus nerve function is the neurological root cause in the majority of cases.
  • Common holistic approaches to vagus nerve stimulation, deep breathing, humming, singing, cold exposure, nature walks, provide a meaningful but insufficient dose for children locked into chronic sympathetic dominance and nervous system dysfunction.
  • Subluxation in the upper cervical spine and brainstem directly interferes with vagus nerve signaling, which is why birth trauma (forceps, vacuum, C-section) is a primary driver of vagal suppression in children.
  • Neurologically-Focused Chiropractic Care, using specific neurotonal adjusting protocols and INSiGHT scanning technology, delivers the highest non-surgical, drug-free dose of vagus nerve stimulation available, and is measurable through Heart Rate Variability (HRV) testing.

What Is Vagus Nerve Stimulation, and Why Do So Many Children Need It?

The Vagus Nerve is the body’s primary healing and recovery nerve. Conventional medicine has long described it as the “rest and digest” nerve, but the research now makes clear it does far more: it regulates the body’s response to stress and trauma, controls inflammation, governs digestion, sleep, speech, socialization, emotional behavior, and immune function. When the vagus nerve is working properly, it sends constant calming, regulatory signals from the body up to the brainstem and brain, telling every system to settle, repair, and heal.

When the vagus nerve is suppressed, offline, or interfered with, virtually every regulatory function in a child’s body can break down simultaneously. Children with chronic conditions, autism, ADHD, anxiety, seizures, sensory processing challenges, sleep disorders, gut dysfunction, are nearly always dealing with significant vagal suppression. That suppression, Dr. Tony Ebel argues, typically traces back to The Perfect Storm: high-stress pregnancy, birth trauma, and early toxin exposure that dysregulates the nervous system before a child ever takes their first step.

The CDC reports that over 40% of school-aged children currently struggle with at least one chronic health condition, and the majority of chronically ill children struggle with multiple conditions simultaneously. Dr. Ebel’s position is that this epidemic has a neurological root, not just a genetic or nutritional one. Stimulating the vagus nerve means activating the parasympathetic side of the nervous system to break the cycle of chronic Sympathetic Dominance, and doing that effectively requires more than breathing exercises. It requires getting to the structural source of the interference through Neurologically-Focused Chiropractic Care, measurable through INSiGHT scans and HRV testing.

Why Chronic Illness and Vagus Nerve Suppression Are Linked [00:00 – 00:12]

Dr. Tony Ebel: What our kids need now more than ever is to have their vagus nerve buzzing. We have vagus nerves that are so suppressed, so shut down, so dysfunctional. And then we combine that with a high stress, super toxic, ridiculously crazy social media fed world. No wonder our kids are so sick.

Sadly today, our country and our families are overwhelmed by chronic illness and disease. And it’s not just our older population, our kids are suffering big time. The latest statistics from the CDC show that over 40% of school-aged kids currently struggle with at least one chronic health condition. And more kids who are sick are actually struggling with multiple chronic conditions today.

Take autism as an example. Autism is not a neurological condition where kids just struggle to communicate, socialize, and control their emotions. The majority of children struggling with autism also have chronic gut issues, immune system dysregulation, systemic inflammation, sensory and motor challenges. That tells you something profound about what’s actually going on neurologically.

Chronic illness is a very big deal for all of us, but unfortunately, it’s also very big business. There is no patient worth more financial gain to the medical system than a chronically sick kid. We now know that every time kids under the age of three, and especially under the age of one, are given antibiotics, it significantly increases their risk of chronic illness and autoimmune conditions like asthma and allergies later in life. So not only is the industry profiting off that five- to ten-day medication, given unnecessarily since most respiratory infections are viral and resolve on their own, but it actually helps ensure that your child will become chronically sick into the future, destroying the gut and microbiome further.

There is no cold and flu season. There are chronically sick kids. The reason they get sicker and struggle even more with their immune systems, behavior, and emotions in the fall and winter is not because there are more viruses and bacteria. It’s because there’s more stress, more pressure from school and sports, less time outside, less vitamin D, and less healthy food. Too much stress, too little ability to adapt to it. That’s where the vagus nerve comes in.

“The vagus nerve is the most important nerve in the body because it doesn’t just control our rest and relaxation and digestion. The vagus nerve actually controls our response to stress. The vagus nerve is in charge of bounce back. The vagus nerve is in charge of recovery.”

The vagus nerve is our parasympathetic system, relaxation, regulation, digestion, anti-inflammatory response, emotional and behavioral regulation, bounce back, recovery, healing. We need it now more than ever. The research is fully out on the vagus nerve. That old “rest and digest” description that dominated medicine 20 to 30 years ago is nowhere near complete.

Two Approaches to Vagus Nerve Stimulation: What You’ve Heard vs. What Actually Works [00:12 – 00:20]

When most people hear about vagus nerve stimulation, they encounter one of two camps.

The first is what Dr. Ebel calls low-dose vagus nerve stimulation, the stuff you’d find on Instagram, TikTok, or wellness blogs. Music, singing, humming, social connection, laughing with friends, spending time in nature, walking, exercising, movement. Gargling saltwater. Cold plunges. Deep breathing. Even devices you can hook up to your ear or tongue. Dr. Andrew Huberman talks about the vagus nerve; companies have developed consumer wearables and apps around it. And on the medical end, surgically implanted vagal nerve stimulators exist for kids with intractable epilepsy, children who have tried every medication on the market and had none of them work.

Here’s the critical distinction: stimulating the vagus nerve essentially means reducing stress. The body’s way of turning off the sympathetic fight-or-flight side of the nervous system is to activate the parasympathetic vagal side. We all know intuitively that going outside, going for a walk, and laughing with people you love is going to help. That’s real. That’s biology.

But hear this: those low-dose approaches are not enough, not for kids who are locked into autism, epilepsy, or anxiety. Not for a teenager who has been living inside anxiety for a decade and can’t go to school or socialize. Not for a toddler so stuck in sensory overdrive that they literally cannot take a deep breath for more than a fraction of a second. They are so buried by stress, subluxation, and sympathetic dominance that the good ideas cognitively cannot reach them neurologically. They know deep breathing is supposed to help. Their nervous system is too dysregulated to access it.

“What if they’re just stuck in fight or flight so deeply, so significantly, that they need a higher dosage of vagus nerve stimulation? That’s this kind of chiropractic. Nothing else out there gets into vagus nerve stimulation without drugs, and without surgery and surgically implanted artificial devices into your child’s neck.”

Medical vagal nerve stimulators, by the way, are often effective initially, just like the sixth, eighth, or fifteenth medication a seizure family has tried. But the body adapts. It becomes immune to the outside-in intervention. Of the hundreds of patients Dr. Ebel has seen with surgically implanted vagal nerve stimulators, only one or two still had theirs turned on and working by the time they reached his clinic. The body’s neurophysiology outpaces the static device every time.

The Anatomy of the Vagus Nerve and Its Role in Childhood Health [00:16 – 00:25]

The vagus nerve is one of 12 cranial nerves, and it’s nicknamed “the wandering nerve” because of how far it travels. It branches from the brainstem, at the base of the skull and upper neck, and wanders all the way down through the neck, through the thoracic cavity (collarbone to diaphragm), and into the gut. It’s a bilateral nerve, one on each side, following the symmetry of the human body.

Critically, 85 to 90% of the vagus nerve is sensory. That means its primary job is not to send commands out to the body, it’s to receive information from the body and report it up to the brainstem and brain. It tells the brain what’s happening in the gut, lungs, heart, thymus, and immune system. It also has sensory branches extending to the eyes, ears, tongue, throat, and vocal cords.

This anatomy explains why vagal dysfunction shows up across so many different systems at once:

  • Gut issues, The vagus nerve controls digestive motility, absorption, and elimination. When it’s offline, the gut doesn’t work right.
  • Immune dysregulation, The vagus nerve connects directly to immune glands and organs, and when active, sends anti-inflammatory signals throughout the body. When suppressed, systemic inflammation spreads, and in children with autism, that inflammation can reach the spinal cord, cerebrospinal fluid, and brain.
  • Speech and motor challenges, The vagus nerve innervates the muscles of speech formation and contributes broadly to motor planning.
  • Sensory processing, The vagus nerve is a sensory nerve. If your child has sensory processing challenges, sensory integration issues, or sensory overwhelm, they have vagus nerve suppression and dysfunction, guaranteed.
  • Sleep, The vagus nerve controls sleep regulation.
  • Social and emotional development, The vagus nerve governs social, emotional, and cognitive development and regulation. Dr. Steven Porges in Chicago introduced the polyvagal theory, and the research now shows unequivocally that vagal function underlies focus, concentration, memory, and emotional regulation.

This is why autism may be the clearest window into how the vagus nerve works. Children with autism typically have significantly reduced digestive motility, vagus nerve offline. They have chronic systemic inflammation, vagus nerve not sending anti-inflammatory signals. They have speech delays and sensory overwhelm, vagus nerve branches compromised. They have social and emotional dysregulation, vagal tone insufficient. The vagus nerve is involved in every single component of autism.

“I actually think when we talk about the vagus nerve and autism, it might be the easiest way to understand how essential the vagus nerve is.”

The same logic applies to ADHD, anxiety, dyslexia, dyspraxia, apraxia, PANDAS, speech delays, motor tics, OCD, ODD, Lyme disease, virtually all of the chronic childhood conditions Dr. Ebel sees in clinical practice share vagal dysfunction as a central feature.

How Birth Trauma and The Perfect Storm Suppress the Vagus Nerve from Day One [00:22 – 00:30

The vagus nerve doesn’t just go offline randomly. There are identifiable root causes, and for most children struggling with chronic conditions, those causes trace back to before they were born.

The Perfect Storm is Dr. Ebel’s framework for understanding how vagal suppression develops: high-stress pregnancy, birth trauma or intervention, and early childhood toxin exposure compound to create neurological dysfunction that can persist for years or decades without targeted care.

High-stress pregnancies decrease what’s called fetal development of parasympathetic and vagal nerve tone. We can measure this. We can test a mother’s HRV and see the impact on her developing child’s nervous system.

Then comes birth. Even the best-case scenario, home birth, midwife, doula, low-intervention, is still a significant physical stress. A baby’s bones are pliable. They can’t protect their own neck. They can’t control their own muscles. Any yanking, twisting, or pulling, whether from vacuum extraction, forceps, a surgeon’s hands during C-section delivery, cord complications, decelerations, or induction, creates physical trauma and injury potential to the brainstem, upper cervical spine, and the vagus nerve traveling through both.

That’s where vagus nerve suppression first sets up shop. The upper cervical spine, the most sensitive and critical part of the nervous system, takes the force of birth interventions directly. And the vagus nerve, which branches from that exact area, takes the hit.

Birth trauma creates what chiropractors call Subluxation: interference in the neurospinal system that blocks the vagus nerve from properly communicating between the body and brain. The vagus nerve is entirely dependent on neurospinal health, function, and communication along its entire wandering journey. When that structural integrity is compromised at the top, at the brainstem and upper cervical spine, everything downstream is affected.

“Through the neck and the brainstem and the spine at birth, that’s where vagus nerve suppression first sets up shop.”

This matters enormously for families who have tried everything else. Families who live completely gluten-free, casein-free, toxin-free, out in nature, and whose children are still stuck in autism, still stuck in anxiety, still locked in that sympathetic storm. Because the root is neurological. No amount of dietary change or nature exposure alone resolves a structural interference pattern locked into the nervous system from birth.

Why Neurologically-Focused Chiropractic Is the Highest-Dose Drug-Free Vagus Nerve Stimulation [00:26 – 00:39]

Neurologically-Focused Chiropractic Care has direct access to the central sensory and Autonomic Nervous System, and most importantly, to the vagus nerve, in a way that no other non-surgical intervention does. Here’s why.

The vagus nerve wanders from the cranial system through the brainstem, through the opening called the foramen magnum, down through the cervical spine, and into the thoracic neurospinal system. It rides along the neurospinal system the entire way. It’s entirely dependent on neurospinal health, function, and communication.

When specific neurotonal adjusting protocols are applied to the spine, particularly the upper cervical spine, they do several things simultaneously. First, they remove subluxation, the structural interference blocking vagal communication. Second, they generate what’s called proprioceptive input: sensory, afferent signals that travel into the brain and activate the parasympathetic system. This is why movement helps on stressful days, if you get stuck in traffic, stuck at your desk, and then just go move, you’re calmer, your digestion works better, your emotional regulation improves. Chiropractic adjustments are a movement-based science delivering concentrated, targeted proprioceptive input to the areas of the spine most critical for vagal tone.

The upper cervical spine controls more vagal nerve tone and proprioceptive tone into the brain than any other region. That’s what makes PX Docs’ specific neurotonal adjusting protocols so different from general wellness chiropractic, they are designed from the ground up to stimulate the vagus nerve at the highest possible dose.

When moms get adjusted, the stress physically leaves their body. When dads get adjusted, energy, empathy, and presence return. When teenagers get adjusted, confidence builds and anxiety fades. When toddlers get adjusted, they calm down, make transitions, digest their food, go to sleep. When children with autism get adjusted consistently:

“You start to see them unlock. You start to see them unwind and unravel. Because the vagus nerve is in charge of socialization and speech and communication, once their nervous system gets out of that sympathetic storm because of vagus nerve stimulation, we don’t do the job for the body. We just restart, respark, and become the catalyst.”

That’s the distinction. These adjustments don’t do the work for the nervous system, they remove the interference so the nervous system can do what it was designed to do.

The first step to know if a child needs this is measurement. INSiGHT scanning technology uses neurothermal scans to identify subluxation in the brainstem, cervical, and thoracic areas where vagal dysfunction shows up as temperature asymmetry and metabolic disruption. Heart Rate Variability (HRV), the same metric tracked by Oura Rings, Garmin watches, and Whoop bands, directly measures vagal tone. Low HRV means the vagus nerve is suppressed. HRV scores can quantify the severity of vagal dysfunction and track the progress of care over time.

The real root cause of chronic illness in children is neurological. Not just genetics, not just nutrition, not just toxins, though those all matter. The real root is a vagus nerve that was shut down or suppressed, often from birth, and never had the structural interference removed. Families living the healthiest lives imaginable still have children stuck in autism, still stuck in anxiety, still locked in that sympathetic storm, because no amount of clean food or time in nature resolves a structural block in the nervous system.

“The root cause of chronic illness in kids is neurological. It is locked deeper than that into their nervous system. Their vagus nerve is shut down, suppressed, and in many chronic cases completely offline altogether when we see their HRV.”

Get into a PX Docs office. Get the neurothermal scans and HRV testing done. That’s where it starts.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does the vagus nerve actually do, and why does it matter for my child’s health?

The Vagus Nerve controls far more than digestion. It regulates the body’s stress response, immune function, inflammation, sleep, digestion, speech, socialization, and emotional behavior. For children with conditions like autism, ADHD, anxiety, or sensory processing challenges, the vagus nerve is frequently suppressed or offline, meaning the entire regulatory system it controls is impaired. Activating it is the key to helping these children move out of chronic fight-or-flight.

Can birth trauma really cause vagus nerve dysfunction?

Yes. The Vagus Nerve branches from the brainstem and upper cervical spine, the exact areas most vulnerable to force during birth. Forceps, vacuum extraction, C-sections, cord complications, and inductions can all create physical trauma and structural interference (Subluxation) at the brainstem and upper neck. Dr. Tony Ebel explains that vagus nerve suppression commonly “first sets up shop” at birth, and that this neurological interference often persists undetected for years without targeted chiropractic assessment and care.

Why aren’t deep breathing and other holistic vagus nerve exercises enough for my child?

Deep breathing, humming, singing, nature walks, and similar approaches are genuinely beneficial and support vagus nerve health. But for children locked into chronic Sympathetic Dominance, who literally cannot slow down enough to take a deep breath, the dose is too low. Their nervous system is so dysregulated that cognitively knowing a technique works doesn’t translate into being able to access it. These children need structural intervention to remove the Subluxation blocking vagal communication before lower-dose holistic approaches can take full effect.

What are INSiGHT scans and HRV testing, and how do they relate to the vagus nerve?

INSiGHT scans use neurothermal technology to measure nervous system function along the brainstem, cervical spine, and thoracic spine, the regions where the vagus nerve travels. Temperature asymmetry and metabolic disruption in these areas indicate vagal suppression and subluxation. Heart Rate Variability (HRV) directly measures vagal tone: the lower the HRV, the more suppressed the vagus nerve. Together, these tools give PX Docs practitioners a measurable baseline and a way to track progress in care.

How is Neurologically-Focused Chiropractic different from regular chiropractic?

Neurologically-Focused Chiropractic Care uses specific neurotonal adjusting protocols and INSiGHT scanning technology designed explicitly to address Sympathetic Dominance, Dysautonomia, and Subluxation, the structural interference that suppresses vagal function. Not all chiropractors use this technology or specialize in this clinical focus. PX Docs practitioners are trained and certified specifically in this approach, making it distinct from general wellness or musculoskeletal chiropractic care.

How do I find a chiropractor who specializes in vagus nerve stimulation for children?

Look for a practitioner trained in the PX Docs Network, chiropractors certified in neurologically-focused care for children, using INSiGHT scanning technology and neurotonal adjusting protocols. The PX Docs Directory is searchable by location and lists certified offices across the US, with international expansion underway.

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