The Vagus Connection: How the Nervous System Finds Calm
Why does breathwork help you feel calmer, clearer, and more connected, sometimes within minutes? The answer lies in the deepest pathways of your nervous system, especially a single powerful structure: the vagus nerve.
This article explores how breathwork influences your autonomic nervous system, how the vagus nerve regulates your stress and safety responses, and why activating this system is essential for healing trauma, improving resilience, and restoring a sense of inner calm.
The Autonomic Nervous System: Your Body’s Internal Regulator
Your autonomic nervous system (ANS) controls the automatic processes in your body: heartbeat, digestion, respiration, immune function, and more. It operates in the background, outside of conscious control, constantly assessing your environment for signs of safety or danger.
The ANS has two primary branches:
Sympathetic nervous system (SNS): Mobilisation. Fight, flight, or freeze.
Parasympathetic nervous system (PNS): Restoration. Rest, digest, and recover.
Both branches are vital. The goal is not to shut down the sympathetic response, but to maintain flexibility so your body can shift between activation and recovery as needed.
Chronic stress, trauma, and emotional suppression lock the nervous system into imbalance. You may feel wired but tired, reactive, emotionally numb, or constantly on edge. This is where the vagus nerve comes in.
The Vagus Nerve: A Superhighway of Regulation
The vagus nerve is the longest cranial nerve in your body. It connects your brainstem to your heart, lungs, diaphragm, gut, and many internal organs. “Vagus” means wandering, an appropriate name for this branching, far-reaching nerve.
It plays a central role in parasympathetic regulation, meaning it’s the nerve most responsible for calming your system down after a perceived threat. It’s the primary highway of the “rest and digest” state.
When your vagus nerve is functioning well, what scientists call high vagal tone, you recover faster from stress, feel safer in your body, and have more access to emotional regulation, empathy, and social connection.
Poor vagal tone is associated with inflammation, anxiety, poor digestion, depression, and trauma-related disorders. In essence, your ability to access calm directly depends on how well this nerve works.
Breathwork as Vagal Toning
One of the most powerful ways to stimulate the vagus nerve is through conscious breath control.
This is because the vagus nerve is directly connected to the diaphragm. Every time you breathe deeply and slowly, especially during the exhale, you send a signal through the vagus nerve to the brain: “I’m safe now.”
Breathwork techniques - especially those with long, slow exhalations, rhythmic patterns, humming, sighing, or breath holds, engage the vagal pathways and promote parasympathetic dominance.
This helps:
Lower heart rate and blood pressure
Reduce inflammation
Improve digestion and immune function
Enhance emotional resilience and mood
And most importantly, it helps you shift from survival to safety without needing to mentally convince yourself.
Trauma, Safety, and Nervous System Flexibility
For people with unresolved trauma, the autonomic nervous system often loses flexibility. It becomes harder to shift out of high-alert states (sympathetic dominance) or immobilisation (dorsal vagal freeze).
This is not a psychological flaw, it’s a physiological pattern.
Breathwork helps to retrain the nervous system. Through rhythmic stimulation of the vagus nerve and dynamic oscillation between activation and relaxation, it builds capacity.
You become less reactive, more grounded, and more able to respond rather than react.
This capacity is called autonomic resilience and it’s what allows true healing, growth, and connection to take place.
When the Body Shuts Down: Understanding Dorsal Vagal Freeze
Not all calm is safe. One of the most misunderstood states in the autonomic nervous system is the dorsal vagal freeze (as mentioned above) a form of immobilisation that can look peaceful from the outside but is, in reality, a shutdown response to overwhelm.
The vagus nerve has two primary branches:
The ventral vagal complex, which supports connection, curiosity, and calm
The dorsal vagal complex, which is activated when the system perceives extreme threat and no possibility of escape
This dorsal state is the body’s last-resort survival mechanism. Instead of fight or flight, the system collapses. Heart rate slows, breath becomes shallow, digestion shuts down, and energy drops. It’s a state of freeze, often experienced as numbness, disconnection, or dissociation.
Unlike sympathetic arousal (panic, anxiety, hypervigilance), dorsal vagal freeze can feel like:
“Shutting down” during emotional conversations
Being unable to move or speak when overwhelmed
Going blank or disconnected during stress
Emotional flatness, hopelessness, or fatigue
Digestive shutdown, breath holding, or a sense of floating away from the body
Importantly, this is not a conscious choice. It’s an autonomic response, shaped by the nervous system’s past experiences.
In the context of trauma, people can get stuck here. Especially those with complex trauma or neglect, where shutting down was the only available option. That freeze becomes familiar. Even years later, when no real danger is present, the body might default to collapse under stress.
Breathwork can help, but only when it’s delivered in a way that recognises this pattern.
Without safety and pacing, intense breathwork can unintentionally push someone deeper into freeze. But when facilitated with care, it can gently bring someone back online. Through grounding, rhythmic breathing, and co-regulation, the body is reminded that it is safe to return. That it can feel, and survive, and stay present.
This is where healing begins: not by forcing release, but by respecting the body’s protective responses and slowly expanding its capacity to stay with what once overwhelmed it.
Co-Regulation and Integration
Healing doesn’t happen in isolation. The vagus nerve also plays a major role in social engagement, facilitating eye contact, vocal tone, facial expression, and attunement.
When breathwork is facilitated in a safe, trauma-informed environment, it not only tones the vagus nerve but also strengthens your capacity for co-regulation: the ability to feel safe and connected in the presence of others.
This is where deep healing becomes possible - not through willpower, but through a rewired, rebalanced, and reconnected nervous system.
Why This Matters for Breathwork Practitioners
Understanding the vagus nerve and its role in emotional regulation is essential for any breathwork facilitator.
You are not just guiding breath. You are guiding nervous system transformation.
Every breath you cue is an opportunity to stimulate parasympathetic tone, restore safety, and bring someone one step closer to integration. With consistency, compassion, and care, breathwork becomes a tool not just for stress relief - but for long-term nervous system healing.