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S3 Episode 5: Meltdowns to Mastery: Unlocking the Power of The Vagus Nerve with Dr. Carrie Rigoni

• Lucia Silver / Dr. Carrie Rigoni • Season 3 • Episode 5

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In this transformative episode, Lucia dives into one of the body's most critical systems: the Vagus nerve. She is joined by Dr. Carrie Rigoni, a leading chiropractor, applied kinesiologist, and Vagus nerve educator, specialising in children’s health.

Episode Summary

The Vagus nerve is essential for regulating stress, digestion, sleep, and mood, acting as the body's brake system to bring us back to calm. Lucia and Dr. Carrie discuss how understanding and strengthening Vagus nerve function can unlock self-healing, particularly for children facing developmental, behavioural, and learning challenges.

Dr. Carrie shares practical strategies to boost vagal tone and explains how parents’ nervous system health directly impacts their children. From co-regulation techniques to resolving retained primitive reflexes, this conversation is a must-listen for anyone seeking to promote whole-family wellness.

Key Takeaways

  1. The Vagus Nerve’s Role: How it regulates critical bodily functions and influences overall well-being.
  2. Signs of Low Vagal Tone: Poor stress recovery, digestive issues, poor sleep, and more.
  3. Parent-Child Connection: How parents’ stress responses influence their child’s nervous system health.
  4. Primitive Reflexes: The link between retained reflexes and vagus nerve development.
  5. Practical Strategies: Tips to improve vagal tone, such as breathwork, cold exposure, and co-regulation.

Resources:

Ready to take the next step? Visit thebrainhealthmovement.com to download a free guide packed with actionable tips from this episode, including a nervous system checklist.

If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a review, share it with a friend, and subscribe to the podcast for more expert insights.

Resource Links:

[00:00:00] Lucia Silver: So welcome to another episode of the Brain Health Movement podcast. My name is Lucia Silva, and I am the CEO, founder of the Brain Health Movement and the very proud mama of my son, my mighty Quinn. Here, our mission is to bring you the devoted parents, carers, educators, and healthcare practitioners, the world leading pediatric and neuro developmental experts, who in turn bring their multidisciplinary science, research, and expertise to a whole child, whole family.

[00:00:30] Lucia Silver: where we reveal the real root causes of and pathways to healing the epidemic of developmental behavior, learning, and mental health challenges affecting our precious children today. This episode dives into one of the body's most vital systems for health and healing, the vagus nerve. Central to the autonomic nervous system, the vagus nerve plays a pivotal role in regulating stress responses, digestion, sleep, mood, and more.

[00:01:03] Lucia Silver: Think of it as the body's built in break system for stress, pulling us back into calm so we can rest, recover, and thrive. And when this system is disrupted, it can lead to poor sleep, anxiety, behavioral issues, and even learning difficulties. But here's the good news. By understanding and supporting vagus nerve health, we can help unlock the body's ability to heal itself.

[00:01:28] Lucia Silver: Today, we're joined by one of Australia's leading vagus Carrie Ragoni, to explore the vagus nerve and its role in brain development and stress. resilience, and how specifically parents can strengthen this critical system for their child's health and their own. Throughout my time researching and studying the many ways our children can heal, I have shared on occasion the aha moment I had When I realized I wasn't okay myself, it was actually shortly after Quinn's PANS, first PANS flare, and my nervous system was shot to pieces and I was burnt out and realized that I needed to do something about me in order to continue to help Quinn.

[00:02:15] Lucia Silver: And this has actually become now a really centrally important piece in our education that wasn't there at all at the beginning. It's important across our platforms, our free resources, guides and podcasts, but particularly for our upcoming course launching this January. Which is called Positive Transformation, A Whole Child Multidisciplinary Approach to Healing.

[00:02:36] Lucia Silver: Where together with the world leading experts in their respective fields, we go through the A Z of healing your children's attention, behavior, and developmental struggles. And here we also look at the well being and nervous system of mama. Papa, chief carer, and we make sure that you are in the best possible place that you can be to take your child on the journey before you begin.

[00:03:01] Lucia Silver: And this is really why my heart called out to Carrie, because this is really where she is in her heartland, looking at the nervous system, not just of your child, but of the chief carer, the whole family as well. I'm thrilled to welcome our guest today, Dr. Carrie Rogoni, a chiropractor, applied kinesiologist, and vagus nerve educator with a special interest in children's health.

[00:03:30] Lucia Silver: Dr. Carrie works with mothers and children to optimize brain development and set families on a path to lifelong wellness. She has dedicated her career to helping parents understand how they can support their child's vagal tone, manage stress, and even prevent chronic health issues later in life. Dr. Carey is based in Perth, Australia, where she runs a thriving practice, and she's also the creator of an online coaching program for mothers and children.

[00:03:58] Lucia Silver: She's passionate about teaching parents how to strengthen the vagus nerve, and shares practical, easy to implement strategies that can make a real difference. Carrie, welcome to the show. 

[00:04:10] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : Thank you for having me today. 

[00:04:12] Lucia Silver: So excited to have you. So excited to have you. So today We're going to focus on the vagus nerve as a vital central piece in our children's well being, as well as we've said, mama, chief carer, the whole family.

[00:04:26] Lucia Silver: I normally start with a definition of what it is we're talking about today, but I'm absolutely going to defer straight to you as the expert. I just want to say one thing that with around this that, that stress is not We are not going to be able in this lifetime to remove stress, family incidences, people dying, grieving, all sorts of things that happen.

[00:04:53] Lucia Silver: Our own upsets, our own not being the best that we can be as mum, dad on a day and perhaps upsetting our children because we're not in a good place. It's going to happen. The issue is how do we recover from that? It's about the repair, not the avoidance of rupture, right? It's about how we can best place our nervous system.

[00:05:15] Lucia Silver: I just want to say that first, because I think a lot of the time, as parents, we berate ourselves for having the stress in the first place. But that's not going to go away. So over to you, for those of us who may not be familiar, could you tell us what the vagus nerve is, where it is and what does it do?

[00:05:33] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : I can. Yes. So the vagus nerve is the largest cranial nerve in the body. And it starts up in your brainstem, which I guess is part of your more primitive brain. And it runs down the, down your neck, down the front of your neck, under your collarbones. Through your chest, so under your chest bone connects to all organs inside your chest and your abdominal cavity, and it goes all the way to your pelvic floor.

[00:06:04] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : So it's a large nerve with lots of different finger like projections that go to every organ. So it has its finger on the pulse, so to speak, for your whole body in terms of your torso. And. One of the big jobs of the vagus nerve is Those automatic processes that we don't think about, how fast our heart is racing, what our blood pressure is doing the rate at which we digest food and expel it out of our body.

[00:06:34] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : All of these things that kind of happen in the background, we know they're happening, but for the most part, we don't really have to consciously think about them. And then it also very strongly contributes to how safe we feel. And safety is really important for the nervous system in terms of that stress response.

[00:06:53] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : So we talk about, and I know we'll get into it in a bit more detail, but dipping into a stress response when we need to. Which is not necessarily the problem. That's how we're designed to respond to stress. The vagus nerve helps us recalibrate and come back to safety. And what people may not realize about the vagus nerve is that and the nervous system in general is that safety can be.

[00:07:17] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : Inside our body or outside of our body. So if our nervous system and our vagus nerve is detecting threat, it's not necessarily something, a giant dog coming towards your child. It could actually be something else happening in their body that is inflammatory even like an infection that will trigger the nervous system to respond accordingly.

[00:07:42] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : But the nervous system, it doesn't discern between. A threat outside the body and a threat inside the body, it's going to respond in the exact same way. And then what we want is a healthy vagus nerve, when it's working optimally, says, okay, the stress has gone. We're going to just calm right back down now.

[00:08:03] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : We're going to recalibrate and go back into a state. state of that parasympathetic activity where we can recover and repair ourselves, can do what they need to do to remain healthy rather than just remaining on guard.

[00:08:18] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : It's so important. You'd think it was on the biology map when we learned about our heart, our hands, our eyes and everything else. Quite extraordinary, really, that many of us will be sitting here listening and going, I can't believe I didn't know what that was. Yeah. It's critical. So why therefore is it so critical to our overall health and particularly for children, Carrie?

[00:08:42] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : What. What do we need to understand in terms of its development and its central place? 

[00:08:50] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : It's like the brakes to the system. So it's our strongest anti inflammatory in the body. So if you have chronic inflammation or your child is having chronic inflammation, the vagus nerve is going to dampen that and balance the immune system.

[00:09:04] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : So it's still going to fight when it needs to, but it's not going to create chronic inflammation. And then secondly, the rest of the nervous system. In a developing child is not going to develop optimally if your child is in a chronic stress state. If your child's vagus nerve is low tone or not functioning as well as it could be, Which leads to your child being in more of a baseline stress state as their general being.

[00:09:37] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : Then that we know that stress changes neurodevelopment and it changes the way the brain wires itself. So in terms of Why it's so important. It can literally change the way your child perceives the world, how they experience their life, how their brain makes networks, how they respond to food, viruses, emotions, literally everything.

[00:10:03] Lucia Silver: It reminds me very much of a conversation I had recently. To deliberately name drop with Dr. Stephen Borges who categorically says if you're not safe, you can't be sound, if the world is not safe in the first premise, then all the work that you're trying to do. With your child, whether it's the premise of reflex integration work that we talk about through our platforms that I know you work so sincerely with as well.

[00:10:30] Lucia Silver: Even changing diet, all sorts of things. If the body is in that dysregulated state, you could argue that a lot of other things cannot be as effective. So it's almost the premise. For the work,

[00:10:45] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : yeah. And I do call it one of the really foundational things that you need to do, we need to create safety.

[00:10:53] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : That's going to look different for every child and a child with low vagal tone may need more safety from outside their body. If their body's, really inflamed, leaky gut, primitive reflexes, there's a lot going on metabolically and neurologically for that child. They're going to need a lot more safety outside of their body, in their environment, in their caregivers, et cetera.

[00:11:19] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : Whereas if we can optimize that and get them some inner safety, Then it takes care of itself more naturally, the way that it was designed to do. 

[00:11:31] Lucia Silver: That, that is hugely interesting. And we'll come back to how we do that in a moment. But I'm wanting to follow two parallel courses as we speak, because with a child's inability, which we emphasize all the time, a young child's inability to naturally down regulate, they do rely on our nervous systems in order to be helped back to that homeostasis, to that place of equilibrium.

[00:11:56] Lucia Silver: And our, as parents, our vagus nerve, our resilience stress management is a huge piece in this and I wanted to just allude to your personal journey because it's really what brought you to focusing in this area when you had chronic fatigue didn't you? Really quite seriously and you realized that you were struggling with severe burnout yourself.

[00:12:23] Lucia Silver: And In that journey, tell us what you discovered and how you pretty much reverse that condition for yourself, right? 

[00:12:30] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : Yeah. I don't identify as someone who has chronic fatigue anymore. Though I will say I still have a very sensitive nervous system. It's definitely, had an impact on my nervous system.

[00:12:41] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : However yeah, I've, I spent most of my twenties with chronic fatigue syndrome, which I now know was. Nervous system burnout, complete dysregulation, just sitting in the freeze response. My nervous system was doing the best it could with the environment that I put it in. And, I tried everything. I was already when I first got it, I was a chiropractic student, but, through my first two jobs as a chiropractor, it really it took a lot of time.

[00:13:12] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : Hold of my life, you could say and I tried everything, diet supplements, all of the things that you should health sorry, gut health, et cetera. Nothing was sticking. I was just finding that the moment I stopped taking supplements or the moment I had one dietary slip up, everything went back to square one.

[00:13:35] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : And it wasn't until then I found the nervous system. In terms of regulation, in terms of safety, in terms of vagal tone or how well your vagus nerve is working, when my vagus nerve turned on and it started communicating with the rest of my brain, it was just like this light switch went off in my nervous system and my whole body changed.

[00:14:00] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : And of course I still had to what I describe as mop up the side effects of being in chronic stress for so long, for majority of my life, I would say I still had to go back and support my gut and my metabolic health and my cells. It doesn't just, it wasn't click done, but it certainly was the biggest step forward for my healing.

[00:14:24] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : And what it did was it just enabled me to realize the power of the nervous system. And all of the things that we can do to support it so that everything else starts to fall in place as well. 

[00:14:38] Lucia Silver: It's absolutely fascinating, Carrie, and I think other mums are going to be sitting here going, What did you do?

[00:14:43] Lucia Silver: What did you do? What did you do? Could you tell us how you climbed out of chronic fatigue and what, just some of the things you did to help yourself? 

[00:14:52] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : Yeah, like for the most part, it is what I do in practice. So I was working with a chiropractor who, who taught me to do what I do now.

[00:15:02] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : And he really knew how to support my nervous system in a slow but guided way. So I wasn't forcing, I was just moving with my nervous system because even body work and therapy can be a thing. Threat if the nervous system is too hypervigilant, we can actually do more harm than good. So it was just about that step by step approach until the vagus nerve said, yep, here I am.

[00:15:29] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : I'm ready, willing, and able to work now. And yeah, the rest is history. 

[00:15:37] Lucia Silver: Fantastic. This morning, just to take it fresh off the press and referring to our point that stress is an ever present factor in our lives and is going away no time soon on the radio this morning was a report from America, from Michigan a shooting in a school, and it all goes, here we go again, but a shooting in a school carried by a 15 year old girl who unfortunately took the lives of a teacher and another pupil.

[00:16:10] Lucia Silver: And the news report shares that she died as well, whether she turned on herself or some other incident happened, we don't know. That I found, of course, incredibly shocking. And then when the police, person on the scene reported, he said, They received news of the incident from a grade two, seven year old boy who called and reported the incident.

[00:16:40] Lucia Silver: I was just listening to it. Quinn won't listen to the news because it upsets him so much. He says, Mommy, why do you even listen to it? But I was thinking, here we are trying to create safety. And, here's another story where, We cannot make stress the enemy or the problem. These traumatic events that are seemingly otherworldly.

[00:17:03] Lucia Silver: They're how did that child ever get in that state, and how did that ever happen, and what's going on at home for that 15 year old girl, and so forth. But, the sympathetic response is necessary in the right place, at the right time for our survival. But it is about where we spend most of our time, right?

[00:17:21] Lucia Silver: And the key is our ability to pull back from that state of fight or flight. Goodness knows what state that young girl was in. Traumatized, totally dysregulated, totally disassociated. Goodness knows. I'm not going to attempt to even unpack that one. But this is literally your body telling you that it is or it's not safe.

[00:17:43] Lucia Silver: How do you begin to orientate within this world of lack of safety when, what do you tell your child? Where do you begin on this journey when this is what, this is the kind of external feedback we're getting? 

[00:17:56] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : Yeah, one of the most common mottos that I talk about with my coaching mums is like removing the shame and the stigma around the stress response.

[00:18:07] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : Making a motto of like my nervous system is responding appropriately to the environment it's currently in. And it's it takes it away from you being the problem of like, why am I so stressed? It's yeah, this is why I'm so stressed. Of course my nervous system is responding in this way.

[00:18:25] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : And it just takes the shame and guilt away. You can enter that with compassion. And that's already step one into that little bit of inner safety. It's step one towards, Oh, it's not me. I'm not the problem here. It's just, the world is chaotic and if your child is old enough, you can teach those concepts to your child as well.

[00:18:46] Lucia Silver: So with that then, what are the key signs that a child, and also a parent, might have an issue with vagus nerve function? How can we see how well or not our vagus nerve is functioning? 

[00:19:00] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : You can measure it with heart rate variability and most, an aura ring or a some smartwatches will measure that.

[00:19:09] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : The only thing that I would suggest if you're planning on doing that is you do use the same device all the time. If you're swapping between devices, then the accuracy is going to be different. Unless you're getting a really high end clinical device, which is, not accessible for majority. And you try and do it at the same time each day.

[00:19:27] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : So you're getting a read on your nervous system, say when you first wake up, et cetera. So you've got that consistent patterning. So if you wanted data, that's what you would be going for your heart rate variability. In terms of symptoms the way I see low vagal tone manifesting really depends on the individual, but what it will do is it will shift your baseline away from a state that regulates easily and what I would call nervous system flexibility.

[00:19:56] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : Sorry. You step up when you need to with the stress response required for the situation, and then you pull back when you need to. So if you feel like you can recalibrate pretty quickly after a stressful event, then your vagus nerve is doing its job well. If your digestion is pretty good, you sleep all night your vagus nerve is doing what it needs to do.

[00:20:23] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : But if you have low vagal tone, you might find that, as a simple example, you're driving to work and someone's driving erratically on the road and they swerve in front of you and you have to hit your brakes really hard. Your nervous system's going to respond with A heightened response, right?

[00:20:41] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : It's activated because it's trying to keep you alive. It's trying to keep you safe. Now, if that incident ruins the rest of your day and the way you talk to your colleagues at work or your children or maybe you get home and in the evening you have to have a glass of wine to unwind because you just can't get over it, then your vagus nerve is not turning back on or it doesn't have the capacity to turn on and say, Hey, it's done.

[00:21:08] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : You can get on with your day. You're safe now. It keeps you in that activated state. Does that make sense? 

[00:21:16] Lucia Silver: It does. Absolutely. I was thinking of it also in terms of that's that sort of us behind the driving wheel after that incident. How might it look in our children and what can we look out for with them?

[00:21:27] Lucia Silver: Because children manifest in so many mysterious and seemingly unrelated ways. And then somebody goes, no that's, neuroception of safety, understanding what's really going on for them. That's what happened this morning. And you're like, Oh, it's still going on for them.

[00:21:41] Lucia Silver: So what are the signs that that a child is still playing out something that might've upset them earlier in the day? And again, a sign of, Their inability to co regulate or find their way back or weak vagal tone, as you would say. 

[00:21:52] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : Yeah, so it does depend on the child. So some children may if they have a strong fight response, they're probably going to get their energy out with fight energy.

[00:22:03] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : Whether that's, pushing other kids to Starting an argument, throwing things, that sort of behavior. If they're more into a flight energy, they may storm off and hide under a desk or, run away from the situation. And a child who's in freeze will often, they need the most support.

[00:22:24] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : They'll just seem numb. They'll seem flat. You might ask them, Is anything wrong? And they won't be able to communicate. They might not be able to find their words, or they might even want to have a nap, depending on how strong their freeze response is. So that's how they may manifest the different stress states, but physiologically, if they've got low vagal tone that is occurring throughout their day, so their baseline is more in that chronic stress state, then they really can get symptoms in.

[00:22:55] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : any organ that the vagus nerve connects to, which is all of our organs. So it may be digestive complaints. It may be some chest pressure or racing heart. They're complaining that their heart's racing. It could even be some neck pain up where the vagus nerve runs, if it's an inflammatory contributor.

[00:23:15] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : It's very broad. It's a really tough question to answer. 

[00:23:20] Lucia Silver: It's really enlightening because so many children will, and adults, will get a runny tummy immediately when there's anxiety or A daughter of a parent who called me recently always gets a sore throat.

[00:23:32] Lucia Silver: So yes, I mean it's bio neuro physiological. If the vagel tone is touching all those different places, then it's going to be manifesting at every conceivable level. So yes, it's a it's detective work, but it's also fairly unilateral as well, isn't it? It's we're seeing, we really are seeing it everywhere.

[00:23:51] Lucia Silver: So yeah so as we've said time and time again, we really are about this whole child approach and looking at the impact of these different stresses. on development, on neurodevelopment, as well as on daily life. There's a big, there's a bigger picture, which is, how is my child developing?

[00:24:09] Lucia Silver: And then there's the immediate moments when these stresses really impact. So if we were looking within our neurodevelopmental, our milestones, and how a child is developing, Gary, And we pull back and look again at primitive reflexes, which can be a sign of neurological immaturity. They're there almost as a barometer of how we are developing.

[00:24:32] Lucia Silver: If they're still in place beyond the first year when they should have become integrated, then we know that something is a little bit out of whack and we need to go back and look and see how our child is developing. But I'd like to look at that with you specifically, because we've talked about it in so many podcasts but I'd like to talk about how it connects to vagus nerve development, how one impacts on the other.

[00:24:59] Lucia Silver: Yeah, would you take that forwards for us and just help us relate the two? 

[00:25:04] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : Yeah, so the two reflexes that are really, the most linked with The stress response and the vagus nerve is the moro or the startle reflex. I don't know if you call it moro or moro over in the UK and the fear paralysis reflex.

[00:25:22] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : So you think about maybe a moment where you have. Being so stressed that you're frozen, like you feel paralyzed, you can't move, you can't speak. That's a freeze response. And that's part of the dorsal vagal branch. So that's the most primitive part of the vagus nerve. And it's the first part that develops in the womb.

[00:25:43] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : So as your child is growing in the womb the dorsal vagal is. the first branch to develop and it displays a lot of the same characteristics as the fear paralysis reflex. So what we see in children who retain that fear paralysis is that they dipped straight into that dorsal vagal response. And. The dorsal vagel is like playing dead.

[00:26:08] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : It's like heart rate starts to drop. Some children might even pass out their breathing rate stops, their blood pressure drops. It's designed for the prey to think that they've already killed you so that they will leave you alone and go and hunt other things. And they know they've got you to come back to, to eat.

[00:26:28] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : Obviously you wouldn't be, the moment the threat is gone, your ventral vagel should. Kick back in, you, your heart rate comes back up and then you flee the scene, right? Or maybe you fight, flight first. And then we've got the morrow. The morrow is more of a sympathetic activation. So that's more that fight flight energy.

[00:26:49] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : And that really kicks in the womb around 20 weeks of age. And what is supposed to happen during neurodevelopment is the morrow will eventually inhibit the fear paralysis. By the time a child is born, majority of children have already integrated or had their fear paralysis inhibited in some sense.

[00:27:13] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : It may be there a little bit. I do believe there is some temperament in there. Also, if if you have a child who freezes and maybe, goes, stops talking and very shy, et cetera, this could be an overactive fear paralysis or it could just be their dorsal vagal is there. Preferred stress response.

[00:27:31] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : But yeah, once the baby is born, the startle, which we know baby startle until around 12 weeks of age should take over and inhibit. So the problem is when we start to see these reflexes, not integrating the way that they're intended to, that they become stronger in children and even, older children and adults who may not know they have them.

[00:27:54] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : And. It's going to prevent the development of the ventral vagus, which is the safety that, that's what we've been talking about. So the ventral vagus, like the the newest part of the vagus nerve, which really well and truly kicks in by 12 months of age, or it should if neurodevelopment is happening the way it ought to but it slowly myelinates after birth onwards.

[00:28:19] Lucia Silver: Does that answer the question? I think so. I'm just trying to unpack a little bit as you're speaking. Does one therefore impact on the other? So are moro and ventral vagals maturing, if you like, together? So as, or is it as simple as if the moro reflex doesn't integrate and by that, what that looks like, and just so that parents are reminded, if your moro reflex is still active?

[00:28:46] Lucia Silver: Past its useful place of being active. Then bright lights, noises even a slamming door in a classroom will absolutely alert and elovate and agitate a child and put them into a fear state or an adult. Indeed, when you see it it's leaves them in a state of dysregulation as opposed to the nervous system understanding that was just a bright light.

[00:29:09] Lucia Silver: That was just a, in layman's terms, that's a sort of the difference between. a regulated response once the moro has integrated and when it hasn't. So in turn, you're saying that the vagus nerve is maturing and developing at the same time, but if the moro isn't integrated, that impacts on The vagus tone or vice versa?

[00:29:32] Lucia Silver: The vagus tone, then the moro can't inter how, what's the interchangeability there? That's what I'm looking 

[00:29:37] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : for. Both ways. Both 

[00:29:39] Lucia Silver: ways, okay. 

[00:29:40] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : Yeah they sit in a similar part of the brainstem, so we're always going to see that bit of overlap, and because they both are involved with the stress response, the If you have low vagal tone from birth, then you're more likely to retain that morrow because you're going to be in that heightened stress state.

[00:30:02] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : However, if you retain that morrow and the vagus nerve is trying to develop, but all of your nervous system is detecting threat after threat, it's going to say, hey, we don't need to be chill right now, vagus nerve, like you don't need to do your job. I need to be. Hypervigilant and agitated and looking out for threat.

[00:30:21] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : So in terms of wiring, it's going to train the nervous system to look for the threat rather than to recalibrate after. 

[00:30:30] Lucia Silver: Got you. That's much clearer. Got you. And I feel like giving myself a really big. Because having added that to the course and involved you in our course, it really is important that we look at both, isn't it?

[00:30:44] Lucia Silver: You can't just look at those steps of primitive reflex integration without looking at the vagus tone. And I remember when I took Quinn out to the States to do this intensive work with Dr. Josh, which was so exciting. He was in fact, putting on little vagus tone devices and stimulating the vagus tone as we were doing primitive reflex work.

[00:31:05] Lucia Silver: So I think in an ideal world, we try and throw it all together and work on it as much together as we can. But I'm so grateful that you're going to be doing this module on the course so that we can continue. absolutely look at that in the first instance and understand its importance. So again, speaking to Dr.

[00:31:22] Lucia Silver: Stephen Borges and reading his stuff, which I'm sure you have done way deeper than I will have done, but Dr. Stephen Borges is the godfather, really, of the poly, polyvagal, of understanding these different elements of the body, but he said in one of his fantastic books, he said co regulation is a biological imperative.

[00:31:44] Lucia Silver: This is all in his understanding of the neuroception of safety, co regulation, and the work that we need to do with our children to bring them into that safe space to then be able to mature correctly. So with that, Carrie, how do neuroception and co regulation and what you call mirror neurons relate to vagus nerve health?

[00:32:10] Lucia Silver: And what do these concepts mean for parents and caregivers? Can you talk us through this a little bit? 

[00:32:16] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : I think the first thing to, recognize, and we know this as adults, we can look back at our childhood and say, Oh yeah, like my parents behaved this way and I can see I've picked up those behaviors, right?

[00:32:29] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : So we can look in hindsight and see that the way our parents modeled behavior, including how they managed to. Stress and emotion is very easily absorbed by a child. So that all happens completely subconsciously. And we have the power to teach our children what is normal and abnormal in terms of responding to stress based on how we respond.

[00:33:00] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : And this is why, initially I only saw pediatrics, but then I realized how powerful the nervous system of the parents or the primary caregiver, usually the mom was in this whole this dynamic. So if you as a parent are chronically stressed and you can reflect and say, yeah, I've probably been that way my whole life because, we're only just really learning about all this stuff.

[00:33:25] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : In this generation, I would say like the last few years have been really powerful for learning about the nervous system. Then growing our child in a stress nervous system is going to teach our baby and our child, Hey, this is normal. This is how we respond to stress. This is the norm of our family, right?

[00:33:47] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : I can just 

[00:33:47] Lucia Silver: hear Carrie, as you're speaking, all the parents going, Oh no, when's she going to get to the bit where she says how I do something about it? Cause I am now going, oh, and that time when I had that dreadful response and that time where I swore and that time where I, oh, yeah.

[00:34:05] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : So we just, and no shame. We're all in it together, right? Our nervous systems are just responding to our environment with the best information we have at the time. So there's always a chance to improve it. But I guess, yeah, what I'm trying to say is we marinate our babies in our stress response when they're still in the womb and they learn our normal through us physiologically, before they're even talking, they're learning it through our body, which is growing them.

[00:34:34] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : And so they were born with. Mirror neurons, and we all have them. So mirror neurons are particular nerve cells that mirror people around you. And it happens subconsciously. It happens much, much fast, faster than our conscious brain can even control. And. It's like when you meet, say you meet a friend and you can tell they're feeling anxious, even though they're trying to hide it, you can just feel what they're feeling, right?

[00:35:04] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : It's that part of like human empathy that we're going to, I'm going to connect with you on a subconscious level through those mirror neurons. And that's, it's actually really a beautiful part of being human. But what happens is we have non verbal small children who are learning about the world and they are not listening to the words that we say.

[00:35:27] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : They're listening to how we say it, and they're listening subconsciously through how our nervous system is displaying that stress response or that regulation. So again, we. have a huge impact on the level of stress in our child. And then if you add in the concepts that your child does have a retained morrow or an, as an example, and they are more likely to seek out they're more hypervigilant to seek out threats rather than safety, then they're also going to be hypersensitive To your nervous system.

[00:36:12] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : So that's going to be very different to a child who has integrated all of their reflexes. So if you've got a couple of children and you have one who seems more sensitive than the others, then that's going to be part of it also. So it's like a dynamic that like, all of the things you talk about in your course really all feed into this rather than it just being the vagus nerve and just being the mirror neurons.

[00:36:36] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : They have this. Such a strong ability to sense everything that's going on in their caregiver and we are their safe person. So if they see that we're not safe or our nervous system is displaying signs of not being safe and being in a high stress state, then they're going to say, Oh my gosh, either I need to meet that or I need to fawn or fix this.

[00:37:00] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : Or I need to do something about this so that I can control that environment and bring it back down. 

[00:37:06] Lucia Silver: Again, I'm trying not to hyperventilate the number of times I have definitely fallen short of that. There was a comedy sketch some time ago and I shared it in our a lot of the work that we're doing around awake and parenting, how you communicate and handle things in the heat at the moment.

[00:37:22] Lucia Silver: But we all know from that, that when your child falls in the playground and then they almost look to you, and then depending on whether you're going, or or you're calm. Your baby does or doesn't cry. That's the social engagement piece, isn't it? That you're talking about them, the mirror neurons, it's social engagement.

[00:37:39] Lucia Silver: I think Stephen Borges rather elegantly phrases it like that. They look to see. We're born into tribes to see what everybody else is doing, and is it safe? It's a bit like when there's a bomb noise in the cinema. The first thing everybody does is turn to everybody else to see how they should be responding.

[00:37:59] Lucia Silver: So there's, there is something of that in the mix, but it does remind me of one time with Quinn. He'd fallen over at football, and I was like it was one of the first kind of matches when he just started playing. Ran over, I was like, you're okay. I was going, you're okay. And Quinn looked at me and he went, yes, mummy, but you're not.

[00:38:19] Lucia Silver: There it is. Fortunately, he'd grown past my anxiety for him and noticed the state that I was in. But it is it's very subtly and not so subtly connected, isn't it? So we, there something in those moments that we as parents, as you say, you can't help when you see your child fall and then blood or they're about to knock their head, you're just going to have that response.

[00:38:41] Lucia Silver: But I sometimes use breath work before I go over to Quinn to just, tell my nervous system that we're okay. What tips in the heat of the moment have you got so that you're not going over like a nervous wreck and dysregulating them further? Yeah. 

[00:38:56] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : Yeah. There's so many and you can try, yeah, breath work.

[00:39:01] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : Anything that I call is just a bit of a speed bump. Just slows you down before you get to your child. Slow breathing is a really good one, but I think, going back to the motto of my nervous system is responding to the environment that I'm in, if your child. Is about to hurt themselves, then it's actually okay to have some of those behaviors too we don't necessarily want to just be like, Oh, nah, you'll be right.

[00:39:28] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : Oh, he's on the edge of a cliff, just let him learn, yeah, it'll toughen up. No we do want to have that response. So we don't. We don't necessarily want to stop it. But what I tend to encourage people to do is have a foundation for your nervous system so that when things arise in your day, you have capacity to deal with it rather than going.

[00:39:52] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : Oh my gosh. Like I'm watching my son play soccer and I'm worried it's going to get hurt. You're already anxious and hypervigilant. And then they do get hurt or they fall over and you think they're hurt. Then you've got nothing left in the tank. You explode. Whereas if you do the work when you're feeling good and you set that foundation and you expand your window of tolerance as much as you can, or what I would call your flexibility, then It means when an event happens, you're still going to respond, right?

[00:40:23] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : You're still going to be activated because it's your child. That's your job. Like innately we will be activated, but then you're going to be able to recalibrate after. So again, it's not about the stress. It's about how you recover after. Does that make sense? 

[00:40:40] Lucia Silver: Absolutely. And those, the windows of tolerance and that elasticity is so important.

[00:40:45] Lucia Silver: And that it's. It's about responding, not just getting back to, as you say your state of equilibrium, but it's also about responding appropriately to the system, to, a lot of our stored trauma and our stored stress is about bringing something that has happened in the past and it's overwhelmed the moment.

[00:41:03] Lucia Silver: We're not actually responding appropriately. So we've got, this is all the work that I'm really encouraging our parents to do before beginning work with our children. As you say, there's breath work, and there's all sorts of things. So there's recognizing what is really true in this moment, and what might belong to something that was, for you, traumatic, or something that happened for you in your life, that is not happening for your child.

[00:41:25] Lucia Silver: Yeah, I think this area of preventative stress or it is key, and I know this is very important in your work too, Carrie with pregnancy being such a critical period as well, right? For stress prevention. Vagus nerve health, begins during pregnancy, doesn't it? And it impacts mother and child.

[00:41:46] Lucia Silver: We've talked about, what happens, once our little people are with us and having playground accidents and so forth, but let's pull back a little bit and Look at pregnancy and look at the impact of a vagus nerve health in that time too. 

[00:41:59] Lucia Silver: Talk to us about 

[00:41:59] Lucia Silver: that. 

[00:41:59] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : Yeah, so there's some, I mean there's a lot of research on babies because ethics and it's a really hard area to get a lot of research in, but there is some research to suggest that mums who have high cortisol or stress hormone during their pregnancy tend to have babies who exhibit high stress, particularly in the first 12 weeks of life.

[00:42:25] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : They did a study where they drew blood from mums and those who had high cortisol in their blood had babies who exhibited more stress behaviors. They were monitored only for the first 12 weeks. Now we can only assume what is going to happen after that and it would depend on the individual ride and then neurodevelopment.

[00:42:48] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : But we know that it's going to impact The baby's behavior from the day they're born. And the Gottman Institute have done a study on relationship stress and they found that couples who had a lot of relationship stress, particularly in trimester three which I find interesting because that's when the ventral vagus is starting to develop are more likely to have babies who have lowered vagal tone, again, in those first 12 weeks of life.

[00:43:19] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : There's evidence to suggest that pregnancy stress will impact how your baby's vagus nerve develops and we know that it will impact neurodevelopment as well. So we're more likely to see those retained primitive reflexes, which again is going to affect vagal tone and then that vagal tone is going to affect how those primitive reflexes start to integrate.

[00:43:42] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : It's, Yeah, it's a really, it basically starts from conception onwards. 

[00:43:48] Lucia Silver: As we say with everything, the earlier we know, the more that we can do, really. It's just to shine light on it again, not for parents to feel, Oh my God, I was so stressed through my pregnancy. It's just to understand a little deeper how these things can affect development.

[00:44:04] Lucia Silver: And to remind us all again about this wonderful thing, neuroplasticity, which is for me. The secret source to understand how much we can impact how the brain is developing on an ongoing basis. Nothing is set in stone, is it, Carrie? All of this we can work on. Have a friend who changed the subject slightly, but onto a lighter note, there's, who's suffered from anxiety deep anxiety all through her life.

[00:44:30] Lucia Silver: She lost her younger brother when she was. young herself and her parents went into a state of kind of permanent grievance and almost her mother became hysterical and it impacted on her life hugely and I don't think she ever really found a way through talking therapy of recovering from this trauma.

[00:44:52] Lucia Silver: And I believe she's been in a state of fight or flight throughout her life and in the last four or five years has discovered cold water swimming. And it has been absolutely extraordinary. Forget the meds, forget, this has been, I always said to her, the meds are going to do nothing, they're just masking the problem.

[00:45:16] Lucia Silver: We need to there's something that's happened within your development here, where your body thinks it needs to be in this state. It's serving a purpose somehow, but it's got to be time to let it go. But she's literally submerged her anxiety, and I mean that in the most positive way possible, not suppressed, but this freezing cold Lido pool the coldest place known to man.

[00:45:40] Lucia Silver: She took me a little while ago and I thought it was fantastic, but I couldn't feel anything physically. It was the most extraordinary experience. But she now responds completely differently to situations. And I know there's quite a trend now with this cold water swimming. I don't know if it's happening in Australia, but it certainly is happening here.

[00:46:02] Lucia Silver: And they are the loveliest, calmest, most wonderful people. Those 80 year olds with winter hats and their little swimming costumes going up and down at, two degrees and, she'll swim in two. Literally until it's almost frozen and she doesn't wear a wetsuit and she loves it. Is that speaking to something around this area of Vegas?

[00:46:22] Lucia Silver: I've said to her, I know it's Vegas town, I'm going to ask Carrie because I know this is all connected. 

[00:46:27] Lucia Silver: Yes, 

[00:46:27] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : it is. It does allow it forces your vagus nerve to walk, to work better. It forces it to turn on because, initially it's actually a stressor to the body getting into something that cold, right?

[00:46:41] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : Your nervous system goes I'm going to activate my stress response, but with time it will start to recalibrate. So what she's doing with that cold exposure is simply just Expanding her window of tolerance using physical input to the body. We do know that cold exposure itself also gives you a massive dopamine hit.

[00:47:03] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : So it's going to hit a few points in the brain that are going to support like happiness and fulfillment, as well as lowering your anxiety and increasing your capacity to deal with stress. 

[00:47:17] Lucia Silver: Wow. That's exactly what she would say. She says, I just, I'm completely There's like an elasticity she talks about, where I'm just so much freer in the moment when things happen with the kids, I just don't respond with the same shout back response.

[00:47:31] Lucia Silver: I just feel calmer. So yeah, I just think even in terms of practical tools and different things that we can really do. Without adding to the list of to dos that we already feel overwhelmed by. She gets up early in the morning and six out of seven days a week, despite being a working mom with two kids, she makes that happen for herself.

[00:47:51] Lucia Silver: And interestingly, she's set that boundary and the family like treat it as sacrosanct, because it's that makes mom feel better. So everybody ensures she gets it. It happens for her, so with parents looking for practical tools, Carrie, to help children could you share a few strategies or activities to strengthen vagus nerve function in kids and adults, and perhaps if you prefer to answer it this way, or as well as, some real life stories from your clinic, what's happened with children presenting or with mums presenting?

[00:48:21] Lucia Silver: What have you done and what have the outcomes been with your work? 

[00:48:25] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : I use a lot of tools in my clinic. Like I have the lasers, which I know, I think probably Dr. Josh and those guys use as well. And vibrations and lots of sensory input. To enable the body to feel safe. So you could even simply get a weighted blanket at home.

[00:48:46] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : And that's a wonderful option. Something that I create with my clients particularly children who. Tend to go into the phrase response is a nurture nest, but it's basically just wrapping them in heavy things and helping them feel weightless and helping them feel safe. So they're in like a little cocoon.

[00:49:07] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : So you could make a game with your children around getting into this nest and you might find that a lot of things come out for them that they haven't been able to express to you before. It's almost like a Oh, I, I don't know how to describe it, but like when I, even when I put my children in it, I can see once it's hit the spot because they go, and then they might be like, Oh, I'm bored or whatever.

[00:49:30] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : No, I can see what's happening in your nervous system. You're just downregulating. So that's a really lovely one and adults can do that too. So that's designed for all ages. You definitely can do some cold plunges if you wish. You can even start with just ice over your face and your cranial nerves, even at the front of your neck.

[00:49:52] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : Anything cold, you can get like a They're like ice rollers for your face really soothing and will activate your vagus nerve. So things physically are really helpful, I find. And if you are feeling really stressed in the moment, maybe you're driving to school and the kids are at each other, or you've just had a really rough morning, then what I encourage you to do, rather than try and say, Stay calm is to get it out.

[00:50:19] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : And that might be, thumping your chest or shaking your arms or doing something that moves the energy through your body before you try and calm yourself because you'll be too full of energy and your sympathetic nervous system will be saying, I am like. Trying to fight this threat and you want me to deep breathe.

[00:50:39] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : I'm not going to do that. So you're going to be fighting your nervous system if you're trying to force it to breathe when it's trying to, be really activated. So thinking about where you're sitting and working with your own nervous system is really important because you don't want to force it.

[00:50:56] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : It's just more work for you and it's, you're going to feel like you're not getting anywhere. Definitely a breathing exercise of any description. So I really love HeartMath breathing. You can find them on YouTube for free. There's box breathing. There's, the physiological sigh, which is two breaths in.

[00:51:17] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : To maximum capacity and then a big release that's been one of the ones scientifically to show a really big activation in the vagus nerve or just regulating your nervous system. 

[00:51:31] Lucia Silver: There's the gargling. How about gargling and singing in the shower and that, that sort of thing? How does that sit with you?

[00:51:38] Lucia Silver: Singing, singing. 

[00:51:39] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : Amazing, humming, even, v the sounds so lovely because we are using the vocal chords and we are vibrating them. And the v the vagus nerves very strongly linked to your vocal chords and how your tone of voice is coming out. You can gargle. Most people don't gargle. Deep enough in their throat to really activate their vagus nerve.

[00:52:04] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : You really need to be doing it to the point of gagging, like it's quite aggressive. So typically I don't recommend just gargling because we just don't do it do it properly. Yeah. Yeah. And then 

[00:52:18] Lucia Silver: You end up with everyone in a state that. Fight and flight because they've choked on the water, which hasn't really Correct, right?

[00:52:24] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : It's really It's just it's one of those things that, I read about or I hear other people talk about. I'm like, it's true. It does Activate the vagus nerve, but you really got to gargle. 

[00:52:35] Lucia Silver: I'll remember that one. So yeah and we're going to put all of this together as well so that our listeners can download this and follow some of these tips at home as well.

[00:52:46] Lucia Silver: I think it's also important, isn't it, Carrie, as you said, to honour the nervous state that you find your child in. I'm just reflecting as you said that presumably there is something different to be done if a child is in a more aggressive or enervated or hyper vigilant state of fight or flight versus freeze, immobilization.

[00:53:06] Lucia Silver: You're not necessarily going to employ The same strategies in both cases, are you? And this is the importance of understand, importance of understanding the polyvagal, the many different states that the nervous system can be in. It's not just fight and flight. It can be that, we talk about fight, flight, fawn, and freeze.

[00:53:24] Lucia Silver: There are subtleties and without trying to go into too much detail right now, I think, It is about really understanding first, where is my child right now? Because it's not unilaterally, okay, now deep breathe as you say, there's a place and a time for that employment, isn't there? 

[00:53:42] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : Yeah. And the easiest way to do that is to work on yourself.

[00:53:47] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : The stronger your foundation and the more time you spend in a ventral vagal state or The more you can spot something that's not that, whereas if you're chronically in fight flight yourself, and you're already hypervigilant and anxious and burnt out, burning the candle at both ends, you're really just feeding into your You and your child are feeding off each other, but it can be harder to see your child's state when you're not, when you're too close to it.

[00:54:19] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : Whereas when you're in that regulated state, it's like this space between you guys and you can see your child for what they are. But not react to them and feed into that dynamic and rather go, Oh, hey, yeah, you're in a bit of fight flight right now. Let's do something to support that. So even, yeah, even when you talk about wanting to respond to your child's state, it first comes back to what state am I in right now?

[00:54:49] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : What am I contributing to this situation? 

[00:54:52] Lucia Silver: Annoyingly, everything comes back to personal accountability. There's no getting away, right? Oh, I so wanted to blame someone else for that. But yes, yeah, the more in connection we are, the more we can serve our children. And that's really the work that you and I are going to be focusing on with the course and moving forward.

[00:55:12] Lucia Silver: Okay, so in rounding up, Carrie, for parents who feel overwhelmed by everything they're hearing, and I mean that in a positive way, they're like I want to do something about this, but how and where do I start?

[00:55:22] Lucia Silver: What is the first step they can take today? Okay. To support their child's healing journey with their vagal nerve. 

[00:55:31] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : Yeah, I really encourage you just to do the one percenters, the small things that increase your capacity to handle stress. And that might be as simple as remembering to drink water to start with.

[00:55:45] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : It doesn't have to be, this grand ice bath journey. It can be really simple at home. It's having compassion for where you're at and where your child's at and some understanding of how their nervous system stress response works so that you've just got that space between you. To be able to see them as their nervous system response in that moment, rather than it being about you or about your child.

[00:56:18] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : It's just how their nervous system is responding. And in terms of working on your vagus nerve, I would start personally with a breathing exercise. I would encourage you to do it when you're feeling good. So rather than already when you're feeling bad. Now, if you might be thinking I feel bad all the time.

[00:56:37] Dr. Carrie Ragoni : I'm so burnt out and I'm chasing answers for my child. And I totally get that. Just find a moment in your day, even if it's while you're having a shower, it's like your only moment of peace in the whole day is being alone in the warm shower. Just slow your breathing down. HeartMath isn't even about counting your breaths, it's just about slowing your breathing down and just allowing your nervous system to start engaging your vagus nerve and creating more safety in you so that then you can support your child better.

[00:57:09] Lucia Silver: Just listening to you, I'm slowing my breathing down. So this already feels great. Dr. Carrie, thank you so much for sharing your expertise and passion with us today. It's clear that the vagus nerve is such a vital piece of the well being puzzle when it comes to our children's health and our own.

[00:57:32] Lucia Silver: Yeah, thank you for having me. So for our listeners, if you're ready to deep dive into supporting your child's vagal tone, nervous system, and overall development, we have a free resource for you. Created from all the gold in this podcast with Dr. Carrie Rigoni. So head over to our website at www.

[00:57:53] Lucia Silver: thebrainhealthmovement. com or check the show notes to download. What we'll create is maybe a little nervous system checklist and a free guide. It'll be packed with actionable tips and insights to help you get started on this journey. And remember, if you found this episode helpful, we'd love for you to leave a review, share it with a friend, and subscribe to the podcast so you don't miss future episodes.

[00:58:16] Lucia Silver: Thank you for listening to our world leading experts and the explanations, revelations, and transformations their science and hard work brings to parents and our precious children around the world. Sending you lots of love, and we'll see you next time.