Musings
What Is Vagal Tone, and Why Should You Care?
You’ve probably heard someone say it: regulate your nervous system. It’s everywhere now, podcasts, Instagram captions, wellness blogs. And most of the time, what people actually mean, whether they know it or not, is vagal tone.
So what is it? And why does it matter so much?
The Nerve You Never Think About
The vagus nerve is the longest nerve in your body. It runs from your brainstem all the way down through your neck, chest, and abdomen, touching your heart, lungs, and digestive system along the way. Its name comes from the Latin for wanderer, and that’s exactly what it does. It wanders through you, carrying signals back and forth between your brain and your body.
Most of those signals, about 80%, travel upward. Your body is constantly telling your brain how things are going. Whether your heart rate needs to slow. Whether your digestion can switch on. Whether, at the most fundamental level, you are safe.
Vagal tone is a measure of how well this nerve functions. High vagal tone means the nerve is responsive, your body can shift easily between states of alertness and rest. Low vagal tone means the system is sluggish or stuck, often locked in a stress response that won’t switch off.
What High Vagal Tone Feels Like
You’ve felt it, even if you didn’t have a name for it. High vagal tone is that feeling after a long exhale when your shoulders drop and your belly softens. It’s the moment you finally relax on the second day of a holiday, when the doing stops and something in you unclenches.
People with healthy vagal tone tend to recover from stress more quickly. Their heart rate comes down after a fright. Their digestion works well. They sleep more deeply. They can feel strong emotions without being overwhelmed by them.
It’s not that they don’t experience stress. It’s that their system knows how to come back.
What Low Vagal Tone Feels Like
Low vagal tone is the opposite, and it’s far more common than most people realise. It’s the background hum of anxiety that never quite goes away. The digestive issues that no diet seems to fix. The fatigue that doesn’t respond to rest. The feeling of being wired but exhausted at the same time.
If you’ve spent years in a demanding job, a stressful relationship, or simply doing too much for too long, your vagal tone has likely taken a hit. The system adapted to survive. It learned to stay on alert. And now it doesn’t know how to stand down.
This isn’t a character flaw or a lack of willpower. It’s physiology. Your body is doing exactly what it was designed to do in response to sustained pressure. The good news is that vagal tone isn’t set, it can be improved.
How Yoga Improves Vagal Tone
This is where it gets interesting, and where yoga earns its place not as a wellness trend but as a genuine physiological practice.
The vagus nerve responds to three things particularly well: slow breathing, gentle movement, and the felt sense of safety in the body. Yoga, when practised slowly and with attention, offers all three.
Extended exhales. When your out-breath is longer than your in-breath, it directly stimulates the vagus nerve and activates your parasympathetic nervous system, the rest-and-digest response. This is why sighing feels so good. It’s why your body naturally produces a long exhale when danger passes. In yoga, we do this intentionally.
Gentle backbends and chest openers. Poses like Bridge and gentle Cobra open the front of the body where the vagus nerve runs. They create space around the heart and lungs, allowing the nerve to function more freely. Not dramatic backbends, small, supported ones where you can breathe and stay present.
Forward folds and inversions. Poses like Child’s Pose, Puppy Dog, and Legs Up the Wall activate the calming branch of the nervous system. The gentle compression of the abdomen in forward folds stimulates the vagus nerve directly. The inversion of Legs Up the Wall shifts blood flow and triggers the baroreceptors in your neck and chest that tell your brain to slow your heart rate.
Stillness. Perhaps the most important one. Lying in Savasana at the end of a practice isn’t a reward, it’s the point. It’s where the nervous system integrates what just happened. Where the vagus nerve recalibrates. Where the body learns, through direct experience, that it is safe to rest.
The Chakra Connection
In the chakra system, the vagus nerve’s territory maps almost exactly onto the lower four centres, root, sacral, solar plexus, and heart. These are the chakras concerned with safety, emotional flow, personal power, and love. When vagal tone is low, these are the centres that feel most affected: anxiety at the root, emotional overwhelm at the sacral, loss of confidence at the solar plexus, a closing-down at the heart.
Working with these chakras through yoga isn’t separate from improving vagal tone. It’s the same work, described in a different language. The body doesn’t care which framework you use. It only cares that you showed up and listened.
Where to Start
You don’t need a complicated programme to start improving your vagal tone. You need a few minutes, a quiet space, and a willingness to slow down.
If you’d like to try it now, three gentle poses to start with are Locust, Bridge and Puppy Dog. They work directly with the vagus nerve through gentle backbends, forward folds and slow breathing. No experience needed.
And if you’re curious about where your nervous system is right now, which chakras are holding tension, which ones are open, the free chakra energy quiz is a good place to start. Ten questions, two minutes, and a snapshot of what your body might be trying to tell you.
Your vagal tone isn’t set. Your nervous system isn’t broken. It just needs reminding that it knows how to come home.