Dhru Purohit Show
Struggling With Mystery Symptoms? An Expert Explains Why Your Vagus Nerve May Hold the Key and How to Fix It with Dr. Navaz Habib
Mon, 27 Jan 2025
This episode is brought to you by Fatty15 and Cozy Earth. When we think about longevity and health, the vagus nerve isn’t always at the top of our minds. However, its function—and the signs of dysfunction in our body—can signal that it’s time to reassess our lifestyle. Prioritizing sleep, rest, and relaxation might be the key to restoring balance. Today’s guest highlights why this is essential and shares practical tips for integrating these practices into our busy lives. Today on The Dhru Purohit Show, Dhru sits down with Dr. Navaz Habib to explore the power of the vagus nerve and how modern life stressors affect its optimal function. Dr. Habib breaks down the four types of stress we face and how wearable technology can help us self-assess throughout the day. He also delves into sleep architecture and shares strategies for building routines that enhance overall well-being. Tune in to discover simple, actionable steps to reduce stress, optimize your health, and take charge of your well-being today! Dr. Navaz Habib is a functional medicine practitioner, chiropractor, renowned international speaker, and bestselling author dedicated to optimizing health by addressing root causes. As the founder of Health Upgraded, an online functional health clinic, he empowers parents and health seekers to enhance energy, productivity, and overall well-being through vagus nerve optimization. Inspired by his transformation from chronic health issues, Dr. Habib takes a holistic approach to help clients overcome challenges like chronic, uncontrolled inflammation. He is the author of Activate Your Vagus Nerve and Upgrade Your Vagus Nerve, working with clients worldwide to teach strategies that activate their innate parasympathetic healing capacity. In this episode, Dhru and Dr. Habib dive into: Top signs that the vagus nerve is not working as it should (00:26) Top triggers that damage the vagus nerve (04:50) How wearables technology can help us self asses (14:13) Breaking down heart rate variability and the healing process (23:21) Respiratory Rate (33:28) Optimal Sleep architecture and cycles (38:33) Doubling down your sleep to improve your vagus Nerve (50:55) The importance of creating routines in the morning and the evening (54:06) Recommendation to protect your vagus nerve (01:03:16) Dr. Habib's practice (01:08:09) Also mentioned in this episode: Dr. Habib’s Book: Upgrade Your Vagus Nerve Dr. Habib’s Slides: Deciphering Wearable Data For more on Dr. Habib, follow him on Instagram, X/Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and his Website. This episode is brought to you by Fatty15 and Cozy Earth. Fatty15 is offering an additional 15% off its 90-day subscription Starter Kit. Go to fatty15.com/dhru and use code DHRU to replenish your C15 levels for long-term health. Right now, get 40% off your Cozy Earth sheets. Just head over to cozyearth.com/dhru and use code DHRUP. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is the vagus nerve and why is it important?
Dr. Habib, welcome to the podcast. A big part of your mission and what you're here to do today is to help people understand that when their vagus nerve is out of whack, everything in their life becomes tougher. So give us a short reminder of what the vagus nerve is.
And more importantly, or just as importantly, help us understand what are the top signs that our vagus nerve is not working in the way that it should be working.
So as a very simple overview, The vagus nerve is our 10th cranial nerve. We have 12 pairs of cranial nerves that come out of the head and neck area that come out of the brainstem in particular. And they generally send information to and from the head and neck area.
They're the ones that are pulling data as to what's going on in our vision and our hearing and sending info out into what's going on or what we should be seeing or feeling around the face and the head and neck area. The vagus nerve is unique. It's the 10th of those 12 pairs. And it is the only one of these cranial nerves to actually leave the head cavity. It comes out from the brainstem.
It has a few branches within the head and neck area, one to the ear, to the airways, the pharynx and larynx muscles. And then it comes down through the neck and it actually leaves that head and neck area and it sends branches to every single organ in the entire body.
It comes down to the heart, to the lungs and the thorax, which is a chest area, continues down along the esophagus and goes down through the diaphragm, which is the muscle separating the Thorax and the abdomen, the chest and the belly. And then it continues on in the belly to attach to virtually every single organ in the abdominal cavity or all of our abdominal organs.
So the stomach, the intestines, the liver, the spleen indirectly. It has direct connections to nearly every single organ in the body, and that is unique because there's no other nerve like the vagus nerve. It is sending information to those organs, but the vast majority of information that's flowing on the vagus nerve is actually coming up from those organs to the brain.
So it's actually reporting in what's going on with regards to inflammation, with regards to optimal regulatory function, with regards to digestion and detoxification. And it's sending that information up to the brain to tell the brain what's going on. 80% of the information on the vagus nerve is going from the organs up to the brain.
That's different than what we generally initially expected to hear because vagus When we think of the vagus nerve, we think of the parasympathetic nervous system, the rest, digest and recover system, meaning that we're sending this information to tell the body to relax, to slow down. That's not entirely true. Only about 15% of the information on the vagus nerve is brain to body.
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Chapter 2: What are the signs of vagus nerve dysfunction?
Is there challenges that are causing issues to your cellular function, your ability to pull in nutrients and your ability to release toxins? What if there's a buildup of toxins in your body and you have poor liver dysfunction or you have the inability to clear out these toxins? So biochemical stress results in cellular dysfunction. So issues of dysfunction at a cellular level.
If you're lacking the nutrients to absorb or to allow for cellular function to be optimized, if there's microbiome dysbiosis, if there's access to pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, all of the things that are sprayed on our foods now, chemicals that are found in indoor air quality issues.
the cookware that you're using that might be coated in specific things that are toxic to our bodies, as well as excess sugars and excess processed foods. These are all biochemical stressors that cause cellular dysfunction. And this is really where functional medicine thrives. So identifying the sources of these biochemical stressors is another area that really needs to be looked at.
So those four areas, once again, are daily stressors, day to day, psychological stressors that occurred in the past, physical stressors that caused your body not to be able to function in a movement pattern effectively, and biochemical stressors that actually break down our body on a cellular level and create dysfunction on our ability to regulate or trigger inflammatory control.
We know the role of the vagus nerve is to control inflammation. And when we cause issues to its ability to control that inflammation because we're overstressing it, that results in vagus nerve dysfunction. And that's how people become sick because we lack the ability to control inflammation. And so now what we're able to do, lucky enough, we have access to amazing data almost all the time.
And I'm sure we'll get into that as we continue on.
That's fantastic. You know, one of the greatest things that's happened, this is your second book now on Vegas Nerve. And the book is called Upgrade Your Vegas Nerve. We have the link in the show notes below. People can check it out. Since your first book, something amazing has happened. A lot more people are using these wearables. that maybe they're not perfect.
You're going to talk about that, but they can give us an indication of a proxy of where our vagus nerve is. Can you talk about that?
And then you've also additionally, for those that are watching on video on YouTube, and we have the link below for those that are looking on audio, you have a series of slides that you can help us get an understanding of how many of us who have these wearables can do a little bit of an audit to see where our vagus nerve health is, or maybe in some cases isn't. Can you talk about that?
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Chapter 5: What strategies improve sleep architecture for vagus nerve optimization?
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The newest and coolest technologies are these health tracking wearable technology pieces. And What we're really excited about when it comes to overall healthcare and the way that people function is we're able to now have data coming in on a continuous basis as to their movement patterns, their sleep patterns, their readiness patterns.
And this is really what's exciting when it comes to this new trend in health is wearable technology. So you're absolutely correct when you mentioned that they're not wearable. Perfect, and I promise you at this point, they're not. These are not diagnostic tools. I don't think wearable devices should be considered diagnostic tools for the vast majority of them.
But what I would say is that they're phenomenal at providing trend data, trend analysis to tell us about certain processes, certain issues, and provide us a bit of feedback as to what's actually happening in our bodies. Because humans notoriously are not very good at knowing what's going on with regards to the internal functioning of their body. Their interoception is not very good.
And we tend not to in our day-to-day modern world spend time becoming more aware of that. And that's a real issue. So having access to wearable health technology data can help provide that insight.
And so I want to share a few really interesting slides because these are the big three that I look for when I'm working with my clients to pull in some information as to what's going on with regards to their health. So we'll talk about deciphering some of that wearable health data.
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