The Hour Between Dog and Wolf: How Risk Taking Transforms Us, Body and Mind

by John Coates

As we have seen, the dive reflex, triggered when you splash or submerge your face in cold water, can engage the vagus and slow the heart, breathing and metabolism. Breathing exercises, involving slow, deep breaths from the diaphragm, rather than short, shallow ones from the chest, can also bring the vagus online, as will similar practices, suggest Porges, such as “playing wind instruments, singing, and even expanding the duration of phrases when talking—all will have a profound effect on vagal influences to the heart.” The calming effect of controlled breathing is a well-known biofeedback practice. It also forms an important part of yoga, meditation and some Eastern religions, especially the Buddhist art of mindfulness, in which mind and body are united through a focused attention on breathing. This exercise may have further benefits: the neuroscientist Read Montague and his colleagues have found that people practicing Buddhist meditation engaged their gut feelings more than others, and as a result made more rational choices in a financial decision-making task. Research into stress, the vagus and gut feelings is in this way building a bridge between East and West. We have only just started to understand and harness the power of the vagus nerve. Can we increase vagal tone? Can we train this nerve to come online sooner and act more powerfully, so we rely less on the metabolically expensive fight-or-flight response, or worse, the full stress response, with its attendant high ...