Accessing the Healing Power of the Vagus Nerve

What if the key to restoring your emotional balance, physical health, and connection to others lay not in your thoughts but in a single nerve running from your brainstem through your heart, lungs, and gut? In Accessing the Healing Power of the Vagus Nerve, Stanley Rosenberg argues that the health of this vast nerve network—and the way we can consciously support it—holds the secret to understanding anxiety, depression, trauma, autism, and countless other conditions. Drawing on Dr. Stephen Porges’s Polyvagal Theory, Rosenberg contends that our nervous system doesn’t just determine how our bodies function; it drives how safe we feel, how we relate to others, and even how we heal.

In essence, Rosenberg believes we’ve been using the wrong map of the body’s stress system. Traditional medicine taught that our autonomic nervous system had two modes: stress (fight-or-flight) and relaxation (rest-and-digest). But Porges’s pioneering work revealed a more nuanced, three-tiered system that includes a newly identified branch of the vagus nerve responsible for feelings of safety, calm, and social connection. This reframing, Rosenberg says, changes how we understand everything from chronic stress to emotional shutdown.

A New Physiology of Safety and Connection

Rosenberg introduces readers to the Polyvagal Theory, which redefines the autonomic nervous system as a dynamic hierarchy of three circuits: the ventral vagal state (safety and social engagement), the sympathetic state (mobilization for fight or flight), and the dorsal vagal state (shutdown and collapse). Each state corresponds to distinct physiological and emotional experiences. When you feel loved, cooperative, and safe, your ventral branch of the vagus nerve enables smooth breathing, digestion, and open communication. When you’re triggered by danger, the sympathetic chain floods your body with adrenaline. When threat becomes unbearable, the body shuts down under the dorsal vagus, leading to numbness, apathy, or even fainting. The Polyvagal map doesn’t just explain these responses—it offers a path to help the nervous system return to balance.

Bridging Science and Touch

For Rosenberg, this theory was not just an abstract neuroscientific model—it was a revelation that transformed his decades of bodywork practice. As a craniosacral and Rolfing therapist, he had long seen clients’ moods, posture, and muscle tone shift under his hands, but he’d lacked a framework for why touch could affect emotions so profoundly. Polyvagal Theory offered that missing link. The five cranial nerves connected to social engagement—the trigeminal (V), facial (VII), glossopharyngeal (IX), vagus (X), and accessory (XI)—could all be stimulated mechanically or through gentle movement to restore vagal tone and reduce suffering. This physiological insight allowed Rosenberg to design hands-on methods and self-help exercises that improved cranial nerve function and, consequently, people’s wellbeing.

From Myth to Medicine: Slaying the Hydra of Modern Stress

Rosenberg uses the Greek myth of Hercules and the Hydra to explain how modern healthcare often treats symptoms instead of root causes. Each time Hercules cut off one of Hydra’s heads, two more grew back—mirroring the way stress, anxiety, and physical ailments resurface even after medication or surgery. His “Hydra’s mortal head,” he suggests, is the vagus nerve itself. By targeting and strengthening this nerve, one can address many seemingly unrelated problems—from migraines and back pain to depression and anxiety—at their physiological source. Modern medicine, focused on pharmaceuticals and surgeries, often misses this deeper thread binding mind, body, and emotion.

The Path to Resilience

What if your body could learn to recover more quickly from stress—naturally? Rosenberg introduces a set of simple, noninvasive exercises designed to restore flexibility to the autonomic nervous system. Chief among them is the “Basic Exercise,” a two-minute sequence of eye movements and gentle head positioning that helps reset alignment in the upper cervical vertebrae (C1 and C2), improving blood flow to the brainstem and enhancing vagal function. When practiced regularly, Rosenberg claims, it can ease symptoms of chronic stress, depression, and trauma, and help people feel more socially connected and emotionally stable. Throughout the book, he supplements these techniques with anatomical explanations, case studies from his clinic, and practical advice for therapists and individuals alike.

You’ll also learn how the state of your nervous system shapes the state of your life: how faulty neuroception (the brain’s unconscious scanning for safety or danger) leads to misreading situations, how cranial nerve health affects facial expression and empathy, and how aligning the spine and head can improve breathing and cognitive clarity. This book is as much a manual for emotional healing as for physical balance.

Rosenberg’s overarching message is hopeful: by understanding and restoring the body’s built-in rhythms of safety, you can shift from chronic vigilance or shutdown to connection, vitality, and joy. He envisions a healthcare future where physicians, psychologists, and body therapists alike integrate the physiological wisdom of Polyvagal Theory—not just to relieve pain, but to restore humanity’s innate capacity to heal through presence, touch, and trust.

Rosenberg uses Stephen Porges’s Polyvagal Theory to describe how our nervous system operates more like a ladder than a switch. At the top is the ventral vagal state of safety and connection; in the middle, the sympathetic fight-or-flight state; at the bottom, the dorsal vagal freeze or shutdown. Each of these states affects your physiology, emotions, and relationships in distinct ways. The ability to move flexibly between them is the hallmark of a resilient nervous system.

Ventral Vagal: Connection and Calm

When you feel safe—breathing evenly, digesting well, and interacting with relaxed attention—you’re in ventral vagal activation. Your heart rate is balanced, blood flow is steady, and your facial muscles soften. You experience curiosity and compassion. This is the physiological foundation for relationships, creativity, and empathy. Porges calls it “immobilization without fear”—the same calm trust a mother and infant share during bonding or that you feel lying quietly with a loved one.

Sympathetic: Mobilized for Danger

When the body detects threat—real or perceived—the sympathetic nervous system floods you with adrenaline. Muscles tense, pupils dilate, and your heartbeat accelerates. You’re ready to fight, flee, or, in modern life, argue fiercely or rush through deadlines. Applied chronically, this survival response drives anxiety, insomnia, and hypertension. Rosenberg notes that stress management fails when it merely induces “relaxation” without restoring ventral vagal regulation beneath it.

Dorsal Vagal: Shutdown and Freeze

When the system is overwhelmed and neither fighting nor fleeing seem possible, the body activates the ancient dorsal vagal response. Blood pressure drops, breathing slows, and energy collapses. You feel numb, tired, or disembodied. In extreme form, this can manifest as fainting—or long-term as depression and chronic fatigue. It’s “immobilization with fear.” Restoring vitality requires gently reactivating safe connection, not forcing action or positivity.

Rosenberg emphasizes that moving from stress or shutdown to social engagement isn’t done through willpower. It happens when your body perceives safety again—through calm breathing, supportive relationships, or exercises that realign your cranial nerves. Therapies from yoga to craniosacral work echo this transition physically by restoring flow between all three circuits. As Rosenberg puts it, “the body is the bridge.”

Every moment, your nervous system scans for cues of safety or threat—a process Porges calls neuroception. Unlike perception, neuroception occurs below consciousness, allowing you to react before you even think. Rosenberg likens it to a loyal watchdog: it keeps you safe when accurate, but can cause problems when misinformed.

When Neuroception Works

Healthy neuroception coordinates your body’s responses intelligently. You sense a friend’s smile and feel warmth; you hear a sudden noise and reflexively prepare to respond. You shift smoothly between states according to real circumstances. This subconscious regulation lets you focus on living rather than surviving.

When Neuroception Fails

Faulty neuroception distorts reality. Rosenberg gives examples of people who sense danger in safe environments or ignore real warning signs because their system’s calibration is off. After trauma, for instance, a slammed door may be interpreted as threat, sending the body into defense. In contrast, chronic stress or medication can blunt responses, leaving one numb when action is vital. These misfires shape anxiety, phobias, panic attacks, and even poor relationship choices (“blinded by love”).

By learning to regulate your autonomic state through touch, breath, and awareness, you can retrain neuroception to read safety accurately again. Meditation, tai chi, and body therapies help by grounding awareness in the body—reconnecting perception with lived experience. As Rosenberg concludes, “When we sense ourselves fully, we sense the world truly.”

Five cranial nerves—the trigeminal (V), facial (VII), glossopharyngeal (IX), vagus (X, ventral branch), and spinal accessory (XI)—form the circuitry of what Rosenberg calls the social engagement system. When they function well, we smile, listen, speak with melody, and connect easily. When they malfunction, we appear flat-faced, monotone, withdrawn, or hostile. You don’t just act this way—you physiologically are this way.

The Face and Voice of Connection

The trigeminal and facial nerves control sensations and expressions of the face and mouth. They allow your smile, tone, and eye movements to signal openness. Rosenberg describes how facial tightness or monotone speech can show low vagal tone. By contrast, lively micro-expressions and melodic voice—what Porges calls “prosody”—signal safe engagement. This explains why social connection itself can calm your heart: your nerves are literally synchronized when empathy flows.

Breathing, Swallowing, and Posture

The glossopharyngeal and vagus nerves regulate deep breathing, swallowing, and heart rate—functions often disrupted by chronic tension. The spinal accessory nerve governs the trapezius and sternocleidomastoid muscles, moving the head and shoulders for orienting and communication. When these nerves falter, neck pain, migraines, poor posture, or social withdrawal follow. Restoring cranial nerve health thus impacts both body alignment and emotional resilience.

By testing and stimulating these nerves through Rosenberg’s techniques—like the uvula “ah-ah-ah” test or soft cranial touch—you literally bring your nervous system online for connection. Emotional healing begins where physiology allows it.

To objectively measure and improve vagus nerve performance, Rosenberg introduces several methods bridging science and self-care. In clinics, researchers use heart rate variability (HRV)—the variation between heartbeats—as a gold standard marker of vagal tone. Higher HRV correlates with better health, adaptability, and longevity; low HRV links to anxiety, obesity, PTSD, and heart disease. But Rosenberg offers simpler ways to test at home or in therapy sessions.

Clinical Tests

He teaches the pharyngeal “ah-ah-ah” test, where a functional ventral vagus lifts both sides of the uvula symmetrically. Uneven elevation indicates dysfunction. He also describes the “Trap Squeeze Test,” where differences in shoulder muscle tension mirror vagal imbalance. Psychologists, unable to touch clients, can still observe facial tone and voice prosody to infer vagal state. At seminars, Rosenberg found that guiding participants through a few minutes of his Basic Exercise consistently restored vagal function in over 80 percent of cases.

Restoration Through Awareness and Movement

Rosenberg recounts how his understanding evolved from early manual therapy to test-treat-test precision. Previously, his clients would feel “so relaxed” they could barely drive home—he later realized he was leaving them in a dorsal shutdown. Modern Polyvagal-informed therapy instead ensures clients leave calm and alert, capable of social connection. Whether through the Basic Exercise or gentle craniosacral techniques, the goal is always resilient self-regulation.

At the heart of Rosenberg’s self-help program lies the Basic Exercise. This two-minute process repositions the atlas (C1) and axis (C2)—the first two neck vertebrae that house arteries feeding the brainstem. Misalignment there, he claims, impairs circulation to the cranial nerves essential for social engagement. The exercise uses gentle eye movements while lying down to trigger a cascade of relaxation through the suboccipital muscles.

How It Works

By looking to one side without moving the head, holding for 30–60 seconds until a sigh, swallow, or yawn occurs, then repeating on the other side, you activate the body’s natural reset. These reflexes mark the parasympathetic system turning on. Physiologically, tension releases from the neck, breathing deepens, and the eyes and cervical spine synchronize—restoring blood flow to the brainstem and improving vagal tone.

Why Position Matters

Rosenberg demonstrates that emotional distress and even negative thoughts can subtly rotate the C1/C2 complex, constricting the vertebral arteries and reinforcing tension patterns. Realigning these through the Basic Exercise or his Neuro-Fascial Release Technique has ripple effects on mood, posture, and cognition. Clients report improved breathing, lighter heads, and lifted moods in minutes. The practice becomes a literal and metaphorical head-raising—bringing you out of collapse and back into awareness.

Rosenberg reframes common conditions—COPD, migraines, depression, PTSD, and autism—as expressions of vagal imbalance. When the ventral branch falters, dorsal or sympathetic dominance sets in. By improving vagal tone, he observes remarkable recoveries even in chronic cases once deemed untreatable.

Breath and Visceral Connection

For example, his COPD patients, initially struggling to climb stairs, regained deep, effortless diaphragmatic breathing after combining the Basic Exercise with gentle manipulation of the esophagus to reverse hiatal hernia. By stretching the esophagus and relaxing the diaphragm, he reestablished normal breathing patterns—transforming despair into vitality. This same principle applies to trauma: when the respiratory diaphragm moves freely, the nervous system senses safety.

Emotional and Social Regeneration

The road from fight or freeze to social engagement is paved not by positive thinking, but by physical regulation. Exercises like the Salamander and Twist-and-Turn cultivate flexibility through small spinal movements that mirror early developmental patterns, priming the body for ease and communication. Whether treating autism through hearing-focused techniques or migraines through gentle trapezius release, Rosenberg’s message is simple: restore the body’s ability to relax safely, and emotional healing follows naturally.

Rosenberg devotes part of his work to autism spectrum disorders as living examples of vagal dysfunction. Drawing on Porges’s Listening Project Protocol, he describes how specialized filtered music can strengthen the middle-ear muscles (stapedius and tensor tympani) governed by cranial nerves V and VII. Because these muscles help children distinguish human voices from background noise, retraining them can unlock speech, attention, and social interaction.

From Hyperacusis to Communication

Many autistic children experience hyperacusis—painful sensitivity to sound. Rosenberg recounts cases where after such auditory therapies or craniosacral treatments, children previously nonverbal began making eye contact, smiling, and playing with others. The change, he explains, comes when safety is restored at the physiological level: once ears can selectively hear familiar human tones, social curiosity reawakens.

Safety Before Speech

For Rosenberg, touch, tone, and gentle presence prepare the groundwork before language. Therapists can’t force speech or sociability; they can help children feel safe enough to connect. Whether through filtered listening, gentle neck work, or parental affection, these interventions rebuild communication by repairing the body’s listening to the world—the true heart of Polyvagal healing.