The Science of Regulating Your Nervous System | Dr. Kevin Tracey
4/27/20261 hr 18 min
Plus: How to increase vagal tone, improve heart health, and reduce inflammation.
Kevin J. Tracey, MD, is president and CEO of the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research at Northwell Health, a pioneer of vagus nerve research and author of the recent book, The Great Nerve: The New Science of the VagusNerve and How to Harness Its Healing Reflexes.
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Transcript preview
First 90 secondsDan Harris· Host0:00
[upbeat music] This is the Ten Percent Happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. [upbeat music] Hello, party people. How we doing? I have noticed, and you will hear me mention this to my guest today, I have noticed that when we do episodes about regulating your nervous system, those episodes do really well. I think the reason for this is pretty clear. We are in an era where many of us feel like our nervous systems are totally out of whack. So today, we're gonna talk about how to regulate your nervous system, but we're gonna specifically talk about the vagus nerve. That's, uh, V-A-G-U-S, which has been getting a lot of attention these days. There's a lot of talk online about how to improve your so-called vagal tone, and you will hear my guest express, uh, some skepticism about some of the people making these claims. But anyway, my guest is a true expert in this field, and he's gonna talk about the importance of the vagus nerve and what he personally does, given his understanding of the physiology and the data, to improve the functioning of his own vagus nerve and by extension his mental health, his heart health, and his immune response. He's also gonna talk about something called bioelectric medicine and how this might be the next big wave in treating chronic diseases. My guest is Dr Kevin J. Tracey. He's a neurosurgeon. He's the president and CEO