32 Ways to Stimulate Your Vagus Nerve, Fine-Tune Your Nervous System & Self-Hack Your Hormones.

Ben Greenfield (0:01)

In this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Show.

Joseph Cohen (0:04)

What makes it relaxing for the brain? By decreasing the HPA axis, decreasing the autonomic fight or flight nervous system. When you decrease that system, that has a very potent effect on the brain. As far as the hypothalamus, the suprachiasmatic nucleus does connect to the brain stem, and that connects to the rest of the body.

Each of the cascade in the thyroid hormones, so this TRH, TSH, T4, and T3, those are usually associated with weight loss. But they do increase appetite, so the thyroid hormones do increase appetite because they're simulating metabolism even more.

SPEAKER_3 (0:36)

He's an expert in human performance and nutrition.

Voted America's top personal trainer and one of the globe's most influential people in health and fitness. His show provides you with everything you need to optimize physical and mental performance. He is Ben Greenfield.

Ben Greenfield (0:54)

Power.

Mobility. Balance. Whatever it is for you that's the natural movement. Get out there when you look at all the studies done. Studies that have shown the greatest efficacy.

SPEAKER_3 (1:11)

All the information you need in one place, right here, right now, on the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast.

Ben Greenfield (1:34)

Hey, folks, it's Ben Greenfield, and when it comes to your hormone balance, your sleep, your mood, your gut function, your physical performance, your cognitive power, pretty much every body and brain variable you'd ever want to optimize, there's something that I think is more important, or at least way underplayed compared to your heart, or your brain, or your lungs. In my opinion, a huge part of fixing everything I just talked about, or optimizing everything I just talked about, comes down to the health of something called your Vegas nerve. Now, in podcast number 31, which I'll link to in the show notes to this podcast, which you can find at bengreenfieldfitness.com/vegas, that's bengreenfieldfitness.com, not the city Vegas, but the spelling is V-A-G-U-S. In that podcast, I talked about your Vegas nerve, enhancing Vegas nerve tone, kind of hacking your nervous system, but honestly, I pretty much scratched the surface of everything that you can do to care for and enhance this nerve, because when you can get this thing taken care of, you'll be pretty shocked at the results on things like stress and heart rate variability and mental horsepower and physical performance, recovery, digestion, libido, you name it.

I wanted to get a guy on the show who is an expert in biohacking your body, upgrading your body, and also somebody who knows quite a bit about the vagus nerve. And his name is Joe Cohen.

Joe's the owner and author at a website called selfhacked.com, which is a great site. It's got a really good link to the vagus nerve that I will link to in the show notes of this episode. But Joe has upgraded and biohacked himself. And also, he's now an investor and an entrepreneur. He founded a company, a biotech company called Self Decode, and he helps people understand their genetics in order to optimize their health using things like genetic testing and blood testing and health data to kind of design drugs and supplements and lifestyle and dietary changes to optimize health. So he works with high-profile execs and self-hackers and companies, and he's even writing a book right now. In all that free time that he has, Joe, I understand that you like to program or code computers. Is that correct?

Joseph Cohen (3:50)

Well, kind of. I'm pretty much a newbie. I started because when I found my company, we first called it something else, but I was working with developers. I was trying really hard to get a good developer, and I realized that that was the blockage for getting a really great company.

And if you wanted a good developer, it was going to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Finally, I found a great developer. We rebuilt the whole program from scratch, and it's going really, really well. But even so, it's just something that you can automate so many things if you know programming. So it's something that I feel has a good ROI.

Ben Greenfield (4:29)

Yeah, it's tough, man. It's like learning a new language. I took coding in college and then taught myself HTML and JavaScript back when I was designing all my own websites. And dude, I don't think I'd go back and do it again now that we live in the era of freelancing. But I think for you, I mean, like in the position you're in, with this whole idea of self-decode and decoding the human body, it's kind of cool that you're learning to understand code. I recently read a really good book about code and how DNA is code. It was by this guy named Perry Marshall.