Podcast - Dr Carrie Rigoni with Baby Brain
Baby Brain Podcast - The Vagus Nerve & how this affects babies health with Dr Carrie Rigoni
This blog post is a transcript of the podcast interview between Baby Brain and Carrie Rigoni. It was created for those of you who prefer to read rather than listen (please forgive any grammar mistakes, it may have come across differently verbally vs in written form).
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“Hello and welcome back to another episode of Baby Brain, happy Tuesday, we hope everyone is having a great week, we are very excited, as we are every week about this episode, we are interviewing Dr Carrie Rigoni who is a Chiropractor who is based in Perth actually and we had an amazing interview with her recently talking about the vagus nerve, which i knew nothing about.
I had no idea that this was a part of our body, I was like ok tell us all of the things!
And we will leave it to her to do all the explaining but it is something that can affect babies and so we kind of focus this chat on how she can assist with babies and the vagus nerve and what impacts that may have if there are issues with the vagus nerve in young babies as well. So, it’s a very interesting and informative chat and we hope you guys enjoy it and if you wanted to check out Dr Rigoni, her Instagram is Dr Carrie Rigoni, so you can go and check her out on Instagram and she has got a link on there to all her other pages as well.
We are here this morning with Dr Rigoni, so did you want to tell us a little bit about yourself and your business.”
Yeah sure, so I am a chiropractor in Perth and I have a special interest in the vagus nerve and how that relates to health and wellbeing and my practice is kind of a blend of babies and kids and then also burnt-out mums who are you know, just getting by. What I do is mostly is work with people who are interested in improving their stress resilience and how that may manifest in their body, we know that chronic stress wreaks havoc in the body and I get a lot of people who are interested in decreasing their stress or working out how they can cope better with their stress or maybe how they can help their child avoid the problems that they have experienced in their lifetime due to stress. So that’s what I do in a nutshell.
“I love that, that’s amazing. I actually see a chiropractor and have seen her since I was pregnant as she also specializes in children and pregnant woman and obviously, she sees everyone but that’s her specialty and we see her in Sydney and I've told Hannah a million times that she has absolutely changed our lives. My daughter had really bad gut issues when she was younger, she would be super uncomfortable, scream and cry in the pram or car seat but after we would go and see our chiropractor, she would be totally fine and we still see her now but yeah, she absolutely changed our lives so I stand by chiropractors, I love you guys, just amazing.”
I'm very glad to hear, I love when people tell me these stories it's amazing.
“So, we know you teach a master class which is called Bio hack your Kids, can you tell us a bit about what biohacking is?”
So, most people know biohacking as adults who are doing ice baths and you know coffee enemas and all the crazy but I just found this hole in the market where there are mums who want to know, or parents, who want to know what they can do with their child's body and their health to improve their overall lifelong health. We know that those early years can really set a child up for a really healthy trajectory or it can set them up for a bumpier road so to speak so biohacking for me in terms of the master class is just teaching parents what they can do with very simple daily things to improve the environment their child is in and improve their health.
“What does the course entail and what would we learn for example in the course and how do we get involved?”
Bio hack your Kids is a 2-hour webinar basically and I go through different things that can affect your child's physiology and their brain development and then I go through practical ways you can counter that so a big one is screen time, we all know about it, but we go through why it's actually dangerous for a developing brain but then also you know we live in a world where it's almost impossible to be screen free so what can we do to mitigate those risks. It becomes very much like practical tips that we can put into our lives immediately that mean we don’t have to completely go bush and have no screens, no radio, it's about how we mitigate those risks in our day-to-day life so we can kind of live in this modern-day life.
“That’s very interesting about screens, we live in Sydney and we have been in lockdown for 7 weeks and my son who is almost 18 months old has just recently started getting obsessed with the Wiggles and id just show him a little dance clip on my phone which went for 30 seconds to begin with but now he will yell at the tv and chuck a tantrum and grab my phone and be like ‘aaargh’ so I'm finding the balance really hard cause we are in lockdown and I'm trying to find things around the house to distract him with but there is just a fixation, like it's amazing how drawn they are to screens and it's so hard, or I find it really hard, to stop him from going there and to set those boundaries.”
It is so hard and it’s a slippery slope, I throw rules out the window during lockdown so yeah bringing it back! My daughter is pretty ok with screens, my son seems to be a bit of an addict in that if I let him have too much it escalates like that so we need like a week of no screens to recalibrate him so it's very individual. Some kids just have that addictive nature and they will love it whereas others will be like ‘nah its good but there are other things to do’ so it really is down to the individual child and age.
“Yeah, I'm sure age plays a factor cause Eli is just getting to the point where he is starting to push the boundaries a bit like he is starting to have the toddler tantrums and he doesn’t quite understand what discipline is yet or if I say to him no not now like I'll give you a minute on it later or something like that he just doesn’t get it so that would be really interesting to get involved in that course and understand a few tips what we can do with that.
So, Emma and I were speaking before you came on about the vagus nerve and I mentioned I don’t actually know what it is and Emma was kind of like in the same boat a little bit and we are really interested to hear your insight on what it is so could you give us a bit of background on what the vagus nerve is and what role it plays your babies health and development?”
Yes, I absolutely can. The vagus nerve is my favourite nerve and it's also the largest. The vagus nerve runs from your brain stem, basically in the base of your brain, it runs through your neck, through your torso, through your digestive organs all the way down to your pelvic floor. Its main role is to recalibrate your system after a stressful event so in a normal functioning stress response, what is supposed to happen is we are exposed to a stress our body goes into a flight or fight state to protect us, then our rational brain kicks in and tells us oh you know it's actually not a stress, you can calm down. The vagus nerve kicks in and says your safe let's recalibrate, let's get back into a calm coherence state. So, the vagus nerve is what pulls us out of the stress response and keeps us well calibrated, it keeps us well regulated. I use the example of say you're walking with your toddler down the road and you're walking down a main road and your toddler runs out onto the road. You need that stress response, the stress response itself is not the bad thing, a lot of people focus on I can't have any stress, we need that stress response, you run out and grab your toddler and keep them safe but then if you have low vagal tone you may stay in that stressed out response, you might not be able to kind of calm back down you may feel like your day is ruined and you're on edge for the day, you just can't quite calm down. With a strong vagal tone, it may take you a few minutes but you can regulate yourself back down into a calm state.
I feel like it’s the missing link for a lot of people in terms of their health, you know we all focus on our diets and all these supplements and exercise and all of this stuff is incredible, we need it, however if you can't shift out of a stress response, you're basically fighting your physiology day in day out so it's all about getting the vagus nerve working well so that everything else falls into place, everything seems easier you know, your body will utilise nutrients better, it will digest food better, you will have more energy, you will sleep better. So that’s basically what the vagus nerve does. I'm passionate about sharing what the vagus nerve does in a baby because those first 3 years in particular where our babies are reliant on us, they don’t have that self-regulation capacity yet, so we need to regulate with them if we do that and we also have babies with a healthy vagus nerve then that’s going to set them up to be settled in their bodies, to be able to have a bit of stress resilience to kind of cope with whatever life throws their way as a child and it's you know one of the side effects is your baby will sleep a bit better and they probably feed and poop better so you know it can change the whole tapestry of a family if you have a happy baby!
“So, has there been any research done that connects low vagal tone to cortisol levels?”
Some research particularly surrounding the cortisol levels in a pregnant mother and then the stress response in the baby. It is hard to measure in babies as a lot of things are, however one study what they did was they measured the level of cortisol in the mother's blood while they were still pregnant and they monitored the baby for the first couple of weeks of life particularly in that trimester 4 and monitored signs of stress response and they found that mothers who had high stress or high cortisol in their pregnancy were more likely to create or grow a baby who had high levels of stress or stress response once they were out of the womb.
“Wow, ok, that’s interesting. Think I'm going to have to do some meditation or something.”
It can instill a lot of guilt in some mums particularly if their child is already here in the world and they can't change it. The beauty of the nervous system is that it's very plastic, it can change quite quickly depending on the environment you're in so if you did have a pregnancy that was super stressful and you feel like your baby is irritable and even if they are like 4 or 5 you can still help them to self-regulate their vagus nerve but it's not all lost, it's not like you have ruined your child there is heaps you can do no matter how old your child is.
“So, what does a low vagal tone look like in babies, like how would you pick that up, what things do they show and how can you improve this?”
Some signs that a baby has low vagal tone, firstly they may seem like they only want their mother, the babies that we might call a koala baby, clingy babies, I hate those descriptions but the babies who just have to be with their mums, you walk into a new environment and they cry and cling to their mum, they may go into that freeze response where they just stop still and stare and don’t move their body, these are signs that the baby does not feel safe in their environment unless they are with their mother or their caregiver.
“This sounds like Eli.”
Number 2 they may have some poor digestion, so kind of the hallmark is that you have maybe tried different diets or tried probiotics but you just can't seem to work out why their digestion is right, maybe an irritable bowel, loose stools, tummy aches or constipation, some kids with low vagal tone tend to be really resistant to sit on the toilet because that position feels wrong for them to release their bowels so they may prefer to squat or you know kids who like to go out in the garden, that can be a sign that their vagus nerve is struggling in that position like it's all just not quite right.
Another one is more related to babies in that the vagus nerve plays a bit role in the swallow so their tongue position, their ability to latch onto the breast so babies with low vagal tone may have trouble with breastfeeding, you may also find that they have trouble with taking a dummy or even swapping to a bottle if you get to that point where breastfeeding is just not working I'm going to swap to a bottle they may still have trouble, you may still have to go through a bunch of different teats before you find one that they are ok with and they may dribble milk while they are feeding or have a really extensive gag response that’s way too big and this can translate with you introduce solid's into a baby who doesn’t like different textures, who may take a while to accept solid foods in their mouth, the instant sensation inside the mouth can trigger them to gag.
And the final big one sleep! So, babies with low vagal tone need that safety. So often babies who don’t feel safe in their own body may only want to contact nap, may wake up a lot during the nights so say you are contact napping during the day or maybe they are sleeping in the carrier or whatever at night you try and get some sleep yourself so you put the down in their own cot but they may wake frequently and they may only go back to sleep if they have contact with you it's that touch from the caregiver or maybe the scent, their safety is in you so if you are putting them down alone in a bed they may wake up every 30 minutes or an hour and they probably need more feeding to sleep again they need that comfort, their bodies are always kind of in a slightly stressed response so they need constant unwinding and constant safety to feel like they are actually safe in the world.
“Is some of that though when babies are first born just because they are separated, they are used to being in your womb all wrapped up nice and tight then of course it must be a shock for them to be separated from you to begin with so is some of that just kind of normal baby behaviour from the beginning like at what point would you say like ok this is maybe low vagal tone?”
Yeah, so definitely there is a spectrum right, every baby has their own personality and own relationship dynamics with mum. There are so many factors, the big thing is that, I tell mums to listen to their intuition because so many mums come to me and they have been to the GP and pediatrician or whoever and they have said oh that’s normal, that’s normal baby behavior don’t worry about it and the mum is just depleted, the mums always say I just know that something is just not right, like I don’t know what it is but I know and so just encourage mums to really hone in and listen to their intuition and if they feel like something is not right to search for answers.
“That was totally me, I knew that there was something not quite right and there was something off and like the combination of a chiropractor and a naturopath, a lactation consultant, we were able to work separately and figure out what it was but I totally know what you are saying cause obviously it would be normal behavior for a newborn to come out and need their mother to contact nap but there was a point in our journey that I knew this is not right and it was maybe about 3 and a half months old and I was like no there is something not right here and I was right, there wasn’t, it wasn’t right and I totally understand what you are saying when you say trust your intuition.”
Some mums say their baby came out screaming and never stopped, you know babies should be somewhat settled, all babies will cry but if they are screaming nonstop from the moment they come out and you're struggling to get them to sleep etc. then that’s a really big sign but yes, it can take a little while of getting to know your baby and eventually going no yeah this is not right, there is just something off.
“And we know that this relates back to brain development as well and we that this is such an important period for babies during their first few years and their developments so is there anything that we can do as parents to support this?”
Yeah, number 1 would be to try and establish breastfeeding. Breastfeeding has been linked to lower stress response and it does stimulate the vagus nerve in a different way to bottle feeding just because the swallow is different.
Secondly would be just to ensure that you, as the co regulator to your child, take care of yourself. We put ourselves last as mums, we get depleted and especially if our baby is higher needs you know if it needs contact all the time and it needs to be feeding more than average so to speak, you know if things are a struggle you need to take time for yourself whether its seeing a naturopath or a nutritionist to make sure your getting all the nutrients, just taking care of your body and your stress response because your baby will feed off that, they actually need you to be regulated before they can learn to be regulated, they kind of feed off your energy so to speak so take care of yourself! And the other thing I think will overflow from a mum taking care of themselves, so if your milk is full of nutrients and you're eating a wholesome diet and all of that, that is going to flow through to your baby, your baby is going to get the nutrients they need and we know that part of the vagus nerve working well is that we ensure that we have all the nutrients we need in our body because if we don’t and we are in a slightly luminary state then the vagus nerve starts to shut down when there is any form of inflammation so a low inflammation diet and ensuring that they get all the nutrients they need is going to be really powerful for them.
“Are there any activities or anything that you should be doing from a young age as well to try and support that development?”
The vagus nerve because it works mostly on safety, it's about throwing away the textbooks that say your baby should be socialising or your baby should be passed around at a party, you know if your baby is clearly feeling unsafe and doesn’t want to be passed around then you need to honour that, it's giving them that safety even if the culture around you is judging you saying just give me the baby it's like no, clearly my baby doesn’t feel safe with you right now, I'm not going to allow that to happen, the more that they feel safe the stronger their vagus nerve gets, it's as simple as that. There are no big exercises to do because they don’t have that regularity capacity and they also don’t have their rational brain yet, that doesn’t kick in for a long while, they don’t have the ability to be like oh that’s grandma, iv seen her before therefore I know she's safe, they just feel in their gut, their vagus nerve says I'm safe or I'm not so allowing them to feel safe as much as physically possible is going to allow that vagus nerve to get stronger and stronger.
“So on that note are you pro contact napping and that kind of stuff to help improve the vagus nerve?”
Yes absolutely, yeah get a baby carrier or however they feel safe. You might find that a baby with low vagal tone prefers to be wrapped so swaddle it real tight cause that’s again just a comfort for their body. They may prefer to do that longer than what people say you should, you know babies when you take them out of that wrap they start wakening more frequently, maybe a sign that they still need that contact and if they're not getting it from you then that’s a really good alternative is just making sure they are wrapped nice and tight and comfortable.
“Amazing, so you touched on food before and nutrition. So how can babies first foods have an impact on their life long development?”
This is a big one, I could talk about this all day. The big thing is as a culture at the moment, what we are giving our babies is all processed carbohydrates, it's like 2 steps away from giving our baby sugar, and what we need to do is take a step back and look at the research which says all of these first foods that we give to our babies they actually prime to taste center in the brain and the appetite center in the brain to prefer those foods for our life time. All of the research that they have done is tracking this and they don’t see any change over a lifetime, so it means if we are starting our baby on foods like white rice cereal that is quite processed and carbohydratey then that’s what they will start to prefer. So what I recommend instead is setting your baby up to prefer, you know, have exposure to proteins, fats and carbohydrates, I'm not saying all carbs are bad, but we forget about the protein in the fat and we are going from white rice cereal to fruit sugar, pumpkin which are high GI vegetables and missing out on exposing our babies to the proteins and fats and low GI vegetables and then we wonder why our kids are sugar hounds you know and all they want to eat is carbohydrates and white foods, we are setting them their nervous systems to prefer that.
“So, what would you recommend as a good first food to try with babies?”
I actually have, and I can send it to you guys, a top 12 first foods list so I'm happy to send that to you guys, but what I actually recommend starting is like bone broth, low GI vegetables, add in some fats and then add in some protein which can be harder to digest if its meat-based protein and then finally add in some fruit so they have been exposed to things that are not super sweet because breast milk and formula are very sweet and if they get a taste for sweet they are going to be like yeah I'm going to hold out for that I'm not going to have that bone broth you know that’s disgusting, you need to prime their taste buds to accept those other foods before we give them the super sweet delicious stuff.
“I was chatting to a mum in my mother's group actually because she was just about to start her son on solids and she was like I've been doing all this reading and I can't give him anything sweet and she was like what do I feed him, so it would be great to get that resource list and we will pop it in our show notes so everyone can take a look as well. I was actually reading something about the method of feeding as well so I'm not sure if you probably have more insight into this but it was about how you are feeling when you are feeding the baby and I know I did this with Eli because I was so terrified that he was going to choke so I would feed him something and I wasn’t sure whether I should do baby lead weaning or should I be spoon feeding him so I would give him something and then I would sit there and watch him like a hawk probably looking like an absolute psycho and I was reading that you shouldn’t cause that will teach your baby that feeding is a stressful time cause mum is freaking out and like staring you down while you're learning how to chew.”
I mean you do have to watch obviously but I do have a course that is all about introducing food to your baby and it does go through these things because you know some mums do have that level of anxiety and I feel like that’s a valid anxiety to have and so not all mums will feel comfortable starting with baby lead weaning and just letting their baby feed themselves, I think there is value in both formats but the big thing with purees is that we often start them too runny and it's just like having a smoothie or something, to stimulate the vagus nerve and to stimulate those mouth muscles we do actually need to get them to use them and that may come in the form of chunks in the puree or it may come in the form of them feeding themselves and shoving the food a bit too far back and learning oh I'm going to gag if I do that, the whole process is a learning experience for them but yeah its super hard if you have high functioning anxiety or a high level of anxiety it's really really hard to switch that off as a mum and they will definitely pick up on that 100%.
“I was the same but I would, what I would do is I would put slices of avocado or pieces of sweet potato or whatever and I would leave her in her high chair and I would stand in the kitchen behind the kitchen bench and I would like eat my own food but be away from her and I would wear my glasses cause my eyesight is awful and pretend to be doing something else but I feel like I would be staring her down from my glasses but I read the same thing so I tried to give her space to do that then sometimes Matt would sit right in front of her eating and stare and id be like don’t actually do that cause the way her personality is in our case is she won't eat if you're sitting right there she likes to have the space to just work it out and do it herself so I always stand in the kitchen, put my glasses on and watch her.”
“That’s funny, I think personality definitely has a play cause Eli is such a clingy eater and now he wants, I have to be sitting next to him because he wants to share his food, he will do one for himself then one hand one to me and watch me eat it. So, we know that the vagus nerve relates to everyone in the family and so do you have any to tips for parents to improve the families overall brain health?”
I do, I always get hit with hard questions towards the end! The big one is going to be learn to regulate your own stress response, so a big one for parents these days is what we tend to do is we have our devices at hand, if we are feeling bored or whatever we just reach for your devices and scroll, we kind of can get lost in that, that does not decrease our stress response, that actually keeps our brain in a heightened state of stress but it gives us a doper mean hit that makes us feel that we are doing something, so if you as a parent are feeling like you're not coping then removing that phone addiction or that or that habit or even just decreasing it, I'm not saying give it up completely, just learning how to self-regulate so the easiest way to do this is number 1, some form of breath work that works for you, the easiest one is breathing slower and deeper than you usually do but what can help us, what research has shown is what can help us stay in that state for longer and continue with that breath work for longer is a state of gratitude so what I actually get my mums to do is think of something that makes them feel really grateful or happy or whatever, you know I always visualise my ids sleeping cause they look so frigging innocent and beautiful, I visualise that first then I can feel that shift in my body you know that I love them so much and I find getting into the breathing is easier but then you can actually stay in that state for longer so the nervous system starts to shift much faster if you are using that gratitude than if you are just trying to push through with that breath work and your system is on edge with whatever like the whole juggle of life and your trying to force it into a calmer state ad it's like no, I got to deal with all these things, I don’t want to be calmer like fighting so you can kick in and out of it, you're fighting your physiology, when putting your body into that gratitude state it goes yeah I like being here.
“Yes, I love that, I actually did a breath workshop a few days ago which was incredible, and one of the things they got us to do at the start was to write one person that you were grateful for and one thing that you are grateful for and one experience that your grateful for and it was really powerful. They said to get a pen and piece of paper and write it down so everyone who is listening to grab a pen, grab a piece of paper and write down one person, one thing and one experience that you are grateful for and see how powerful that is to kind of to kind of shift our mindset and get you to think about something, it's something so simple yet it's such a powerful tool.”
Yeah so I find that if my kids are super dysregulated, you know the more they get worked up you can start to get worked up and your like aargh you know, if I think of that moment of gratitude it brings me down a notch and then I can deal with their emotions without absorbing their emotions so I can be that rock so to speak while they are processing their own stuff and I see a shift in my children when I do that and how they deal with their emotions and how they learn to regulate themselves so its super powerful for the whole family dynamic.
“It really resonated with me when you spoke about the tendency to just grab your phone and go on your phone and recently iv turned off notifications for social media cause I often find I look at my phone to check the time and all of a sudden I have all of these notifications, I'm really stressed cause I think shit I need to reply to these people, I need to open these apps and it's like 10/15 minutes later and I've just been on phone the whole time and I haven't even checked what the time is so it's been so good for me to turn off notifications because I figure if there is anything urgent or if anyone needs me then they will call me and so other than that there is no emergency like I can just go in and check a couple times a day when I actually have the time to sit down and do it and it's not going to detract from my time with Eli, then again he won't see me on my phone the whole time cause I'm in that battle at the moment of saying to him no you can't have phone time but if I'm just sitting there on my phone it's kind of hypercritical so that’s a really good tip there.”