In my chiropractic practice, I focus on the vagus nerve. And many unsettled babies come through my doors, to see if their nervous system is part of the picture.

My most common question? Why is my baby not sleeping? When I’m doing all the right things.. why won’t they sleep?

And the thing is, that’s actually quite a complex question to answer. But I’m going to give you a little run down of what the vagus nerve does and how it influences sleep.

The vagus nerve

The vagus nerve is the largest cranial nerve in the body, spanning from the brainstem all the way to the pelvic floor. It controls automatic body activities such as heart rate, breathing rate, and blood pressure. It even plays a role in how quickly food moves through your digestive tract, and how easily you can expel waste.

But the biggest thing that the vagus nerve does is scan the environment to detect signs of threat, or signs of safety.

Now most of us might know that our babies need to feel safe. That they need caregivers who are attentive, who respond to their cries, who provide external safety cues. And this is true. In fact many mothers I see are burning themselves trying to be SO attentive to their baby’s needs, and feeling like it’s just not even hitting the surface to help their baby regulate.

But what many miss is that the environment is not always external. It is internal as well.

The vagus nerve senses your internal environment, and if there is anything not working optimally, it tells the brain there is a threat. A simple example would be you cut your finger. You need it to heal. Well your nervous system detects the cut, increases activation, produces healing cells (including some short term inflammation) to the area, and gets to healing your cut for you.

But in some cases a baby’s vagus nerve is picking up multiple threats, all of the time.

Nervous systems that are activated, or sensing something threatening, won’t want to sleep (it’s not safe!).

Think for a moment of times you haven’t slept because you’ve been so stressed about something.

Sleep is a vulnerable state, and if your nervous system isn’t feeling safe, why would it allow you to go into a biologically vulnerable state?

Our nervous systems cannot actually discern between the stress of biology (eg. injury or inflammation), vs emotion, vs any other stressor. It responds the same, no matter the trigger.

And it’s the same for our babies [and our children].

And these are often the babies who require a LOT of external cues to help them seem less irritable. But under the surface? They’re still pretty high on the irritable scale.

The babies who need to be rocked for an hour, and only sleep while being held, and wake frequently to comfort feed. When they are not getting enough inner signals of safety from the vagus nerve, they will lean on you as their caregiver to provide the safety cues for them.

And while all the external cues are amazing (I’m all for healthy attachments for optimal nervous system development), sometimes working on your baby’s inner world might be the answer you’ve been looking for.

If you want to delve deeper, I suggest my Vagus Nerve for Babies Mini Series.

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