How I Reset My Nervous System in the Sauna (And Got Better Results)

Most people sit in the sauna and scroll their phone. But what if you could use that same time to reset your nervous system?

In this video, I walk through four proven vagus nerve techniques that I’ve personally tested in the sauna—box breathing, auricular massage, humming, and a cold rinse. These help lower stress, improve heart rate variability, and turn every sauna session into a full-body healing ritual. I also share what I actually do differently and why it works better for me.

Try these during your next session and let me know what changes for you.

Read the transcript >

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Transcript

Today I want to talk to you about combining the Vagus Nerve Reset with your sauna sessions for a complete nervous system relaxation session. So today I want to walk you through four clinically documented processes to do a Vagus Nerve Reset. Aaron has some notes here so we can go through them in order, but I also want to interject from time to time and tell you what I personally do that gets me good results because it’s a little bit different than these techniques.

So instead of massaging or stroking like the articular or auricular, however you say it, basically the areas that have nerve endings or flow passages that are commonly targeted in order to achieve this, I really focus on breathing basically like your current nervous system state. So, but I’ve also been trained by a master hypnotist to do self hypnosis.

I don’t want to get too woo woo or fancy or anything like that. All I’m suggesting is that if you can generate a response that relaxes the muscles in the same area as doing some type of physical massage, I think you can achieve the same result. But before we get to that, let’s go through each four so you can decide what’s right for you.

One on the list has got to be box breathing. There’s a ton of names for this. My first exposure to box breathing was over 10 years ago from Mark divine from seal fit. They practice this all the time.

It’s part of their daily ritual, but over the time period there’s been tons of books and research that have come out since then. The substantiated. Let me read you some of the technical verbiage for something like that. Diaphragmatic breathing, box breathing, a six eight concept is inhale through the nose for six seconds.

Exhale through the mouth for eight seconds. You want to do belly breathing only, which means not breathing up into your chest, focusing on lower breath. Very specific. Only two to three minutes.

activates bar receptors and Vegas signaling and we’ll give you the achieved outcome that you’re looking for. Next on the list would be an auricular massage, which targets the tragus neck and chest. A lot of times this is going to be a physical massage. You can look up videos on YouTube that talk about how to do it.

There’s varying degrees of intensity, but also I guess you would call it application. Some practitioners say that you should do it with fingertips where it’s very precise and you’re like digging in. Others should say it should be more like a lymphatic massage and it’s like gentle stroking or pressure points that are very specific.

People who are trained in acupuncture will also suggest that you should hit the acupuncture meridian points and things like that. And then on the flip side, there’s others that say you should use a blunt area and just kind of do something that’s more general. I think, and this will tie into one of our other points that this is indicative of where they were trained because a gua sha scraper, which we’re going to talk about later is very similar to switching from a wide pressure point to turning the tool and then getting very fine and being able to really press in.

And I hate to use the word scrape because a parasympathetic massage is not supposed to be scraping necessarily, but perhaps some of these practitioners know more than I, I’m not trained in this. I’m just showing you what I’ve learned over the years or been exposed to or tried.

If you have any questions about that, just search on YouTube. I mean, there’s hundreds of videos that do a much better job than I ever could. They go into that very, very specifically. We should have touched on this in the very beginning, but the one reason why you want to focus on switching from sympathetic to parasympathetic and knocking that stress response down, especially combined with sauna, like it should be part of your breathing regimen when you get in.

So that becomes habitual and ritualized. Why? You want your nervous system to be relaxed when you’re in the sauna because it does two things. It’ll keep you in a lower heart rate zone when your body is exposed to heat stress, which means you can not have a negative reaction and stay in longer with your breathing controlled and

have a better heart rate variability outcome that will give you more positive health improvement, better sessions, and you’ll actually feel better too because you’re tolerating the heat stress in a more controlled manner. If you’re already stressed, like I’m going to change my physiology for a minute. If you’re already stressed and you’re, you know, you’re shallow breathing before you even start the sauna.

As soon as your body starts to react to the heat stress, it’s going to be exacerbated much quicker than if you have a relaxed nervous system, right? This is twofold. The other reason that you really, really, really want to focus on this is really just due to constriction, right?

One of the benefits of infrared sauna specifically is vasodilation and you’re going to get it more sitting still than you will in almost any other activity. This is how people that are going through a health crisis or somebody who is having a physical challenge or health challenge can still detox, even though they can’t exercise or work out.

People confuse, you know, replacing exercise with sauna or this and that. And I always go back to the basics. If you just walk while your sauna is preheating, get the lymphatics moving, do your box breathing, do some type of relaxation method that works for you. I don’t care if it’s putting on a CD or some type of meditation track.

When you do it, you will have better benefits if your nervous system responds appropriately to the heat stress. And why would you want to create constriction in a system that’s in an environment that is inducing vasodilation, right? So you have to also go back to our whiteboard videos.

How do we, how do we talk about saunas and detoxification? The people who say saunas don’t detoxify you are right. The people who say saunas detoxify you are also right. There’s two sets of conditionals and you have to understand exactly how it works.

So if you go back to the basics, what happens? Compounds are stored in the fat cells or in your tissues. Let’s not even complicate it. It’s in your tissues.

It’s in your body, right? It’s stored in there. You induce vasodilation. What’s happening?

You’re loosening, you’re unlodging, you’re inducing something into circulation, right? You’re ramping up circulation. You’re ramping up heart rate. Things are filtering.

through the lymphatic system. Your body is a giant filter, right? So what happens? Lymphatic fluid comes down.

It also empties eventually into the blood that goes into circulation through the organs. And then what’s going to happen from there? There’s a filtration and an excretion. If you have leaky gut, if you have any of the complications that we talk about in the whiteboard videos, you are going to not complete this circle and end up with issues.

One of the things that can make that happen for people is stress. So while you think it’s just about having a lower heart rate or a better HRV reading on your wearable technology or this, that and the other, it’s really about priming your body to get used to relaxing.

This is why I call this a healing sanctuary. Anytime I talk about doing sauna, it’s not just about, Oh, this is how you get heavy metals out of the body, or this is how you detox pesticides. But I digress. We could do a whole video on that.

The point is when you’re creating this environmental situation for the body to relax vasodilate sweat and also calm down and you combine all this together. Now you have an actual therapy that gets even better results. Let’s get back to the regular programming. That was a tangent, but I think a useful one.

So let’s move on to the next one. One of my absolute favorites and I don’t talk about it enough, which is humming or vocal toning, right? If you go on YouTube and you look up ancient monk own meditation, right? You can listen to a basically hum that is tuned to a particular frequency that has scientific benefit in a different study that doesn’t come from the monks.

You know, we could talk about a bunch of different things here. I think the most interesting thing to me, let’s just not go off the sheet. I want to tell you what I think is the most interesting thing to me. Folks who have pots, people who have a nervous system, dysregulation, blood pressure, dysregulation, things like that.

There are some functional medicine practitioners in recent years who have used humming techniques.

as a way to adjust how their body responds to that stimuli in real-time. Go on TikTok, go on YouTube, search for some of these videos, you can see them. Basically, a gal will have a wearable, she works with a practitioner. Under normal circumstance, her blood pressure will shoot up based on just standing up, right?

They deploy some of these techniques and her body is able to regulate and normalize as long as they’re continuous, right? Now, is that sustainable for everyone, 24 hours a day? Absolutely not, but it provides substantiation for the outcome from the actual technique put into practice. And I think that has huge benefit, especially when you’re talking about doing it with your sauna time.

So, when you first get into your sauna, if you don’t have a meditation track that you like to play, if you don’t have, you know, this, that, and the other, try this. Do the sacred monk om and do the chanting, right? It’s not some, you know, woo-woo devil spiritual worship crap or all this stuff.

It’s really, it’s a tuning fork. You’ve seen tuning fork before? You’re basically tuning the chakras or you’re tuning the breath with resonance through the body and you can move it up or down based on the octave or based on the track that you’re modeling. So, I highly suggest that you try that.

This should probably be number one on the list because it’s damn near free, it’s easy to do, and there’s not a lot of excuses on why you can’t execute on it. And number four is they have on the list cold face splash after sauna. So, as soon as you get out of the sauna, splashing your face with cold water.

My personal opinion is this is a viral trend right now. I think that one guy who splashes his face with a really expensive bottle of water is kind of like everywhere. So, I don’t know if this comes from, you know, all that viral stuff. My version of this would be just a cool shower to cool down after sauna.

You don’t have to do that. A lot of people do contrast therapy post sauna or jump in a cold plunge. I personally don’t. It’s too much stress for my system all at one time.

I don’t do cold plunge very much. But what I will do…

My core temperature is still elevated when I get out of the sauna. I’m walking to the shower, I’m still kind of surface sweating, my body temperature is still elevated. I’ll turn the shower on lukewarm so it’s not a huge shock when I first get in and then I’ll continually start lowering the temperature, right, the whole time that I’m in there.

By the time I get out it’s cold and it’s helping my body cool down and it just feels nice. All these people that say that you should hold the heat in and not shower after the sauna, you guys are nuts. You’re going to have acne on your skin and you’re just dirty.

So these are just four examples of techniques that you can try. Pick something that resonates with you and give it a shot. The real intention here is to not push you into any one thing, right, it is to get you to understand that you have a normalized stress response throughout your day and sometimes just because, you know, at the end of your day 5-6 p.m.

you’re done with work, you’re done with picking up the kids from school, you’re done with your extra activities, you’re done with taking care of the house, you’re done with grocery shopping, you’re done with all this stuff, your body is like, right? But that doesn’t always mean that your cortisol levels or your stress response or your breathing pattern for that matter is completely relaxed or reset.

So combine that need with your sauna session and make it a healing sanctuary type experience. That’s my recommendation. If you don’t like one of these things, that’s totally fine. You can hate it but just pick something that you like and give it a shot.

Work back in the comments and let us know how you’re doing and I’ll keep you updated with the newest techniques next month.