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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

Posted this (about externally stimulating the vagus nerve) a while back because it looked interesting:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-athletes-way/201...

I bought the equipment to try this myself (basically a TENS device and some electrodes), but have been too afraid to apply it :/

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You probably already know this, but for the benefit of others: it is very possible to kill yourself if you do this wrong. The vagus nerve (or its mirror on the opposite side of your face, I forget, it's been a while since I worked on this and I've never particularly wanted to revisit it) is involved in pacing your heart. Screw it up and you can end up very dead of cardiac arrest.

So be careful trying this stuff at home!

You can avoid the potential for death by slow exhalations and other breathing techniques that have been shown to stimulate the vagus nerve.

Oh boy. No. Slowing your breathing is not going to protect against the effects of electrically stimulating the vagus nerve. Whether or not the TENS approach to vagus nerve simulation is effective or not, please don't believe this will somehow help.

I think the advice was to forgo TENS in favor of breathing, not to mitigate adverse effects of TENS with breathing.

This is correct. Apologies for the ambiguity in my comment.

Ah!! Then you have my apologies for my misinterpretation too :)

Thanks for clarifying, it seems I did misunderstand. Too late to edit unfortunately.

Would you have a source for this?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6189422/

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-athletes-way/201...

Important advice. As a person who has PVCs and PACs I would say avoid anything that isn't medical grade and advised by your cardiologist/specialist doctor.

Sorry, what’s PVC and PAC in this context?

Probably Pre-Ventricular Contraction. And I guess Pre-Atrial Contraction.

PVCs and PACs are premature ventricular and atrial contractions. There is also some recent studies treating arrythmias with vegus nerve stimulation too that's why I'm saying youve really got to be careful.

I’ve heard of people giving themselves permanent vertigo, a condition with a notably high suicide rate which should be an indication for just how bad it is.

> I bought the equipment to try this myself

Cue the obligatory scene (42 seconds) from "Strange Brew" [0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/embed/EojzfxXGxtE?start=4064&end=410...

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