Did you all know I have a radio show? I do. (A show on college radio: the hallmark of someone whose Life Is Going Well.) You can listen to it live on Thursdays at 11 AM EST on www.wrct.org — though a fall semester time change is likely and imminent — and listen back to the most recent two episodes here. Our cursed DJ software only keeps recordings for two weeks; I am one day going to figure out how to record my broadcasts and upload them somewhere for posterity, but for now, you’ve got to catch them while they’re (relatively) fresh.
I jokingly called today’s show the “vagus nerve regulation mix.” I put it together yesterday when, instead of pushing myself through a fug of stress and depression-induced mental chaos to make mediocre edits to my book proposal, I decided to try to just listen to myself and accept how I was feeling. I went for a walk in the park instead of procrastinating work, and composed the mix while I did it. I listened to it on my way home and laughed to myself a little bit because I had clearly made it to chill myself out. (I usually play blistering psychedelia and Steely Dan deep cuts.)
Hence the vagus nerve stuff. Vagus nerve regulation is a deeply silly area of new age healing horseshit and one that is a perennial joke among my friends, many of whom work in mental health and think this shit is a big eyeroll, and I. The “vagus nerve” is actually two big branching nerves that regulate your parasympathetic nervous system (the cooling one; the activating one is your sympathetic nervous system).
Like many obscure psychiatric concepts that are being chopped up, recombined, and disseminated on social media platforms, the vagus nerve bullshit is based on so-called polyvagal theory, proposed in the early 1990s by a psychologist named Stephen Porges. I’m in a hurry, so instead of going over the components of polyvagal theory and why they’re wrong, I’ll just refer interested readers to this article from last year. TL;DR, it’s a mess in there, a real hash of galaxy-brain evolutionary psych bogus and incorrect neuroscience. Everybody knows this is bullshit, except for Bessel van der Kolk, who everybody loves to dickride because of The Body Keeps the Score. Some day I would like to do a really deep dive into this stuff — the trauma-industrial complex and the suite of associated MLM scams you can enter into to receive “therapies” for diffuse “traumas.” But I’m just one lady being nibbled to death by work, family, and social responsibilities right now and this is a free newsletter — you get what you pay for, at least until I find my Engels.
My introduction to these techniques was, perhaps unsurprisingly, via credulous polyamorous people who hate their annoying lifestyle but are monastically committed to an arcane and intricate social practice they refer to as “healthy communication,” which as far as I have observed means doing mindfulness exercises to make yourself think you’re not mad or jealous when you in fact are. (One might think that healthy communication means speaking honestly about your feelings, but what the fuck do I know — I was just a domestic violence and healthy relationships counselor professionally for a little bit. I certainly don’t have even one fake Microsoft Word certificate from a life coaching MLM!)
The mind-body connection is extremely real. This is why mindfulness works. I’ve been practicing yoga for fifteen years, and it’s an essential part of my mental self-care routine; it’s the best single thing I have found to help with my often life-ruining anxiety. But let’s be serious for a minute. Can you vagus nerve regulate your what out of a chronically exhausting or dangerous situation? You cannot. You will become chronically stressed in such a situation. Any of us will, and most of us indeed are.
We live in an accelerating nightmare. It is very popular right now to seek liberation via diagnosis, via medicalizing distress, via the positivisitic framework of science (or at least things that sound kind of like science, such as evolutionary psychology) — and that makes sense given how abandoned and abused we are by the system of official medicine. These theories and techniques end-run around the impossibility of receiving real treatment or care by locating the “problem” and its solutions within our biology and our neural architecture. But what if this is wrong? What if we live in a wounding world (the core question of Burnout, the book I mentioned in my last post, is how to heal in a wounding social structure, or whether such healing is even possible) and no amount of butterfly hugs or turning your head side to side or listening to dial-up noises (these are all real polyvagal theory “interventions,” lol) will change that? Then we’re sort of in a pickle, aren’t we?
We’re in a pickle because this stuff — like “psychedelic narcissism” — is relentlessly ingrown and inward-looking, and as such depoliticizes the extremes of suffering caused by capitalism, pandemic, climate catastrophe, and more. Proponents of the vagus nerve stuff seem from my vantage to be aligned (at least aesthetically) with progressive causes and love to tack on some lip service nonsense about how we have to regulate ourselves in order to be in community, to engage in collective action effectively. Source for this claim, though? What if it’s just plain fucking wrong?
What if this stuff is inducing us to turn inwards, to retreat, to hug ourselves and focus on ourselves and think about our feelings and talk about our feelings, when what we really actually need is to be turning outwards? Figuring out how the fuck we save each other from the torment that is life on Earth in 2024? What if all this stuff amounts to is calming ourselves down as the water gets hotter and hotter?
Much to consider! Like I said, I’m in a hurry, so I apologize that this is rather inconclusive and dashed-off. But my interest in new age stuff extends beyond just music (which I do love) and I’m fascinated with the intersection of new age spirituality, with its exclusive emphasis on the self, and the modalities of pseudoscience and “healing” that are positively efflorescent in the culture right now. I’ve been saying for about a year that I want to get more into this, and hopefully some day I will. I also promise to get back to more eggheaded theory-posting soon. Till then, I hope you enjoy the Iasos jams. 💫