In which I become a wellness influencer
I recently experienced yet another round of Weird COVID, complete with the brain fog and fatigue I’ve felt after every infection. I was asymptomatic again, and in fact, I never tested positive on a rapid test. My husband did though, and I didn’t isolate from him. So, when my now familiar brain fog and dizziness began after he recovered, I knew what was happening.
I already wrote what I wanted to write about recovering from COVID, and I don’t need to do it again. I’m only bringing it up because this time, I found something that seemed to actually help. It didn’t prevent or cure my post-COVID symptoms, but it did make me feel noticeably better in the hours after I did it, and I moved through the whole process a lot faster than in the past—weeks instead of months.
What helped me this time around were vagus nerve exercises, specifically this video. (If it gets interrupted by ads on YouTube, here it is in a blog post that's always been ad-free for me.)
It’s 35 minutes of breathing deeply and gently moving your head and eyes in various directions. You can, and probably should, do it lying down. Lying down and breathing is never a bad thing, but I did a lot of both during my previous two recoveries, as well as in my everyday non-COVID life (yin yoga 4ever), and it didn’t seem to help my symptoms as much as these eye exercises did. Once I realized how much they were helping, I found a couple of classes in my yoga app (Glo, if you’re curious) focused on the vagus nerve, and I started rotating through them and the original video so I didn’t get too bored.
I wish I could tell you this information came from one of the many doctors I’ve seen over the past two years, begging for help treating or at least understanding how COVID affects me. Alas, it did not. It came from the internet, specifically one of my Discord communities, where someone with symptoms that sounded like mine (fatigue, brain fog, and dizziness that felt like being motion sick all the time) shared the original video and their positive experience with it. I wish with all my heart we weren’t still here, that we weren’t still relegated to trying anything a near stranger online says maybe helped them feel better. But here we are, and now I’m the near stranger passing it along to you.
I’m not prepared to make a scientific case for vagus nerve exercises treating post-COVID brain fog. My sample size is one, and it’s far from a controlled trial. There are a lot of things that might be helping me feel better faster this time, such as multiple vaccines, thyroid medication, and the non-negligible possibility of a placebo effect. So while I can’t guarantee these exercises actually helped my recovery—and much less that they will help yours—I am very confident they aren’t making anything worse. If you read this and think, hmmmm that sounds familiar/interesting/intriguing, give the video a try. And if it helps you, pass it on to the next internet stranger.