What They Didn’t Tell You: From Core to Floor
Your go to podcast for real talk about women’s bodies, pelvic floor health, hormones, pregnancy, sex, and healing all through a mix of science and intuition.
What They Didn’t Tell You: From Core to Floor
The Hidden Key to Relaxation Is Already Inside You
Feeling stressed, stuck, or overwhelmed?
In this episode, Dr. Millie and Dr. Yardena Bauer dive into the fascinating world of the vagus nerve, the body’s hidden switch between fight-or-flight and rest-and-digest.
You’ll learn why stress shows up the way it does, how visceral manipulation supports your organs, and simple, practical tools you can use at home, like breathwork, temperature shifts, music, and connection, to calm your nervous system and feel grounded again.
If you’ve ever wondered how to move from burnout to balance, this conversation will give you science-backed insights and soul-nourishing strategies you can start using today.
Links:
Connect with Yardena: @Yardena Instagram
Follow Millie: @milliedpt
Join the Core to Floor community: https://millie-schweky.mykajabi.com/intimacy
Dr. Millie Schweky]: [00:00:00] Hey sis, and welcome back to the What they didn't tell You from Court of Floor. I'm your girl, Dr. Millie Schweky, your favorite pelvic floor physical therapist, and I'm here with Dr. Yardena Bauer, a PhD and highly qualified dietician with an impressive academic background and expertise in the fields of psychology, physiology, dietetics, nutrition, neuroscience, and endocrinology.
Dr. Millie Schweky]: Her focus is on hormone nutrition, including PCOS, fertility and endometriosis. Yardena, welcome back to the studio. I'm so excited to have you where we're gonna be talking about stress and visceral manipulation, vagus nerve stuff. Let's dive in. Can you tell us a bit about stress and the vagus nerve and how we can support them. Okay, great. So the vagus nerve is.
[Dr. Yardena Bauer]: very, very real and really needs to be understood. So we, when we are talking about stress, we're talking about the sympathetic nervous system, which is our fight and flight response, and that versus the parasympathetic nervous system, which is, rest digest.
[Dr. Yardena Bauer]: Now, these are [00:01:00] systems of survival. The whole idea being that if a line is chasing you. Best you don't, you know, say I'm suntanning now. Best you get up and, deal with the stress in front of you. However, in today's society, most of us are not being chased by lions unless you're in the Kruger National Park.
[Dr. Yardena Bauer]: And even then, but. That's a safari for non-South Africans. But you know, so we dealing with, we need to, we go into stress or it's stress is characterized by a rise in cortisol. The cortisol is going to cause increase in heart rate, increase in blood pressure. Why? Because we need to run an increase in glucose production from the liver.
[Dr. Yardena Bauer]: Why? Because we need to take action. We need to fight. We need to either go towards and fight it or we need to. Flee. We need to run, fight or flight. It's great. It's a sympathetic nervous system response that we take on the stress. We've also come to add freeze, but that's a [00:02:00] different system. So what does a vagus nerve have to do with all this?
[Dr. Yardena Bauer]: So the vagus nervous, when we go into, we need to go into a little bit of sympathetic, I think go up. We meant to go into between, so there is the vent. So in the parasympathetic nervous system, there is what's called, we have the ventral vagal and we have the dorsal vagal. Ventral vagal, sorry.
[Dr. Yardena Bauer]: Parasympathetic system. We have two systems. The one where we wanna be in is calm. It's rest digest. We are grounded, we are curious. We have a little bit of stress. We go into the sympathetic. Into the rest digest. We go up and down and up and down, but we have a nice little curve going up and down. That's great.
[Dr. Yardena Bauer]: What happens is when we are in stress for too long, we actually go into the next level and that is when we have shutdown. That is when we have complete shutdown and we it's, and we aren't able to cope with life anymore, and that is very dangerous. That is where we lead to. Deep depression con, get out of bed.[00:03:00]
[Dr. Yardena Bauer]: Suicidal thoughts. And that is, needs to be avoided the way to, so what we wanna be doing is managing our sympathetic nervous system. So when we are in fight and flight and you're in fight and flight because you're feeling stressed, you may be jittery, you maybe are like , heart rate is heart rate, increased blood pressure, but you know it because you can't really focus.
[Dr. Yardena Bauer]: You can't, if you can't really read a book, you're not really able to be grounded and calm. You need to take action. So what do you do to help people? So in the vagal, by activating the vagal tone, that is helping us calm the sympathetic nervous system and get into a place of groundedness. So what do you do to help people activate this parasynthetic?
[Dr. Yardena Bauer]: So I have. There are a few things. The one thing is I work on, I do a lot of visceral manipulation, so that is working on our organs. To help make our organs work optimally for us. And it's almost like a light massage on your organs to move them into the right rotation to make [00:04:00] our organs work for us and optimally.
[Dr. Yardena Bauer]: So for example, we've spoken once on liver detox, but you want your organs to be able, like I said, if your liver is not in the right way, maybe there's a blockage, so we're gonna move the liver. In order for to be able to do detoxification of hormones, detoxification of estrogen goes through the hormone or incident resistance.
Dr. Millie Schweky]: That's incredible. So the position of the organ in the body is going to affect its efficacy. And so if something is out of place, whether it be from pregnancy or posture related, alignment related, then we can use visceral manipulation Yes. To get the organ back in place Exactly. And have it function.
Dr. Millie Schweky]: Absolutely. We can also use it for fertility. Mm-hmm. I've, I've actually trained, I'm trained in ovaries, bladder, and uterus. Amazing. Well,
[Dr. Yardena Bauer]: the fallopian tubes
[Dr. Yardena Bauer]: will be very difficult because they're like a their hair thickness, so it would be very difficult to be able to, while I would love to be able to, 'cause I have lots of clients with blocked, fallopian tubes, which we can help with nutrition, like anti-inflammatory antioxidants, but it's not really helping the blocked.
[Dr. Yardena Bauer]: Fallopian tube would be very [00:05:00] difficult to manually get to the fallopian tube. But we do work with fertility. I work a lot with fertility, and to help that optimize, but things people can do at home, that's why Breath works very
Dr. Millie Schweky]: popular. Yeah. I wanted to hear like three quick tips someone at home could do to go from that heightened state Okay.
Dr. Millie Schweky]: Into a more regulated state.
[Dr. Yardena Bauer]: Great. So first thing you can do very effective is temperature change. Like have a bath, have a shower. What about just splashing water on your face, just splashing water on your face, hot or cold? Uh, please don't splash hot water on your face. What? Warm or no? Cold, cold, cold water.
[Dr. Yardena Bauer]: Right? We want a temperature change. We want the body to be come. What's going on?
[Dr. Yardena Bauer]: Does it, does it make dopamine increase? You might. No, because remembering that we're going into mo. Dopamine is about motivation and drive. Mm-hmm. This is, and wanting more. You're probably not gonna want more water splashed in your face.
[Dr. Yardena Bauer]: You're probably just gonna go into a cortisone adrenaline response, uhhuh, and then you're gonna calm down.
Dr. Millie Schweky]: Interesting.
[Dr. Yardena Bauer]: Okay. So I like cold. I like water splashed in your face. Very effective. When we talk about breathing breath [00:06:00] work, very also important is breathing. Exhaling. Whew. In and it's not actually, the square.
[Dr. Yardena Bauer]: Remember it used to be the square info, four hole, the box breath. It's not anymore. It's now. And they did the studies through COVID, which is a great time. 5, 7, 8.
Dr. Millie Schweky]: What do they do now?
[Dr. Yardena Bauer]: I just do your in info in 5, 7, 8. Yeah. In, you want your exhale to be double your inhale. So if you inhale for four, you wanna really expand the lungs.
[Dr. Yardena Bauer]: Do you hold. Hold it. Hold for how long? Hold for two and then out
Dr. Millie Schweky]: for eight. So in for four. Hold for two. Out for eight. Out for eight. And how many breaths should we do?
[Dr. Yardena Bauer]: Do three. Cool. Do three. Remember this is also about carbon dioxide and oxygen change and you can't help it, right? When someone says take of breath.
[Dr. Yardena Bauer]: And this also really, it's really works.
Dr. Millie Schweky]: Yeah.
[Dr. Yardena Bauer]: I've been teaching
Dr. Millie Schweky]: my kids to do this.
[Dr. Yardena Bauer]: Remembering that, that it's also like through the vagal tone, so swallowing, you know, the, the ity. I told, my daughter should have some water. So clever. And I was like, what's water gonna do? But no, but she's drinking when you swallow it, [00:07:00] so your vagal tone is down your spine, your vagal nerve, your vagal nerve, sorry, your vagal nerve is down your spine.
[Dr. Yardena Bauer]: So if you're swallowing the water, it's going down, it's activating. Oh wow. So having some water, the deep breathing. And, uh, splash some water on your face.
Dr. Millie Schweky]: I saw a very funny video. It was like, wives, when they tell their husbands they're stressed, they're tired, they go, honey, did you drink some water? And they're always like, I'm gonna slap my husband.
Dr. Millie Schweky]: And he is just asking me if I wanna drink water every time I complain to him like, it's such a man thing. But you know what? Drink some
[Dr. Yardena Bauer]: water. Have you, have you seen? Drink some water, drink some water, and also acknowledge. There's a really important point of just saying, okay, I'm feeling stressed. I am not feeling good right now.
[Dr. Yardena Bauer]: Mm-hmm. Hand on your chest and like, hand on your tummy and then do the breathing and just connecting with yourself. Other things that also work. Music. Music is great. Relaxing music or upbeat music plus one of your current state. Oh,
Dr. Millie Schweky]: interesting.
[Dr. Yardena Bauer]: So if you are, if you're going to like, you're really feeling, let's say down or you're [00:08:00] feeling anxious to put on something that's so super happy, it's like, oh my God, it's painful.
[Dr. Yardena Bauer]: So just wherever you are, plus one. Totally.
Dr. Millie Schweky]: I like that. I'm gonna start doing that. I'll like a Spotify playlist.
[Dr. Yardena Bauer]: Yes. Love that. And then share it.
Dr. Millie Schweky]: Yeah. So that, and then build it. Build it with your friends, you know? Yeah. Now you could do like a collaborative playlist on Spotify.
[Dr. Yardena Bauer]: And speaking of sharing, that's probably the best way.
[Dr. Yardena Bauer]: To activate Vagal to get into Rest Digest is to share because that's going to in increase oxytocin and that you can only do when you, with, when you have connection. Nothing heals us better, faster, quicker than real connection. I wonder if it's even more important than sleep. I'm not sure. I don't think so, but it's probably a quick, I
Dr. Millie Schweky]: actually saw a study like five things.
Dr. Millie Schweky]: I make people live longer. It was. It's the Harvard study
[Dr. Yardena Bauer]: you're talking about. It's the longest study.
Dr. Millie Schweky]: Oh yeah. Is
[Dr. Yardena Bauer]: it Harvard or Oxford?
Dr. Millie Schweky]: It was connection. Some sort of spirituality. Mm-hmm. [00:09:00] Sleep, food, and exercise.
[Dr. Yardena Bauer]: Yep. So I think it's the Harvard stu. It's a Harvard study. They said they did. They wanted to see who would live longer and the people who was happy.
[Dr. Yardena Bauer]: It's the happiness study. Who is the happiest, and it's the people who have connections. And it doesn't have to be even like deep soul connections,
Dr. Millie Schweky]: just good. There's a, there's an island in Italy somewhere, an island off of Italy where people live well past a hundred regularly, and they found that it was the food they were eating, the sunlight they were getting.
Dr. Millie Schweky]: They all were like really close. Yeah. The blue Zone diet. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And these people were just like living longer. So get a friend. Get a friend. Get a friend. All right guys. Thank you for tuning in to today's episode. Thank you, Yardena for being here with us today, and we'll see you next time.