I’ve written a great deal about the vagus nerve lately and that’s because its such a key player in the matter of autonomic dysfunction as well as cervical instability (see my other posts on these). So here’s today’s topic on the subject. I’ve had a long love-hate relationship with modern household heating systems because, whilst I am no lover of the cold (being somebody who is especially sensitive to it) I really do struggle to be around central heating systems, especially when they are pumping a lot of heat in winter and/or when I sleep anywhere near them.

For years, I have had an issue whereby I almost can’t bear to be in bed once the heating turns on in the morning and certainly not if the dial is turned up any more than a 1 or a 2 on the nearest radiator. I can even sense when the boiler is active in the house (often waking within seconds of it coming on…and no, nothing to do with the noise as it was always in a completely different part of the house), even when the bedroom radiator is “off”, because I start to get dysautonomic symptoms that crash my day even before its started.

In particularly, I’ve lately noticed how the stuffy rooms in the flat where we are staying, sandwiched between two other flats that are no doubt toasty warm for their occupants, feel like (and this is the phrase that sprang to mind this morning when it happened) it is causing my vagus nerve to atrophy. The more I am exposed to this kind of stuffy heat, which was even worse over Christmas as the thermostat was broken and the repair guy couldn’t get out to us until the new year, leaving us in over-hot rooms much of the time I had covid, the more unwell I start to feel and I don’t just mean a little bit uncomfortable. Other people may comment “its warm in here” or take off a layer of clothes but even when they don’t seem to notice or profess that the temperature is fine for them, I am left fanning myself, feeling dizzy, exhausted, breathless, with blurred vision, messed up digestive system, neuropathy, numbness, brain fog, pain….to name but a few of the varying effects. Sometimes, the other parties are cold and I am running some sort of system meltdown, until I can get away from it or open a window.

In an effort to rehabilitate my underfunctioning vagus nerve, as this is what it all boils down to, I have lately started throwing really ice cold water on my face (so cold it hurts!) when I first get up in the morning. I’ve also started opening windows, when I don’t get complained at by the person sharing my space (who thinks I’m bonkers and that I must be having womanly hot flushes) and it helps, not just with achieving a better temperature but with all of those other things I just listed. On days when there has been no fresh air allowed in at all, I really…really struggle, so much I sometimes forget to do the very things, like get outside, that would make me feel better, like I am systemically suffocating. Oddly enough, I can recall feeling just like this in the open plan corporate office where I experienced my first major health crash…

So, when we move into our own place, I really can’t wait to be in charge of my own temperature zone again. Sharing a space and keeping to the concensus temperature has been hard (like working in an office) these last few months and has made me even more prone to POTs and other disautonomic effects. Its really made me wonder about the relationship between the vagus nerve and environmental temperature. There’s not an awful lot out there about it, due to the fact that, as this one 2019 study I found states, “the precise role of the vagus nerve in body thermal responses or visceral organ-related thermoregulation is still under debate due to extensive contradictory results. This data discrepancy is likely due to the high cell heterogeneity in the vagus nerve, as diverse vagal neuron types mediate numerous and sometimes opposite physiological functions.” The same study goes on to speculate “Thermosensitive vagal afferents may sense temperature changes from the airway and gastrointestinal tract, and mediate visceral thermal reflexes” (Body Thermal Responses and the Vagus Nerve, Chang), which is exactly what I am speculating here…though I sense it has far broader, more abstract (less “scientific”) sounding, sensory equipment at its disposal than cells in these two parts of the body; I tend to regard the vagus nerve as a sort of radio aerial tuned into the frequencies of the wider environment.

As I’ve mentioned many times before, the vagus is a a very long nerve that works in both directions, feeding information between the brain and the visceral organs, involved in countless, and (as above) often opposite physiological processes, affecting almost every system in the body in ways that can only be speculated about but its likely all pretty complex and, I would imagine, nuanced from person to person, influenced by factors such as their own personal differences (neurodiversities) and weak spots, perhaps even epigenetic factors such as the kind of environment in which they were raised during their formative years. Imagine how many systems this vagal “thermosensitivity” could affect if the vagus becomes so deconditioned that even the smallest changes affecting the environment come upon it as a sort of shock to the system…the merest draught, a change of air pressure and suddenly the whole system is potentially sent into disarray!

In my own case, my parents didn’t install central heating until I was about 8 (I grew up in the late 60s and 70s when piped heating was still far from standard). As a result, I spent the first almost decade of my life in a house that was often frigid in winter or had hot and cold zones, depending where the plug in or parafin heater had been positioned and where the most people were gathered. This was my normal for a lot of years and I strongly suspect my nervous system memorised that and still struggles with anything contrary to it.

Once those radiators were installed, a huge luxury to us all, the one in my room ran along the length of my bed super-heating my body as soon as the timer clicked on. It seemed like a great idea at first, especially on the coldest winter mornings, but I can clearly recall really struggling with the foggy head and strangly enveloping torpor that would often take me over in the mornings when I was a teenager trying to rouse myself to get ready for school, though I had felt fine in the middle of the night before the timer came on. Looking back, it feels like the beginnings of dysautonomia began occurring around that time (oh-so easily blamed on teenage hormones) and this also corresponded with the first swathe of odd physical symptoms that had me feeling breathless and oddly out of condition, for such a previously active kid, with widespread aches and pains and peculiar sensations in my foggy head that made it so much more of a struggle to cope with the school day than when I was that much younger kid in our frigid but seasonally appropriate house. Stuffy temperatures in schools were a long running struggle for me, right back to primary school days, meaning super-heated school environments (and hospitals!) have been a pet hate ever since. Oh how I struggled to get through the couple of hours of my daughter’s winter term “parent evenings” ever year, during which my brain would progressively melt like an over-hot candle, rendering me less and less coherent in my small talk as I walked from room to hot-stuffy classroom consulting with the various teaching staff; I would often wonder how the kids, and teachers tolerated it in there day after day. So many public spaces impact me the same way and, no surprise, POTs is one of the biggest risks when I am forced to be in them!

I also suspect this same vagus deconditioning, if that’s what it is, is why I struggle so with February every year (typically my worst health month) as there’s a lot of environmental shift taking place out there in nature during that particular month as the seasons really start to wax, yet it’s also the most likely month to be stuck indoors with the central heating cranked on. Feb has long been a struggly month for me but, these days, it also leads to the worst POTs symptoms of my year, after which the sudden transition into spring can come as quite the shock because of the sheer contrast in how many body responds from month to month!

After all, how am I meant to transition easily into the warmer days of March without my body experiencing the run-up to that transition that I would have, ordinarily, experienced in days gone by, when my inner environment more closely matched the outer? Because (as far as my confused body is concerned) where did all that change come from, as if appearing overnight out of nowhere the first time I start to spend any real time outdoors, when my inside home environment is a balmy as a summer’s day in the Bahamas all winter long? There’s a lot more going on out in nature than just temperature variation and, when the visual and other cues don’t all match up with the appropriate season (hot indoors when the view tells you its freezing out there), how are we meant to piece together all the appropriate information so the body can respond to it all? I’m really not good at transitions (a key factor of my neurodiversity) and need much more of a heads-up that change is occurring than that. I strongly suspect that mixed messages sent by modern environments have thoroughly screwed with the autonomic system that used to tell me all this information well in advance; it’s been done out of a job and become jumpy, glitchy and prone to extreme over reaction as a result!

And an over-reactive autonomic system really isn’t good, especially when it is too dialled into environmental factors, because when fight or flight drives the entire system, ringing alarm bells whenever the slightest change in circumstances crops up, you have a major health problem on your hands. When it completely over-reacts to subtle environmental factors as though they are cause for alarm, you can end up with a body that has all kinds of issues such as IBS, sudden hypermobility flare-ups, breathing issues, mastcell activation, increased inflammation and pain and so on…all because your system doesn’t remember what’s normal any more.

I know it’s difficult to completely reconsider the way you use heating in your house (although the energy crisis is forcing a lot of us to do just that). In my case, I’ve recently had covid, had a persistent late night cough worsened by exposure cold air and, even without these provocations, even the slightest draught can cause my cervically unstable neck to seize up at a moment’s notice, resulting in trapped nerves (vagus including) thus even more such autonomic disarray (see my other recent post on this). However, I’m wondering if there’s a possibility that, slowly and cautiously reacquainting my system to cooler and more seasonally appropriate temperatures might be the way through all this to where my body doesn’t always overreact to the merest hint of temperature alteration in the future, so I can rehabilitate myself somewhat back to the way that I was before “chonic” became my buzz word.

I’m not quite ready for the Wim Hof method (and probably never will be, though I encourage you to become acquainted with it!) but I have started splashing ice cold water on my face, till it properly stings, when I first wake up in the morning and then opening that window wide to get some real, often sharply cold, winter air in the room before I start my exercises (again, with caution, as this backfired the other day when my neck went into immediate spasm and sent me into a lot of dysautonomia and pain for the next two days). I generally wrap my neck up to protect it and have a strap around neck support with insertable heat pad in reserve, which can be used before, during or after execercise in a cooler room (listening to my body) to make sure I don’t send my vagus into panic with the cooler air and I also make sure to warm up my body before doing anything more vigorous (my exercise of choice, after a few yoga stretches, is dance). The cooler room also allows me to stay upright for longer and to garner more stamina than I ever could if I started out over-warm. All of this can start my day off in a far better way…if I am careful about it…with far less brain fog, blood pooling or other dysautonomic effects thereafter.

I strongly suspect that I need my living environment to become more “real” as in much more closely related to what nature has in mind, per the season we happen to be in. I don’t mean that I need to make it frigid and uncomfortable but at least not stuffy, coddled or so artificially consistent…because all manmade consistency does for us is reduce the natural capacity to deal with variety and change (a case of use it or lose it). Personal zone temperature consistency sends confusing messages to a body that needs to still be able to cope with a highly variable world out there all of the rest of the time. Over the most recent years of coddling myself through illness, living at home most of the time, compared to days when I used to a have to scrape the ice off my car every winter’s morning and would go out walking in the frosty woods or be out in chilly winds and frigid downpours with my dog every day, I’ve lost touch with seasonal variance over the last five years or so…and never struggled more with dysautonomia!

I need to claim back all the natural adaptability that is built into the human system but which modern life is steadily erasing through the increasing artificiality of our living spaces. For me, as someone who is neurodivergent, it’s perhaps even important because it’s really not my strong suit to be adaptable to change so I have to keep working at it or suffer the dire consequences!

Just to add, I’m trying not to be too black and white about this topic (it’s a pitfall of mine…) as there are benefits to consistency and warmth, especially when the nervous system is recovering from trauma or injury, so really its a case of applying common sense and balance. I’m well aware that this is the sort of post I sometimes write and take down later, when I decide my opinion was much too strident and gung ho…but in this case I really do feel I’m onto something and that it’s worth putting out there for consideration.

Disclaimer: This blog, it’s content and any material linked to it are presented for autobiographical, general interest and anecdotal purposes only. They are not a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, treatment, or prescribing. Opinions are my own based on personal experience. Please seek medical advice from a professional if you are experiencing any symptoms that concern you.