The nerve to heal
Jessica Maguire reveals how nervous system regulation and the vagus nerve can transform chronic pain and wellbeing.
“I think for so long, the message has been, ‘If you can change your thoughts, you’ll feel differently,’” says Jessica Maguire. “In some cases, there’s truth in that. But for people who are dysregulated, who are highly stressed, it’s actually more about what’s happening in the body, and we’ve left the body out of this for so long.”
Jessica Maguire, an expert in nervous system repair, is a woman on a mission to empower people to find the root cause of their chronic pain symptoms and improve their physical and mental health. Based in the Northern Rivers region of NSW, Maguire is the founder of The Vagus Nerve Program and the Nervous System Certification Course, a TEDx speaker and author of The Nervous System Reset.
After spending 13 years as a physiotherapist, Maguire travelled to the US to study alongside experts on the nervous system. One key element of her research was on the vagus nerve, the main nerves of your parasympathetic nervous system that carry two-way signals between the brain and body. Jessica Maguire brought what she learned back to Australia and, since then, has become a leading global educator in nervous system regulation. Her programs have helped thousands of people around the world get to the root of their health problems.
The vagus nerve — aptly named, vagus is the Latin word for “wandering” — runs down the spine from the brain to the colon and branches off into almost every major organ including the heart, lungs and digestive tract. Signals from the vagus nerve can influence elements like heart rate, respiratory rate, blood pressure, digestion and mood. When chronic stress disrupts the vagus nerve’s ability to regulate your nervous system, it can contribute to conditions such as irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), insomnia and depression.
Whereas so much health information has focused on the brain and body as different entities, Maguire learned that the vagus nerve was the communication highway between the two. She has now educated more than 20,000 students in how to calm their nervous system by manipulating the vagus nerve, which helps us regulate, leave “panic mode” when needed and enter a calmer and more balanced state of wellbeing.
From troublemaker to trail-blazer
While Maguire is a wellbeing trailblazer these days, she wasn’t always as focused. She grew up on a farm in Tasmania and had a two-hour bus ride each way to school. Her bundles of energy, combined with the boredom of a long journey, often resulted in her encouraging havoc among her peers onboard.
“I got suspended off the bus three times, for a week each time, for being too naughty,” says Maguire, laughing. “But I grew out of it. Then in years 11 and 12 I became a prefect, so I did settle down after that, but [before that] I was usually a ringleader of instigating the thing to get everybody in trouble!”
Maguire later learned to direct her energy towards more productive endeavours, like studying for a Bachelor of Health Science and Masters of Physiotherapy. But after working in private practice as a physiotherapist, treating mostly physical symptoms, Maguire started to wonder if there was a better way to help her clients.
“I’d been a physio for about a decade and I was finding that a lot of people were coming in who had chronic symptoms, and they’d often present to me with the physical pain, but what they were telling me was there was an emotional aspect to it, there was a stress aspect to it,” says Maguire. “I could see the link and knew that there was that correlation.”
Through her research, Maguire found studies that suggested the mind and body are more closely connected than many of us realise, and that patients’ chronic symptoms could be the result of long-term stress, both past and present. One study that suggests this was the CDC-Kaiser Permanente adverse childhood experiences (ACE) study, which found that participants who experienced adverse childhood experiences were more likely to develop chronic health issues later in life.
“That’s really grounded, great research, but I didn’t ever really feel like there was a clear framework to support me as a clinician, but also for me to empower the patients that I was seeing,” says Maguire, who became even more convinced that to truly help her patients, she needed to look beyond just the physical symptoms of their pain.
Maguire decided to close her clinic and travel to the US to study alongside pioneers in the field, learning more about the brain and nervous system, focusing on trauma, stress, neuroplasticity and the vagus nerve. But three weeks before her trip, she faced a tragedy that would change her life forever.
Growing with grief
As Maguire prepared for her journey to the US, she received a call she would never forget, to tell her that her older brother, Sam — who Maguire describes as her “cheerleader” and “confidant” — had passed away at age 34.
“He died by suicide, and that was a really big shock for me, so I ended up with a lot of anxiety, lying awake at night and developing my own chronic symptoms,” recalls Maguire, who says she became unable to eat or sleep and experienced agonising stomach pains.
“I’d find myself crashing down into not being able to get off the couch for a few days and not being able to go and do the things that I loved.”
It wasn’t the first tragedy to shake Maguire’s family. When she was four years old, her baby brother, Luke, passed away from sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). Being so young, Maguire didn’t know how to process such huge emotions, but Sam’s death brought the trauma of losing Luke bubbling to the surface again. She now had to confront the loss of not just one brother, but two.
Instead of cancelling her trip, Sam’s passing only further solidified Maguire’s determination to explore the links between mind and body. She studied under psychologists and meditation experts Tara Brach and Jack Kornfield in the US. Maguire realised that her studies were an opportunity not just to learn the theory of nervous system regulation, but to put it into practice herself.
“I was studying while I was experiencing this [chronic pain]. I really dove into a lot of different fields of research to do with modern pain science, interoception, neuroplasticity, how the brain and nervous system change and the vagus nerve,” says Jessica Maguire.
Bridging the brain and body
Upon returning from the US, Maguire knew she wanted to use what she’d learned about the vagus nerve and nervous system to help others so they could empower themselves to identify the real source of their health issues and address them.
“I came back to Australia and started working with my patients again in a really different way,” says Maguire. “We started with workshops that were teaching people how to connect to their own nervous system, how to understand it, the link between emotional health, physical health, psychological wellbeing and that just took off around Australia.”
The workshops sold out across the country and Maguire says that her patients and students who had previously experienced chronic symptoms saw huge impacts in their health by better understanding how to regulate their nervous system.
“One student who completed the program spoke about how her heart rate variability improved and so did her chronic irritable bowel syndrome,” recalls Maguire, who says the student had spent several years being stuck in a cycle of anxiety and overwhelm. “She always thought it was a gut issue alone but realised how it was a symptom of a chronically dysregulated nervous system.”
To explain the concept of a regulated nervous system, Maguire says to think of it like a warm bath: your system has a comfortable set-point for equilibrium, known as homeostasis. But sometimes life’s demands can activate the sympathetic nervous system state, which can result in aggression, stress or agitation, making the bath feel too hot. On the opposite end, it may cause immobilisation, which can feel like apathy or disassociation, making the bath water feel too cold. These hot and cold blasts can be helpful in the moment — for example, a surge of heat activates our “survival brain” and allows us to respond quickly to a threat — but in a well-regulated system, once the threat or demand has passed, our bath should come back to our comfortably warm set point. In dysregulation, however, your set point can get recalibrated and become stuck in a mode of too hot or too cold.
According to Maguire, just one technique to self-regulate when in the “too cold” state is to bring awareness back to your bodily sensations, through touch or gentle tapping.
“If somebody tends to have sensations that are too quiet, and it’s hard to connect to their physical sensations, using touch and pressure to connect back to their body [can help]”. She explains told there’s something wrong with your child … It doesn’t stop pain, but you learn a different way to relate to what’s happening inside of you, and I think that’s really the essence of self- regulation.” [Maguire]
This can be as simple as gently squeezing one hand with another, placing firm pressure on the joints, which increases proprioception.
“There’s a bilateral stimulation [stimulating both sides of the brain] which crosses the body, but it’s turning the volume back up on sensations. You could do that right throughout the joint … then afterwards, you could say, ‘I can feel the tingling inside my hands … inside my arms’, you can go right through the body. It’s getting the body and brain to speak to each other again.”
Visiting labour land
When it comes to nervous system regulation, Maguire practises what she preaches. This was especially apparent when having complications after the birth of her daughter, Ivy, in 2023. Ivy was in cardiac arrest and needed emergency medical care.
“When you’re having a baby, they say you go to ‘labour land’,” says Maguire. “And you really do leave your body so you’re not really aware of the room.” As a result, she only found out much later that there were 17 medics in the room, as doctors couldn’t find Ivy’s heartbeat.
“She was born on the Sunshine Coast, and they flew her to the Gold Coast via helicopter when she was just a few hours old,” says Maguire. “We were in the NICU, they basically said she was deprived of oxygen and that she could be really unwell … It was so devastating as a new parent.”
When reflecting on such an uncertain and devastating time, Maguire says she expected to be hit with the same big feelings she’d had after losing Sam. But, having learned how to self-regulate and bring herself out of “fight or flight” mode, she was able to cope and process the emotions, rather than holding them in.
“There’d be a lot of tears coming out, but it didn’t have the effect that I thought it would have from when Sam died,” says Maguire. “I thought I would be just as impacted. I was really scared at times, but it didn’t linger on … I knew that was from doing that nervous system regulation work, because there’s not much scarier than being told there’s something wrong with your child … It doesn’t stop pain, but you learn a different way to relate to what’s happening inside of you, and I think that’s really the essence of self-regulation.”
Pain into purpose
After Ivy was eventually able to come home safely, Maguire wanted to extend her teachings even further. She put together a 12-week certification program to train health professionals, practitioners, clinicians and coaches in nervous system regulation.
“That was so rewarding, because they can now go and help others,” says Maguire. “It’s a real ripple effect to the communities. It’s an art and a science to teach or to use nervous system work. There’s a lot about helping people connect with their bodies, but it needs to be trauma informed, and how to look at all the different aspects of it, because there’s an intersection of gut health, emotions, mental health, sleep, inflammation.”
Like Maguire’s earlier experiences with grief, many of her students had experienced their own traumas. Seeing the impact her work has on others, helping them navigate some of the most challenging moments in their life, has been deeply rewarding for Maguire.
“I cry every round of our program at the end because they tell me how much it’s changed their life,” says Maguire. “One [student] was a woman who went on, after losing a son, to create a not-for-profit that would support other parents who had experienced pregnancy loss, child loss or had spent time in the NICU,” says Maguire.
The graduate, a woman named Lottie, had spent 109 days in the NICU with her son, after losing his twin brother days earlier. “She said learning [these skills] for herself helped her be a more present and attuned mother. She had skills to help recover from her own adversities. She went on to complete the Nervous System Certification Course and help other parents,” says Maguire. “It inspires me to see how many of them turn their pain into purpose.”
And no matter how difficult a time you’re having in life, Maguire believes that nervous system regulation is something we can all learn, it just may not look like what you expect it to look like.
“If we think that nervous system work is about sitting on a yoga mat, looking really Zen, it doesn’t really serve us, because a healthy nervous system will match what’s happening outside of us with the right amount of activation inside,” says Maguire.
“If it’s something that’s really stressful, we’re allowed to get really stressed, but it’s important that it doesn’t linger on and keep us there. We process it, we know that it’s over and we move forward.”
