Quick Read:
- Most of the bodily functions needed to heal are tied to your nervous system.
- Tapping or Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) is a powerful and free way to signal safety to the vagus nerve and shift your entire body back into parasympathetic healing mode.
- The Vagus Nerve is the main power line of your parasympathetic nervous system. When it is activated, your body can shift into healing mode.
Your nervous system is one of the most influential healing forces in your body, yet most people do not give it the attention it deserves. It determines how you respond to stress, digest food, regulate hormones, eliminate toxins, repair cells, and even how effectively your immune system can protect you. Yep, literally most of the functions needed to heal breast cancer, and most dis-eases, are tied to your nervous system.
Therefore, learning how to work with your nervous system rather than against it is one of the most important steps you can take. This is another reason why Essential #4 of the 7 Essentials System® [1] is Heal Your Emotional Wounds because they live IN your nervous system (not just in your head).
Tapping or Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) is a powerful and free way to signal safety to the vagus nerve and shift your entire body back into parasympathetic healing mode. Addressing emotional wounds isn’t just emotional work—it’s biological, neurological, and a critical step in creating a healing environment for breast cancer recovery.
Now, let’s unpack what all of this means…
Your Nervous System Is A Communication Network
Your nervous system is your body’s electrical wiring—sending messages between your brain, organs, hormones, immune system, and emotional centers. It has two major parts:
1. Central Nervous System (CNS). Think of the CNS as your command center, located in your brain and spinal cord, running from the base of the skull down the length of the spine. It is “central” because it is where your thoughts, emotions, memories, beliefs, and survival responses are created and interpreted.
2. Peripheral Nervous System (PNS). It consists of all the nerves that branch from the spinal cord throughout the body. The PNS has two branches:
- Somatic Nervous System: Controls voluntary movement—lifting your arm, standing up, writing, cooking.
- Autonomic Nervous System: Controls the functions you don’t have to think about: Heartbeat, digestion, immune function, hormone balance, detoxification, healing, and repair.
The autonomic system has two opposite but equally important modes:
Sympathetic Nervous System
This system manages your “fight, flight, or freeze” response. It activates when you encounter stress, danger, uncertainty, trauma, or even chronic worry.
Too much sympathetic activity leads to:
- High cortisol
- Chronic inflammation
- Disrupted digestion
- Hormonal imbalances
- Poor sleep
- Lower immune protection
- Slower detoxification
- Mood swings and anxiety
In short, this state blocks healing.
For example, when you are constantly stressed, your sympathetic nervous system and adrenaline hormones can alter gene expression, triggering a cascade of problems for your immune system. These can include reducing natural killer cell activity [2], inhibiting cancer cell apoptosis, preventing DNA repair [3], and massively increasing systemic inflammation [4] throughout the body.
Parasympathetic Nervous System
Your “rest, digest, repair, and heal” response. This is where your body:
- Lowers cortisol
- Repairs DNA
- Digests food thoroughly
- Removes toxins
- Regulates hormones
- Supports the microbiome
- Strengthens immune function
- Reduces inflammation
- Encourages emotional calm
This state, the relaxation response, supports healing.
It does so by allowing the healing mechanisms of the parasympathetic nervous system to cleanse your body, mind, and soul with endorphins, dopamine, oxytocin, and serotonin, leading to a sense of happiness, wholeness, and healing.
And now your Vagus Nerve and Tapping can finally enter the chat.
The Vagus Nerve Is Your Body’s Healing Highway
The vagus nerve is the longest cranial nerve in the body, running from your brainstem through your throat, heart, lungs, diaphragm, digestive tract, and reproductive organs.
It is the main power line of your parasympathetic nervous system. When your vagus nerve is activated, your entire body shifts into healing mode.
And here’s what makes it extraordinary: 80% of the signals on the vagus nerve travel FROM your body UP to your brain. Not the other way around.
This means your body tells your brain whether:
- You’re safe
- You’re supported
- You can relax
- You can heal
If your vagus nerve tone is weak (low vagal tone), your brain assumes you’re in danger—even when you’re not. This keeps you stuck in fight-or-flight (Sympathetic Nervous System).
Low vagal tone is linked to:
- Anxiety
- Depression
- Chronic inflammation
- Poor gut health
- Hormone disruption
- Immune weakness
- Higher recurrence risk
- Slow recovery from treatment
Is it all coming full circle now? Improving vagal tone is something to be intentional about when on a breast cancer healing journey, and on any path that life takes you.
Tapping (EFT) is an effective, free, something you can do anywhere to improve the health of your vagal tone (Vagus Nerve).
How Tapping (EFT) Tones Your Vagus Nerve
Tapping, or Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), is a mind-body practice that combines gentle tapping on specific acupressure points with focused statements about stress or emotional challenges. This process helps calm the amygdala (the brain’s fear center) while sending safety signals through the nervous system. By stimulating acupressure or meridian points and acknowledging emotions, tapping lowers cortisol, releases stored tension, and shifts the body into a parasympathetic “rest and heal” state. It’s a simple, accessible tool anyone can use to reduce stress and support emotional and physical healing. For a deeper dive, please review this blog post. [5]
Seven ways Tapping directly impacts the vagus nerve:
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Reduces amygdala activation. The amygdala is your brain’s fear center; it triggers fight-or-flight. Tapping calms it, helping your brain shift toward safety.
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Lowers cortisol. Numerous studies [6] show that EFT reduces cortisol, allowing your parasympathetic system to take charge and heal your body.
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Stimulates meridian points connected to vagus pathways. Many of the tapping points lie close to vagus nerve fibers or branches that influence the neck, chest, and digestive organs.
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Triggers diaphragmatic breathing. Tapping naturally slows your breath. Slow exhalation = vagus nerve activation.
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Releases stored emotional patterns. Unresolved emotional tension is one of the biggest blocks to healing. Tapping can calm emotional layers and can work well with other therapies, such as talk therapy.
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Creates new neural pathways. This is neuroplasticity: the brain’s ability to rewrite old stress patterns into calm and safety.
- Improves sleep and reduces anxiety. This 2025 study [7] found that after a 4-week program, women showed significantly lower AG scores than the control group, greater anxiety reduction, and improved sleep quality.
How does this all relate to breast cancer healing?
So glad you asked!
Tapping, by toning the vagus nerve and increasing parasympathetic dominance, helps support:
- Stronger immune surveillance
- Lower inflammation
- Better digestion and detoxification
- Balanced hormones
- Improved sleep
- Steadier mood
- Emotional resilience
- A healing internal environment
It is a quick and effective way to shift your body into a state where healing becomes possible.
A Simple Vagus-Nerve Toning Tapping Sequence
Here is a gentle sequence you can begin using daily, whenever and wherever:
Step 1: Set your intention
“Even though I feel stress in my body, I deeply and completely accept myself.”
Step 2: Tap through each point
- Top of head
- Eyebrow
- Side of the eye
- Under eye
- Under nose
- Chin
- Collarbone
- Under arm
Repeat calming statements such as:
- “I release this tension.”
- “I am safe.”
- “My body knows how to heal.”
- “I soften into calm.”
Step 3: Slow exhale
Inhale 4, exhale 6. This is powerful vagus nerve activation.
Step 4: Anchor the new signal
One hand on your heart, one on your belly. Feel your body shift into safety.
Use this sequence anytime you feel overwhelmed, anxious, or disconnected from your body.
Your nervous system is not working against you—it’s trying to protect you. But when it gets stuck in overdrive, it needs help to return to balance. Tapping (EFT) is a gentle, accessible, science-backed way to shift back into a state of calm repair and healing. For a more detailed review of tapping, please read this blog post [5].
Tapping is a powerful technique, and there are many others. Below is a sampling of therapies that Dr. V uses to calm and balance her nervous system so she can enter into The Relaxation Response and tone her Vagus Nerve.
Dr. V’s Library of Nervous System Healing
Dry Brushing. It’s quick and supports your lymphatic, nerve, and immune systems, all while providing a relaxing and invigorating self-care therapy. This blog post [8] has all the details.
Heal Emotional Wounds. Energy is the foundation of your body, and emotions are just “energy in motion” that has become stuck—emotional baggage. This “baggage” can negatively affect how you think about yourself and your relationships with others, how you react to stress, and how your physical body is damaged. Please learn how and where emotions and trauma get trapped in your body via this blog post. [9]
Train your subconscious mind. Changing your thoughts changes your brain—your brain develops new neurological pathways that create patterns, behaviors, and a new, healthy body. This blog post [10] outlines several steps to train your subconscious mind, activate the relaxation response, and heal your nervous system.
Sleep well. I honestly can’t stress how critical it is to get a rejuvenating night of sleep. Please read this blog post [11] to learn how to put yourself and your breast cancer cells to sleep with melatonin.
Recall Healing. This Psycho-Neuro-Immunology therapeutic technique helps you “Identify and solve the emotional trauma behind the condition or behavior.” Please learn more and get a free guide
via this blog post. [12]
Heal Your Inner Child. Our subconscious reactions often stem from experiences we endured growing up that we have yet to process and heal. So, as adults, we sometimes overreact and don’t consciously understand why we do certain things. It is our hurt inner child surfacing and acting out. Please learn more about the steps to healing your “little girl” in this blog post. [13]
Products Dr. V uses to balance her nervous system
BrainTap. Their LED visor and headset use auricular therapy (Chinese medicine that stimulates specific points of the ear), light therapy, and various frequencies to relax and train your mind. Its patented technologies and design help you tap into different neural pathways to unleash creativity, manage stress, improve communication, enhance focus, speed healing, and, most importantly, relax better. Please read this blog post [14] to learn all about it.
Heart Math. Their Inner Balance Heart Math app has been instrumental in my journey to coherently align my physical, mental, nerve, and emotional systems—heart coherence. By doing so, I experience increased access to my heart’s intuitive guidance for approaching situations with more compassion, clarity, personal confidence, and emotional balance to be the best version of myself. Please review this blog post [15] for more info.
Chiropractic care. It focuses on correcting dysfunction in the Nervous System by bringing balance to the vertebrae, which protect the spinal column. Proper spine alignment prevents stress on the nervous system, helps to reduce stress responses, and boosts your immune system overall. Removing subluxations (spinal misalignments) can also unblock signaling pathways between your nerve system, organs, and immune system. Please read this blog post [16] to learn more.
Supplements
[17]
- Magnesium Ease. Magnesium Ease [18] supports over 300 biochemical reactions, making it one of the most critical minerals in your body. Healthy levels of magnesium lead to amazing sleep, lower depression and anxiety levels, healthy bowel movements, stronger bones, better cognitive function, and so much more. If you want to improve any of the above, taking Magnesium Ease daily will give your body the fuel it needs for optimal functionality.
- Adrenal Calm. Chronic mental and physical stress (fight, flight, or freeze syndrome) leads to your adrenal glands producing excessive amounts of adrenaline and cortisol. Adrenal Calm [19] is designed to rejuvenate and calm your adrenals (the protectors of your hormones) from these damaging impacts.
- Vitamin D+K. Vitamin D+K [17] is critical for breast cancer healing and almost every aspect of your health. It strengthens bones, stops the growth of breast cancer cells, optimizes mood and energy, boosts the immune system, and provides all sorts of other sunny benefits that you can learn about via this blog post. [20]
Inhale…exhale…and tap in healing!