The neurochemistry of the vegas nerve is really interesting, and bits and pieces (especially the breathing and heart rate) have been metntioned and touched on many times in other podcasts (Breathing—117, 54, and heart rate). The emphasis on heart rate and exercise with this neuroscience focus is great, as it balances a lot of the tool and practical episodes over the last year or so. My biggest take away, as is often when learning neurological systems, is that phenomena that we take for granted and are parts of life we often feel are out of our control and up to fate/luck/genetics, are actually neural in nature and aspects of that can be controlled. And neurons can change. So by changing our behaviors—breathing, exercising, stress management---we can change our neurons and thus change our brains and effectively ourselves. A really cool phenomena that is core to Hub pod that really comes out mechanistically in an episode like this.