“…While the vagus nerve is one of several responses systems contributing to the experience of wellbeing, it has a regulatory role over many including the sympathetic nervous system (Porges, 2011;Deuchars et al, 2018), hypothalamic-pituitary adrenal axis (Porges, 2011), immune functioning (Tracey, 2002;Pavlov and Tracey, 2012), brain-gut interactions (Bonaz et al, 2018;Fülling et al, 2019) neurogenesis and epigenetic mechanisms (Follesa et al, 2007;Biggio et al, 2009;O'Leary et al, 2018). Research now links vagal function to positive emotions (Geisler et al, 2010;Kok and Fredrickson, 2010;Kok et al, 2013), meaning and purpose in life (Zilioli et al, 2015;Dang et al, 2021), emotion regulation (Geisler et al, 2010;Williams et al, 2015), executive function (Williams et al, 2019;Eggenberger et al, 2020), psychological flexibility (Kashdan and Rottenberg, 2010;Colzato et al, 2018), prosocial behaviours (Kemp et al, 2012;Geisler et al, 2013;Kok et al, 2013), positive health behaviours (Werner et al, 2015;Young and Benton, 2018), biopsychosocial resilience (Dedoncker et al, 2021), time spent in nature (Richardson et al, 2016;De Brito et al, 2020) and future morbidity and mortality (Hillebrand et al, 2013;Jandackova et al, 2016;Fang et al, 2020). Various theoretical models have been proposed within which these findings have been interpreted.…”