Av Michelle

｜

Published on juni 3, 2026

Fact-checked by Dr Aneesia Satheesan, BAMS, MD, MSc

I’m a 39-year-old graphic designer, and I’ve been tired for three and a half years.

Not the “I had a long week” kind of tired, but the other kind.

Wake up after eight hours and feel like you haven’t slept tired.

Three coffees in and still squinting at the screen tired.

Reach the end of the workday with nothing left for your family tired.

I’d tried clean eating, earlier bedtimes, B12 shots, magnesium, ashwagandha, a sleep app, mouth tape, dawn alarms, infrared blankets, cutting wine, cutting sugar, and two months of personal training that left me more wrecked than when I started.

Things helped at the edges, but the heaviness behind my eyes never really lifted.

After a while you stop looking and you assume this is just how your body is now: you build your day around three coffees and the hope that 8 PM comes quickly, you start declining invitations because the recovery isn’t worth it and you stop being able to remember what not tired even feels like.

Then a mum at my daughter’s swim class mentioned “vagus nerve stimulation.”

I’d never heard of it, and honestly it sounded like one of those wellness things on TikTok…

I almost didn’t bother.

I’d been burned by enough miracle fixes to recognise that tone of voice, the “have you heard about…” and I usually changed the subject. But she’d been a foggy zombie for years too, and at the school pick-up the previous week she’d been awake.

So I asked her about it.

Then I bought one, mostly because of the 30-day money-back guarantee. If nothing happened, I’d send it back.

I decided to keep a journal, day by day, no filter.

Here’s what actually happened.

Day 1–4: The Morning I Couldn't Wake Up From

It came in a plain white box, I clipped it onto my left ear while the coffee was brewing. A faint tingle, not unpleasant, just there.

For three days I felt nothing. I wore it through the morning chaos, same fog, same coffee, same “I need a nap and it’s only 9 AM” feeling.

Jag mailade nästan för återbetalningen.

On day four I wore it for a longer session, about forty minutes while I sat down to work on a client logo at home, and around the half-hour mark, something shifted.

It wasn’t dramatic, and I didn’t suddenly feel energised.

But the heaviness behind my eyes, the one that had been sitting there since 2022, had eased a little. My shoulders weren’t around my ears and I wasn’t already counting the hours until I could lie down.

Not awake exactly, but not dragging either.

Det är det ögonblick jag slutade tänka på att återlämna det.

Day 8–12: The 3 PM Crash That Didn't Come

By the second week, the mornings had started to lift. But the crash was still where I lived.

Every day around 2:45, my brain would just go offline.

I’d reach for more coffee, open the fridge and stare, and seriously consider lying down on my office floor and setting an alarm.

Then came day eleven.

I’d worn the device for half an hour at lunch, got back to my desk, and worked through a client revision. When I looked up at the clock, it was 3:42 PM.

I hadn’t reached for a coffee, hadn’t checked my phone twelve times, hadn’t crashed. I almost didn’t believe it, and I sat there for a minute trying to work out what was different.

It happened again the next day.

And the day after.

I wasn’t energetic – let me be clear about that. I was just not crashing, which after three and a half years of crashing, was the strangest feeling.

Ongoing tiredness like this has been associated with how the autonomic nervous system regulates itself.

When the body has trouble switching between its “on” and “off” states, the result can feel like both at once. Wired and exhausted, going through the motions but never quite recovering, looking fine while running on empty.

That last one, looking fine while running on empty, was the one I’d been doing for years.

Day 16–22: Sleep That Actually Sleeps

Sleep had always been the thing I clung to…

I got eight hours, so why was I still feeling that exhausted?

It turns out “eight hours in bed” and “eight hours of sleep that does anything for you” are very different things.

I’d been wearing the device for an hour before bed for two weeks.

The first night I noticed something different was on day eighteen: I went to bed at 10:30 and woke up naturally at 6:45, and for the first time in I can’t remember how long, I felt like I’d actually slept.

I checked my Oura ring: deep sleep up, REM up, HRV climbing, resting heart rate dropping.

In the mornings I still wake up tired, the difference is huge.

It’s “tired but functional” instead of “tired and broken.”

This was the part I’d given up hoping for.

Day 23–26: I Went Down a Research Rabbit Hole

Around day 24 I started actually wondering why this was working.

I’m not a scientist, but I’m a designer, so I read the documentation when something works without me understanding it.

Here’s what I pieced together.

The vagus nerve is the body’s main parasympathetic pathway, which is the “rest, digest, recover” system. About 80% of its fibres run from the body up to the brain, meaning it’s mostly informing the brain about what’s happening below the neck, not the other way around.

When that system gets stuck (through stress, illness, poor sleep, hormonal shifts, or just years of running on empty), the body can have a harder time switching into recovery mode. You’re tired, but you’re not resting.

Your sleep doesn’t restore you the way it used to and your weekends don’t sort you out.

HRV, which is the most reliable proxy for vagal function, tracks all of this: lower HRV has been linked with persistent tiredness, poor sleep quality, and slower recovery. It’s why my Oura had been showing me low numbers for years and I’d just rolled my eyes at it.

The technology I was using, called auricular vagus nerve stimulation, has been studied in randomised controlled studies, safety reviews, and analyses. A few numbers from that body of research stood out to me:

I won’t pretend I read every paper, but it was enough to convince me that what I was experiencing wasn’t placebo or wishful thinking, and that there was a mechanism behind it.

I went back to my journal that evening with a different attitude: less “is this working” and more “okay, what is it actually doing.”

Dag 30: Vad förändrades

This didn’t make me twenty-five again.

I’m still 39, I still have two small humans who don’t reliably sleep through the night, and some days I’m still tired.

Men:

The 3 PM crash has eased, and I now reach 6 PM with something left in the tank
I'm down from four coffees a day to two
I'm starting to actually enjoy work again instead of just surviving it
My Oura HRV chart has been climbing for three weeks
Most strangely, I've started saying yes to things on weekends, like a friend's birthday, a long walk, dinner out, instead of bracing for the recovery

And the one I really didn’t expect, I’m more patient with my kids in the evenings.

I’m not snapping.

The bedtime routine isn’t the worst hour of my day anymore.

Varför din kropp stannar fast (och hur detta hjälper)

Vagusnerven är den längsta kranialnerven i kroppen.

It runs from the brainstem down through the neck and into the abdomen, branching into the heart, lungs, and digestive system. About 80% of its fibres are afferent, meaning they send signals up to the brain, and only 20% are efferent, sending signals down.

When your body has been stressed, depleted, or running in survival mode for long enough, the parasympathetic side can struggle to do its job properly.

The sympathetic (“go-go-go”) side takes over, and you stop being able to switch off, even when you’re asleep.

This is one reason why ongoing tiredness so often shows up alongside poor sleep, low mood, and slow recovery. They can all be downstream of the same underlying state, a nervous system stuck on alert that has a hard time getting back to baseline.

Auricular vagus nerve stimulation works by sending mild electrical signals through a branch of the vagus nerve that runs close to the skin in the outer ear.

The signal travels up the nerve to the brainstem, which can help support the parasympathetic side of the nervous system.

It’s not a stimulant, and it’s not energy in a bottle.

It’s about supporting your body’s ability to recover, so the energy can come back on its own.

En anteckning på den praktiska sidan

If you’re thinking of trying one, here are a few things I wish someone had told me.

Jag betalade fullt pris, cirka €700.

Det är inte billigt.

I later found out they run a remote research study you can sign up for.

You fill out some forms, share your data, and you get around €40 off.

The other thing that made me commit was the 30-day money-back guarantee. If it hadn’t worked, I’d have sent it back…

That’s what removed the uncertainty for me.

You wear it clipped to your ear, and sessions run from 15 minutes up to two hours. I do thirty minutes in the morning while answering emails, fifteen at lunch, and forty before bed. The sensation is a faint tingle, not painful.

You can wear it while reading, watching TV, or working at a laptop.

Mitt ärliga tag

I’ve spent more money than I’d like to admit on tiredness solutions over the past three years, and most of them disappointed me.

This one didn’t.

It hasn’t given me my pre-kids energy back, because that’s not how this works. But it’s given me my afternoons back, my evenings, my patience, and the ability to look forward to a Saturday instead of dreading it.

For the first time in three and a half years, I’m not just dragging myself.

Det är den mest ärliga sammanfattningen jag kan ge.

Du kan läsa mer här.

Detta blogginlägg syftar till att vara informativt och bör inte ersätta professionell hälsorådgivning. Rådgör alltid med en vårdpersonal för personlig rådgivning.

I Used a Vagus Nerve Device for 30 Days to See If It Could Help With My Constant Tiredness… Here’s What Happened