Understanding fainting, fear, and the wisdom of the vagus nerve
Someone once told me they believe they faint in the presence of evil.
To some, that might sound far-fetched or even dramatic — but to me, it made perfect sense.
I believe there’s truth in it, though perhaps not in the way it first appears.
When the body detects overwhelming threat, the vagus nerve — the great communicator between brain and body — can trigger an emergency response. It slows the heart, drops the blood pressure, and reduces blood flow to the brain. Consciousness fades, and we faint.
This is called vasovagal syncope, and it’s the body’s most extreme form of self-protection — a complete “cut-out” when survival energy becomes too much to process.
A nervous system that learned fear early
As a young person, I fainted often — sometimes weekly. Especially in church or at school.
It took years before I understood why.
When I was seven, a teacher humiliated me in front of my classmates. At nine, a nun stabbed my hand with a pen and shamed me publicly. Those moments left deep marks — not only in memory but in my nervous system. My body learned that authority, church, and classrooms were dangerous places.
So even when nothing “bad” was happening years later, just stepping into those environments triggered the same fear pathways. My nervous system didn’t distinguish between past danger and present safety. The fainting was my body’s way of saying, “I can’t bear this. I’m shutting down.”
The body’s secret surveillance system
Stephen Porges calls this neuroception — the body’s unconscious ability to detect safety, danger, or life threat.
Unlike perception (which is conscious), neuroception happens automatically, below awareness. It’s an ancient survival mechanism that continuously scans the world around us and inside us, asking:
“Am I safe, or am I in danger?”
It listens to tone of voice, facial expression, posture, energy, and even the spaces between words. It detects micro-signals — the subtle shifts in presence and intention that our thinking brain may never notice.
This means we can feel danger long before we understand it.
We might walk into a room and suddenly feel uneasy. Our stomach tightens, our breathing changes, or our heart races — and we don’t know why. That’s neuroception at work.
When someone says they faint in the presence of evil, perhaps what they’re really describing is this:
Their body perceives a profound energetic or moral threat — something cold, unsafe, or deeply incongruent — and the vagus nerve steps in to protect them from overwhelm.
When words fail, the body speaks
Looking back, I see those fainting episodes not as weakness, but as wisdom.
They were my body’s attempt to manage what I couldn’t process.
What religion called “sin” and psychology might call “trauma,” the nervous system simply calls too much.
The body doesn’t lie. It tells its truth in sensations, symptoms, and sometimes in silence.
And when the cues of safety return — through compassion, connection, and time — the same body that once shut down can begin to reopen, soften, and trust again.
So yes — I do believe there’s truth in the idea of fainting in the presence of evil.
But I see it through a different lens now.
Not superstition. Not weakness.
Just the ancient intelligence of the body — doing its best to keep us alive in a world that sometimes felt unsafe to feel.