The Nervous System Circuitry of Safety, Sound and Gratitude – Stephen Porges

Bulletproof Radio, a state of high performance. You're listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey. Today's cool fact of the day is that gratitude changes patterns of activity in your brain. In the last 15 years, researchers have really just exploded in the amount of effort that they're putting into the science of gratitude. We now know that when you focus on gratitude, it activates your brainstem region that produces dopamine and it can also boost your serotonin levels. But they've also found that gratitude can have a profound and long term neural effect. Like a study at Indiana University Bloomington that focused on people with anxiety or depression. Participants had a gratitude exercise of writing letters of thanks to people in their lives and three months later underwent brain scans. During those scans, all the subjects participated in another gratitude task where they could choose between keeping money for themselves or giving it away. Those who choose to give money away exhibited a specific pattern of activity in their brains. Even months later, they still showed more gratitude related brain activity under a scanner. The team of researchers described this as a profound and long term neural effect simply from focusing on feelings of being grateful. That is awesome. And as you may have predicted, we will be talking about gratitude with a world leading expert, as you've come to expect. And first, I'm going to propose something for you. If you'd like your own personal gratitude exercise like the one just described, find three books that have absolutely changed your life. Go to Amazon and leave a review and thank the author for what they've done for you. And if any of my books are on the list, great. And if they're not, that's okay. Go out there and just say thanks to people who do that kind of work or just write a letter to your mom, whatever it is, do that right now and the world will be a better place and your brain may be better neurologically. Now, today's guest is a returning guest at Bulletproof Radio. He is a distinguished university scientist, surprisingly at Indiana University of Bloomington, where he's the founding director of the Traumatic Stress Research Consortium at the Kinsey Institute. And he's also the guy who created the polyvagal theory, theory of how the vagal nerve works. And if you missed that episode, it was episode number 264. It was one of my favorite episodes of Bulletproof Radio. And Stephen Porges is very well known in medical circles for his deep and profound understanding of how our nervous system works and how gratitude works as well. Stephen, welcome to the show.

Well, thank you, David. And thank you for having me here. A Second time, so we can explore other issues.

Back when I was still in university, you proposed this idea of polyvagal theory to link our autonomic nervous system to our social behaviors. And you looked at the physiological states in what would happen. And people had behavioral problems or even just who were a little bit on the psychiatric spectrum. It's now been. See, that was 1994, so it's been a good 20, a lot of years later. And I guess I'm getting old when I think about that.

Geez.

Anyway, what made you get into this in the first place, Stephen? Like, why the vagal nerve?

Okay. I started with different levels of questions. I was very curious about what was going on in people's minds when they were interacting with me or with others. It was this curiosity that people would say certain things and you knew that they meant something totally different. And I would start looking at cues or facial cues, the intonation of voice, posture, and gesture. And I became, in a sense, a good observer of what people. Of the intentionality of what people really wanted in their interaction. And when I started, there really wasn't a science of this. And I got very interested in this new science when I went off to graduate school in the. Actually, I went to graduate school started in 1966. So we're talking about a long time ago. There was this new branch of science called psychophysiology. And was really the part of science that was really investigating mind body issues or mind body sciences. And of course, that's coming of age now, but it really wasn't of age in the 60s. And the part of it that was really interesting is that people were there trying to measure physiological responses, whether it was brainwave activity or heart rate changes or sweat gland activity. They were trying to measure these as they were parallels or substrates of cognitive functioning and emotional functioning. And I was just extraordinarily intrigued with this. And I started to work on measures of intentionality, which we called attention at that time, attending to something and started to observe on a physiograph on the machine that measures physiological responses, that there were changes in the patterning of heart rate. And thus I saw changes in heart rate variability. And that was before anyone else had quantified heart rate variability, which is now a common variable that lots of people measure.

For listeners who haven't heard the term heart rate variability, can you just define that for them?

Sure. Our heart does not beat at a constant rate. Even though you go to a physician's office, they tell you what your heart rate is. That's just an average of many, many different heart rates over a period of time. So the heart isn't in a sense just waiting there, sitting there, beating at a constant level. It's being affected by our nervous system. And that neural influence provides beat to beat changes in rate. And it creates the rate changes are actually create a pattern. And when the pattern shows nice sinusoidal, nice rhythmic changes, it tends to show good neural control, good neural feedback from our brainstem to those target organs, this case the heart. So but when I started, people were making certain assumptions and one of the assumptions was that the heart was just beating. And when you start to put electrodes to measure the ECG and measure B2B changes, there were unique patterns of how people's heart rate pattern, heart rate changes looked. And what I started to find out there were two important aspects of this initial research. One, that when people got focused or attended, their heart rate patterns became much more stable, meaning the variations of heart rate were greatly reduced. So I started to operationalize that changes in heart rate variability were index of attention. But then the research became much more intriguing because the base levels when people weren't attending, you could make predictions of what their heart rate responses would look like and whether they would or good on attention demanding tests like reaction time. So if they had a lot of systematic heart rate variability, they were the ones that suppressed or reduced the variability the most and they were the ones that had the fastest reaction times. So I got interested in that and that's where it started.

So if you can raise your heart rate variability, it could raise your reaction time and make you less add.

Yes. Well, let me give you the full the issue is if you can control your heart rate variability, you will probably become less addictive.

I did learn to control my heart rate variability and in 2008 I started becoming an advisor to the HeartMath Institute. Just for people listening who don't know the full bulletproof story. It was one of the things that really made a difference is that I didn't realize that you felt different. But there is a connection there and it's a learnable skill. Is why I'm.

Well, let's go through really what we're talking about. Basically the brainstem is the pivot point between higher brain structures in our bodily organs and what we are always looking for. And this is what I would say is my mission in life or mission in science was in search of what I call the intervening variable. Now, coming from a psychology perspective, people would talk about stimulus response and in basic science, people would talk about input and output. And I was actually seeking what goes in between. And that in between variable in scientific models, especially in psychological models, is called a measure of organismic state. What I really was discovering was that if you measure this neural regulation of autonomic state, you could make very strong predictions between stimulus and response. So now coming back to your question. If a person has great difficulty in inhibiting or regulating their behavior, most likely that intervening variable can be detected by measuring heart rate variability and the regulation of it.

That makes a lot of sense. I've. When I spend more time coaching people individually, I would just tell them, you've got to learn how to do your heart rate variability. You know, it's 100 bucks or something for a little sensor to do that. And the feedback from people, whether they were engineers or bankers or anything else, was, it was nothing short of amazing because these people were already performing really well, Would say things like, everything got easier.

Well, they didn't have to fight their body. But there's certain, it says, background events occurring in that process of trying to learn how to control heart rate variability. One is that you tend to change how you breathe. You tend to use more diaphragmatic abdominal breathing, and you tend to extend the duration of exhalations, so you breathe out for longer periods of time, and you breathe in for shorter, relatively shorter periods of time. And that's when you. Now when that, when you start thinking about that, you get at the mechanisms of what heart rate variability is. And those mechanisms are regulating the heart through vagal pathways. And the vagus is this big cranial nerve that goes from our brainstem and goes to many organs, especially the heart, and it goes right to our heart's pacemaker. And when you have a lot of vagal control coming through that nerve to the heart, it inhibits the pacemaker. It basically slows the heart rate up. And then when you change your breathing pattern, meaning when you start to inhale, it takes that inhibitory vagal break off the sinoatrial node, off the pacemaker, and the heart rate starts to go faster. So the heart rate goes slower when we exhale slowly and goes faster when we inhale.

So that is related to the things the military does with a box breath, where they teach people to calm themselves. And that's something that breath work is something I've talked about quite a bit on the show. And it's directly affecting your heart, which is directly affecting the vagal nerve, the order of operations there.

Right, right. But if we think a little differently and we say not we don't use the term affecting the vagal nerve, but affecting the regulation of our autonomic nervous system through the vagal nerve. So we don't want to give intelligence where intelligence is not necessarily there. It's the brain stem that's traveling, sends signals that travel through that nerve. And so when we shift our breathing, as people do when they chant or when they do breathing exercises, it shifts the neural regulation of the autonomic nervous system. And these, in my metaphors, become neural exercises. So singing, breathing exercises, chanting, and even playing wind instruments become a neural exercise that enhances the regulation of those physiological states.

Is this one of those reasons that people who play the didgeridoo are always weird?

We could go there, but I'm not sure we want to, but we could say that. Actually, where I would give you an idea to think about for someone else's episode, is that if you utilize a wind instrument, then for your. Your ability to regulate state, then maybe you are not interacting and regulating with another, or let's say a significant other. Enough.

Oh, interesting.

So this gets at your issue of weirdness, that in. So what polyvagal theory also uncovered was the whole aspect of our evolution, which was to signal conspecifics, those of our species that we were safe enough to come close to, so that we could regulate each other's physiological state, meaning making individuals feel safe. Now, if someone's playing a digitally, I can't even pronounce it, so help me out on that.

Didgeridoo.

Didgeridoo. They're regulating their state without another individual.

Ah, interesting. So there could be relationship things. I actually do have didgeridoo, and I'm not that good at circular breathing. But you look at this very, very long, slow exhales. That was the instrument that came to mind that had the most things. And frankly, most people I know who are really good at playing the ditch are people I really like. But they're also people who are probably not average.

But, you know, even playing a wind instrument, even without circular breathing, using deep abdominal. Just so. When I was trained as clarinetist, there was no real inhalation. It was an active dropping of the diaphragm. It was all passive. Interesting. And that enabled me to play. I could hold my breath or exhale slowly for well over a minute playing music.

One of the things that I learned to do over the last just 20 years of learning to better manage my own biology was to breathing control, sorts of things like that. And I got to the point where I could do one Breath per minute between the inhale and the exhale. And I could do that for minutes at a time, which was sort of strange. But you're just really slowly breathing in, holding for all. It's really slowly breathing out. But I didn't do it by playing a wind instrument very well. All right. I have a question for you though, that goes beyond that. You created a music based intervention called Safe and sound protocol, which 1200 therapists use to improve spontaneous social engagement, reduce hearing sensitivities, improve language processing, and even just people's ability to regulate their states. Tell me about what that is, because that sounds too good to be true, even though I know it's real.

Well, let's simplify this and say that what is this device or this process doing? It's functionally an acoustic vagal nerve stimulator. We have to go back down to that level. And what it's doing, it's modulating acoustic information that our nervous system is waiting for its cues of safety and trust. So when a baby is crying and dysregulated and the mother sings a lullaby, what happens to the baby's physiological state? It calms down. What happens to. If a father who's irritated by a crying baby tries to signal to the baby to stop crying? What does a baby do? Tends to cry more because the father's voice will tend to be at lower frequencies and less melodic. If you have a puppy and your puppy is kind of uncomfortable as puppies are, you talk to the puppy in a petties or mother like voice. And males do very well with talking to their puppies that well, less well talking to their children. So the nervous system is basically prepared to extract signals of safety. And so what we have is a neural circuit that when our body feels safe, it changes the neural tone to the muscles of the face and head. So our voices change, we become less threatening when we talk to each other, the upper part of our face becomes more alive and engaged. And when that occurs, the muscles, the nerves to the muscles in the middle ear start to dampen out low frequency sounds so that we can do better extracting human voice.

Wow.

Now that that whole system, which I call the social engagement system is, is linked to the vagal pathways that go to the heart and also vagal pathways that go to larynx and pharynx that regulate voice. So we can hear it in people's voices, their physiological state. And this goes back to where I started. If we go back to the 60s, while I was interested in this whole area, why did people's voices tell me so much about who they were, more than what they were actually saying. And remember, we live in a culture that says, it's not how I say it, it's what I say. And our nervous system has it totally reversed. It's not what we are saying, it's how you say it that our nervous system responds to.

You remind me of a famous guy named Erickson. I'm hoping I remember which of the famous psychiatrists, psychologists. This was a guy who as a child was paralyzed in bed for a long period of time. It is Erickson, right?

I don't know. I mean, that story, I don't know, but I'm a.

It was a childhood disease. And this guy just laid there. Basically, his sisters had to come in and feed him. And he was so bored as a young man that he started observing the social interactions because he had nothing else to do. And he realized that what people would do with their tone of voice, with their eye movements, with the way they shook their head in a subtle way, the way they would say yes or they would say no, that this was providing so much more information than what they were actually saying, that it led to the creation of a school of psychology. And I bring this up because Robert Greene writes about this in the first rule in his most recent book. This is the guy who wrote 48 Laws of Power and one of my favorite authors on the planet who's about to come back on the show again. But the idea there is when you observe all the small details that no one else sees, and you suddenly have this view, like Neo from the Matrix, who just sees zeros and ones. You're like a Neo in that when you listen to someone speak and when you see them move, you have this complete superpower to understand what's going on. I'm trying to figure out, is this because you have 40 years of clinical experience? Like, how did you get that?

Well, let's have it. First of all, I am not a clinician. So I was a scientist.

Wasn't clinical. All right?

So. So I was a scientist who then got invited into clinical environments. And I. I love the way that people treat me. They say I'm a. I'm a scientist with the heart of a clinician. And I. And I welcome that. And. But how did I get there? I got there through observation and from theory development. Most people who just observe don't go to the next step, which is try to make it into a theoretical system so you can figure it out. And with the theory, you can find Things that you haven't seen, you can actually do the research to identify more things. But there's one point. So when we talk about being able to extract that information is another part of the whole story is that when you extract it, what do you do as a human being? You become available to that other person because you know what that other person really wants. So you become accessible, meaning that your voice doesn't go into high frequencies and start screaming at people. You try not to argue, which is not very easy, especially for an academic from the east Coast. On top of that, all these features we realize when you start looking at the dimensions, you realize that you can't win an argument. There are no arguments that you can win because there's an emotive underlying part of an argument. So that you have to understand that you have to be physiologically safe to have a really good discussion, which might be intellectual debate, but you have to be physiologically safe. And what happens in most interactions, someone loses it. And what does that mean? From my perspective, they're no longer safe.

Now, I'll get a little bit personal here. I was born with the umbilical cord wrapped around my neck. I didn't lose oxygen to the brain or get brain damage or anything like that. And I had no idea this had anything to do with my psychology or anything in my life until I was 30 and really started digging deep. And to this day, even with all the work I've done, if you run one of those psychological profiles where you look at someone's face and you have to identify just as a photo, are they happy or are they angry? I'll see angry face three times faster than I see happy face. And I'm kind of still wired that way.

You're not wired that way. Let's start really picking at your operational definitions. I love it. You're in a state that has a negative bias.

There you go.

Okay. Now if we shifted your state, your bias might and should spontaneously change so that you see what your problem, this is a well known phenomenon, is that I coined a term that I called neuroception, which is our nervous system's ability to detect risk or evaluate risk of the environment without awareness. Right. And what happens is that when you shift states, your perception, this is your cognitions take on a bias. So if you're in a more quote, mobilized state, which we go back to the hyperactivity and the little irritability in your nervous system, your bias would be very much towards negativity.

You know, that has been the case throughout at Least the first half of my life. And I'm really on top of that. And I'm certain that I can rewire myself and I have in lots of different ways. Gratitude, things like that change the pattern in your language there.

So we don't want to use the term rewire. We want to have access to thinking more in terms of portals. Basically. This isn't. We're going to play with the word gratitude for a moment, all right? We're going to say have more gratitude for what you have or what has come into the world with you and don't be so negatively evaluative of. Of who you are that you need to rewire your body in safe environments will start to spontaneously optimize those circuits so that we need to structure narratives that have a degree of positivity so that our nervous system doesn't feel too. Too scared to evaluate it.

And I love the way you say the nervous system feeling too scared. Because I went through this long process where I would feel I wouldn't recognize that I was feeling unsafe because I would think about it and I'd say, well, there's no reason to be afraid right now. So therefore I'm not afraid. Not recognizing that physiologically my body was in that state, but that my brain wasn't, and that mismatch was really confused me for years. And now I'm wired to the wired in. And not in a unflexible way, but just I'm connected to the ability to sense when my body's triggered. And sometimes I don't know why, but at least I can change my behavior.

Well, see, I would play with this. I would say often changing the behavior is not the first goal. The first goal is literally self compassion and respect and witnessing your physiological state and realizing the vulnerabilities of your physiology. And then just like a beautiful suitcase, you take it to a place where it can be safer. You. You basically move your body into a place where it can function. So for people with low thresholds, people who are hyperactive, the environment can be very disruptive, can get their bodies very. People use terms like wired. They don't feel present well what their body is telling them because they're very aware of the body's change. They're not aware of the cues that are sending it on that journey. But as we learn, there are certain cues that do send it. There are cues of safety, and they're cues of danger, and there are cues of life threat. And once we become aware of this, we take on a different responsibility. We say I got to take care of my body. It doesn't do well in these situations. And the irony of all this is once you start taking care of becomes much more resilient. And now you can intrude into these other places. And the paradox becomes our environment doesn't respect that, or, let's say, is ignorant of it. And we say people have to do this. They have to, quote, learn to do this. And the learning is not the strategy. It's the support of their body that is the strategy.

I love the way you said that. And it ties back into that core definition of biohacking that is now a real word in the English language as of last year. The definition that actually isn't the full one in the dictionary, but the one that I wrote when I was creating this field was change the environment around you and inside of you so that you have control over your own biology and that the body will listen to that even if you don't want it to.

Yes. So our first interview, which must be two years ago or so, we got into a discussion on biohacking. I said, stop there or something. That's not the strategy. But I will also tell you what I'm working on. So I am actually finalizing a utility patent which has a lot of these features of reading the body and changing the environment to support the body.

Well, I am exceptionally excited to see that patent as soon as it's visible or just whatever work you're doing based on it, because I think this is one of the keys to unlocking the innate kindness that's built into humans, is you have to feel safe and you have to have enough energy, too. You can feel safe and just be too tired to do anything about it. But if you're energetic and you're not triggered, you're probably going to help other people.

Oh. So let's hold that for a second and let's talk really about the culture. So the culture is a culture of danger and threat. And we're led to believe through all our institutions, education, the media, and everything that our goal in life is to remove threat from our environment. Our nervous systems tells us that's not enough. It says you can remove all the threat, and it doesn't make you feel safe. Your nervous system wants something else. And that's. So if we go back to what safe and sound protocol is, it's trying to give the nervous system that something else, and then you see what spontaneously emerges, and it's really quite spectacular in many individuals. Now, the issue is it works extraordinarily well with kids on spectrum and children with language and learning delays. But now with people with severe trauma it does something different. Many people who have heard me talk, they want to use it if they have had trauma and they, and many of them happen to be therapists. So they'll go and order it and they'll do it by themselves. And they miss the first word of the protocol, which is safe and sound. They, they put it on without the support, without the caring individual to help them regulate. Because the sound of safety to a person with trauma is a trigger. It says you can trust me. And of course a person who's been violated, if someone says trust me, what does their body say? Been fooled once, not going to be fooled again. So initially the body, they'll relax and do it and suddenly they'll get very anxious as the body retracts and tries to protect itself for from those cues. And an astute trauma oriented therapist can now work with a client through those stages.

Now you're listening to this going what the heck? If you've had serious trauma, there's a substantial chance if it happened early in your life, you don't even know you did, which is the case for me.

Yeah, well we can talk about yours and what that is. The reason yours is important from a use the term polyvagal theory is that with a cord around the neck There's a 10. There's a high probability that there's a reduced level of oxygen. Even though your app cars were probably okay and even though your, your perinatal variables were, it doesn't mean that you didn't have a transitory shutting down or the body got this bit of lack of oxygen and then the body kind of recovered. It's like the first hit that creates a vulnerability. It's like a traumatized individual who says my body looks fine but now someone becomes tries to engage me and now it feels like I'm being seduced by a predator because I don't want to be vulnerable. So your body, in fact I've had a many decade long quest, I use the word to study individuals who had babies who survived delivery, who had meconium, which is fetal feces coming out, but then had normal apgars because you get the feces coming out due to a hypoxic episode. A lack of oxygen is part of that ancient reptilian diving reflex which is part in polyvagal theory of the shutdown response. And it's part of what many survivors of trauma they.