Jake Burhans explores how your nervous system shapes your emotional state through Stephen Porges' three states: social engagement, fight-or-flight, and shutdown. He recommends The Polyvagal Theory and The Body Keeps the Score to understand how to move out of survival mode into peace.
Books that help me live my life from peace instead of pressure, part 2. The second pillar of living a peaceful life is regulation. This pillar focuses on how your body and your nervous system influence your state of being. My top 2 books are The Polyvagal Theory by Stephen Porges. This is an absolute foundational piece of work from Porges on the nervous system and how it functions. It basically breaks down the nervous system into 3 states, right? The social engagement system, the survival system, and then the shutdown system. So depending on how we respond to threats in our environment, we're going to use our social engagement system to try to get out of survival mode. Then we use fight or flight, and then we go into shutdown mode. So when we understand this, we can begin to work with our body to shift out of survival states the way it was designed to. Second book is The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk, an absolutely phenomenal book. I'm actually currently working through it, but it talks about how trauma is stored in the body and how to move past it. But not only trauma, how the nervous system works and how to work with it so that you can live with more peace. Follow for more on how to build your life from peace instead of pressure.
