How You Can Help Others Regulate Stress

The top 2 ways to get your colleague, your friend, your family member out of survival mode, and it's not about what you say. These 2 methods come from the polyvagal theory introduced to us by Stephen Porges back in 2011 in his famous book, The Polyvagal Theory. The book talks about how we regulate ourselves as mammals and how the nervous system works. Basically 3 branches, right? You have the social engagement system, you have the fight-or-flight system, and you have the shutdown system. And based on responding to threats in our environment, our system is first going to look to the social engagement system to try to regulate ourselves, and that's where these two things come up. The first thing is our facial muscles. So when we perceive a threat in our environment, the first thing we're doing is looking to other mammals' facial muscles to see if we're safe or not. The second thing we're paying attention to is vocal prosody, or the tone of their voice. So if our system perceives a threat in the environment and we look to other people in the room and they look scared and their voice is low, we're gonna perceive that there's a real threat and we're gonna go into fight or flight mode. However, the opposite is true as well. If we look around the room and see people's facial muscles are relaxed and inviting, that's going to signal to our system that, hey, there's not actually a threat in the room. The other thing we're looking at is the tone of voice. If their tone of voice is inviting and safe versus threatening and low, we are going to again relax. So how does this tie into you? The next time you're around a disgruntled colleague or friend or family member, stop telling them to calm down. That is just going to put them into a further dysregulated state. You need to be aware of how do Do you look? Do you look inviting? Do you look safe? And how do you sound? Do you sound inviting? Do you sound safe? That will take the wind out of their sails and kick them down a few gears.