The Science of Safety & Trauma with Dr. Stephen Porges

The problem with trauma is that we tend to define trauma by event and not by response. So if we were, in a sense, better witnesses of ourselves and others, we would realize that the event changes the probability of the feeling. But the way of predicting is really to see or ask the individual, how did you feel? What happened to your body?

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Our mission is to decode the neurobiology of flow and cognitive peak performance, access the minds of maverick scientists, groundbreaking innovators, and world-leading experts to understand what it takes to achieve ultimate human performance so you can feel your best, perform your best, and accomplish your boldest goals. I'm your host, I'm Ryan Dorris, and together with best-selling author Stephen Kotler, I present to you Flow Research Collective Radio. Stephen Porges, welcome to Flow Research Collective Radio. It's absolutely great to have you here.

Thank you for inviting me. It's a pleasure to meet you and to be live, well, or recorded with you. So thank you.

I appreciate that. Yeah, it's going to be a really fun conversation, and I wanted to start off just by Reading some of your own words back to you and getting your take on this quote, which is from your book, The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation. And in this passage, you say, by processing information from the environment through the senses, the nervous system continually evaluates risk. And you say, I have coined the term neuroception to describe how neural circuits distinguish whether situations or people are safe, dangerous, or life-threatening. Because of our heritage as a species, neuroception takes place in primitive parts of the brain without our conscious awareness. So to kick us off, I was wondering if you could elaborate on neuroception.

Yeah, well, thank you. I've actually kind of updated it a little bit because virtually every living organism has a neuroception of threat. It detects risk and basically tends to go into some type of defensive mode. But through the evolution, uh, that led to mammals, or what I call the phylogenetic journey from asocial reptiles to social mammals, there was a repurposing of our physiology, of our autonomic nervous system, and there was also a repurposing of neuroception. Now that nervous system detected cues of safety, and the magic word or the pivotal word is detection and not perception. If we were to use the word perception, we would start blaming people for not detecting things because we'd assume that there was an intentionality. But by moving it down to an automatic level, which is much more adaptive to reflexively react to cues that are either safe or dangerous, we can both move into states that support our defense systems of mobilization or disappearing, shutting down, or turn off threat with cues of safety. And I think what polyvagal theory brings to the fore is this acknowledgement that we as social mammals have a toolkit on board, and that is that we react and respond to cues of safety and turn off our threat reactions. So the world for humans is not just a world of removing threat, it's a world in which we want threat to be removed, but we need more. We need cues of safety. And the model for cues of safety, of course, are the mother's intonation of voice, facial expressivity. And we're still in a sense, we're there, we're vulnerable to a modulated voice, a sweet-talking person. We're very sensitive to individuals whose voices are melodic. And we're very sensitive to people who are facially expressive that join us in, because that's how our body reacts. Our body reacts to those features as cues of safety.

That's a really great breakdown. So one of the core points I got there is that it's, it's not just about the subtraction of threat, it's about the addition of, of safety cues.

Absolutely. And the problem is that it's a hard thing to, to put into practice because our culture is so objectively focused on removing threat. You know, that's why we have armies, that's why we have missiles. The whole idea is that we offset threat with additional threat. We don't offset threat with cues of safety. But that's how our nervous system works. Our nervous system works to offset cues of threat with cues of safety. That's why, like during the pandemic— the pandemic has been this really challenge to our nervous system, a paradoxical challenge, because it's a true threat. You know, our body's under threat. There's a pandemic out there. But what has been the go-to mechanism to mitigate threat for, for social mammals? And we're social mammals, and that is to interact with our own species. So for us, social behavior. But what happened during the pandemic? The opportunity to behave socially or interact with others became a threat. So it's a very complicated situation that the public health message was to remove threat. Don't interact with people, stay away from potential pathogen. But the nervous system needs interaction. So for some of us that we, we live with someone we get along with, we're able to have a degree of social interaction that calms us down. For many people, it's their pets more than their spouses or their partners that enable them to calm down. Social pets, social pets.

I could definitely imagine that. Yeah, dog is probably going to be better than a goldfish.

Well, exactly. Exactly, but a dog may be better than a spouse even, because the dog's nervous system is totally tuned to your emotional state. So if you use a voice with a low pitch, without a— it's monotonic, so you start talking down there without inflection, the dog will interpret that as a threat cue or something's wrong. And if you gaze over to a well-engaged dog, they will take that as a cue that they've done something wrong too. So, so we need to be very sensitive. But the pandemic, of course, has shifted so many people's nervous systems, retuned them into a more chronic state of threat, and now they're just literally bombarding each other in, in the family unit and their kids with cues that are not cues of safety.

So I want to come back to other examples of safety cues in a moment, but before we do that just to ensure everyone's up to speed, I'm going to ask you a question that I'm sure you've had to answer thousands and thousands of times over the last few decades, which is just to break down what polyvagal theory is.

Sure. The, the quick way of telling that story, which is what I often say, the least— the story I least like to tell because it can go on and on, you know, it's like 30 years of work or more. Um, but if we think about one important point, and that is our physiological physiological state. Our physiological state influences how we react to the world. So in more scientific terms, we would call it a mediating variable—mediates how we react to external stimuli, gives us categories of response—or in psychometric statistics, it's an intervening variable. And the issue is, when we learn about behavior, whether it's through an educational model or conditioning learning models, we think of it as a deterministic model. We give people information, they process, they give a response. We tend to be less aware or cognizant there's anything in between. You know, we talk about, oh, the bright person will take the information and process it, so intelligence is that mediating variable. And what we have forgotten is the personal experience. If our body is in a state of fight-flight or in a state of defense, we don't process information on a learning curve very well. So we have to acknowledge that the physiological state that we're in determines in part how we react to the world, how we learn, how we interact with each other, and how we create cooperation, how we create community, and how we socialize with others. Now, what polyvagal theory does, it tells you more. It tells you what those different physiological states are, and that those physiological states are basically a mirror of the evolutionary history of the neural regulation of our visceral organs or our autonomic nervous system, and where the newest ones are really this kind of a social system, and where social behavior, facial expressivity, vocalization are linked to calming mechanisms of our heart and our viscera. So when we are happy, when we are functionally feeling safe, where safety is not operationally defined by not having threat cues but by a bodily state we become spontaneously emergent, spontaneously social, and we become co-regulators of each other. It's our natural predisposition is to interact and co-regulate. But when our body gets into states of threat, and we tell people that if you're in that state, you need to socially interact, the cues will not work. People will give hugs and they'll be rigid. People will pull back, people will gaze avert. The body is in a sense taking the lead, even though the mind is saying being social, the body is saying, "I'm not accessible for that sociality." And we know that physiology, as people use the term sympathetic arousal or in states of fight-flight, but the bottom line of it is our nervous system is in a threat state. So anxiety is another word we use for a label of when our physiology is now in this state of defense. So that is evolutionarily older than a new circuit which links face with vagal regulation of the heart. And that new circuit we're going to call in polyvagal theory, the ventral vagal pathway, because it comes from a brainstem area that is, excuse me, ventrally in the front part of the body. So now we have a sympathetic nervous system, a ventral vagal circuit that's linked with the nerves that regulate the striated muscle of the face and head, so vocalization and facial expressivity. But now the oldest evolutionary circuit is functionally a dorsal vagal circuit, comes from the back of the head. And when this circuit, which is very useful in supporting health, growth, restoration, and it's very useful in regulating organs below the diaphragm, but when this circuit is recruited in defense, we can either totally collapse, pass out, we can defecate, or we can have gastric pains. And just think of kids who don't want to go to school because they're intimidated or bullied. It often gets reflected in their gut. Think of society in the prevalence of irritable bowel syndrome. That's basically saying that this older circuit is being recruited in defense. If it were recruited in a state of safety, it would support our homeostatic processes. So we have this evolutionary hierarchy. So you now have a rule about how the autonomic nervous system gets recruited to serve our adaptive functions. When we are safe and have cues of safety, we are spontaneously engaging, and sociality becomes a portal to help basically support our physiology, our health, growth, and restoration. When we're under a state of danger or threat, we take away, we retract reflexively through those neuroception processes, we take away that social engagement. It enables our heart rate to be more rapid, and our autonomic nervous system not to be impeded by a constraining system that keeps it calm. You take away the brake and now the system, if needed, can really be expressive. And that's our fight-flight sympathetic nervous system being— so sympathetic being used in defense would be called fight-flight. Sympathetic being used in safety would be called exuberance and excitement, passion. And then we have this older circuit, this dorsal one, and when that's used in defense, we shut down. We— and ancient vertebrates that are way back in the evolutionary journey of vertebrates, and mammals are the newest vertebrate, those ancient vertebrates, their primary defense system was to immobilize, stop breathing, and appear to be dead. And that was a regulator when there wasn't enough food, wasn't enough oxygen, and they could just be dormant. —but we don't have that option because we need oxygen. So that's the short bit: that those different states which are triggered by nociception are ordered in an evolutionary hierarchy in which the newer circuits inhibit or contain or constrain the older circuits.

So I, a few days ago here in Mexico City, got really, really bad food poisoning. And, uh, I had a— my heart rate variability went down to 7, uh, so single digit 7, and my heart rate was 105 or something like that, and that was while I was asleep. So I think that that would be an example of sort of acute sympathetic dominance in response to something physiological.

Yeah, you exactly. But you have to again sit back and interpret it from the intelligence of what your body is doing. If you have a pathogen, something in the food, often fever is useful. Often increasing metabolic output is how you raise the temperature to kill the pathogen. Now you do that, you can't get the heart rate up to those chronic high levels because your pacemaker is really at a level of, let's say, 60 beats per minute, 65. If we took the vagus off the heart, your heart rate would be more like 90 to 120. But if we put the vagal activity on it from that ventral vagus, your heart rate can be anywhere from 60 to 85, you know, depending upon your fitness. But if you take that vagus off, you allow the heart to metabolically, with more cardiac output, uh, deal with what's going on. It's a threat reaction, and you're literally giving permission to the sympathetic nervous system to say, the field is yours, do what you need to do. And in your case, it was get that vagus off, lower that heart rate variability, allow the sympathetics to do what they want, and they'll burn the illness out of you.

Right. And in this case, it was, it was very useful and it did burn the illness out of me very effectively. However, what I'd love to ask you about is sort of chronic sympathetic dominance where heart rate variability, and obviously those are physiological correlates to something that is causally distinct from that. But what drives sympathetic dominance in a chronic fashion where people are stuck in a 9 out of 10?

Well, let's just start off by saying you can only get to that state if your ventral vagal circuit, your social engagement system, this newer mammalian vagus, is basically told to turn itself off, so when— or to be withdrawn or to be minimized. And when does that occur? It occurs when your nervous system is detecting threat. And when you talk about chronic sympathetic dominance, rephrase it in your mind and say, is that individual in a state of chronic threat? Now, we'll often use the term chronic stress And then we start to blame the individual for being stressed and say, why, why are you stressed? You have nothing to be stressed out. Take a deep breath, smile, and get on with it. But their body is too smart, and what their body is telling you when they're in that sympathetic dominance is that their nervous system has evaluated the context, the environment, as being threatening, chronically threatening. And this leads to other types of clinical labeling. Anxiety disorders. If rather than thinking of anxiety disorder as, quote, uh, related to events or anticipations of events, if we think of it, the body's been retuned to be in a state of threat. And how do we get the message to the nervous system that it's no longer threatening, or that the environment's no longer threatening? And that's, in a sense, the role of, I would say, a more somatically informed psychotherapy, or even, you know, a self-regulatory strategy So people who try to regulate themselves, they do more of a body scanning and more of an awareness of their own body and feedback loops, and may often do breathing. And breathing is actually a wonderful toolkit because that ventral mammalian vagus gets turned off during inhalation. So you may see in anxious people that their breathing patterns are focusing on inhalation, not on exhalation. So they're literally gasping and not exhaling slowly. Their phrases may be short because if you have long phrases, you're exhaling slowly.

I love the phrase, the nervous system evaluates the environment as threatening. In some ways, that sounds like quite a good descriptor for trauma.

Yeah. So I would say the problem with trauma is that we tend to define trauma by event and not by response. So if we were, in a sense, better witnesses of ourselves and others, we would realize that the event changes the probability of the feeling, but the way of predicting is really to see or ask the individual, how did you feel? What happened to your body? In my own research, what we're using— I'm using a term which I call a retuned autonomic nervous system. So people who have survived trauma the nervous system has literally learned on a single trial that it can't be accessible, so it has to be defensive, because accessibility, trusting another, is really risky once you've been injured. And survivors of trauma will explain that as well. And the survivors of trauma tell you what's really happening, because they tell you that their intentions, their desire in life, is to be safe in the arms of another. But when they approach that, uh, that people are getting too close to them, they have to push the relationship away because the body is now feeling that vulnerability. I like to think of this continuum of a common construct, and that is vulnerability and accessibility. So if accessibility is where you are on this continuum, your arms are open, your ventral side is open, you're giving people hugs. But if vulnerability is where you are, those same behaviors result in rigidity and defensiveness because your body is no longer accessible. Because if you become accessible and you have this trauma history and a retuned nervous system, that accessibility is a trigger of vulnerability.

So it's, it's the nervous system's evaluation of the event that determines the implications of the trauma.

Yeah, the beauty of this— so I was this morning, uh, was watching a series of videos that I have to comment on for a conference, and they were about— it's all about resilience. And one was about literally a person who dove off the Golden Gate Bridge and survived. And when he jumped, he knew he made a mistake, is what he's saying. So it was like, I want— but what he was telling in his, in this interview was that his body had, had a journey. His mind had a different one. His body said, you have to commit suicide, it's too painful. His mind said, I want to live. And this is this dialogue that people are always going through. And in many times, or many cases, they'll— they allow— they got to be very careful using this term, they allow. Their body takes charge, and part of their therapeutic model of dealing with this is to be aware and respectful of that bodily drive, but not necessarily act it out. So it's like you become your own Buddhist. You say, I have this feeling, but I don't need a narrative for that feeling. I am experiencing this, Once I start creating a narrative, I now have to complete it. So it's like saying, I have this visceral feeling, it has a range of uncomfortableness, let me explore it. You know, and so in a sense you diffuse it by honoring the feeling without labeling it, or without what I call giving it meaning. As you give it meaning, it starts literally driving people's lives. I think that's how people who are anxious and who don't really understand what their own anxiety is. They think it's the task that they haven't completed and that has to get done, but complete that task, there'll be something else because their body needs them to keep moving. Because if they don't move, there's going to be vulnerability. And this is the issue of understanding that adaptive function of the fight-flight system. It keeps you out of shutting down. So if you have a severe trauma history in which your body shut down, high-risk behaviors and mobilization keep you out of it. Doesn't make you social, doesn't make you happy, but it keeps you out of shutting down. So the question is, do I want to live my life as a highly anxious person running around and trying to make meaning out of doing without having meaning through relationship? The answer is most people are really frustrated that they can't get to that next stage. And that next stage is that their bodies have to become accessible, and they have to be a welcome portal to cues of safety, which means they have to understand that it's a different physiological state that enables them to be accessible and engaging.

So that relates directly to our audience and the focus of much of our work, which is on peak performance and leadership. And I'm curious what you've seen over, you know, all the years of advancing this research as some of the biggest impediments that emerge in people's ability to succeed and produce the results they want in their life. Due to these maladaptive strategies and due to, you know, a sort of dysregulated ANS, autonomic nervous system.

Yeah, I'm very autonomic-centric, but because the model is not a causal model, it's that intervening. So if we talk about performance in terms of cognition, performance in terms of sporting events, performance on all levels have to do with are we good regulators of our state or is our state regulating us? So it's almost like saying, I need to be angry to perform. Forget it. Um, you know, in certain, uh, competitions, anger may benefit you for this short period of time, but it doesn't— it puts you in— you miss cues. So, you know, in terms of like performance in martial arts, it's all about breath, it's all about detection, it's all about slowing time up. How do you slow time up? You slow it up by calming your body down. So whenever we, we get to questions, whether it's performance or even spirituality or learning, it's all going to have a state-related component. And we have to literally step back and ask the question: if we're scared out of our minds, are we going to be good competitors? Are we going to be spiritual people? Or are we going to be— and can we be social? And the answer is, if we're scared out of our minds, or meaning our bodies are under chronic threat, Who are we? In a sense, we are in a sense defining ourselves based upon what I call the wrappers of our society, which are the demands placed on us and not allowing who we are to be expressed, the core.

Hey, it's Joshua with the production team. Thanks for listening to Flow Research Collective Radio. Before we dive back into our conversation, there's something to consider. It may be that today We are under-challenged. We're drowning in comfort. Now, in his book Antifragile, statistician Nassim Taleb pointed out something that's of key importance. Quote: "Undercompensation from the absence of challenge degrades the best of the best. The best horses lose when they compete with slower ones and win against better rivals." Now, put another way, who we could be, or our highest potential, is squandered by safety, coddled by comfort. If you want to train with us at the Flow Research Collective, it will require boldness, but what's life without a little adventure, right? To learn more about how you can get more flow in your life and achieve your professional and personal goals in less time and with more ease, go to getmoreflow.com. If you're a good fit, we'd love to train with you. All the best.

What are some of the tools you recommend in order to be able to regulate? I know you mentioned self-regulating strategies, and then there are I suppose, non-self-regulating strategies that involve other people, like psychotherapy. So I would love to get a breakdown of just the full array of tools that you recommend.

Well, the first thing I would say is awareness. We need to be aware of who we are before we fix ourselves. In this sense, you're asking for a toolkit to fix. And this is very consistent with how we see the world. If something's broken, we fix it. But when it comes to our body, our body really wants to be heard. So rather than quote fixing it, which at times they mean not responding to it, it's like when people are anxious and they said we have to fix that, don't be anxious so you can perform. What are they doing? Some of them are taking anti, you know, beta blockers, and other people are going through meditative processes that are not necessarily processes to develop awareness of body, but processes of numbness. So what we want is, in a sense, to honor what our body's doing and literally give it a cue that doesn't have to be defensive. So the cue I mentioned, breathing, and breathing just gives, in a sense, sticks your toe into the door because breathing is a powerful manipulator of physiological state. And when you manipulate it, you can start seeing that your world changes based upon your perception of the world during inhalation versus exhalation. So I used to do, uh, in my workshops, I would have people pair off and do a breathing exercise of 10 breaths of slow inhalations and fast exhalations, and then 10 breaths of fast exhalations— fast inhalations and slow exhalations. And when you do that slow exhalation, the vagal effects start becoming prominent and you calm down. When you do a slow inhalation, you're turning off the vagus and you're literally mobilizing the body. Now, what I found out was that when people did this, when they did the long inhalations, uh, they were looking at the person who was monitoring them and they were saying to themselves, did I do something wrong? So the long inhalation of turning off the vagus created a negative bias of the world around them. They thought they're not doing it correctly. And of course, what they are also doing is sending a cue to the other based upon their face, where the neural regulation upper part of the face is most likely dampened during long inhalations, and the person who's looking at them is saying, "Not a person I want to know." And then when they reverse it and do this slow exhalation, this was a frequent comment, people would say, "Wow, I'd like to get to know that person." It's like you're sending these cues. So it meant that our facial expressivity is kind of linked to this visceral state, but the visceral state has an open portal, and that is breathing. Other people can do visualizations, so they do visualizations of calming and meditative-type processes, but the bottom line in all of this is that the portals into that physiological state are actually literally wired. So we know that visualization through top-down will change our visceral state. We know that breathing using instructions that is top-down down, but the bottom up from our lungs can actually move us into different states. And the portal that I work a lot with is using acoustic stimulation, because as we listen to cues of prosody, like a mother's voice, we're sending information up to higher brain structures that are reflexively coming down to that brainstem area and calming us down. And that's how a mother's voice works. There's certain frequencies, modulation of frequencies that are built built into our DNA. We look for that. And actually, all social mammals have a frequency band that I call the frequency band of perceptual advantage. It's where all the social communication occurs with vocal mammals. So it's kind of nifty. And the interesting part is that those who are watching this, who have pets like cats and dogs or horses, know this. They know that if they speak in a certain intonation their pets become extremely receptive and engaging. And it always will be, in a sense, a hyper-melodic feature. So increasing the intonation of the voice is what's going to calm the pet down. So if you talk to your cat or your dog, you talk with a very prosodic intonation, sing-songy voice. It's wired in. That's how mothers calm their babies.

I actually used to work with someone who would use a very hush, prosodic voice in an incredibly manipulative way, unfortunately. He would sort of talk like that, and yeah, kind of this really soft voice, but the things he was saying in that voice were incredibly just not good. Yeah, hijacking physiology.

Yeah, well, I had a friend in graduate school who could say anything. However, if I said it, I'd be kind of like, I'd be on the ground, someone would be beating me up because, you know, it was the— so your friend was doing the same thing, that we get mismatches. And we know that the intonation, how people use their voice, determines whether we feel comfortable with that. So like with your friend and the bad things he was saying, like, my friend, you wouldn't agree with him, but you still like him. Now, people, people who would say nice things without intonation, you say, well, you know, then, you know, so what? Yeah, it's— I'm always reminded of what I had heard about Bill Clinton as when he was president, and that the story went that when the Republicans would come over to the White House for a meeting, they would leave very happy not knowing what they had agreed to. So it says the— because he had a very hyper-prosodic voice. In fact, to me it was too sing-songy, but it triggered the physiology of those around him and they became, it says, accessible.

Right, right. Yeah, you can, you can in a sense leverage safety cues. Yeah. To, to manipulate the physiology. Yeah. In good or bad ways.

Yeah, but you can only— if you do it in a bad way, it will only work once, and then the nervous system of the survivor in this case gets re-triggered and becomes, uh, in a sense resistant to intonation of voice. This is what you find with people who have been severely traumatized by a social interaction that could be characterized by a violation of trust. And the point is, if we can think, think of it, the intonation of voice is a liquid trust. It's acoustic trust. Acoustic trust.

That's a really interesting way to put it. And I think there's definitely a case to be made for leaders using prosodic tonality and some of these strategies in an ethical way to downregulate the nervous systems of their—

Yeah, but here's the problem. I mean, you're bringing up a functional and a practical application. The answer is most people don't have that much control over their intonation of their voices. So in the world that you're in, I'm sure you've met many people that you would call tightly wrapped and anxious. What's their voice like? Do you need even to see them? Right, yeah, it's sort of shrill and without much, uh, variation. So the prosody is gone. The reason for that is through this wonderful evolutionary process where we became social mammals, the vagal regulation of the heart, the area of the brainstem that regulate our heart, are basically the organs above our diaphragm. That area migrated from that dorsal area of the brainstem to a ventral area that regulate the muscles of the face and head. So the muscles that regulate intonation, laryngeal and pharyngeal, are regulated by vagal nerves. So it's a parallel to what's going to your heart. So what you're getting, rather than measuring heart rate variability with sensors, you're intuitively— your acoustic system, your nervous system, your neuroception is evaluating vagal regulation, visceral state, from the intonation of voice. So, but what I'm really saying is that part of it has a degree of voluntary input but in general, it's reflecting that tonic physiological state. So if your nervous system is in a state of chronic threat, anxiety, fear, your voice is going to project that. And that was the adaptive importance of that linkage. We conveyed to each other what was going on, but it also— we were able to calm each other by one of us at least not being in that state of fear or threat.

Yeah, and I think that, that, that piece, being able to be the one who is downregulating at least their own nervous system, I would argue is an important element of leadership, being able to downregulate. Because it— because to your point about co-regulation, it, it, it is in a sense contagious, you know, it will calm the other person as well.

Oh, absolutely. And I think your point, intuitively, whenever someone takes on a leadership role, I've always found this kind of remarkable because I had been a university administrator at one time. And that was the day you become that administrator, your colleagues think someone has, in a sense, implanted a bunch of knowledge and wisdom with— it was just given. You're supposed to know everything. You're supposed to be the parent. And so, so your views, your judgments are not equivalent to theirs because you're the chairman now, or you're the dean. And the point is that, you know, we are— we're a social species, and we're always kind of looking for parents or surrogate parents, those who will be open and good witnesses of who we are, and those who will want to be helpful, make us feel safe.

Yeah, Gabor Maté talks about the power of the empathic witness, which I'm imagining is very much so related to that. One of the things, Stephen, I wanted to ask you is what some people, and I'm assuming it's more so within academia, question about the polyvagal theory. If you had to create an ironman argument against the polyvagal theory, what would be the—

Okay, so what's out there is a straw man argument because the arguments are actually not what the Polyvagal Theory states. So it's quite, quite an interesting phenomenon. I actually wish that the arguments had some validity because it helps you retune knowledge, but they're actually—

Well, I would love to hear then, so what is the straw man argument people make? And then, and then, okay, what is the difference between the straw man argument?

First of all, the straw man argument is actually being— was made by a couple of people who obviously didn't read the theory, because even the title of the major first major paper was Functionally Mammalian Modifications of Our Evolutionary Heritage. So everything about Polyvagal Theory is really focused on this transition between asocial reptiles to social mammals, a journey of sociality. The straw man argument goes back to very ancient Vertebrae, where they have identified in some fish a myelinated pathway in an ancient vertebrae, and therefore, which comes from the dorsal nucleus. And therefore, since they have found a myelinated pathway back there in this ancient bit, polyvagal theory can't be correct, because polyvagal theory emphasizes the myelinated vagal pathway that comes from the ventral vagus and basically states that's unique to mammals. Well, it is unique to mammals, and what they had quoted was that I had misquoted me by saying that I made a statement that only mammals had myelinated vagal pathways. And what I said— I went back and looked at exactly what I wrote— I said myelinated vagal pathways from this area called the ventral vagal complex is uniquely mammalian on this evolution. I didn't say anything about you only a myelinated pathway. And there are multiple places where they think they have undermined the theory by showing something in a more ancient vertebrate, but that's not the question. The question is what happens between reptiles and mammals, and how does the autonomic nervous system get repurposed. So it's— there's a series of what I call misquotes, and that becomes a strawman argument. And the fact that, you know, a couple of the papers have been published in peer-reviewed journals doesn't make— because those are the statements in their discussion, uh, doesn't make their findings undermining the theory. It means that the scholarship was pretty shoddy. And, uh, I— if I were to criticize the theory, I would criticize it on other levels. So I, I wouldn't criticize it on this phylogenetic evolutionary work because I did a lot of scholarship there. And when I wrote the original papers, it's highly documented. And if they felt that I made a mistake, it has to do with a misinterpretation of the literature. And they never criticized the interpretation of literature. They just said it was wrong and they have found this. So they never really read the theory or read the justification of it, which, you know, to me is a little bit on the disturbing side because I have my own belief system that academics are supposed to be scholarly. And if you put things down, you at least should substantiate in a valid way. Now, if I were to criticize the theory, I would, in a sense, argue more in terms of, uh, the hypotheses that are— can be generated from the theory. Have they been validated? It yet. So concepts like neuroception, which have a lot of, uh, let's say, uh, clinical validity when you use it and you talk to survivors— what is the documented research? Where is the neuroimaging of this? And there's some people working on that, but, you know, it's not— the science isn't totally documenting that. But it's a, I would say, a set of constructs that have neurophysiological plausibility. So that I would go at. I would also, uh, and I actually want to add one area myself, and that is, uh, the recruiting of, uh, dorsal vagal, the old vagus that shut you down. Well, we know that, uh, reptiles do this, and we also know that preterm babies do this. In a sense, they get bradycardia under threat. But do we know that that adults, when under life threat, do they go bradycardic as well? Does their heart rate start to slow down? I've gotten a lot of emails and clinical communication saying, yeah, this occurs, but how do you manipulate this? How do you create the situation where you can document that there are still sufficient number of vagal pathways to shut you down? So I've been waiting for that literature to be developed. Developed. And but the issue is the theory provides a framework for hypothesis testing. The pandemic was really a wonderful period of time, uh, to test the hypothesis and to test how autonomic state self-reported was actually this intervening or mediating variable of how people dealt with, uh, the pandemic. And we start off by looking at trauma history, looking of adversity symptoms and mental health outcomes in individuals that did not get the pandemic. And there's a relationship— more trauma history, it's like a pre-existing condition. But virtually all the predictive variance of trauma history was accounted for by a measure of— a subjective measure of autonomic reactivity, just asking the person about their autonomic responses on a day-to-day basis. Accounted for virtually all the predictive validity or predictive variance of their trauma history. So it showed that with that knowledge, we're no longer deterministically saying that trauma causes vulnerability, mental health vulnerability, due to COVID. We're saying trauma most likely disrupted autonomic function, and autonomic function results in poor mental outcomes. That's an optimistic story that says that if we can get a portal into that autonomic nervous system and retune it, optimize it back, then people's lives become better. And I think that's the message of polyvagal theory. It says this system reacts, it reacts in two directions: it can support more defense, or it can become accessible and support co-regulation. And now many of the trauma therapies have embraced polyvagal theory and are trying to move people's physiological state into this more accessible level through cues of safety. And the intervention we developed called the Safe and Sound Protocol, which uses acoustic stimuli to trigger that ventral vagal circuit, is being used in many of those situations now. That's a really great breakdown.

So the pieces you would question yourself are the inferences, the if X then Y. Yeah. And that's where more research is needed.

Yeah, I see. To me, okay, so when I start this whole idea of a polyvagal theory and published the first paper in '95, I saw it— okay, I saw it as sitting on the shoulders of a long history of science. I didn't see it as paradigm-breaking. I saw it as the natural next step. And because it was— it's almost like doing a Rubik's Cube. You look at the literature and now you find the answer. The answer to the question really was, in the neonatal intensive care unit, bradycardias are lethal, meaning slowing the heart rate of a preterm baby will die— they'll die. Uh, and the neonatologist said, that's a vagal phenomenon. And I was working in, uh, neonatal intensive care unit at that time, and I said, well, beat-to-beat heart rate variability is vagal. And when babies have that, they're resilient, they're more positive in their outcomes. How could the vagus be both, uh, support health, growth, and restoration, and be lethal? And that was the question I asked that led me to the Polyvagal Theory. And the answer was two different vagal pathways with different adaptive functions. The pathways are coming through the same nerve nerve. So polyvagal theory reconceptualized the vagus as a conduit that has fibers, pathways, coming from different areas in the brainstem. And those different areas had different evolutionary functions and histories. And when you separate them, the world became quite obvious on the clinical level. So what you had was the clinical world leading to that question. You also had development, because when a preterm baby is born, their autonomic nervous system is more reptilian than mammalian. So they have tachycardia, increased heart rate, and bradycardia, and not heart rate variability. And then you see the next part of the theory. So you see it maturationally, you see it clinically, because clinically you start seeing the de-evolution or dissolution of how our autonomic nervous systems work. And that is, we use our newest circuits first and then our oldest ones last. So the first one is I'm socially engaged, you challenge me, I still use it, and then I retract it, and which allows my sympathetic nervous system to be defensive. But if that doesn't get me out of it, like if I'm strapped into an airplane, the airplane is doing some unusual things, I may just totally shut down. And when you walk into the world of survivors of trauma, they say this is the script from Polyvagal Theory is their life. And rather than being blamed for not moving, they now understood what their body was doing. It was, in a sense, attempting to enable them to survive. So they learned to honor a physiological reaction that they had been really literally angry at their body for not giving them the power to fight off the predator.

That's a great breakdown, Stephen. Thank you for that. And I know we're just coming up on time here, so I want to just wrap with 2 quick questions that we close on generally. The first one is, if you could recommend to our audience to do between 1 and 3 things, 1 minimum, 3 maximum, to downregulate their nervous systems and mitigate sympathetic dominance, what would those 1 to 3 be?

Let's just start off by saying I think I think we need to be a good witness of ourselves and a witness of others. So there's an importance about not trying to fix things, but trying to first learn to be aware of who we are and what we are. So it's the honoring of our bodily state. I think we tend to say, oh, I'm anxious, I need to do these things to calm down. And now we're anxious about doing the things to calm down. We're in a— we're a community. Polyvagal theory is more about the emergent properties of being in different states. And so your focus on flow is the same thing. It's the emergent property of being in a physiological state that is not a state that is supporting fight-flight defensiveness. So it's a state that enables expansiveness and greater resource of whatever you are, whatever you're doing. So the first thing is this awareness and it leads into a level of honoring one's own state. And we can even use the word— it's really a practice of self-compassion, which means that we don't evaluate that state. So that— so when you start the question, it really had to do with evaluating the state. I'm saying the first step is no evaluation. It's honoring it and understand what that state does for you, and literally say that state is a remark— you know, almost like praying to it. Look what it's done for me, you know. And then, and then, but it doesn't have to be on all the time, you know, you know. So in a sense, you honor it, you don't demand from it. Because what we end up doing is when we have deficits, we basically try to compensate. And if the deficit is an inability to calm, we will never reach calmness by trying to fight off the deficit that we can't become. The first one is the awareness of where we are, the honoring of it, the patience, the self-compassion, and the ability to witness oneself. The second one is functionally a series of neural exercises in which we move state and become aware of state. This can be done through breathing, it can be done through movement. If you're an exercise person, before you exercise, take a few minutes, visit your body, visit the feelings inside your body. And then when you go and do the treadmill or the elliptical, whatever you're doing, and your, you know, your heart rate's up there, sit still for a minute, listen to the heart, feel what it's doing, listen to your breathing, learn what your body is teaching you. And these are all journeys of what I call journeys of re-embodiment. And what polyvagal theory does, it gives a science, a science for safety, but also a science for a nervous system or brain connection with your organs of your body. And we are products of a society that has vested so much of its resources in telling us not to listen to our body, you know, whether we are children in the classroom or wherever we are. Children at home, children in the class, we're still children being told not to honor what our body's trying to tell us. And I'm saying honor what your body's trying to tell us as the first step.

Great, thanks for that breakdown. And then the final question, Stephen, which is one we always ask on Flow Research Collective Radio, is what we call the research genie question. And it's a question about a question. So if you could instantly click your fingers and have the most beautiful empirical validation to answer any question, what would that question be?

Well, I— okay, so I— the question for all of us who are on various quests are really a quest on this journey of purpose in life. And actually, I start developing scales of that because from my work within the trauma world, I learned one— if I learned anything, I learned that purpose in life is what is literally taken from people who have experienced severe trauma. And that meant to me that it was a biological phenomenon. So an understanding of purpose in life and exuberance and our ability to have these emergent properties to explore, to discover, even to be, you you know, safe in the arms of another, and also to be spiritual. These are exploratory stuff coming out of us that can only occur when we are safe. And purpose in life is really— I view that as the core. So that's the question in the bottle, is what is man's purpose, or woman's purpose, or human's purpose in life? Nice, great.

Thank you so much for that breakdown. And I want to recommend that people pick up your latest book, Polyvagal Safety: Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation. And if there's anything else that you would like people to know or anywhere else you would like people to support your work, you can let them know as well.

Okay, so if you— there's— we created a not-for-profit organization called Polyvagal Institute and it's accessible online at polyvagalinstitute.org. And, you know, we are developing educational material for different disciplines, and we are trying, in a sense, to enable the principles that are embedded in polyvagal theory to be used in different disciplines.

Perfect. Thanks, Stephen. Thank you so much for your time today. It's fantastic. Much appreciated. Oh, you're quite welcome. Enjoyed the hour.

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