Polyvagal Theory: Why You Feel So Anxious All The Time - Dr Stephen Porges

You've authored more than 400 peer-reviewed scientific papers and literally created poly vagal theory. It's sort of rare that you get to ask Mike Tyson about how to throw a jab uh or the founder of a really impactful theory about what it means. So I guess how do you describe polyagal theory to someone who isn't familiar with it? >> It's really quite simple. is that our underlying physiological state affects how we perceive the world, how we interact with others and how receptical we are to others engaging us. So in a sense we we kind of got dropped into a world where we think that all our behaviors are intentional and but we don't acknowledge that some days we feel basically quite constrained and some days we feel very energetic and engaging. The bottom line is that we have to start paying attention to our own underlying physiological state because it will help us navigate through very a very complex world. >> So we're responsive in that way to the local ecology kind of like a plant. >> We are a plant in a way. Exactly. We are be we're detecting signals just like plants. We're responding. The difference is that with our great intelligence we think it's all our uh we caused it all. We create narratives of uh control when in reality we're being swept away by the challenges of the environment in which we are in. And when we feel swept away and overwhelmed at that point, we start acknowledging things. But we don't acknowledge it until it really gets over over a certain threshold. >> Why is that adaptive? Why have we evolved to have that uh dynamic? because the world was a dynamically changing place. That's as simple as that. But we've lost some of the I would say innate and intuitive skill sets and that's being aware of when our body loses that resilience. And instead we are trained by our culture to say you can do it. You know, it's like it's like I mean that's a quote from the water boy. If you don't remember that movie, it's but the issue is we live in a world in which everyone thinks we can suppress our feelings or we can get over something when in reality our body is just percolating and broadcasting signals to our awareness and now we're being told don't pay attention. I understand why. And this is a a pivot in the world of non-fiction, communication, personal development, uh, self-growth that I've been really fascinated by the um, forget your feelings, just work harder approach. I understand why because maybe for a lot of people, they're too at the mercy of their feelings. They actually could do with a little bit more agency. They could do with I can do it. We're in a meritocracy and we want to uphold people. But as you say, it's denying the real dynamic that we are a system that is interacting with our environment. >> There are certain things that you're like skimming across the top of because implicit in what you're saying is you have some idea what being a successful human being is. And and what I'm saying is our markers of success may be somewhat uh confounded because part of being a successful person is feeling good about being a person. And part of the motivation beautiful >> for working is to in a sense get over those feelings of inadequacy. So we get kind of twisted and tricked by all this. And the other part is that we don't truly acknowledge that as we numb our body out or don't listen to it, we're literally turning off neuroysiological feedback loops. A feedback loop is the part of us that monitors our functioning and the part of us that now creates the motor actions. And so in a way we are destroying our own bodies. And those who work hard acknowledge that. They said I I'm I'm stressed out. I have burnout. But there's a physiology to that and that is in part we're not listening to our body. >> That's so wonderful. You're so right. How many people are uh chasing success to give themselves the sensation of feeling good but in the pursuit of achieving the success they have denied themselves of the feeling of being good. >> Yeah. Now, as you say that, listen to what you said [laughter] and and there's a circularity there and then you're, you know, then you accumulate and listen, you're in Austin, so you're you're in the midst of a lot of what is now the success track, >> patient zero. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This is ground zero right here. >> Yeah. And the issue is, yeah, acquisition, uh, wealth, influence, these are wonderful things, but wonderful things for what? So how do you leverage that successes of acquisition of respect and accumulation to become more to do more to be uh you know it in a sense what are our goals in life and this is kind of a complicated and very personal question. So our goals acquisition or our goals uh curiosity learning or our goals benevolent and compassionate? So, we can set our goals, but they're not really the here and now. We we as a species like to do things that are different. We like exploration. We like curiosity. We like humor. >> And you know, we like to meet people as well, which is part of that whole bit. So, you could accumulate resources without having in a sense a type of curiosity that enables our nervous systems to thrive. So in a way the manual for living a good life has been mistransated. Can we use that term? [snorts] >> So brilliant. So great. Okay. What was the actual problem that you were trying to solve in 1994? Like what didn't fight or flight rest and digest? What didn't that explain? >> Well, it gets okay. There are different levels. So you're sitting across from me at least uh uh metaphorically and you're asking me those questions but there is really decades before that as well like who was I what were the types of questions that I personally was asking I was asking what was going on basically behind the smiles of people what was going on in their mind what was going on what were they feeling I was asking different level questions not levels of what were your scores on your test or how fast was your reaction action time. I was kind of more interested in what was going on inside of them and it but didn't have really an area of science. Science was really very uh mechanistic. So behaviorism was big and then uh you don't uh so behaviorism was to explain everything. certain types of physiological conditioning was to explain everything and then the other part what was going on in the mind like psychoanalysis mental health that was something else totally independent of the body. >> So the issue then was if something's bothering you just sit on it don't don't let it percolate. There was no understanding that the way we feel which was a kind of like was was anything other than optional until something catastrophic happens in people's lives like loss of a loved one or a severe injury or it's a a traumatic event where uh someone is raped or mugged on the street and suddenly everything is different in their world and what used to be comforting and inter engaging is no longer there or what happened to me was I got pneumonia >> and uh I had been extremely a social individual and I this was when I was a tenure actually I was probably a full professor at that time and uh the issue was I I basically no longer could be around crowds of people and start to bother me my threshold and you see this after COVID for many people they had a chronic illness and they words for like chronic fatigue syndrome and people are literally marginalized when they say they have that. Come on, get back into the flow. >> Everybody gets tired as they get older. Everyone's a little bit underslept. >> Yeah. Or fatigue. But those who suffer really get very upset because they're being dismissed and they're trying to explain to you that they had a body that listened to them and now their body doesn't. And that's the interesting part that I started to ask. Why doesn't your body respond? What was going on? But let's get back to your question going back to 1995. I was starting to do work in intensive care units with preterm babies and I was building this in a sense of veagal related theory about parasympathetic nervous system was very important. I was basically trying to describe the other side of the world, the other side of stress. What are the uh systems that calm you down? Where does yeah let's say in a sense even meditative aspects where do these insights what state supports that and so you had fight and flight and stress and then you had this parasympathetic this wonderful system that was a rest and restore system and that was kind of a interesting model until I worked in the neonatal intensive care unit where you have these preterm babies and of course they have a fight-flight response frequently high heart rates and tacoc cardia. But you know what? Their defensive systems were shutting down a lot of this vagal slowing heart rate, but slow so slow that it could actually compromise their ability to get oxygen to the brain. And I couldn't quite understand what I later called the veagal paradox. How could this same nerve which was really associated with uh basically uh good states health growth restoration how could it kill you in a sense how could a good in fact a neatlogist wrote to me after I wrote a paper in a in a journal and said maybe too much of a good thing is bad >> that was and that you know that was the way most people think you know too much of a good it shuts down and I said that doesn't make any sense That's not how systems are is all evolved or wired. And I started to get deep into the anatomy and then into the uh uh evolution basically was called fogyny where you look at species changes in autonomic regulation. And then there was something that became very mamalian something of which we are mammals and we start to have a very different type of autonomic nervous system. a nervous system that enabled us to be safe in proximity of another. So was reading cues. So you know when uh mothers talk to their babies or if you have pets, do you have a pet, a dog or a cat? >> No, I am on the cusp of getting a dog but not yet. >> Okay. Yeah. Well, [snorts] you have friends at least. >> And >> I treat them like dogs sometimes actually. So that that probably works. >> But when you don't you probably don't. This is the secret of it. the way people treat their dogs, they use very melodic protic voices. It's the way that mothers talk to their babies. And that's when I started to realize that we as mammals have a whole collection of it's called a behavioral repertoire of broadcasting signals of safety to others and those seem to affect their physiology. And so that's where this whole story started was trying to identify what was uniquely mamalian and using the pre-term baby as this window of an opportunity to see a system that was not fully developed and I could see it coming on board. >> Can you just give me the adaptive explanation for those three states as you conceived them? >> Sure. There there everything is adaptive in the in the model. Nothing is wrong, nothing is bad, nothing is pathological. they're adaptive in certain contexts. >> So in a sense they we have because the system basically for uh vertebrates and those are all the species of backbones as they evolved into amphibia and then basically mammals and reptiles broke off at the same time and had basically have parallel evolutionary pathways. The mammal had a very unique pathway because it needed to nurse. It needed the parent to take care of it and it also when it when it mature when it was born it needed to be taken care of. Now the other species laid their eggs and walked away. So the what happened was that you had a very special need to survive for this type of vertebrate which we became which we are part of mammals and they needed to broadcast their underlying physiological state in their vocalizations in their facial expressivity. They needed to broadcast to signal. Everything's about now signaling and other species didn't need that because they could just survive. they could scamper off and survive. >> So you needed this new signaling system and ironically what that signaling system did was enabled social behavior to act positively on her physiology. So that's why I asked if you had a dog. >> And when you have a dog, you realize that the dog's engagement to you and the way you vocalize with the dog is going to be a great regulator of both your physiological states and that made us uniquely mamalian. And that's why dogs and humans or if you look and see can you see my cat? >> Yes. Yeah, we will be able to. >> Yeah. So the cat back there loves for me to talk to her and if I don't talk to her, she will talk to me. And that's her broadcasting that she is there and she wants this comforting back. So let's go through the three. The old vertebrates had a very primitive autonomic nervous system. The system that regulated your organs and that's fine. It had basically a primitive vehicle system and it had a bunch of chemicals like adrenaline or chemicals like that in the body. So it could mobilize and had a neural system of calming. That neural system was not merely acting on the organs. It was also reflecting what the organs were doing. And this becomes really critical here is that we tend to focus on the brain neuro regulation of the organs when most of the neural traffic is the body sending signals to the brain. And that's what our culture has said forget it. Yeah. Just don't attend to it. So the Vegas initially was fine when we were in we could rest and restore with it in peaceful comfort. But when we had a fightlight mobilization, we interfered with that rest and restore. >> But what happened now with mammals, they had a very, let's say, nuanced veagal system that became a veagal system that enabled social engagement, enabled even mobilization without fear, and we call that play and dance. And we didn't merely have to be immobilized and intimate to in a sense have this physiological calming. We could be interactive. So the mammal basically had not only a fightlight system and not only a older dorsal the back of the brain veagal system that regulate your organs but also had this newer vententral veagal that was locked to our voice and the muscles of our face and head. basically we were broadcasting that visceral state and we were in a sense encouraging others to co-regulate with us to come closer. Yeah. So the whole in a sense the and in sense in Austin where you're seeing you know startup businesses and all this the question always will become the degree of cooperation within a workplace and as we become more and more remote that type the social cues become more and more uh separate from the actual interaction. So the mammal had this remarkable system that enable it or us to control our fight flight and actually co-op it as play and to control our immobilization to support our health growth and restoration by being safe in the arms of another >> and to also signal uh that we needed help that we needed care that we needed support. >> Yeah, signaling is the magic word here. We are a nervous system that is looking for signals. Signals literally of safety and connection. And what you really were saying is so if you go and meet someone and you engage them and have a drink with them, you make face to face contact, you smile with them and you start now creating a almost a template of what that person is like. you start is inferring or is that a person you would like to spend more time with or do you look at your watch or your phone and say I got to go and you're picking up all those signals and those signals are really signals of whether that person is accessible to you and are you accessible to that person or are you defensive? >> Does that person in a sense make you feel uneasy? You want to get out of there and you may have those same feelings doing podcasts. have to say, "Wow, is the hour almost up or what am I going to talk about or can I move on?" >> Yeah. Yeah. >> Yeah. You say that we come into this world with a quest to be safe. >> Yeah. >> Why? >> Because we can't survive by ourselves. So, I mean, it there's a function to all this. So, it's not like it makes it unimportant because it's pragmatic. It's just how we evolve. We not we didn't evolve as a independent self-controlled or self-contained system. We needed others in our world. >> And for many especially those who survive trauma, people have great difficulty moving into their worlds or they have difficulty moving into others. So they often gravitate to horses or dogs or cats. They want some type of co-regulation from a social mammal. 95% of people don't get enough fiber. Which is why Momentous built Fiber Plus. Because hitting your daily fiber target through food alone is actually kind of hard, even harder than your last toilet trip. Fiber isn't just a digestion thing. It's the foundation of your gut health, which drives how well you absorb nutrients, how stable your energy is, and how quickly you recover. If your gut isn't dialed, everything else you're doing is working at a fraction of its potential. Fiber Plus is a threein-one formula built to address digestion, gut barrier strength, and blood sugar stability all at once. That's why I plan to make my next big dump momentous. Best of all, they offer a 30-day money back guarantee. So, you can buy it and try it for 29 days. And if you don't love it, they'll give you your money back. Plus, they ship internationally. Right now, you can get up to 35% off your first subscription and that 30-day money back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to livemus.com/modernwisdomd and using the code modernwisdom a checkout. That's l i v m o m n o.com/modernwisdom and modernwisdom a checkout. What does feeling safe actually mean neurologically? >> It it means basically we can Okay, so let me flip it on you. What does feeling stress mean to you? >> Um high heart rate, sweating, um tightness in the body, ruminating thoughts, intrusive thoughts, concern, >> um lack of creativity, >> lack of ability to access your capacities. >> Yes. Yes. Constrained capacity. Yep. >> Right. So now let's flip it and say, when do I feel I have options to access my capacities? When do I feel exploratory? When do I feel expansive? >> That's a they're basically two different physiological states. One supports our physiology of health growth and restoration and one is very constrained and is costly to us. And we know that we call it burnout or exhaustion. And we also know that there are benefits. So safety really is is the child of a physiology that is homeostatic. is is taking care of itself. That's why when we start to block the feedback loops because when we talk about homeostatic or the body regulating itself, it has to assess itself and act on itself. So, it's a feedback loop. But if we numb our own feelings, those feedback loops become less effective. >> What's the most powerful force of safety in the human world? >> Let's reframe it. What are the most powerful signals >> of faith? >> And they would, you know, you you could identify them. That would be maybe a smiling face, uh, a a voice that's protic voices, melodic voices are powerful. And just ask that crying baby who feels isolated, out of control. and how rapidly that baby will calm down when the mother's if if the mother has a good engagement, good voice. In fact, we actually did research on this where you kind of like disrupt the baby and then you talk to the baby and see what happens. And if the mother's voices were more melodic, the baby's heart rates dropped almost immediately. The mother engaged without a melodic voice. No way. >> Yeah. So when you get your dog, you can try this all out. [laughter] >> Yeah, I will do. I'll sing. >> I would say if you had a child or if you had a spouse or a partner, you can try it out as well. >> Yeah, child child soon cometh. Just give me I need a little bit more time on that one. Okay. So, to to sort of recap to recap where we're at, is it right to say that your position is our ability to connect with others is fundamentally a biological state and not just a psychological choice. Feeling safe enables curiosity and empathy and social engagement. >> Yeah, I think that's quite accurate. I would kind of reframe one word. I would say our capacity to [snorts] which is not necessarily our ability. So our capacity >> to connect with others. >> Yeah. And so part of I view my goal in life is to navigate in a let's say complex world that has lots of signals. So my capacities can be expressed. So if I'm in a world that is too aggressive, too noisy, too overwhelming, I can't access my capacities. >> Why do some people never truly feel safe even when objectively everything's fine? I think that's the greatest that was the question that got me going [snorts] because I said, you know, we use this word safety and it's not like there's a metal detector that's not going to make me feel safe. It's something different. And it's because our culture sees threat and the removal of threat as obviously being safety. It's not. Safety requires signals just like threat. So it's not like take away the signals of threat and everything's fine. No, you can take them away, but we really really want signals of safety >> and they will be uh you know watch children playing uh and and actually you think that like when we mobilize as fight flight when you watch children running in play they're still smiling and when you look at them you feel good. But if you see children running from a school or something else, your body gets a totally different response to that signal because the faces are telling you everything. So that was the part that really got me going. This is now we're in the 1990s because the nerves that control the face, the smile, nerves that control the intonation of her voice were linked to how that mamlian Vegas was working. So as the mamleian Vegas was really sending signals of calming it was triggering social engagement. So it was like this is the broadcasting part of what we can see physiologically and the mammal social mammal when it evolved it literally gave a window to that underlying physiology. So we know by people's voices and faces whether they're safe to come to. Do some people just naturally in terms of disposition before conditioning, do some people require a different dose of signaling in order to feel safe? I've I've read a little about uh HSPs, highly sensitive people. I'm trying to think about how much of how much of personality and how much of safety is really nervous system state and how much do people differ in terms of what it is they need. >> We could actually kind of build a model and say before we think that it's a locked in temperament or a personality. Maybe it's a physiological state that got retuned and got locked into this more defensive mode. And so let's kind of look at things optimistically. The interesting thing or one of the interesting things you're bringing up is that if a person has a history of not having safe individuals in that person's history, when someone tries to engage them even with protic voices and those signals, they may actually react adversely to it, especially if there's a a real abusive trauma history. And you can actually read what's going on in their nervous system. The nervous system is getting triggered and it hears that voice, that face and it goes, "Wow." Then the body starts feeling those feelings inside the body and those feelings for healthy I say healthy is not the right word for atypical nervous system are feelings you feel good. But if those feelings of feeling good are associated with being abused, what happens? Mhm. >> So you get the feeling and then the the brain remembers says been there. This is what happened to me. I'm out of the room. >> Sorry for interjecting. That feels a little bit uh scenarian. That feels a little behavioristy that we have this stimulus response. What is it that we have associated? Is that fair? Is that fair for me to sort of add that little bit of a twist to into how the conditionings occur? So, so we have in the sense of reflex which is no cognition is necessary >> and you talk with to me or I talk to you or you you talk to your dog and the dog just kind of relaxes. Uh that's a reflex. It's not an awareness. Now the body responds and so you have that feeling. That's an awareness. Now that awareness becomes conscious and then you can associate that with good and bad things. >> Yes. Yes. So there are two different parts of this sequence. One, my nervous system has a propensity to react. I can't change it. That's who we are. >> You know, we we can get triggered. It's like this this reason I have a smile is that my wife used to say to me, you should be above it, you know. And I say I'm human. I get triggered. We all get triggered. >> Yeah. >> And so the real issue is being triggered is not the real issue. The issue is what happens when you get triggered. And when you get triggered, your body shifts state. And what is your awareness of that state? So when you get aware that your body shifted state, what do you do? Do you scream at the other person across the table from you, or do you say, "Wow, I got people going say think you're weird, but you say, "Oh, wow. I must have been triggered. Where did that come from?" >> Very few people have the patience to stop, get in the way of that physiological shift. They want to create the narrative to get out of there. >> What's interesting, you used the example of when you got pneumonia and uh preferred to be around smaller groups of people, didn't want as much social stimulus. That that shows just how adaptive not only across time, right, human evolution, adapting to the environment, creating these different capacities and signaling that means that it's more likely that you'll survive, but even within a single organism's lifespan, your your system had adapted to see an old stimulus. >> Yeah. >> In a new light. >> Yeah. Yeah. That's that's who we are. You know, we're flexible species. And the problem is that when we have things like pneumonia or chronic fatigue or long COVID, that flexibility gets reduced. And that tends to be a shock to many of us when it happens. And we the the up part of it is that there's pathways of rehabilitation. There are ways in which you can signal the system to slowly uh gain confidence in itself. Again, >> it feels I need I need to break the fourth wall a little bit for a second, so bear with me. Uh it feels very timely to be speaking to you. So, you probably won't be aware of this, but a lot of the a lot of the audience will. Uh, I released a a health vlog about uh nine months ago or so, tracking a journey that I'd been on from long COVID, chronic fatigue, uh, lime, uh, CMV, EBV, uh, I lived in a house that had mold with every different polymorphism that you don't want in order to have mold toxicity. Uh, heavy metal, like just this laundry list of of of challenges. It had meant that I was tired at 7:00 at night every night. It meant that uh no matter how much I slept, I never felt recovered. Uh I hated the smell of standing water. I couldn't stand silence, but I also couldn't stand music. This real sort of big mess. >> We get to the back end of of last year and I'd made a some good progress. I' I I'd improved all while doing this, right? bits of the brain that are associated with word recall, working memory, being in a good mood. All of those were the ones that were being slammed while I was trying to put on a good show and be a professional for a few million people a week and and and to try and do this well. So that that felt like a big tension. Uh I go and do a tilt table test >> in February. >> I failed my tilt table test or succeeded depending on how you looked at it. um 11 minutes full vasovagal syncopy fainted uh heart stopped for 5 seconds. So for the people that don't know this is a a test for autonomic flexibility autonomic response they strap you onto a table you've got blood pressure cuffs everywhere heart rate sensors on your feet on your hands there's an IV in case you faint and need to come back around and after you've laid down and done some breathing exercises they raise you up >> to sort of 70° >> and they see how your body responds. something about that 70° angle that um that your body doesn't like it. And after 5 minutes, I felt a little sweaty. I felt a little uncomfortable. I started to feel a little bit sick. But I've done a lot of meditation, a lot of breath work. And I was like, "Right, okay. Well, this is the time to apply some of your meditation and breath work. You're not allowed to move at all. You can't wiggle your toes even a bit. You can't move your calves. You're on this special bed. you're all strapped in, not moving, cuz you don't they don't want you to help your circulation to to get a full a fully valid test. So, I start breathing through it and it gets a little better and then it gets quite a bit worse and then my vision starts to go blurry. It's 9 minutes in and then I start to sweat and it's 10 minutes in and then the next thing that I knew I was flat on the bed and the nurse had come over me. this small Filipino nurse. There was a really lovely guy. He came over me and the first sentence that came out of his out of his mouth after I sort of came back around was, "Okay, so your heart stop. Your heart's no worries, buddy. Your heart stop." I was like, "Hey, dude. If I've just if I've just passed out, okay, I don't want the first words out of your mouth when I come back around to be your heart stop." Um, anyway, all of this together, I've got about as strong of a personal investment in your work and in the world of nervous system regulation as as I think I could. This has been unbelievably personal to me over the last >> two years and specifically the last nine months. And you're catching me today. >> This week coming up, I'm going away on my first ever meditation retreat for 7 days. And a big part of the motivation for that has been to try and get my uh autonomic system back in check to be gentle with myself. So anyway, I just appreciated you opening up about your about your case with the pneumonia thing because it it it felt like it gave me license to talk about >> license to talk to me about anything. So the the interesting part is first of all it's a slow journey back. Don't I I thought we could just throw a switch. I had optimism about these things as well. basically listen to your body. It is telling you things. I will I will tell you a similar story when I was getting u a heart checkup. They did they were uh basically put a IV in me and the IV start to get loose and so I started to uh told them that they say twiddle it and I went to vasovagal syncopy as well and they they then looked at me and they said what are you scared of? I said not scared you're basically tweaking with my bowel receptors. >> Yes. basically are playing with the blood pressure receptors but they don't think of it in that way. >> So they see like this this autonomial which is what they're looking for >> uh with that and they uh actually for many of the people who fail those tests they start they have a broad uh let's say array of symptoms and they tend to be treated by the medical community as if there's nothing wrong with them yet these symptoms keep coming out. What I'm saying to you is be patient. Your nervous system is on a recovery track. And long COVID is the story that I want to tell you is a metaphor for you to think about. You survived a pathogen. You had COVID and your COVID is for some people lethal. As you know, and the other part is that when our body wins the war kills the pathogen, it doesn't always inform the entire nervous system. >> You know what? You know what my Filipino friend said to me? He said, "Um, this is what I do. I'm a technician for the the tilt table test, and prior to CO, I would maybe do between three and five of these a month." >> Yeah. >> And now I do between three and five of these a day. >> Wow. I think long CO or the consequence of the pandemic have been so underestimated. I've just completed a study on long co. I was part of a interesting uh government funded project uh basically doing it remotely and we basically the intervention was a veagal nerve stimulator um which was developed by a colleague of mine and another intervention a sound intervention that I had developed with a with a basically it's called sonacea or son sonic augmentation technology it's a new stuff that I've developed with a colleague called ethne gori and what it does first of veagal nerve stimulator you know what it does >> it's sending a signal to the vagus and it's basically trying to tell the vagus that everything is okay in your body and if it tells you that then it may start connecting to the organs of your body and you feel better so it's a signaling system it's not regulating the motor part of the vagus is sending a signal in the sound does the same type thing it basically sends signals of literally that you're floating in a rhythmic sea. >> So it's just like think of the tilt table but not like that. Think of it as rocking. >> Mhm. >> Slow. >> More like a cradle than a tilt table. >> Yes. Yes. And we all have that visual image like babies. Kind of like coming away and floating in space but with no fear of falling off. And basically the sounds had the same effectiveness >> as the veagal nerve stimulator. was very profound in terms of what it did over a 4-week period. And so basically we had massive effects on all basically all the parameters we had were measuring on they were all uh questionnaires in symptom arrays. There were no uh blood samples but symptom of rays of how people felt and whether they had fatigue and whether they were anxious or depressed and basically all the indicators improved in a very let's say powerful way which provided the whole model whether it's a veagal nerve stimulator or the sound is that if you know what the signal profile is that your nervous system is looking for >> you can get at that. 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Right now, you can get a free AG1 welcome kit that includes a bottle of D3 K2, an AG1 flavor sampler, and that 90-day money back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to drink ag.com/modern wisdom. Why would it be the case that a disregulated nervous system would cause people to feel more anxious, people to feel more depressed, them to have lower energy, them to be Why would this huge suite of things occur? First of all, let's let's let's tap you on the back and give you a congratulation for observing and calling out that it is a suite of systems that are effect. It's not one it's not really is >> not just tired, not just sad, you're not just and it's not just you have poor sleep. It's not that your gut isn't working. It's not that you have tacoc cardia. It's everything about your autonomic nervous systems regulation. So it's a regulatory disorder and we have difficulty in I say we I'm talking about modern medicine in seeing a system and seeing the system and its function. The system is disregulated. It doesn't it's not coordinated in the way that it should and and we're picking up on it. And so the issue is yes and I'll give you a word that fits in with all this. Your body is in a chronic state of defense. It's as simple as that. It's like the you killed the pathogen, but that information, the success of that war didn't retune how your nervous system worked. >> So, it's still prepared for war. >> Oh, you're locked into this price. Oh, that's interesting. And so in the same way as a uh traumatic emotional event or physical event, >> a traumatic pathogenic event, >> yeah, >> does something similar >> is all the same. >> But the difference is when something has occurred consciously, you know, people can talk back to, well, I got into that car crash, so getting into cars, it makes sense that that would make me feel nervous. Now, the same thing we don't draw because it's it's below the conscious threshold. We don't draw the same analogy to >> pathogens >> because we're numb to our body. We don't have the language. So, our narrative isn't saying, "Look, it doesn't matter whether it was a car wreck or a pathogen or whether someone humiliated me in public. It doesn't matter. My body reacted to it as if I was going to die." >> And this is what bodies do when they think they're going, they don't think when all the signals are that that death is eminent. Imminent. So I actually uh uh gave a couple recent talks I call sentinel trauma and that is what the how does the body react to the single events of mortal threat and I'm actually saying that COVID can be a mortal threat to the nervous system and that's the consequence it gets hardened as a response pattern and you're you're living through it. I I I would say optimistically uh these you're doing well and even your curiosity so where you're going with it is and you're going to end up on that journey about understanding about the body's own feedback loops and how they got challenged and that's exactly what they're assessing in the uh tilt table test. They're assessing whether the feedback loop is working on your blood pressure, >> meaning your vascular bed, the vagus, the sympathetics, you know, blood flow. Now, I will tell you one of my exercises every morning. >> Yes. >> I have a back swing, basically a tilt table in the basement. Yeah. Ever see one of the back swings? So, it tilts down like that and you can go upwards like that >> to in like an inversion table. >> Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't go 100. I can't rotate, but I can go like 70 degrees down, 70 degrees up. >> Yep. Yep. Yep. I have seen that. Why? >> I'm challenging my bowel receptors. I'm doing a neural exercise on them every morning. >> How long are you doing that for? >> I'm doing first of all, I tilt downward and do basically situps and about basically about 10 five minutes or so of exercises in the inverted position. Mhm. >> Then I do tilts on each breath, 30 of them. >> They're quite rapid. You would pass out. >> Yeah, I bet I would. >> Yeah. And but I'm not passing out. And look, I'm 81, so it's not like I What I'm saying is I'm trying to stay here for a while. And if I were totally seditary, my body might think it's uh you're too old to do those things. >> How fascinating. Okay. I I I think this is important to get into. Across all of your research, what interventions have you found to be most impactful for improving autonomic function? >> Okay, so first of all, if we go back, we're going to go back into the '9s. I actually was playing around with the tilt table. I had a motor on it where I rocked people up 21° and then back down to horizontal. It took 7 seconds up. So 1 2 3 4 5 6. So you can start feeling that it's kind of like a very nice rocking even slower than what you're doing much slower. >> Yeah. >> And suddenly no one wanted to get off the table. >> That was the first. So the research showed that I could entrain rhythms associated with literally vascular bed activity. I could actually get into that system and exercise those. But the subjective response, how people felt was to me the most interesting part of it. No one wanted to get off the table. >> And I never forgot that. And that's when I started to develop the acoustic one. I was mimicking what the tilting was doing. And so the the issue is that the acoustic interventions, I've developed two of them. One has been used by a few hundred thousand people now. It's called the safe and sound protocol. And what it does is basically mimic the acoustic features of a mother's voice. So it's broadcasting calmness and engagement. And they're finding that it works quite well with, you know, pediatric populations. But the trauma population people have used it with other therapies and it's been uh intertwined with EMDR and with uh various uh cognitive behavioral therapy and all forms of it. It says to make the client more accessible to the therapy. >> So what it's doing is priming a system to be more connected with the therapist. So what I'm doing so both and then the new one I developed which is called uh sonic augmentation technology and the intervention was called rest and restore protocol and that was dealing really with visualized basically floating in a wonderful sea without having any need to connect you feel so safe you don't have to look for someone you don't have to listen you're just there basically I called it stealth meditation And when you deal with when you deal with it, meditation is too hard. Okay. And and the issue is if you deal with meditation for traumatized individuals, they run out of the room. >> Yeah. >> Because that immobilization now is a signal to the nervous system of vulnerability. >> Fascinating. So, okay. You've managed to isolate frequencies of a mother's voice. I think it's like 1500 to 3500 hertz. Is that right? >> You read real well. Yes. >> Can I say I do my research also? obviously like unbelievably personally invested in getting this right. Um but then that's why uh layering it into music making the connection that that's enough to signal safety cues to the >> nerves. Yeah, but it's actually even broader. So anything it's like 500 to 3,000 will be fine or >> y >> uh basically it enables the frequent actually all mammals even little mice like animals they vocalize in a certain area of the auditory spectrum that is very similar if you looked at their full spectrum. So dogs, cats and horses overlap with our uh band of social communication. So you can calm a dog or a horse or a cat by talking to them. >> Is that part of the reason that we have >> Yes. >> collaborated and partnered with those animals? So a that's so [ __ ] cool. Okay. So part of the reason that humans, cats, and dog cats, dogs, and horses, >> yeah, >> have bonded so well is that our frequency of calm >> when vocalized >> Yeah. is in a similar range to the one that they use. >> Absolutely. That is so cool. >> It's totally amazing. It's so interesting to watch how people talk to their pets. It's like they have a manual, you know? It's like, >> have you ever seen uh there's a a video, a short video of a a golden retriever and there's two hands down in front of it. It's on a couch somewhere and the golden retriever is going from dad to mom. And with dad, the golden retriever is used to play fighting. So he bears bears his teeth and sort of pretend bites at the hand as he's putting the hand down. And then when he goes to mom, he just rests his chin on the top of a hand. But the dog does it two seconds, two seconds, two seconds, two seconds, bite, rest, bite, rest, bite, rest. And um I just thought that was it's so funny. It's so funny how um quickly adaptive that that is to be able to have >> there. Listen, there's my cat does something similar. My cat likes likes to mouth me, my hands, not my wife's. >> It's okay. So, if that if this is the case, right, and safety cues can be cued through uh auditory um input. Why not just play this music all the time? If it's that simple, why not just play the music permanently? Okay. Interesting. And so I had that idea and I decided to play it in a preschool to see what would happen. And I was playing in the preschool and guess what? The kids were talking to each other. They were gravitating near the speakers and they were very socialized. I played the same music without the algorithm uh modulating it the way I wanted. And they were they were solitary. This very solitary. And I played other music and nothing happened. [snorts] So the the part was that our nervous system recognizes it. But here is the problem and this is a massive problem. And I thought that we're just there sitting there waiting for love sounds and sounds of connection to occur and wouldn't the world be so much nicer? M >> I forgot that if you come out of a traumatized environment, someone who is broadcasting those same frequencies is a predator to their nervous system. So the history, their own history retunes them and keeps them out of social settings. And again in the world that we both live in, we know people who have had very bad relationships and we also know that they talk about finding the right person but you know after meeting them there will never be a right person. >> They're because their nervous system is not broadcasting signals of accessibility. >> That's interesting. Okay. So [clears throat] what about um Vegas nerve stimulators? That's something else that you mentioned earlier on. How much is real and how much is bunk with regards to that? >> Oh, I mean number one, it's real. Uh the question is for what and what reason are you do you want to use it? A lot of people want to use these things because they think it's a simple way out that [snorts] they can change the context of their life by stimulating a nerve. And the answer is the nervous system is smart. If you stimulate the system to be calm and accessible and you abuse it, the nervous system will cut off that feedback. It will just adjust. So terms like hacking the nervous system is not the right concept. You want to make the nervous system available and then you want to exercise it to expand its range and increase its flexibility. >> What does exercise it, expand its range, increase its flexibility look like? For me, it's like challenge it and let it let it calm down. Challenge it again. It's like my oscillating tilt in the morning. I'm challenging the system. So, one might say this is stressing the system, but it's exercise if I allow it to recover. So, the issue is I'm aware that if I stress the system, it's going to change. It's going to pull off its inhibitory or slowing up aspect. So, the heart rate will go up, but then my heart rate will come back down. and now I can do it again. It's like saying to people who have high heart rate and they're concerned about exercising, their system has been retuned and they're locked into a fight flight. And if they now try to exercise, they can get into a syncopy situation where the the body just can't adjust. It can't give anything else more out and it just will shut down. >> So we have a real problem in how we conceptualize even our own physiology. So it's not only our heart rate level, it's the neuro regulation of our heart rate. And that's where heart rate variability uh actually what you don't know is that in the 60s I was the first person to quantify heart rate variability. >> That's something that I do know because I did my reading. >> Ah that was your first paper, right? 1969. >> Right. But here's the the real you're you're you're on my good list. uh so uh so the real issue is I'm extraordinarily disappointed in the dis in the area of heart rate variability because what I was working on was once I observed the phenomenon the question was what is causing what were the underlying mechanisms what was I really measuring and if I could measure it better and it says get closer to the neural intervation then the measurement would have much greater and better generaliz more useful >> and What happened is that it went back to very descriptive. So like I have a Fitbit and the Fitbit is just giving me measures of uh variance which is a descriptive statistic and I worked on this for decades to develop technologies to pull out the specific veagal influence in the heart rate activity and that's basically swept under the carpet. >> Speaking of that, what do you make of resonance breathing? >> Well, there's something very interesting there. uh it it well first of all there is a when we start understanding that the brain stem's respiratory rhythm is not just affecting heart rate but affects other things we start getting into this notion of what would be called resonance I have a very simplistic view of it I think a lot of people think that a lot so the theory is really that there's individual differences in what your resonant frequency is I don't think is that tailored that neatly. I think our bodies like certain slower rhythmicities >> and and when that's even like with the music I was really working on. I don't think it has to be as that specifically designed and with resonant frequency they were going at 0.1 hertz or 10 seconds. >> I think the body wants to gravitate slower. Yeah. >> And it wants to go to like 0.12 which is really what I was tilting people at. Actually, I think it wanted to be moved out of our normal breathing frequency. It wants correct a different experience. Yeah. It wants a a frequency that is closer to our normal vascular oscillation. And breathing is tends to be quite a bit faster than a vascular oscillator. >> My uh I I I did a bunch of assessments. I I love this product. It's called M.alth. And um it's it's a HRV resonance breathing uh lamp. And you you grab this thing. Anyway, my uh my frequency is 4.5 breaths a minute. >> It's 4.5 and um >> that's good. >> That's that's where I get the highest >> oscillation between top and bottom. That's where that's where mine is. Okay. So, um veagal nerve stimulator is good but being used in the right context. Resonance breathing uh interesting and may may also play a good role. >> Also good. But remember what you were doing. You were doing a lot of introsception with your resonant breathing. Y >> you were not only looking at what the numbers are, you were assessing what was optimal, how you felt, >> how you're really closing the loop of the sensory part with the motor. >> If you're trying to go from Joey Chestnut to Joey Swole, the RP Strength app is the best place to start. I've been in the gym for two decades, and it wasn't until this last year that I had some of the best training sessions of my life, and RP was a massive part of that. actual scientists built this thing around the obsession to beat up their high school bullies and provide the most sciencebacked effective path to maximizing muscle gain. It tells you your exercises, how many sets, reps, the weights, everything. So, all you have to do is show up and lift. If the RP strength app could wipe your ass for you, probably would. 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So, there's a ton of different interventions, uh, humming, chanting, um, a variety of other interventions that we could use, but how much of what we're trying to do requires some relational aspect between us and another person because there's the physiological intervention, uh, vag nerve stimulator, um, using a tilt table up and down, uh, breathing at a particular rate, but and that uh perhaps um stresses and then relaxes or relaxes and opens up tolerance for your nervous system in that window. Is that important beyond just the interception thing to say, "Hey, and now I'm going to start to relate to the world around me like a a social exposure therapy or nervous system exposure therapy within that newly calmed window." >> Yeah. Well, that's exactly how the safe and sound protocol is being used in clinical interventions. It's not being used by itself. It's being used to make the client more accessible to the intervention, which may be the therapist uh herself or himself is maybe what the actual the stimulus may make the therapist more effective. >> Mhm. So you're uh engendering a state. >> Yeah. >> Which is one of calm. Uh would you would it be fair to say sort of a broader flexibility within the nervous system for a little while? >> Absolutely. You're creating a window of flexibility >> of tolerance and then in that newly expanded window that's going to exist for a little time, >> you're going to expose yourself to some interventions >> and then once that's closed off, the goal is to increase that window of tolerance from state to trait. >> Yeah. Well, this is exactly what uh several therapists are using the safe and sound protocol with with extraordinarily sensitive people. So, go back to your initial interest which is on hyper sensitive people >> which is something you brought up. They found or some of them found that just listening for uh let's say a few seconds or a minute uh has had effect but they tend to react. They found that if they start to expand over days how much they listen to, they're creating a sense with a tool, they're opening up the window for longer and longer periods. >> Yep. Yep. Okay. Uh why do singing and humming and chanting commas so much? >> It's a very easy answer. Uh it's because they're they're recruiting. I could actually say why does eating or ingestion commas? uh you have enough resources to uh sit down and have this food that suggests that there's not a threat. Also, it's a reinforcement that there's calories so you're not in starvation mode. >> No, let too smart. You have to go back there. >> It's a problem I have all the time. See, it really is. >> Well, yeah. No, you're trying to You're building your narrative when all you need to be was a simple observer and that is you watch your baby suckling. Okay. And what you realize is that the nerves and the neuromuscular control of suck, swallow, and breathing, that coordination are the same of social expressivity. It's the same thing. So we're essence using the same neural system when we ingest than when we are in interacting with others. And this becomes really I in some of my talks I say we we try to share ingestion but not digestion. And digestion is a private matter. It's a thorosal vagus. Ingestion is the vententral Vegas which is our social engagement system. So we say let's get together and have something to eat. That's a social act. And in fact, if we start tracking the history of society, ingestive practices or rituals, literally are part of the history of community. You know what's uh interesting? I had a a communication expert, a guy called uh Chase Hughes on the show a couple of weeks ago and he deals in micro expressions and body language and and and some interesting things. And he had one insight around uh people who are feeling uh anxious and uh unsafe. He says that they tend to keep the inside of their arms in close. They don't want that brachial vein to be exposed. But one of the other things I was I was um got him to break down a killer who was being sentenced. This guy this guy that had done some pretty heinous crimes. and he highlighted that as the uh sentence was being given to him and the judge was reading out what he' done and and and sort of giving him his his his dressing down. He was there and he his tongue came out just a tiny little bit licked his lips and then pushed back in. And I said, "What's what's going on there?" And he said, "Well, it's a vanity thing. uh uh moistening the lips makes you look better. But also as a baby who is preverbal, the first no that you have is because it's pushing whatever is in your mouth, maybe a nipple out of your mouth. And he he had that as the the a human's first no. And I have no idea if it's true, but I thought it was really cool. >> All these things can be true, but there are other parsimmonious strategies. uh if you're getting a sentence are do you think you're your mouth will be drier than if you're getting an award? So it can be really the body's uh dehydration at that the the adaptive reaction is to kind of relubricate your your orifice. >> Um I think >> relubricate your orifice indeed. Yes. >> Yeah. Okay. That's another point because they they Anyway, another another time. [laughter] But let's let's go to this this bit. This is for me. I basically talk about this is accessibility when the arms pull out. >> Mhm. Mhm. >> Okay. That's showing the vententral side. And like when my cat My cat loves to do that. That That's not a normal posture for a cat, but she loves because she likes her belly to be rubbed. She wouldn't be doing that if she was underneath a foreign parked car out on the street or a stranger. But this is really we hold in we protect we protect the vententral side. So the issue of the evolutionary history is the vententral side is a side of vulnerability to injury and and it becomes how we protect ourselves versus not. So part of the bracing is symbolic. I if I were to sit like this, you'd have a different interpretation than if I were like this. >> What's the biggest myth about anxiety from your perspective? >> Anxiety is the body being in a defensive state. Simple as that. We don't need the word anxiety. We don't even need many of the words that we associate as emotion. [gasps] The characteristics of anxiety are we're mobilized. Why are we mobilized? Now, what people like to say, I'm mobilized because I have to get something done. But what we notice is that quote anxious people, it doesn't matter if they get it done. If they get it done, they're still anxious. So that's just the narrative of how they are explaining their feelings. So the myth about anxiety is that it's outside of us when it really is we're really broadcasting our physiological state. H I guess a lot of people may feel and obviously very self-s serving um they go through periods of life where new lower tolerance periods lower tolerance uh abilities with regards to how much stress they can put up with how much energy they've got their startle response their level of ambient anxiety uh their capacity to deal with stress and change and uncertainty and ambiguity and where that gets constrained. >> Yeah. >> What's the difference between somebody who gets locked in from that situation and somebody who ends up bouncing back and how much how much resilience can be reinherited after it's potentially being damaged. >> Okay. So, you're living through a recovery phase of post uh long co. So, you know exactly that your range of resilience is different than what it was precoid. >> Correct. But you also know that it's getting greater than it was immediately after COVID or during CO. So you have a trajectory that you can assess. So the the part of it is that uh we tend to think that if we're not flexible, we're not trying hard enough. And the issue is we have to understand what it is that is uh implementing the constraint on us. Our nervous system wants to blame something outside of us. It tries to blame uh let's say colleagues or bosses or spouses or let's say fiscal demands or political issues. It tries to create a whole set of other issues to externalize feelings that are really being generated inside our body. I'm not saying that the external ones aren't real. They are real. But the issue is uh it's not that they're not real or not that they are real. It's how we deal with them. So we can't solve the problems. We can't navigate in the complex world if our body's in a state of defense. So what I've been working on is this whole idea of what optimizes our ability to utilize or gives us the access to our capacities. And that should be really the real question we should be asking not what is your capacity but what gives us access to our capacities. So what you experience and are experiencing is that the capacities that you know that you have >> were being compromised and that creates a conundrum. you don't understand why or how you want it to be fixed. And the answer is the nervous system is really broadcasting a message that those capacities are not accessible. It's not that they haven't been taken away, but they're just not accessible. So the real question is what enables them to be accessible. And that's where we move into the concept that our physiological state how we start the conversation. Our physiological state is really giving the uh boundary conditions a permission for these capacities to be expressed. But the problem is when it's giving us constraints, how do we reverse that? And that is that's part of our whole dialogue. And that is it's all going to end up with signaling the nervous system that it's basically okay to come out. and play again. [snorts] >> It, you know, it's almost like the, you know, it's almost like, is it safe enough to come outside? You know, it's like a horror movie. Uh, our nervous system wants to be reassured. And this is difficult because we do not know the signals. Our culture is horrible with signaling our nervous system. Just think [clears throat] about the traumatic events of schools with mass shootings. And the solution is give guns to teachers and principles and put metal detectors. [laughter] Now what is that doing to the nervous system of these children? >> Yeah. Yeah. >> I mean it's not like metal detectors aren't useful and having someone with a gun may be very adaptive in in complex situations, but those are profound signals to a developing nervous system. It's so interesting how because people's nervous system states aren't anywhere near as visible as pretty much anything else. If you if you had dirty dirty drinking water and that impacted uh the way that a child's digestion worked or if you had uh loud music and it was obvious how distracted they were, if you can see stimulus and response quite easily, the the fact that the push back against that intervention would be quite obvious. What we don't see, for instance, like are humans built to see uh assassinations live streamed on X, you know, within minutes of it happening, posted around the world? Are we supposed to watch uh movies and car crashes and and you know, >> well, we you know the answers. You know the answers. Of course >> the but the question is you you start with a very interesting and very important question and that is if our nervous systems were visible and I'm saying they are to much more of an extent than you think. >> Yep. They because people's faces broadcast, their voices broadcast, their muscle tension broadcast. >> Can you e explain what a uh low tolerance nervous system expressing person and a high tolerance nervous system expressing person? How would they show up differently? >> Okay, they first of all, the face would be flat and you've seen flat faces, especially the upper part of the face. The lower part you have much more control and so you can make false smiles, but the upper part tells you really truthful emotions or feelings. The other one is intonation and again this is from your seat as a podcaster when it when you're uh interviewe is has a uh a monotone voice or high that's a high pitch voice. It doesn't show any flexibility. It's just broadcasting to your ear and to your body anxiety. Uh so they're broadcasting their physiological state. And I think when you brought up your question about anxiety, it is know spend well it's not it's a rhetorical question. If you spend time with someone who's highly anxious, there's no doubt that your body is feeling their anxiety. >> And what are you detecting? What are the things that you feel? You basically say, I don't want to be around this person. that is you make a global statement and you try to distance yourself. You haven't really uh he says uh gave the simple answer the physiological state that that person is in is broadcasting that state to me and it's bleeding all over me. >> Yep. Yep. >> And and so what it does is it changes our responsibility in the world that we are in. We feel as a species that we can say whatever we want. It's all I shouldn't say it doesn't matter how we say things. It's what we say is important. And I'm saying it's how we say it becomes as important or more important. >> How we utilize this wonderful apparatus vocalization. >> Okay. How do you advise people to increase their window of tolerance and build safety practically? Then we've talked about a variety of in interventions. What's something that's uh high compliance, high impact? >> Well, you actually brought up things that people are doing. They're working on breath. I would say when they do breath, they start really working on their own internal feelings of the breath. So, they're helping the feedback loops become uh more enhanced. I think you know like resonance breathing is is powerful. Yoga breathing is powerful. I think part of what's missing again even in the world of let's say elite athletes and exercises people are not saying as you exercise go into the exercise and feel your body responding to it you know so we put on a television while we on treadmills we don't take the exercise as a moment of zen >> why is that important why is it important to feel the thing that's happening why is it not enough to just do the Ah, this is where the nervous system comes in. If we're not feeling it, we're in a down reggulating the feedback loop of the feelings of the sensory information coming in. We're dampening the sensory information and I don't think we appreciate the I would say the power of what sensory information does to our brain. And so even like with the uh concept of the vagus which has a lot of press 80% of the fibers of the vagus are sending sensory information to the brain. 80%. It's a it's an internal surveillance system of our body. Our body craves that information. So are you suggesting that the because 80% is going Vegas up and only 20% is going brain through Vegas down. that by paying more attention to the breath as you're doing resonance breathing to the sounds as you're doing safe and sound protocol to your body as you're exercising playing or dancing that you're uh opening up the aperture uh inside of your mind to pay attention to that 80% that's coming back. >> I'm saying it's not even paying attention, it's allowing the feedback loops to complete themselves. This is all metaphoric by the way. There is absolutely as far as I know no research on this but is in a sense the whole uh uh I would say underlying or implicit theory behind meditative work meditative breath uh that is that we can literally travel or body scans where people literally try to travel within their body >> that it may be sound like it's kind of weird or woo woo but think about what you're doing you're allowing the neural circuits to send information into areas of your brain to have a degree of awareness and then to act on that to or allow I would say act on it may be merely be to be more patient and more reduce your own muscle tone. So we think of activity as skeletal motor but some of our activity is visceral motor our organs and cranial motor like the muscles of our face is we have to start to appreciate these different sources of motor systems in our body. Most people have no idea where the testosterone levels sit. But what if I told you there was a solution? 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So, get the exact same blood panels that I do and save $25 by going to the link in the description below or heading to functionhealth.com/modernwisdom using the code modernwisdom at checkout. How uh how important do you think metabolic support is to provide a window of tolerance to sematic interventions >> in terms of mitochondria that or is that >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And and and >> Oh, I I think it Okay, now we start talking personal information. Okay. So, I had um um let's say I had radiation and I had prostate cancer and I had treatments and the treatments really wiped me out and they wiped me out so much that I couldn't walk up a flight of steps and [snorts] I you know I just was gone >> and um in fact we went to Greece and I couldn't even go to the banquet. We were at my wife was talking at a conference and the conference was on physiology of stress. She's an endocrinologist. She by the way she's the person who discovered the link between oxytocin and social behavior. >> Sue Carter, that's my wife. So she uh basically talked to the organizer who was a very famous stress physiologist and said, "What's the matter with Steve?" You know, Steve wasn't going to come. And so he said, "It sounds like mitochondria. Okay. And and then we talked to someone else and we got the answer. The answer was there are supplements that kind of signal the mitochondria to come out and play again. >> And the the one I took was called LC carnitine. It's it's it's off over the counter. And I was now I couldn't go even walk a flight of steps or walk to my office. I took that and the next day I did two miles on an elliptical. So it was a switch change and actually it may be helpful to you as you recover from long COVID. So what it is doing is signaling the mitochondria to and the and the ATP production is basically saying come out and be productive again. Right? So there is uh could it be the case that you could be doing the work doing the work um from a [snorts] >> yeah you would be metabolically incapable of the work having any impact. >> Bingo. >> Yeah. And the issue is you need certain resources. So you need the the nerves have to communicate. And there's another thing about like neurotransmitters are part of that and we haven't discussed that at all. But I will tell you that for I'll say decades I've been taking lecithin which is a has phosphatilylcoline a precursor for acetylcholine because acetylcholine is the uh used in bagel nerve transmission and a lot of other neurotransmission and I've been taking and fish oil. So I've been taking a lot of precursors that are useful in neurotransmission. So which is yeah >> I'm I'm interested in the the sort of journey or what happens if someone goes from having this narrow window of tolerance to regaining safety again. Why is it that the nervous system seems to oscillate between hypoarousal and to hyper arousal? >> Okay. what you have and actually I I got an email from someone from a a physician from the UK who says the letter start I have a client who's suffering from the poly vagal syndrome which I had no idea what he meant but I read through it and what it really was exactly what you're saying moving from hyper to hypo and being poorly regulated in between that's because access to that vententral Vegas is not there so the system goes in one direction then goes in the other. And when you have a vententral veagus, it's kind of like a choreographer. It creates it enables us to repurpose fight flight into play. Repurpose immobilization into intimacy and restoration. So it's like it's like this social net that's over us and when it's there, these other components really uh basically serve our needs. But when that's gone, we are basically functioning like in a way almost decorticate animals. You know, it's like we're down in we don't have this master regulator. So, we're a regulated system. >> Oh, yeah. You're just much more at the at the mercy of everything flip-flopping from one side to the other. some like an element that I wasn't aware of but [clears throat] there's a paradoxical relaxation and startle response where the nervous system interprets parasympathetic states as threats. So as people start to relax >> as the as they start to get below the window of tolerance on the bottom end that their system sees that as a threat and bounces them out the top. Like why would why would that be the case? Why in a system that needs more relaxation why would it bounce you out the top? This is where we talked about the introsception of that calm state is now associated with vulnerability and injury. >> Right? >> So it's in a sense our higher brain structures sabotage us. So the lower brain says relax you need it. The higher brain says can't relax in this environment. It's it's to is prioritize this threat. Mhm. Mhm. And I guess this is where the safe and sound protocol would come in >> slowly slowly with those who have that type of history. The I would say the greatest surprise to me on this interesting journey uh was that the safe and sound could be a trigger for people, meaning it could create defensiveness. And I had no concept that in my theoretical model. So I had how does something that only is broadcasting signals of safety or calmness. >> How can it be responded to? Then you start asking the question who are the people responding? What are their clinical symptoms? What's their history? And then it becomes a script. the script is that they were injured by let's say a biological parent and and so the vulnerability of to signals that are is in our DNA become signals now of threat. >> Why does tinitus often show up in highly activated people and what is it about the ear that's got I know some of your research has gone into the ear territory. Yeah, the issue with tinitus is tinitus is just let's use it's not a very descriptive diagnosis. So with the history of tinitus is that people thought it was in a sense uh in the ear and they actually did such things as aggressive surgeries and remove the entire ear uh internal ear structures. the tinus was still there even though >> God you would be really annoyed if you had your ear structure removed and you were still hearing ringing in your in your head. >> That's right. Because it was now uh the solution to that is basically it's on the auditory cortex that type of tinitus and the solution now is actually they put a a [clears throat] stimulator on the auditory cortex to scramble those sounds. [snorts] So it so that's one type of tinitus. I have uh tinitus or had it and it was I have something called an acoustic or vestibular neuroma. It's a non-malignant tumor on the vestibular branch of the auditory nerve and it was discovered because I start to get severe tinitus. It was like hearing sounds of being in the kitchen and people throwing dishes. It was not a calming humming. It was a lot. And then I actually uh Okay, so there two issues on that. They uh the medical community, this is 2002, said there's only one solution that is you need to have surgery. And I said, "What will that do?" They said, "We we we're going to do we'll have to cut this out, the tumor, and you'll be able to have hearing. However, you're going to lose hearing, which is really the consequence of the surgery." And you know, I I'm not your average or your normal patient. So I went and did my literature search and I started to read the publications were not giving me any information but the conference papers which are done before publications started to tell me about what will be called watch and wait and they basically said look a lot of people don't get surgery nothing happens you know it just they they live they so it's not going to kill you >> and if it grows big then you which is extraordinarily rare >> now what I found out was that when I was quote stressed uh the the tenses would bother me. Okay, this is where your question is for the focus on >> and in fact this is now 25 years ago or 20 years ago. I'm now in Miami visiting my father and and I'm driving across a railroad track and on the tracks as I go over the tracks the tentis is going on and off on and off. Okay. So there was a physical component and what I was dealing with was in the literature when I read the material there was an inflammatory component to to the expression of the tumor. So I start to take high doses of fish oil and it tends disappeared. Fish oil has a anti-inflammatory. So, so what I'm saying is that that the what I was getting that my type was due to the actual nerve being inflammator inflamed and I could control that with fish oil. So, I was very fortunate and now I don't even know that I have tenitus. >> Why would it be the case that a disregulated or a lower tolerance system would worsen tinitus? >> Why is that? No, because it it just because inflammation is part of that uh defensive system. >> Oh, okay. Yeah. >> Okay. So, let's go back uh rewind the tape and we're talking about clusters of symptoms that are together. Inflammation is one of them. So, the whole family of things happen. It's not merely your heart rate gets up, your regulation of heart of heart rate and sweating. the inflammatory component is there as well. >> Yeah, that makes complete sense. I'm interested in the link between the veagal nerve and the gut mic microbiome biome. What do you make of that connection? >> Well, just remember that 80% of the veagal fibers are and where's the vagus going is in your gut. It's really monitoring your gut as I would think most of or many of the veagal apherins are really gut receptors. So >> why would that be the case? Just because digestion is really important. >> Yeah, it's not digestion. It's is toxins. And the other thing you got to think about what your gut is. It's not it's a farm. It's a farm for molecules that your body needs. Think of it that way. You are you're raising all kinds of things in your gut. the floor of your gut is complex. Mhm. >> So uh so basically uh uh I've actually been doing uh the past decade quite a bit of work in gastronenterology and was showing that most a lot of of these syndromes within GI which uh is also another one of these uh disciplines where it's very hard to document pathophysiology with the symptoms that the autonomic nervous system is highly disregul ulated in many of the individuals who have gut problems including chronic uh uh vomiting syndromes and symptoms like that. >> What direction is that going from? Is that low tolerance nervous system giving you bad gut? Is that bad gut giving you low tolerance nervous? Like what do you make of the gut biome's effect on the nervous system? Okay, you you need to take some do some resonant breathing now [laughter] and realize that when we talk about a system, it's birectional. It's really sending up signal and we know we can influence by how we feel. So we know our gut reacts to things happen in our environment and we know if we have a stomach ache, we're really our capacities become very very limited. So we know that the sensations from the gut can disrupt our daily life and we also know that our daily life can disrupt how our gut works. Now we start talking about what it is to be having a system. Another thing that tends to be missing from our own narratives of explaining how our body works. >> Is there a sex difference in how nervous systems operate? >> Well, for decades I've tried to neglect that question. My wife is always uh informing me that there are sex differences. Uh the answer is probably. I mean I think we can say that there are some basic mechanics that are in a way asexual and said systems work the same way but there are different demands on let's say different sex as a subspecies different demands on women than on men and at different times of their lives. So there's a time course it's going to be different. I think it's so underststudied because most of the research on health has been done on males because females had more variability and especially when it comes to clinical trials. >> Variability kills you in clinical trials because people wanted cause and effect relationships. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I I think what I'm interested in around the sort of sex difference for for nervous systems is male socialization uh antisocial behavior uh situations, loneliness, stuff like that. Um certainly seems to show up in men more than in women for a variety of reasons. But I'm I'm wondering whether male socialization is partly a nervous system challenge uniquely. [snorts] >> I don't know. I mean, I haven't thought of it that way. >> I keep thinking of our socialization process of males and females and the history of humanity which was you know different social circuits uh for men and for women historically >> and and the issue and also the notion of birthing and how that was really a communal event. Uh I'm actually more interested now in the other part of the lifespan and that is how poorly we as a species are doing with end of life um which is not really discussed or worked on and so I'm getting very interested in paliotative medicine and with the with a desire that uh we have tools that enable us to literally smile and wave goodbye at the end of our duration. here uh as opposed to trying to preserve life and make people fearful of the dying process. >> That's interesting. >> Yeah. I mean, think about it because uh how many how many uh episodes have you had interviews on? >> 1,150 maybe. >> Okay. How many have talked about paliotative care, end of life? >> Less than 10. >> Yeah. And we're all going to die, right? I think [laughter] >> and and it just gives you a glimpse into how we are so unprepared for the essence the whole life uh the passage. >> Yeah. Yeah. I think it makes at least a little sense about why what especially around nervous system people understand that something which impacts you at the beginning uh lays the foundation and can be an echo which is heard throughout the remainder of the journey. We don't talk about uh grandparent trauma. We talk about childhood trauma because the trauma doesn't tend to move backward in time. It tends to move forward in time. So I I understand why it feels like um investing in an early stage startup as opposed to a company that's very mature because well how much more is there to go but you're right I mean like everybody is going to pass away and the fact that we haven't looked at paliotative care with the same level of uh of uh scrutiny >> compassion let's use the word compassion >> well it's it's the one type of discrimination which is still almost universally accepted is aism >> right like it's the one thing that you're never going to get pulled up for. You can say on a daytime TV show. You can say it on a comedy show. You can shout it at somebody that cuts you off on the street. Like very Has anybody ever stepped in and said, "Hey, hey, don't talk about his age like that, man." Like no one's stepped in to do that. People have said it about race, about sexuality, about gender, like all of these different things. Agism is this one that Arthur Brooks told me this is the one that is affected me directly is understanding that the world that I had lived in for so many decades is not very uh accommodating for people who are getting uh frail. >> Yeah. Well, you are spinning yourself upside down a couple of times every morning. So [laughter] >> I'm I'm in I'm doing fine. I was gonna say the frail the frailness thing I wouldn't say. >> No, but the the issue is uh when you're doing fine is when you should be exploring the future is really what I'm saying. >> Yeah. Just going back to the um sex differences thing. You've said that co-regulation is is the biological basis of love that we literally regulate each other's nervous systems. Yeah. >> What do you think are the implications when a man has never experienced consistent co-regulation like potentially especially from a father? >> Um I think we can see that in in in let's say our the politics of today. Uh so that our culture is not uh okay. So there's a lot of okay the consequence what we're really saying is uh uh with the experience of being vulnerable is part of the experience of having relationship and if we can't cope with our own vulnerabilities then we have difficulty navigating the world we're in. Um, and I think there's times when uh being bold or being impervious to or not acknowledging vulnerability serves us well, >> but there's also other periods where it basically locks us out of community. And uh I'm I'm kind of watching this because to me it's the the script of life is becoming uh I think what you were saying about things that happened early in life. We can see it moving on. >> I think that script is uh now be to my to my mind or my eyes and my ears become quite predictable. You know, it's like saying I can see the consequences and uh the issue is uh it doesn't fit with my view when I was young. My view was a we can all be what who or whatever we want to be. I was quite an idealist and I basically felt that options that I could do everyone else could do. I didn't have an appreciation of let's say the uh permiss the permissiveness that was given to me uh through my you know through whatever uh lineage I had or the opportunities I had. >> Um I didn't see them as as special and I didn't see the skill set or the insights as special. And I think part of what because we're trained in sense to have a type of humility. What I'm saying is that the concept of really being compassionate and benevolent is really an understanding that others don't have what we have. >> It's such a good point. I I had a conversation with a friend in Bali earlier this year and you know I explaining to him about this journey that I've been on. I've spent two years trying to piece myself back together after mold lime EBV CMV long COVID stuff. And then just as I've got myself to where I felt I'd made really great progress, this disordia kicks in and now I've got this new fight and and I I'm >> I'm so I'm irritated. I'm tired. I'm agitated of having to do this. I'm starting to get apathetic. I'm like I'm just constantly having to be strong and having to show up and I'm I'm even trying hard at not trying hard. I'm trying hard at being empathetic. I'm trying hard at doing this stuff. He gave me this big long voice note in response and it I think it speaks to what you're saying and he said I don't know of a single person who has fully and truly understood humanity without going through a long period where they didn't know if they were ever going to get better. He said this is the difference between just having a hard time and having a life-changing difficulty that you face because in one of them everyone's been through a hard time. Everyone's lost a job, everyone's lost a parent, everyone's lost whatever. But the difference he said is not knowing whether or not you'll get better. And that that is so true that now when I look around at I've got more compassion for people who are ill. I've got more compassion for people who are uh struggling with addictions. I've got more compassion for people who are seemingly annoying. Like even stuff that's that that's that's uh you think is elective. Everybody's got compassion for somebody that was born disabled. Everybody's got compassion for someone that was abused as a child. But what about that person who just never seems to stop is never able to stop talking about themselves or their accomplishments? And I'm like, I see so much more now. Hey, something's happened at some point in this person's past. Either something's happened to them or they were born and this is something that they their predisposition, right? They didn't get to choose either of these things. Like, [ __ ] Like, as annoying as you are, I should give you a lot of compassion. And that has been >> that's been born out of this experience the last two years of of really trying to sort of grapple and battle with this thing. That's that's been the the biggest takeaway. Humility and and more compassion. >> Yeah. Chris, the as I you know listen and hear the array of of vulnerabilities that have hit you to me. They're all the same. Even the hypers sensitivities sensitivity to mold the system does not have resilience. That's what you're saying. >> Now, this is where the beautiful big cortex is useful. >> So, we evaluate, okay, my system does not have resilience. I can move my system into places where it's going to be less vulnerable. Now, what does that mean? It means different things to different people. it all based upon whether your daily demands like doing podcasts are nourishing to you at this stage of your recovery or they're not. >> And I think that becomes the first question to ask yourself. I mean, I'm just talking to you as a person, not as a therapist, but as the observer. And I think that's really the first question that you really have to come to grips with because that is in a sense containing or uh containing you is the work and this is what you do. This is how you define yourself. And the question is if you didn't have that to define yourself, what is your how's your body going to feel? So the issue is you can't deal with the vulnerability of the uh disease entity that has invaded you unless you can deal with how you can feel without the container that may now be uh contributing to the expression of the symptoms >> dependent on whether it feels nourishing or sapping. >> That's right. >> Very interesting. One thing I haven't mentioned, what do you make of stellate ganglen blocks? What do you think of SGBS? >> Yeah. Well, so Eugene Lipoff, who I know quite well, he's is really one of the originators of that and I'm very okay. From my view, it's turning Okay, it is actually something that we alluded to implicitly. If you if your sympathetics are now overextended, uh you're going to be locked in fight flight and you're going to continue to do that. And if you downregulate them, the parasympathetic calming has an opportunity to express itself. That's what I think is happening. I think the stoic ganglia is actually uh dampening that whole limb of the sympathetic sufficiently that the parasympathetic vagus can start to express itself. >> Okay. But the utility of it has been really uh in terms of the world of trauma or PTSD as far as I can tell. And PTSD is manifest in different ways. There are people who are locked into a state of fight flight. And I think that's really the great uh toolkit to help treat it. But there are those who are kind of locked into a shutting down, withdrawal, and immobilization. And I'm not sure if that's going to be helpful for that group. >> Yeah, that's interesting. Some I've seen some research that says deeply traumatized baby mice require three generations to get back to a normal nervous system state. Do you feel like that's true for humans? >> Well, you're you're asking what I call um Okay. So, they talk about intergenerational trauma. I'd like to use the word transgenerational because I think uh the country where we live and I imagine the UK as well historically is a trans uh generationally traumatized environment and what it doesn't okay a lot of it you don't have to assume that's epigenetics so the genes have been modified and transmitted all you need to think about is what is the culture so think of the UK and the private or the boarding schools and the you know basically stripping kids from childhood and uh and then making this the elite you know this is uh and totally >> these are the trends setters moving forward culturally >> yeah or they were the leaders so I I met a actually became a friend he's written a book called the basically about the damaged elite of of the UK because they become the prime ministers and all these other people and he's really saying Their bodies are locked into states of defense. So their ability to be compassionate is quite compromised. >> Oh, that's so fascinating. And then you you you're in an environment which probably makes that worse. It rewards a stoic stiffness. I am not affected by this. I'm a safe pair of hands to drive this organization forward. >> Yeah. Or even, you know, the bit about uh the English uh view of sexuality. They do it for the queen or [laughter] uh or >> I've never pulled that one out, but I will. >> If the line was it will be over in a few minutes, just don't worry about >> Yeah. Think of [snorts] think of queen and country and just keep going. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. It's it's not one of love and and engagement and connection. It's something else. >> Duty. It's closer to duty. Right. >> Okay. Um, obviously this you you you've been working on this theory for a long time and it's unbelievably influential. What are the strongest criticisms of poly vagal theory in your opinion? Which criticisms do you think are fairest >> there? Okay. So my view is this is quite a a trigger to me because the criticisms are not of the theory. the criticisms have been misrepresentations of the theory and and so I don't mind criticism because they will improve articulation of what this is. Every criticism that I've seen has been really a misrepresentation of what the theory said and really what you have are people who think they know what the theory is and who are making statements. And I >> I'm interested what are the most common misconceptions? >> Oh, >> when criticisms are being lodged then >> they they don't understand the evolution of the veagal system. Uh the fact that it the nucleus that where the vagus comes from in the vententral vagus is an older nucleus long before mammals is fine, but that didn't have a cardioinhibitory fibers until mammals had it. So they don't understand the distinction between an anatomical structure and its actually components uh neurohysiologically they basically don't understand that polyagal theory was never about the nerve. It was about the organization of this integrated brain stem system. They just don't understand what it's about. >> And what what what does that lead them to wrongly conclude? What are the implications of not understanding that? What's the criticism that's levied because of that error? Oh, well they say it's not based on physiology and what they've done is misrepresent every point of it and then they would if I and what they may quote accurate physiology but it's not relevant to what the theory actually states. So it's been to the in fact I created a AI poly veagal scholar and it has one basic rule be uh you have to have fidelity to the theory and I have not gotten a criticism that it doesn't basically kick out because the theory has not been accurately represented the theory in in a sense the theory has evolved over decades with more clarification and I'm just finishing two papers one is on an architecture of the theory, but it's not of the Vegas. It's of this whole mamleian organizational system that enables us to co-regulate. It enables our social behavior now to impact on our health and physiology >> and they miss all of that. They get stuck into something that doesn't exist. And and this has been going on for almost 30 years. So it's like you know I basically have said this uh uh read the papers and if you can't read them you know don't tell people that uh they you have I mean it's like >> that's a micro >> but I would also say that it's double-edged the more people uh criticize it the more lights that are shining on it. >> It's like it's not unknown. And it's really interesting because the clinical world which really gave it um traction uh it it works for them. The interesting part is the uh neuroscience world is too uh let's say siloed to understand the organizing principles of it. So it's kind of like uh ahead of its time or pulling things together because it requires an understanding of the interaction of too many components. So you can't criticize a theory based upon the Vegas. You can't criticize it based upon any single pathway because it's not about that. >> And by criticizing on it, you're not understanding what the theory is stating. So uh I'm actually extraordinarily confident that time time is I may not be here but it will survive me by far and the issue is because what I am now writing about is giving people a toolkit to understand what the theory is so they don't get pulled into let's say uh false arguments. uh what I would say if someone criticizes, show my one basic statement. Show show me in the literature where I made that statement. It's as simple as that. And I mean that's all I'm asking. Uh and the bottom line is it doesn't really matter to me if you want to argue with me. It matters to me if you represent my work accurately. That's my >> I'm going to use your statement when somebody misques me on the internet as well. >> Yeah. Uh >> well that see that's the world you're in and to me the internet world and the social media world is so vulnerable because people can say anything >> but they can also say that you've said anything which is uh the the false accusation equivalent. All right we spent we spent an entire episode talking about when uh people's nervous systems are uh too disregulated too sensitive a window of tolerance which is too constrained. Can a person's nervous system be too safe lead to uh risk aversion, lack of ambition, inability to tolerate challenge? Like the pacification of people is there such a thing as too safe? >> Okay. So So what I see I wouldn't my interpretation was what if a nervous system feels too safe? Does that make them too vulnerable? >> See I'm actually going to the other side. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. >> And I actually was very concerned about that. I was actually thinking that that was a possibility. Um, and the issue is so it's like if I feel safe, am I going to be not detect signals of danger? That was my concern. >> Mhm. And I'm basically I feel much better after pondering this for quite a few years that our nervous system, the healthy nervous system that has the capacity to connect and to basically love and share and trust is usually the nervous system that can detect threat as well. >> Mhm. So, so it's like we're talking about a well- reggulated system that enables this co-regulation to occur tends to be the same system that can adjust and navigate to this complex world. Unreal. Steven Porges, ladies and gentlemen. Stephen, you're so great. Uh, I've got I have a million more things I want to talk about about relating, about child rearing, about uh pediatrics and stuff, but we can we can save that for another time. Um, I just really I really appreciate you. I really appreciate you giving me uh and and everybody a language with which to experience or to understand the way that we experience the world. As far I've been on the the front lines of this, so to speak, with my own uh sort of priorities over the last two years or so, I've come to basically believe that our nervous system, we are our nervous systems when it comes to the way that we interact with the world around us. and it's the single most influential thing in terms of how we experience the world and how the world experiences us. So giving us language and and and insights about how to how to navigate that and understand it is awesome. So I just wanted to give you your flowers there. >> Oh, thank you Chris. And my summary of what you just said is that you're poly vehicle informed. U I mean that's when you see the world through the way that you described it. That's what the theory was for. for us to understand that what the nervous system or what I'm basically saying our physiological state >> is really a a major component of our behavior and who we are and our feelings >> in my world that's the world of academia would be pol poly vagal informed in my world of the internet and degenerate culture it would be poly vagal pill but we'll we'll we'll allow us to do one or the other pes ladies and gentlemen Stephen you're great I appreciate you and I can't wait to speak to you again soon >> oh thank you Chris thank you very Thank you very much for tuning in. If you enjoyed that episode, YouTube knows who you are deeply. It thinks you're going to like this one even more. Go on, press