Dr Stephen Porges Interview on Polyvagal Theory: Why You Feel So Anxious All The Time (Transcript)

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 mistranslated. Can we use that term?

The Origins of Polyvagal Theory

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: So brilliant. So great. Okay. What was the actual problem that you were trying to solve in 1994? What didn’t fight or flight, rest and digest — what didn’t that explain?

DR. STEPHEN PORGES: Well, it gets — okay, there are different levels. So you’re sitting across from me, at least 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 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 time. I was kind of more interested in what was going on inside of them. And it didn’t have really an area of science. Science was really very mechanistic.

So behaviorism was big. 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 let it percolate.

There was no understanding that the way we feel was anything other than optional until something catastrophic happens in people’s lives, like loss of a loved one or severe injury, or a traumatic event where someone is raped or mugged on the street and suddenly everything is different in the world. And what used to be comforting and engaging is no longer there.

Or what happened to me was I got pneumonia and I had been extremely a social individual. And this was when I was a tenured — actually I was probably a full professor at that time. And the issue was I basically no longer could be around crowds of people. It started to bother me, my threshold. And you see this after COVID for many people. They had chronic illness and they have words for chronic fatigue syndrome, and people are literally marginalized when they say they have that. “Come on, get back into the flow.”

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Everybody gets tired as they get older. Everyone’s a little bit underslept.

DR. STEPHEN PORGES: 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, a vagal related theory about the parasympathetic nervous system — that it was very important. I was basically trying to describe the other side of the world, the other side of stress. What are the systems that calm you down? What state supports meditative aspects? And so you had fight and flight and stress, and then you had this parasympathetic, this wonderful system. It was a rest and restore system.

And that was kind of an interesting model until I worked in a neonatal intensive care unit where you have these preterm babies. And of course they have a fight-flight response, frequently the high heart rates and tachycardia. But their defensive systems were shutting down — a lot of this vagal slowing of heart rate, but 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 vagal paradox. How could this same nerve, which was really associated with basically good states, health, growth, and restoration — how could it kill you? In fact, a neonatologist wrote to me after I wrote a paper in a journal and said, “Maybe too much of a good thing is bad.” That was the way most people think. And I said, that doesn’t make any sense. That’s not how systems are evolved or wired.

And I started to get deep into the anatomy and then into the evolution — basically what’s called phylogeny, where you look at species changes in autonomic regulation. And then there was something that became very mammalian, 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 it was reading cues.

When mothers talk to their babies, or if you have pets — do you have a pet, a dog or a cat?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: No, I am on the cusp of getting a dog, but not yet.

DR. STEPHEN PORGES: Well, you have friends at least.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. And I treat them like dogs sometimes actually. So that really works.

What Makes Us Uniquely Mammalian

DR. STEPHEN PORGES: The way people treat their dogs, they use very melodic, prosodic 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 — 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 mammalian and using the preterm baby as this window of an opportunity to see a system that was not fully developed, and I could see it coming on board.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Can you just give me the adaptive explanation for those 3 states as you conceived them?

DR. STEPHEN PORGES: Sure. Everything is adaptive in the model. Nothing is wrong, nothing is bad, nothing is pathological. They’re adaptive in certain contexts.

So in a sense, for vertebrates — and those are all the species with backbones — as they evolved into amphibia and then basically mammals and reptiles broke off at the same time and had basically 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 also, when it was born, it needed to be taken care of. Now, the other species laid their eggs and walked away.

So 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 as 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 signaling now. 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 enable social behavior to act positively on our 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 mammalian. And that’s why dogs and humans — or if you look — let’s see, can you see my cat?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yes. Yeah, we will be able to. Yeah.

The Three-Level Autonomic Nervous System

DR STEPHEN PORGES: 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 3. 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 vagal system and it had a bunch of chemicals like adrenaline or chemicals like that in the body. So it can mobilize and have 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 — we tend to focus on the brain neural 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. Just don’t attend to it.

So the vagus initially was fine when we could rest and restore with it in peaceful comfort. But when we had a fight-flight mobilization, we interfered with that rest and restore. But what happened now with mammals, they had a very nuanced vagal system that became a vagal 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 fight-flight system, and not only an older dorsal, the back of the brain, vagal system that regulated your organs, but also had this newer ventral vagal 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.

So the whole — and Austin, where you’re seeing 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 of social cues become more and more separate from the actual interaction. So the mammal had this remarkable system that enabled it, or us, to control our fight-flight, and actually co-opt it as play, and to control our immobilization to support our health, growth, and restoration by being safe in the arms of another.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And to also signal that we needed help, that we needed care, that we needed support.

Signals of Safety and Connection

DR STEPHEN PORGES: 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 almost a template of what that person is like. You start, in a sense, inferring — 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 gotta 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. You may have to say, wow, is the hour almost up? Or what am I going to talk about? Or can I move on?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. You say that we come into this world with a quest to be safe.

DR STEPHEN PORGES: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Why?

DR STEPHEN PORGES: Because we can’t survive by ourselves. So there’s a function to all this. It’s not like it makes it unimportant because it’s pragmatic. It’s just how we evolved. We didn’t evolve as an independent, self-controlled, or self-contained system. We needed others in our world. And for many, especially those who survived 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.

What Does Feeling Safe Actually Mean Neurologically?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What does feeling safe actually mean neurologically?

DR STEPHEN PORGES: It means basically we can — okay, so let me flip it on you. What does feeling stressed mean to you?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: High heart rate, sweating, tightness in the body, ruminating thoughts, intrusive thoughts, concern, lack of creativity.

DR STEPHEN PORGES: Lack of ability to access your capacities.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yes. Yes. Constrained capacity.

DR STEPHEN PORGES: 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 it. They’re basically 2 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 the child of a physiology that is homeostatic. It’s just 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.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What’s the most powerful force of safety in the human world?

DR STEPHEN PORGES: Let’s reframe it. What are the most powerful signals of safety? And they would — you could identify them. That would be maybe a smiling face, a voice that’s prosodic. Prosodic 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 the mother has a good engagement, good voice.

In fact, we actually did research on this where you kind of 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 —

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: No way. Yeah.

DR STEPHEN PORGES: So when you get your dog, you can try this all out.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, I will do. I’ll sing to this.

DR STEPHEN PORGES: I would say if you had a child or if you have a spouse or a partner, you can try it out as well.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. Child soon cometh. Just give me a little bit more time on that one.

Biological State vs. Psychological Choice

Okay. So to sort of 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.

DR STEPHEN PORGES: Yeah, I think that’s quite accurate. I would kind of reframe one word. I would say our capacity to — which is not necessarily our ability. So our capacity.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: To connect with others.

DR STEPHEN PORGES: Yeah. And so part of — I view my goal in life as to navigate in a complex world that has lots of signals so that 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.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Why do some people never truly feel safe even when objectively everything’s fine?

DR STEPHEN PORGES: I think that’s the greatest — that was the question that got me going, because I said, 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 — watch children playing. When we mobilize this 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 our voice were linked to how that mammalian vagus was working. So as the mammalian vagus 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.

Nervous System Sensitivity and Conditioning

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: 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 read a little about HSPs, highly sensitive people. I’m trying to think about 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 that they need?

DR STEPHEN PORGES: 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 — 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 prosodic voices and those signals, they may actually react adversely to it, especially if there’s 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 and that face and it goes, wow. Then the body starts feeling those feelings inside the body, and those feelings — for a typical nervous system — are feelings you feel good. But if those feelings of feeling good are associated with being abused, what happens? So you get the feeling and then the brain remembers and says, been there. This is what happened to me. I’m out of the room.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Sorry for interjecting. That feels a little bit Skinnerian. That feels a little behaviorist-y — that we have this stimulus response. What is it that we have associated? Is that fair for me to sort of add that little bit of a twist into how the conditionings occur?

DR STEPHEN PORGES: So we have, in the sense of reflex, which is no cognition is necessary — you talk to me, or I talk to you, or you talk to your dog and the dog just kind of relaxes. 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.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yes. Yes.

DR STEPHEN PORGES: So there are 2 different parts of this sequence. One, my nervous system has a propensity to react. I can’t change it. That’s who we are. We can get triggered. It’s like — okay, this reason I have a smile is that my wife used to say to me, “You should be above it.” And I’m saying, I’m human, I can get triggered, we all get triggered.

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 triggered. People are going to say 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.

Personal Health Journey and Nervous System Recovery

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What’s interesting, you used the example of when you got pneumonia and preferred to be around smaller groups of people, didn’t want as much social stimulus. That shows just how adaptive, not only across time, 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 system had adapted to see an old stimulus in a new light.

DR. STEPHEN PORGES: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah.

DR. STEPHEN PORGES: That’s who we are. We’re a 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 the up part of it is that there’s pathways of rehabilitation. There are ways in which you can signal the system to slowly gain confidence in itself again.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It feels, I need to break the fourth wall a little bit for a second, so bear with me. It feels very timely to be speaking to you. So you probably won’t be aware of this, but a lot of the audience will. I released a health vlog about 9 months ago or so tracking a journey that I’d been on from long COVID, chronic fatigue, Lyme, CMV, EBV. I lived in a house that had mold with every different polymorphism that you don’t want in order to have mold toxicity, heavy metal, just this laundry list of challenges.

It had meant that I was tired at 7 o’clock at night every night. It meant that no matter how much I slept, I never felt recovered. I hated the smell of standing water. I couldn’t stand silence, but I also couldn’t stand music. So this real sort of big mess.

We get to the back end of last year and I’d made some good progress. 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 to try and do this well. So that felt like a big tension.

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. 11 minutes, full vasovagal syncope, fainted, heart stopped for 5 seconds. So for the people that don’t know, this is 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 degrees and they see how your body responds.

There’s something about that 70-degree angle 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 breathwork. And I was like, right, okay, well, this is the time to apply some of your meditation and breathwork. 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, because they don’t want you to help your circulation to get 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 that was a really lovely guy. He came over me and the first sentence that came out of his mouth after I sort of came back around was, “Okay, so your heart stopped. No worries, buddy. Your heart stopped.” I was like, hey dude, 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 stopped.”

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 I think I could. This has been unbelievably personal to me over the last 2 years and specifically the last 9 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 autonomic system back in check, to be gentle with myself. So anyway, I just appreciated you opening up about your case with the pneumonia thing because it felt like it gave me license to talk about this thing.

Long COVID and the Nervous System’s Slow Recovery

DR. STEPHEN PORGES: You have license to talk to me about anything. So the interesting part is, first of all, it’s a slow journey back. 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 tell you a similar story. When I was getting a heart checkup, they basically put an IV in me and the IV started to get loose. And so I started to tell them, I’d say, “Twiddle it.” And I went into vasovagal syncope as well. And they then looked at me and they said, “What are you scared of?” I said, “I’m not scared. You’re basically tweaking with my baroreceptors. Basically, you’re playing with the blood pressure receptors.” But they don’t think of it in that way. So they see this autonomic, which is what they’re looking for with that.

And actually, for many of the people who fail those tests, they have a broad, 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 — the story that I want to tell you is a metaphor for you to think about. You survived a pathogen. You had COVID, and 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.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You know what my Filipino friend said to me? He said, “This is what I do. I’m a technician for the tilt table test. And prior to COVID, I would maybe do between 3 and 5 of these a month. And now, I do between 3 and 5 of these a day.”

DR. STEPHEN PORGES: Wow.

Vagal Nerve Stimulation and Sound Therapy for Long COVID

DR. STEPHEN PORGES: I think long COVID, or the consequence of the pandemic, have been so underestimated. I’ve just completed a study on long COVID. I was part of an interesting government-funded project, basically doing it remotely. And basically, the intervention was a vagal nerve stimulator, which was developed by a colleague of mine, and another intervention, a sound intervention that I had developed — basically, it’s called Sonacea or Sonic Augmentation Technology. It’s the new stuff that I’ve developed with a colleague called Anthony Gorey.

And what it does — first, with the vagal 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 in your body and you feel better. So it’s a signaling system. It’s not regulating the motor part of the vagus. It’s sending a signal in.

The sound does the same type of 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 slowly.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: More like a cradle than a tilt table.

DR. STEPHEN PORGES: Yes, yes. And we all have that visual image like babies kind of coming away and floating in space but no fear of falling off. And basically, the sounds had the same effectiveness as the vagal nerve stimulator. It 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 questionnaires and symptom arrays. There were no blood samples, but symptom arrays 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 vagal nerve stimulator or the sound — is that if you know what the signal profile is that your nervous system is looking for, you can give it that.

The Body Locked in a Chronic State of Defense

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Why would it be the case that a dysregulated nervous system would cause people to feel more anxious, people to feel more depressed, them to have lower energy — why would this huge suite of things occur?

DR. STEPHEN PORGES: First of all, let’s tap you on the back and give you a congratulations for observing and calling out that it is a suite of systems that are affected. It’s not one. It’s not really—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You’re not just tired. You’re not just sad. You’re not just distracted.

DR. STEPHEN PORGES: And it’s not just that you have poor sleep. It’s not that your gut isn’t working. It’s not that you have tachycardia. It’s everything about your autonomic nervous system’s regulation. So it’s a regulatory disorder. And we have difficulty in — I would say we, I’m talking about modern medicine — in seeing a system and seeing the system and its function. The system is dysregulated. It’s not coordinated in the way that it should.

And so the issue is, yes, and I’ll give you a word that fits in with all this. Your body’s in a chronic state of defense. It’s as simple as that. It’s like 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.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Oh, you’re locked into this price. Oh, that’s interesting. So in the same way as a traumatic emotional event or physical event, a traumatic pathogenic event does something similar.

DR. STEPHEN PORGES: It’s all the same.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: But the difference is when something has occurred consciously, 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 below the conscious threshold, we don’t draw the same analogy to pathogens.

DR. STEPHEN PORGES: Maybe because we’re numb to our body, we don’t have the language. So our narrative is to say, 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 death is imminent.

So I actually gave a couple of recent talks that I call Sentinel Trauma. And that is how does the body react to these 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 living through it.

I would say optimistically, you’re doing well. And even your curiosity, so where you’re going with it — 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 tilt table test. They’re assessing whether the feedback loop is working on your blood pressure, meaning your vascular bed, the vagus, the sympathetics, and your own blood flow.

Now I will tell you what are my exercises every morning.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yes.

DR. STEPHEN PORGES: I have a backswing, basically a tilt table in the basement. Ever see one of the backswings? So it tilts down like that and you can go upwards like that.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Like an inversion table?

DR. STEPHEN PORGES: Yeah. Yeah. It doesn’t go under. I can’t rotate, but I can go like 70 degrees down, 70 degrees up.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yep. Yep.

DR. STEPHEN PORGES: Yep.

Autonomic Interventions and the Science of Nervous System Regulation

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I have seen that. Why?

DR. STEPHEN PORGES: I’m challenging my ganglion receptors. I’m doing a neural exercise on them every morning.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: How long are you doing that for?

DR. STEPHEN PORGES: I’m doing, first of all, I tilt downward and do basically sit-ups and basically about 10, 5 minutes or so of exercises in the inverted position. Then I do tilts on each breath, 30 of them. They’re quite rapid. You would pass out.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, I bet I would. Yeah.

DR. STEPHEN PORGES: 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 sedentary, my body might think it’s, you’re too old to do those things.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: How fascinating. Okay. 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?

The Tilt Table Discovery and Acoustic Interventions

DR. STEPHEN PORGES: Okay. So first of all, if we go back, we’re going to go back into the ’90s. I actually was playing around with a tilt table. I had a motor on it where I rocked people up 21 degrees 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. 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 issue is that the acoustic interventions that I’ve developed, 2 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 pediatric populations.

But the trauma population, people have used it with other therapies and it’s been intertwined with EMDR and with various cognitive behavioral therapy and all forms of it, in a sense, 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.

And then the new one I developed, which is called Sonic Augmentation Technology, and the intervention was called Rest and Restore Protocol. And that was dealing really with — visualize 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 meditation for traumatized individuals, they run out of the room.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah.

DR. STEPHEN PORGES: Because that immobilization now is a signal to the nervous system of vulnerability.

The Frequency of Safety: How Sound Signals Calm

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Fascinating. So, okay. You’ve managed to isolate frequencies of a mother’s voice. I think it’s like 1,500 to 3,500 hertz. Is that right?

DR. STEPHEN PORGES: You read real well. Yes.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What can I say? I do my research. Also, obviously, unbelievably personally invested in getting this right. And that’s why layering it into music, making the connection, that’s enough to signal safety cues to the nervous system. Yeah.

DR. STEPHEN PORGES: But it’s actually even broader. So, anything, it’s like 500 to 3,000 will be fine. Or basically, it enables the frequency. 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 band of social communication. So you can calm a dog or a horse or a cat by talking to them.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Is that part of the reason that we have collaborated and partnered with those animals?

DR. STEPHEN PORGES: Yes.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Oh, that’s so f*ing cool. Okay. So part of the reason that humans, cats, dogs, and horses have bonded so well is that our frequency of calm when vocalized is in a similar range to the one that they use.

DR. STEPHEN PORGES: Absolutely.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That is so cool.

DR. STEPHEN PORGES: It’s totally amazing. It is so interesting to watch how people talk to their pets. It’s like they have a manual.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Have you ever seen, there’s a video, a short video of a golden retriever and there’s 2 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 bares 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 2 seconds, 2 seconds, 2 seconds, 2 seconds, bite, rest, bite, rest, bite, rest. And I just thought that was so funny. It’s so funny how quickly adaptive that is to be able to happen.

DR. STEPHEN PORGES: Listen, my cat does something similar. My cat likes to mouth me, my hands, not my wife’s. It’s very interesting.

Why You Can’t Just Play Calming Music All the Time

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Okay. So if this is the case, right? And safety cues can be cued through auditory input. Why not just play this music all the time? If it’s that simple, why not just play the music permanently?

DR. STEPHEN PORGES: 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 it 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 modulating it the way I wanted. And they were solitary, very solitary. And I played other music and nothing happened.

So 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?

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 because their nervous system is not broadcasting signals of accessibility.

Vagus Nerve Stimulators: Real Benefits and Real Limits

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That’s interesting. Okay. So what about vagus nerve stimulators? That’s something else that you mentioned earlier on. How much is real and how much is bunk with regards to that?

DR. STEPHEN PORGES: Oh, I mean, number one, it’s real. The question is for what and what reason 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 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.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What does exercise it, expand its range, increase its flexibility look like?

DR. STEPHEN PORGES: For me, it’s like challenge it and 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 syncope situation where the body just can’t adjust. It can’t give anything else more out and 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 neural regulation of our heart rate. And that’s where heart rate variability— actually, what you don’t know is that in the ’60s, I was the first person to quantify heart rate variability.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That’s something that I do know because I did my reading.

DR. STEPHEN PORGES: Ah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yes. That was your first paper, right?

Heart Rate Variability: A Pioneering Discovery Oversimplified

DR. STEPHEN PORGES: 1969. Right. But here’s the real— you’re on my good list. So the real issue is I’m extraordinarily disappointed in the area of heart rate variability because what I was working on was once I observed a phenomenon, the question was what is causing it? What were the underlying mechanisms? What was I really measuring? And if I could measure it better, in a sense, get closer to the neural innervation, then the measurement would have much greater and better generalizability, more useful.

And what happened is that it went back to very descriptive. So, I have a Fitbit and the Fitbit is just giving me measures of variance, which is a descriptive statistic. And I worked on this for decades to develop technologies to, in a sense, pull out the specific vagal influence in the heart rate activity. And that’s basically swept under the carpet.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Speaking of that, what do you make of resonance breathing?

DR. STEPHEN PORGES: Well, there’s something very interesting there. Well, first of all, there is a— when we start understanding that the brainstem’s respiratory rhythm is not just affecting heart rate, but affects other things, we start getting into this notion of what was called resonance. I have a very simplistic view of it. I think a lot of people think a lot. So the theory is really that there’s individual differences in what your resonant frequency is. I don’t think it’s that tailored that neatly.

I think our bodies like certain slower rhythmicities. And when that’s even like with the music I was really working on, I don’t think it has to be specifically designed. And with resonant frequency, they were going at 0.1 hertz or 10 seconds. I think the body wants to gravitate slower. I think it wants to go to 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 a different experience. It wants a frequency that is closer to our normal vascular oscillation. And breathing tends to be quite a bit faster than a vascular oscillation.

Resonance Breathing and Closing the Loop

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I did a bunch of assessments. I love this product. It’s called Ohm, ohm.health. And it’s a HRV resonance breathing lamp. And you grab this thing. Anyway, my frequency’s 4.5 breaths a minute.

DR. STEPHEN PORGES: Hmm.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s 4.5. And that’s good. That’s where I get the highest oscillation between top and bottom. That’s where mine is. Okay. So, vagal nerve stimulators, good, but being used in the right context. Resonant breathing, interesting, and may also play a good role.

DR. STEPHEN PORGES: Also good, but remember what you were doing, you were doing a lot of interoception with your resonant breathing. You were not only looking at what the numbers are, you were assessing what was optimal and how you felt. How I feel. So, you’re really closing the loop of the sensory part with the motor aspect.

The Role of Singing, Humming, and Social Engagement

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I guess that’s a really good question. So there’s a ton of different interventions, humming, chanting, 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, vagus nerve stimulator, using a tilt table up and down, breathing at a particular rate, but then that perhaps stresses and then relaxes or relaxes and opens up tolerance for your nervous system. In that window, is that important beyond just the interoception thing to say, hey, and now I’m going to start to relate to the world around me, like a social exposure therapy or nervous system exposure therapy? Within that newly calmed window?

DR. STEPHEN PORGES: 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 herself or himself — the stimulus may make the therapist more effective.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: So you’re engendering a state, which is one of calm. Would it be fair to say sort of a broader flexibility within the nervous system for a little while?

DR. STEPHEN PORGES: Absolutely. You’re creating a window of flexibility, of tolerance.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: 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?

DR. STEPHEN PORGES: Yeah. Well, this is exactly what several therapists are using the Safe and Sound Protocol with extraordinarily sensitive people. So go back to your initial interest, which is on hypersensitive people, which is something you brought up. They found, or some of them found, that just listening for let’s say a few seconds or a minute, 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 in a sense with a tool, they’re opening up the window for longer and longer periods.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yep. Okay. Why do singing and humming and chanting calm us so much?

DR. STEPHEN PORGES: It’s a very easy answer. It’s because they’re recruiting. I could actually say, why does eating or ingestion calm us?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You have enough resources to 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.

DR. STEPHEN PORGES: No, too smart. You have to go back there.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That’s a problem I have all the time, Stephen. It really is.

DR. STEPHEN PORGES: Well, you’re trying to build your narrative when all you need to be was a simple observer. And that is you watch a baby suckling.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Okay.

DR. STEPHEN PORGES: 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 in a sense using the same neural system when we ingest than when we are interacting with others.

And this becomes really interesting. In some of my talks I say we try to share ingestion, but not digestion. And digestion is a private matter. It’s the dorsal vagus. Ingestion is the ventral vagus, 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.

Body Language, Vulnerability, and the Ventral Side

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You know what’s interesting? I had a communication expert, a guy called Chase Hughes on the show a couple of weeks ago, and he deals in microexpressions and body language and some interesting things. And he had one insight around people who are feeling anxious and 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 got him to break down a killer who was being sentenced, this guy that had done some pretty heinous crimes. And he highlighted that as the sentence was being given to him and the judge was reading out what he’d done and giving him his dressing down, he was there and his tongue came out just a tiny little bit, licked his lips, and then pushed back in. And I said, what’s going on there? And he said, well, it’s a vanity thing. 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 had that as the human’s first no. And I have no idea if it’s true, but I thought it was really cool.

DR. STEPHEN PORGES: All these things can be true, but there are other parsimonious strategies. If you’re getting a sentence, do you think your mouth will be drier than if you’re getting an award? So it can be really the body’s dehydration at that point. The adaptive reaction is to kind of relubricate your orifice.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Relubricate your orifice indeed. Yes.

DR. STEPHEN PORGES: Yeah. Okay. That’s another point. But let’s go to this bit. For me, I basically talk about this as accessibility when the arms pull out. Okay. That’s showing the ventral side. And like when my cat — my cat loves to do that. That’s not a normal posture for a cat, but she loves it because she likes her belly to be rubbed.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: She wouldn’t be doing that if she was underneath a foreign parked car out on the street.

DR. STEPHEN PORGES: Or near a stranger. But this is really important — we hold in, we protect the ventral side. So the issue of the evolutionary history is the ventral side is a side of vulnerability to injury. And it becomes how we protect ourselves versus not. So part of the bracing, symbolically, if I were to sit like this, you’d have a different interpretation than if I were like this.

What Is Anxiety, Really?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What’s the biggest myth about anxiety from your perspective?

DR. STEPHEN PORGES: 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. The characteristics of anxiety are we’re mobilized. Why are we mobilized? Now, what people like to say is, “I’m mobilized because I have to get something done.” But what we notice is that 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 that we’re broadcasting our physiological state.

Resilience, Recovery, and Accessing Our Capacities

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I guess a lot of people may feel — and obviously very self-serving — they go through periods of life where new lower tolerance periods, lower tolerance 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, their capacity to deal with stress and change and uncertainty and ambiguity and stuff where that gets constrained. What’s the difference between somebody who gets locked in from that situation and somebody who ends up bouncing back? And how much resilience can be re-inherited after it’s potentially been damaged?

DR. STEPHEN PORGES: Okay, so you’re living through a recovery phase of post-long COVID. So you know exactly that your range of resilience is different than what it was pre-COVID.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Correct.

DR. STEPHEN PORGES: But you also know that it’s getting greater than it was immediately after COVID or during COVID. So you have a trajectory that you can assess. So the part of it is that 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 implementing the constraint on us.

Our nervous system wants to blame something outside of us. It tries to blame, 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, 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 experienced 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 boundary conditions of 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 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. It’s almost like, is it safe enough to come outside? It’s like a horror movie. 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 about the traumatic events of schools with masks, shootings. And the solution is give guns to teachers and principals and put metal detectors. Now, what is that doing to the nervous system of these children?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah.

DR. STEPHEN PORGES: I mean, it’s not like metal detectors aren’t useful and having someone with a gun may be very adaptive in complex situations, but those are profound signals to a developing nervous system.

The Invisible Impact of Our Environment on the Nervous System

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s so interesting, because people’s nervous system states aren’t anywhere near as visible as pretty much anything else. If you had dirty drinking water and that impacted the way that a child’s digestion worked, or if you had loud music and it was obvious how distracted they were — if you can see stimulus and response quite easily, the pushback against that intervention would be quite obvious. What we don’t see, for instance, are humans built to see assassinations live streamed on X? Within minutes of it happening, posted around the world? Are we supposed to watch movies and car crashes and the insults?

DR. STEPHEN PORGES: Well, you know the answers. Of course. But the question is, 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.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yep.

DR. STEPHEN PORGES: Because people’s faces broadcast, their voices broadcast, their muscle tension broadcasts.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Can you explain what a low tolerance nervous system expressing person and a high tolerance nervous system expressing person — how would they show up differently?

Increasing Window of Tolerance: Practical Interventions

DR STEPHEN PORGES: Okay. 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 your interviewee has a monotone voice or a high-pitched voice, it doesn’t show any flexibility. It’s just broadcasting to your ear and to your body anxiety. So they’re broadcasting their physiological state.

And I think when you brought up your question about anxiety, it is — 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, it says, 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.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yep. Yep.

DR STEPHEN PORGES: 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 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 of vocalization.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Okay. How do you advise people to increase their window of tolerance and build safety practically? Then we’ve talked about a variety of interventions. What’s something that’s high compliance, high impact?

DR STEPHEN PORGES: Well, you actually brought up things that people are doing. They’re working on breath. I would say when they do breath, to start really working on their own internal feelings of the breath. So they’re helping the feedback loops become more enhanced. I think resonance breathing 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 exercise, people are not saying, as you exercise, go into the exercise and feel your body responding to it. So we put on the television while we’re on treadmills. We don’t take the exercise as a moment of zen.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Why is that important? Why is it important to feel the thing that’s happening? Why is it not enough to just do the thing?

DR STEPHEN PORGES: Ah, this is where the nervous system comes in. If we’re not feeling it, we’re in a sense downregulating 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 power of what sensory information does to our brain.

And so even like with the 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 an internal surveillance system of our body. Our body craves that information.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: So are you suggesting that because 80% is going vagus up and only 20% is going brain through vagus 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, saying that you are opening up the aperture inside of your mind to pay attention to that 80% that’s coming back up.

DR STEPHEN PORGES: 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 it is in a sense the whole underlying or implicit theory behind meditative work, meditative breath, that is that we can literally travel — or body scans where people literally try to travel within their body — that it maybe sounds 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, or allow — I would say act on it, maybe 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. And so we have to start to appreciate these different sources of motor systems in our body.

Metabolic Support and the Window of Tolerance

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: How important do you think metabolic support is to provide a window of tolerance to somatic interventions?

DR STEPHEN PORGES: In terms of mitochondria, that, or is that—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And—

DR STEPHEN PORGES: Oh, I think it— Okay. Now we start talking personal information. Okay. So 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 I just was gone. And in fact, we went to Greece and I couldn’t even go to the banquet. We were at a — 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 basically talked to the organizer who was a very famous stress physiologist and said, “What’s the matter with Steve?” Steve wasn’t going to come. And so he said, “It sounds like mitochondria.” Okay. 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 one I took was called L-carnitine. It’s over the counter. And I was now — I couldn’t even walk up a flight of steps or walk to my office. I took that and the next day I did 2 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, and the ATP production is basically saying, “Come out and be productive again.”

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Right. So there is a — could it be the case that you could be doing the work from a—

DR STEPHEN PORGES: Yeah, you would be metabolically incapable of the work having any impact.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Bingo. Yeah.

DR STEPHEN PORGES: And the issue is you need certain resources. So you need — the nerves have to communicate. And there’s another thing about neurotransmitters are part of that and we haven’t discussed that at all. But I will tell you that for decades I’ve been taking lecithin, which has phosphatidylcholine, a precursor for acetylcholine, because acetylcholine is used in vagal nerve transmission and a lot of other neurotransmission, and fish oil. So I’ve been taking a lot of precursors that are useful in neurotransmission.

Oscillating Between Hypoarousal and Hyperarousal

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I’m interested in 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 to hyperarousal?

DR STEPHEN PORGES: Okay. What you have — and actually I got an email from someone, from a physician from the UK who says, the letters start, “I have a client who’s suffering from the polyvagal 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 ventral vagus is not there. So the system goes in one direction and then goes in the other.

And when you have the ventral vagus, 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 this social net that’s over us. And then when it’s there, these other components really basically serve our needs. But when that net’s gone, we are basically functioning like, in a way, almost decorticated animals. It’s like we’re down and we don’t have this master regulator. So we’re a poorly regulated system.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Oh yeah. You’re just much more at the mercy of everything flip-flopping from one side to the other. There’s an element that I wasn’t aware of, but there’s a paradoxical relaxation and startle response where the nervous system interprets parasympathetic states as threats. So as people start to relax, as they start to get below the window of tolerance on the bottom end, their system sees that as a threat and bounces them out the top. Why would that be the case? Why in a system that needs more relaxation, why would it bounce you out the top?

DR STEPHEN PORGES: This is what we talked about. The interoception of that calm state is now associated with vulnerability and injury. 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 to prioritize this threat.”

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And I guess this is where the Safe and Sound Protocol would come in.

DR STEPHEN PORGES: Slowly, slowly with those who have that type of history. I would say the greatest surprise to me on this interesting journey was that the Safe and Sound could be a trigger for people, meaning it could create defensiveness. And I had no concept of 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? And 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 so the vulnerability of signals that are in our DNA become signals now of threat.

Tinnitus and the Ear

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Why does tinnitus often show up in highly activated people? What is it about the ear that’s got — I know some of your research has gone into the ear territory.

DR STEPHEN PORGES: Yeah. The issue with tinnitus — tinnitus is just, let’s use it, it’s not a very descriptive diagnosis. So the history of tinnitus is that people thought it was in a sense in the ear and they actually did such things as aggressive surgeries and removed the entire ear, internal ear structures. The tinnitus was still there even when—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: God, you would be really annoyed if you had your ear structure removed and you were still hearing ringing in your head.

Tinnitus, Inflammation, and the Nervous System

DR STEPHEN PORGES: That’s right. Because it was now the solution to that is basically it’s on the auditory cortex, that type of tinnitus. And the solution now is actually they put a stimulator on the auditory cortex to scramble those sounds. So that’s one type of tinnitus.

I have tinnitus 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 started to get severe tinnitus. 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, okay, so 2 issues on that. They, the medical community, this is 2002, said there’s only one solution. That is you need to have surgery. And I said, well, what will that do? They said, 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 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, start to tell me about what would be called watch and wait. And they basically said, look, a lot of people don’t get surgery, nothing happens. It’s just the way they live. 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 stressed, the tinnitus would bother me. Okay. This is where your question is really focused on. And in fact, this is now 25 years ago or 20 years ago. I’m now in Miami visiting my father and I’m driving across a railroad track and on the tracks, as I go over the tracks, the tinnitus 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 the expression of the tumor. So I started to take high doses of fish oil and the tinnitus disappeared. Fish oil has an anti-inflammatory. So what I’m saying is that the what I was getting, my tinnitus was due to the actual nerve being inflammatory, inflamed. And I could control that with fish oil. So I was very fortunate. And now I don’t even know that I have tinnitus.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Why would it be the case that a dysregulated or a lower tolerance system would worsen tinnitus? Why is that an inflammation?

DR STEPHEN PORGES: Well, because inflammation is part of that defensive system.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Oh, okay.

DR STEPHEN PORGES: Yeah. Okay. So let’s go back, 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 rate and sweating, the inflammatory component is there as well.

The Vagal Nerve and the Gut Microbiome

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, that makes complete sense. I’m interested in the link between the vagal nerve and the gut microbiome and biome. What do you make of that connection?

DR STEPHEN PORGES: Well, just remember that 80% of the vagal fibers are afferent, and where’s the vagus going is in your gut. It’s really monitoring your gut. And I would think most of, or many of the vagal afferents are really gut receptors.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: So why would that be the case? Just because digestion’s really important?

DR STEPHEN PORGES: Yeah, it’s not digestion, it’s toxins. And the other thing, you have 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 raising all kinds of things in your gut. The flora of your gut is complex.

So basically, I’ve actually been doing the past decade quite a bit of work in gastroenterology and was showing that most — a lot of these syndromes within GI, which is also another one of these disciplines where it’s very hard to document pathophysiology with the symptoms, that the autonomic nervous system is highly dysregulated. In many of the individuals who have gut problems, including chronic vomiting syndromes and symptoms like that.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: 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 system? Like, what do you make of the gut biome’s effect on the nervous system?

DR STEPHEN PORGES: Okay. You need to take some, do some resonant breathing now. And realize that when we talk about a system, it’s bidirectional. It’s really sending up signal and we know we can influence by how we feel. So we know our gut reacts to things happening in our environment. And we know if we have a stomachache, 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.

Sex Differences in Nervous System Function

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Is there a sex difference in how nervous systems operate?

DR STEPHEN PORGES: Well, for decades I’ve tried to neglect that question. My wife is always informing me that there are sex differences. The answer is probably. I mean, I think we can say that there are some basic mechanics that are in a way asexual and since 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 that’s going to be different.

I think it’s so understudied 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.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yep, yep, yep. I think what I’m interested in around the sort of sex difference for nervous systems is male socialization, antisocial behavior situations, loneliness, stuff like that certainly seems to show up in men more than in women for a variety of reasons. But I’m wondering whether male socialization is partly a nervous system challenge uniquely.

DR STEPHEN PORGES: 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 different social circuits for men and for women historically. And also the notion of birthing and how that was really a communal event.

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, which is not really discussed or worked on. And so I’m getting very interested in palliative medicine and with a desire that we have tools that enable us to literally smile and wave goodbye at the end of our duration here, as opposed to trying to preserve life and make people fearful of the dying process.

End of Life, Ageism, and Palliative Care

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Oh, that’s interesting.

DR STEPHEN PORGES: Yeah. I mean, think about it because how many episodes have you had interviews on?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: 1,150 maybe. Okay.

DR STEPHEN PORGES: How many have talked about palliative care or end of life?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Less than 10.

DR STEPHEN PORGES: Yeah. And we’re all going to die, right? I think. And it just gives you a glimpse into how we are so unprepared. For the essence, the whole life, the passage.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. Yeah, I think it makes at least a little sense about why, especially around nervous system, people understand that something which impacts you at the beginning lays the foundation and can be an echo which is heard throughout the remainder of the journey. We don’t talk about 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 understand why it feels like 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, everybody is going to pass away and the fact that we haven’t looked at palliative care with the same level of scrutiny, with the same level of compassion, let’s use the word compassion. Well, it’s the one type of discrimination which is still almost universally accepted is ageism, 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 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. Ageism is this one that Arthur Brooks taught me this. This is the one that’s really —

DR STEPHEN PORGES: The part that is affecting me directly is understanding that the world that I had lived in for so many decades is not very accommodating for people who are getting frail.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. Well, you are spinning yourself upside down a couple of times every morning, so that’s different.

DR STEPHEN PORGES: I’m doing fine.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I was going to say the frailness thing, I wouldn’t say that.

DR STEPHEN PORGES: No, but the issue is when you’re doing fine is when you should be exploring the future is really what I’m saying.

Co-Regulation, Vulnerability, and Male Socialization

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. So just going back to the sex differences thing, you’ve said that co-regulation is the biological basis of love, that we literally regulate each other’s nervous systems. What do you think are the implications when a man has never experienced consistent co-regulation, potentially, especially from a father?

DR STEPHEN PORGES: I think we can see that in, let’s say, the politics of today so that our culture is not — Okay, so there’s a lot of — Okay, the consequence, what we’re really saying is without 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.

And I think there’s times when 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 I’m kind of watching this because to me, it’s the script of life is becoming — I think what you were saying about things that happened early in life, we can see it moving on. I think that script is now, to my mind or my eyes and my ears, become quite predictable. It’s like saying I can see the consequences.

And the issue is it doesn’t fit with my view when I was young. My view was, A, we can all be 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 permissiveness that was given to me through whatever lineage I had or the opportunities I had. I didn’t see them as special, and I didn’t see the skillset or the insights as special.

And I think part of what, because we’re trained in a 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.

Chris’s Personal Health Journey and Compassion

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s such a good point. I had a conversation with a friend in Bali earlier this year, and I’m explaining to him about this journey that I’ve been on. I’ve spent 2 years trying to piece myself back together after mold, Lyme, EBV, CMV, long COVID-y stuff. And then just as I’ve got myself to where I felt I’d made really great progress, this dysautonomia kicks in and now I’ve got this new fight and 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 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 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 a whatever. But the difference,” he said, “is not knowing whether or not you’ll get better.”

And that is so true that now when I look around, I’ve got more compassion for people who are ill. I’ve got more compassion for people who are struggling with addictions. I’ve got more compassion for people who are seemingly annoying. Even stuff that 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’re predispositioned, right? They didn’t get to choose either of these things. Like, f*, 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 2 years of really trying to sort of grapple and battle with this thing. That’s been the biggest takeaway, humility and more compassion. Yeah.

Resilience, Recovery, and Redefining Yourself

DR STEPHEN PORGES: Chris, as I listen and hear the array of vulnerabilities that have hit you, to me, they’re all the same. Even the hypersensitivities, the 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’s 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 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 disease entity that has invaded you unless you can deal with how you can feel without the container that may now be contributing to the expression of the symptoms.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Dependent on whether it feels nourishing or sapping.

DR STEPHEN PORGES: That’s right.

Stellate Ganglion Blocks and the Sympathetic Nervous System

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Very interesting. One thing I haven’t mentioned, what do you make of stellate ganglion blocks? What do you think of SGBs?

DR STEPHEN PORGES: Yeah. Well, so Eugene Lipoff, who I know quite well, is really one of the originators of that. And from my view, it’s turning — okay, it is actually something that we alluded to implicitly. If your sympathetics are now overextended, you’re going to be locked into fight-flight. 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 stellate ganglion block is actually dampening that whole limb of the sympathetic sufficiently that the parasympathetic vagus can start to express itself.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Okay.

DR STEPHEN PORGES: But the utility of it has been really 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 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.

Transgenerational Trauma and Cultural Conditioning

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, that’s interesting. I’ve seen some research that says deeply traumatized baby mice require 3 generations to get back to a normal nervous system state. Do you feel like that’s true for humans?

DR STEPHEN PORGES: Well, you’re asking what I call — okay, so they talk about intergenerational trauma. I like to use the word transgenerational because I think the country where we live, and I imagine the UK as well, historically is a transgenerationally traumatized environment. And what it doesn’t — okay, 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, basically stripping kids from childhood and then making this the elite. You know, this is, and totally —

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: These are the trendsetters moving forward culturally.

DR STEPHEN PORGES: Yeah. Or they were the leaders. So I met a — actually became a friend. He’s written a book called the — basically about the damaged elite of the UK because they’ve 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.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Oh, that’s so fascinating. And then you are in an environment which probably makes that worse. It rewards a stoic stiff upper lipness. “I am not affected by this. I’m a safe pair of hands to drive this organization forward.”

DR STEPHEN PORGES: Yeah. Or even the bit about the English view of sexuality, do it for the Queen.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I’ve never pulled that one out, but I will.

DR STEPHEN PORGES: The line was, “It will be over in a few minutes. Just don’t worry about it.”

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. Think of Queen and country and just keep going.

DR STEPHEN PORGES: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It’s not one of love and engagement and connection. It’s something else.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Duty. It’s closer to duty. Yeah.

Criticisms of Polyvagal Theory

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Right. Okay. Obviously you’ve been working on this theory for a long time and it’s unbelievably influential. What are the strongest criticisms of polyvagal theory in your opinion? Which criticisms do you think are fairest?

DR STEPHEN PORGES: Okay. So my view is this is quite a trigger to me because the criticisms are not of the theory. The criticisms have been misrepresentations of the theory. 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.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I’m interested, what are the most common misconceptions when criticisms are being lodged then?

DR STEPHEN PORGES: They don’t understand the evolution of the vagal system. The fact that the nucleus where the vagus comes from in the ventral vagus is an older nucleus long before mammals is fine, but that didn’t have cardioinhibitory fibers until mammals had it. So they don’t understand the distinction between an anatomical structure and its actual components neurophysiologically. They basically don’t understand that polyvagal theory was never about the nerve. It was about the organization of this integrated brainstem system. They just don’t understand what it’s about.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And 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?

DR STEPHEN PORGES: Oh, they say it’s not based on physiology. And what they’ve done is misrepresent every point of it. And they may quote accurate physiology, but it’s not relevant to what the theory actually states.

So in fact, I created an AI polyvagal scholar and it has one basic rule. 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 a sense, has evolved over decades with more clarification. And I’m just finishing 2 papers. One is on an architecture of the theory, but it’s not of the vagus, it’s of this whole mammalian organizational system that enables us to co-regulate, enables our social behavior now to impact on our health and physiology. And they miss all that. They get stuck into something that doesn’t exist.

And this has been going on for almost 30 years. So it’s like, I basically have said this, read the papers. And if you can’t read them, don’t tell people that you have. I mean, it’s like —

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That’s a mic drop if I’ve ever heard one.

DR STEPHEN PORGES: But I will also say that it’s double-edged. The more people 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 traction, it works for them. The interesting part is the neuroscience world is too, let’s say, siloed to understand the organizing principles of it. So it’s kind of like 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 the theory based upon the vagus. You can’t criticize it based upon any single pathway because it’s not about that. And by criticizing on it, you’re misunderstanding what the theory is stating. So I’m actually extraordinarily confident that 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, false arguments. What I would say if someone criticizes, “Show me one basic statement, 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. 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 —

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I’m going to use your statement when somebody misquotes me on the internet as well. Yeah.

DR STEPHEN PORGES: Well, 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.

Can a Nervous System Be Too Safe?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: But they can also say that you’ve said anything, which is the false accusation equivalent. All right, we spent an entire episode talking about when people’s nervous systems are too dysregulated, too sensitive, a window of tolerance which is too constrained. Can a person’s nervous system be too safe? Lead to risk aversion, lack of ambition, inability to tolerate challenge, the pussification of people. Is there such a thing as too safe?

DR STEPHEN PORGES: Okay. 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.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

DR STEPHEN PORGES: I actually was very concerned about that. I was actually thinking that that was a possibility. And the issue is, so it’s like, if I feel safe, am I going to not detect signals of danger? That was my concern. And I basically 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. So it’s like we’re talking about a well-regulated system that enables this co-regulation to occur tends to be the same system that can adjust and navigate to this complex world.

Closing Thoughts

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Stephen Porges, ladies and gentlemen. Stephen, you’re so great. I have a million more things that I want to talk about, about relating, about child rearing, about pediatrics and stuff, but we can save that for another time. I really appreciate you. I really appreciate you giving me and everybody a language with which to experience or to understand the way that we experience the world.

I’ve been on the front lines of this, so to speak, with my own priorities over the last 2 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 insights about how to navigate that and understand it is awesome. So I just wanted to give you your flowers there.

DR. STEPHEN PORGES: Well, thank you, Chris. And my summary of what you just said, is that you’re polyvagal informed. I mean, that’s when you see the world through the way that you described it. That’s what the theory was for, is for us to understand that when the nervous system, or what I’m basically saying, our physiological state is really a major component of our behavior and who we are and our feelings.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: In my world, that’s the world of academia would be polyvagal informed. In my world of the internet and degenerate culture, it would be polyvagal pills. But we’ll allow us to do one or the other. Stephen Porges, ladies and gentlemen. Stephen, you’re great. I appreciate you and I can’t wait to speak to you again soon.

DR. STEPHEN PORGES: Well, thank you, Chris. Thank you very much.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: 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 it.

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