How Trauma Gets Trapped in Your Body (& How To Heal) | Dr. Stephen Porges | Align Podcast #529
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Welcome back to the Lab Podcast. My name is Aaron Alexander. Today's conversation is with Dr. Stephen Porges. Dr. Porges is one of the most legendary figures in the world of nervous system regulation. He coined and pioneered the concept of polyvagal theory. I'm sure you folks have at least heard of the vagus nerve and probably the polyvagal theory at this point, depending upon how nerdy you are about the nervous system. And he's a guy.

He's someone that I've looked up to and respected for a very long time. I've been reading his work and studying his work for the last probably 12 years or so. So it was an immense honor to get to have a conversation with him. This conversation will teach you about the origins of your emotions, how they express through the body, and how you can regulate yourself to be a better human being in your daily life.

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So the first week is absolutely free. And I think you guys are going to get to, I don't think I absolutely 100% know you'll get a ton of value out of the first week. So jump over to live podcast.com slash brief. If you want to learn more about that. All right, here we go back to conversation with Dr. Steven Borges.

Dr. Stephen Porges, thank you so much for making time to do this. I have been following you from afar. You've been a mentor of sorts to me for probably the last 12 years or so. You don't realize that. But I've shared your work with hundreds of, well, I guess thousands of people at this point. And I really greatly appreciate the opportunity to communicate with you.

Well, thank you for inviting me and thank you for flattering me. So my work has had some positive impact. Yeah, man, you're a freaking legend. I mean, I don't know that you were, I mean, you probably, you get so much smoke blowing up your ass, you probably kind of, you get it at this point. Well, you know, I think this is a lesson everyone learns is they forget to reframe who they are based upon the feedback. They get kind of locked into,

who they were. And for a lot of people in life, it's how they were treated in high school. It's like they've never changed. The beauty of academics is that you literally go through different rankings and you have actual ways of seeing if you're succeeding or communicating. And it's really up to you to use that to reframe who you are. And if you don't, you're still crawling up a wall as opposed to trying to

integrate and transform yourself as well. So something that I think could relate to what you're sharing now, I wonder, and maybe it'll be a roundabout way of coming back to how this relates, but how from your perception and where from your perception is trauma stored in the body and how do you define trauma?

Okay. So for me, I focus really on the response and not to the event. I think we're misled in our society. I think that trauma is a traumatic event as opposed to a body that has gone to a state of life threat and didn't come really out of it, didn't land comfortably from it.

And so where is it stored? We start off by saying, what is it? It really is this response in which our nervous system basically evaluates the world, not necessarily consciously, but evaluates the world and says, look, I'm going to die or I'm in great threat. And this can occur from pathogens or from injury. It can even occur through being bullied, you know, people be yelling at them.

So you see transformative changes in people based upon events that you think are casual or trivial. And I think that's the biggest mistake. We think it didn't bother me, so it shouldn't bother you, as opposed to looking at that person and seeing what their body did and how they are struggling with it.

So we are not a very good, I would say, not a very compassionate species because we have never really allowed ourselves to be good witnesses of others and ourselves. So to simplify the question, trauma lives in the body. And now the question, I mean, that's my good friend Bessel talks about that, but that doesn't help anyone. It's nice to say that, but what does that really mean?

Okay, it doesn't, is it being lodged in your organs or is it something that gets into your heart or where a lot of people go? Is it the vagus that's doing it? The vagus is just a wire. It's just a nerve. Trauma gets locked into the foundational circuits of our brain. Foundational circuits are not our thoughts. They're much lower.

They're the things that enable us to stay alive, the foundational circuits that enable us to breathe, to support our homoesthetic functions. Trauma resides in disrupting those homoesthetic functions. So our body really moves into chronic states of threat, and at times it's conservation of resources, and we would call that shutting down. We also can see it very easily, another major feature of trauma,

is numbness. What's that about? Being numb to your own bodily feelings is really a projection that your nervous system has turned off its sensory capacity to regulate itself. So we have to think of the nervous system as being a surveillance system of our own internal organs. And trauma turns off that surveillance system. So now you ask me, where's trauma stored? I would say, where do we see the impact of trauma? You see it in the gut,

You see it in the bowel, you see it in the heart, you see it in people's facial expressions, and you hear it in their voices. So it's in a sense gets locked into those foundational survival circuits of the brain. And that's the platform upon how we experience the world. And so we express it on all levels. What, I want to go deeper into that. And I'm curious as a

you know this is going to be a challenging question to put any any preciseness on but

From your perception, what percentage of dis-ease or disease in modern culture is psychogenic in nature? So that's it. See, I like not to go there. See, I like to say that. The reason I make that statement is that we start off by saying it doesn't matter if it's psychogenic or it's physically a physical injury. The nervous system doesn't discriminate. So we now start off with parity.

as opposed to say, oh, it's all in your mind. We say our nervous system has evaluated threat. Threat could be you're bleeding out. Threat could be you were punched in the gut. Threat could be there's a pathogen or threat could be that someone looks at you in a uncomfortable way. Your body reacts. It's that reaction that is critical. And if the body thinks it's under life threat,

things change and they're not that easily resolved. So it's not like, oh, it's like, this is a story like where someone is, is raped and people say, oh, I didn't hurt. You weren't injured. You weren't physically injured. So what are you upset about? You know, this type of aspect where people don't understand the true consequence of, in a sense, feeling life threat, which is a retuner to our nervous system. So what percentage you want a percentage?

Yeah, if you had to take a stab at it, what do you think would be like, because there's obviously there's situations where there's environmental stimuli, you know, or you've walked down the street and you got shot and somebody shot you in the knee. Yeah, but let's say you walk down the street, there are people who can get shot and they basically walk through fire. They walk through, you know, they're... They place themselves in that dangerous position because there was something attractive or resonant about it.

Or it's defining them as being real. Or let's even paint another story. They may come from, this is a possibility, that some individuals who have become numb because their lives were, especially in early childhood, so disruptive that going into these dangerous environments, they feel something.

And that becomes, you know, really kind of rewarding to their nervous system. And it's like why people like to be hugged. I shouldn't say many people don't like to be touched. I don't want to say people like to be hugged. But there are treatments where people use weighted blankets. And those weighted blankets give people a sense of boundary.

And numbness leads to a loss of boundary. A loss of boundary leads to feelings of dissolving in this world. So when you start talking to people who have experienced trauma, there's also this narrative of falling into an abyss.

just disappearing. And those people, their compensatory reaction is to stay highly mobilized. Workaholics, exercise, drugs, and perhaps even high-risk behaviors of occupation. So we keep our bodies moving, we can't shut down. That's another, it has a polyvagal principle. There's literally a hierarchy. So that hierarchy of shutting down does great things if you're conserving your resources.

But we need to breathe, which you demonstrate. We need to breathe. But when our body is under such great threat, we literally stop breathing also. We can actually psychogenically stop breathing from threat. So going back to your initial question, what percent, I would say what percent does not have a psychogenic component?

And I would say that would be extraordinarily rare. So we can even talk about medical trauma, which puts it into a very special category because the intention is not to injure. So it's not the intention of the surgeon or the medical staff, but the body interpreted as life threat. So are they making a mistake? Is it life threat or is it not life threat? Well, to the nervous system, it is. Mm-hmm.

Is there such a thing as having a fully objective view on reality? You asked me that question, and you would really kind of... The humorous part of it is you should see it as the wheels going around, because I could say yes, I could say no. But the issue is because when we're using the word objective, I'm now saying, what do we mean by objective through our senses?

Well, I know our senses get distorted when we're under a state of fear or threat.

So I know that if you're going to scare me, I'm going to see things differently than if I'm just, in a sense, dealing with you as if you're a prankster. And I know you're doing it. But I can only scare you. You can only perceive that through the infinite filters of the past. Like all of your life experiences and your genetic disposition, all that translates to your reaction to whatever my surprise is. You can have a past, right?

And the question is, do you view it as your destiny or do you view it as a learning experience to learn about yourself or to learn about the, let's say, the vehicle that you're in, your body? Can you learn about your body? Can you learn about that body and can you manage it better? So if you see the vulnerabilities of the body, can you manage it and not get into situations in which it gets triggered, the vulnerability being triggered and distorting your reality?

So if we go into all the treatments of trauma, they're all about a re-embodiment, a re-awareness, a regaining one's awareness of one's own physical feelings. I think there are stages here, and this is kind of like why a lot of people have grabbed, they think if you get physiological measures or if you get brain measures, you're getting the real stuff. Feelings, nah, that's not real. Feelings are everything.

Feelings are your body's reaction to the world. And we have kind of not respected it, even in like the world of psychology. In fact, when I was a graduate student, studying emotion was dismissed. Cognition, behavior, it's really interesting to see in a sense how psychology kind of went into these different directions. And so did neuroscience.

So the integration of the various disciplines has been really lacking.

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But you can feel a pump in the face. And so it kind of plumps things up, makes you or makes me feel more symmetrical and makes me feel more like masculine, I would say, because it actually like draws out my jawline. So I think you guys will enjoy this thing. I think it is worth using, worth checking out. If you want to get yourself a 20% discount, you can go to Jawsercise.com.

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kind of briefly or not, whatever direction we're going to go, break down the polyvagal theory and its relevance to people listening? I think we could break it down into a couple of sentences. That is, the physiological state that we're in affects how we experience the world.

And that's really what we're talking about. So if our body has been traumatized, our physiology moves into a defensive state and now we see the world in a defensive way. If we come from an environment and we have lived in a sense, a world that supports our biological needs and our bodies supporting its health growth and restoration, we have literally the permission to feel safe and to feel safe in the world.

And so much of the world is not physically safe. Not being physically safe really drives the physiology to be much more in a defensive state, preparing for movement and protection. And so the perception of the world changes. And even the intellectual resources change.

of trying to solve problems gets challenged because we don't have that resource. We're really trying to defend ourselves. And so with going through the arc of the fight flight, you know, activated, mobilized autonomic state,

and or the rest digest parasympathetic state or then going into the collapsed frozen state could you kind of take me slash us through that arc and how it pertains to the polyvagal theory sure but you missed the most important one i figured i was going to miss something i feel very intimidated by explaining this to you okay you have to go into the our own see we could learn from our own uh

evolutionary history we can learn what's unique about mammals so if we start posing that type of question is that mammals literally gravitate to uh those other species they feel safe they cuddle they nurse they recognize someone of their of their family um how do they do that

Well, a lot of it has to do with the ability to vocalize and mammals vocalize and they vocalize with different frequencies. So when you are, you interview a lot of people and I'm sure there are people that you say, oh, I'm enjoying this interview. I'm enjoying the dialogue and other people you're looking at your watch. Well, directly looking at what you say enough. I have to get out of here.

And you think it's about content. Well, you may think it's about content. Content will play a part, but the intonation and the melody or the prosody of the person's voice means a lot because they're literally broadcasting whether they're accessible to you as you broadcast that you're accessible to others. That prosodic feature is coming through

your laryngeal and pharyngeal nerves, which are also regulated by the vagus. So let me kind of give you the narrative that enabled mammals to broadcast a sense of safety and connection to another. And that is what gets broken from being retuned into states of threat.

So, as mammals evolved, or mammals deviated from reptiles, in the sense that in their brain, in their brainstem, the area of the brainstem that controlled the fibers, it went down through the vagus to the heart. And we'll just focus on the heart for a moment.

started to go for a journey. So the transition from reptiles to mammals is literally the cardio inhibitory neurons, the ones that slowed your heart, move ventrally. You can see this in embryology as well. They move ventrally in the brainstem to an area that control the muscles of the face and head. So mammals now have a heart rate system that's linked to their face and their voice. Now think about what that means.

It means that they broadcast their physiological state in their voice, in their facial expressivity. And think about how you relate to people, face and voice, as well as other forms of gesture. But you are broadcasting your state. And when people talk when they're anxious, they're talking very fast or high-pitched,

They're broadcasting their anxiety. And how do you feel? Your nervous system interprets it as, stay away from me. It's a threat. Their fear is now becoming your fear. So the beauty of this very, I would say,

social mammals, not just humans, is this remarkable ability to calm each other down. And this we call co-regulation. And of course, we see this in terms of mothers nursing and rocking and holding their babies. But we see even trans species with dogs and cats and horses. How do you talk to them?

And we see it with parents and their kids. Do they use melodic voices or do they yell at them? So to me, it's just kind of remarkable, this gift. But now into how that works. When you recruit that system that broadcasts safety, you are functionally down-regulating your fight-flight system.

So how do you calm people down? You are present with them. You witness them. You talk to them. How do you calm a baby? You engage. You rock. You play. You allow interaction. So you can see that we use some very basic strategies to calm each other, called co-regulation. What we don't think about is we think about fight-flight as the only defensive system we have.

And that's not true. We have two defense systems. We have a defense system of shutting down and disappearing. And of course, reptiles use that all the time. But something happened along the way with our science of behavior is we forgot that. We thought that all stress was sympathetic adrenals and fight, flight, immobilization.

And so we think of stress as being very active. Yet, we know that when people are overstressed, their bodies reflexively shut down. And we had, in a sense, good words for that. So we call it depressed stress.

But when you study depression, you realize that anxiety is also somewhat of a component or a partner with depression. So you're not just depressed. You also can be anxious. You can have all these combinations. But the point is that you have a very primitive defense system, which is to shut down. The problem with that is that it doesn't serve us well. It doesn't provide enough blood flow, enough oxygenation. And

Fight-flight works quite well, but it's metabolically costly. So what happens if you use that for a long period of time? Your body gets exhausted and you shut down. So now you start seeing how workaholics and exercise addicts, how they calm their body. They basically do it to the body, it says reflexively, has to shut down.

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And when it is, so the dorsal vagal, you say response, dorsal vagal, is response appropriate language for that? Is that an actual anatomical innervation of the dorsal portion of the vagal, of that branch of the vagus nerve? And is it all literal in that sense? It's literal. Dorsal is, it's not dorsal of the nerve. It's dorsal of the brainstem.

The nerve is really kind of like a wire. It's a cable. And inside that cable are literally four different pathways. Most of the pathways are from the organs up to the brain. It's a surveillance system. And that's coming from, just think of it as a sensory vagus. Then you have two motor pathways coming down, one from the ventral or front part of the brain and one from the backward dorsal.

And more, in fact, the front part of the brain is not very, that those number of fibers are like 6% of all vagal fibers. But those are the ones that we quote, try to hack, that we appreciate that's in our voice. And the ones for the back of the brain are primarily going below the diaphragm. And if you want to get into the world of trauma,

And if you investigate and ask people, tell me about your gut, and you're going to find extraordinarily high probability of those who have experienced trauma as having gut problems, and those who are even in states of chronic stress, gut problems. Because what happens when you mobilize, you turn off the rhythms of the gut. And when you are exhausted, rather than turning the rhythms of the gut on,

the gut will just shut itself down because to digest food is metabolically costly. And what the signal is, stop your mobilization, stop your cardiac output, stop your metabolic demands. And so the bowel will evacuate.

And guess what happens with people with severe trauma? The gut shows it. Yeah, IBS, ulcerative colitis, things of that sort. Right. And the search has been to find a drug when the answer is probably nothing wrong with the organ, but the neural regulation of the organ is carrying a signal of threat and not homeostatic function. In gastroenterology, gut medicine,

more than 50% of the people who come in for physician help in the GI area don't have any pathophysiology. So it's not like there's anything wrong with their gut from medical procedures, and they don't know what to do with it because to them it's medically unexplained, and now they're talking about so-called functional disorders. But from a polyvagal lens, these disorders are really disorders of neuroregulation.

And then I promised to get out of the anatomical, kind of like dry anatomical realm. I just want to create some like groundwork. So the ventral engagement anatomically, is that going to be expression of the facial muscles and the tongue and the auditory system and things of the sort? The way of thinking of it is that the vagal circuit

is intertwined in that front part of the brainstem with the area that controls the facial muscles, the oral cavity, and even the middle ear muscles. It doesn't mean that they are vagal. It means that the vagus is talking to that. So the system comes together and becomes intertwined.

And that's why I called it the social engagement system and also called it a ventral vagal complex. It's not solely the vagus. It has parts to do with trigeminal and facial nerve as well.

So the polyvagal theory is associated to all 12 cranial nerves slash probably the entirety of the body, but the ventral dorsal, it's not just the 10th cranial being the vagus. No, it's not that, but there is sense nerves that are adjacent and

that talk to each other in the brainstem. So it's not all of them. It's really trigeminal, facial, glassofacial. Basically, it's five nerves. Not the entire part of them, but parts of them that come together in these areas of the brainstem. So let me give you an example. Do you ever rub your forehead? You ever rub your forehead? Sure. Every now and again, a little rub. Yeah. Why do you do that?

I'm confused, man. Doing it all the time. Or do you ever do this? Yeah, yeah. Okay. I rub the neck. Okay, so what if I said you're an intuitive because when you're doing this, you're massaging a branch of the trigeminal nerve that goes into the vagus. And when you do this, you're actually pretty much on the vagus and you're massaging the bowel receptor area that a measure or a sense blood pressure.

So the issue is we do a lot of behaviors that intuitively are functionally signaling our brainstem to relax. Yeah. And I want to get into more functional ways we can start to mobilize or support or tone the vagus. And I also would be curious of like the best language, like vagal tone and kind of defining that.

But the sympathetic aspect of the anatomically, where does the sympathetic kind of quote-unquote fight-flight or however you like immobilization, where does that arise in the body? So think of the sympathetic signals are coming down from the brainstem as well. But they're going through these large branches of sympathetic fibers that are going along with our motor control system.

Why? Because when you move muscles, you need metabolic resources, and that's what the sympathetic nervous system gives you. So like muscle movement requires blood flow, requires heart rate activity. The things are very well integrated. So the sympathetic nervous system is also not just a fight-flight. It can be a system of exuberance and excitement and pleasure and play if you

the social engagement system is still on board. So I actually have a slide where I show children running. Now, are they running out of fear or are they playing? There's never any doubt that they are playing because you're looking at their faces. They're smiling and running. But if you saw someone's face being flat running, what would you say? They're running from something. They're frightened.

The dorsal shutdown concept is really, really getting at life threat. You're falling into this. So like when people grieve, they're kind of like in that dorsal state, if you want to get people, you know, who have been. Well, I think there's a lot of people in. OK, let's let's really be blunt. Politics to the country are upsetting people.

and people feel loss of agency, meaning that they have little control. That puts people into these vulnerabilities of moving into these different states and not feeling support or they're not co-regulated because the people that they would normally go to are having difficulties as well.

It's interesting as I'm, as you're talking, I'm having a vision of like the seeing the body almost like dehumanizing the body in a way and kind of getting into like this more mammalian expression. And, and,

You could see a person almost like the way that we are, the tone of our facial muscles or the shape of our postural patterns. If we're hunched over in a protective state, if we have chronic tension in our spine, it's almost like our shell that protects us from the world. You could retune the body, which is what a lot of work with trauma or structural integration or different forms of manual therapy or even just exercise, dance,

which I'd be curious your perception on some of the modalities to start to retune the body but there can be a disharmonious expression of the physical tone of the body that would be a translation to ah anxiety ah depression ah disassociation

And there would also be an expression of the tone and the structure and the postural patterns or expressions of the body that would be, ah, jubilance, ah, safety. Oh, like you feel safe within your community. You feel like you belong. You feel like, you know, it's very interesting to kind of strip away the story.

of you know my name's michael or you know peter or tom or whatever but be able to see yourself as like a autonomic expression of of of the self okay so i used to use metaphors like uh

unveiling Darwin, because Darwin talked about facial expressivity, and I'm saying, no, I'm going at the neuroregulation of facial expressivity. So when my, and he's a good friend of mine, Paul Ekman, was coming up with these different facial expressions, I was really saying, well, you go one step further, you can see how the cranial nerves are regulating these expressions, and now you're getting at what they're part of.

And rather than thinking that you come up with a psychological reason people smile, you're saying, what does it mean in terms of underlying physiology of the body? I think as you were talking, I think that you could, with a little push,

you would be redefining a lot of the principles that I have observed, including this whole concept of rhythmicity in the body. And you were going there. So that's why dance movement therapy. And then if we talk about like structural integration and Rolfing principles, that when I first learned about that, I found it a little bit difficult because it was structure and not functional.

And I was in this kind of like fit because the structural people say, we'll move the ribs, we'll change this and you'll feel better. Well, they did. But what happened next? The body went right back to it. And the issue is, why did the body go back to it? Because the body was actually protecting itself. And even though you were literally free for a while,

The older habits, and it's kind of like our earlier conversation, the earlier associations pulled you right back down. So you can get people into different states, but will they stay there or will they body pull them out? And so that comes to another curiosity I have for you. How effective are some of the more kind of like outside-in approaches to networking?

vagal nerve stimulation such as like doing the electrical stimulation on the neck or maybe massaging the ears i think any form of massage probably would be very actually very supportive from a more long-term perspective possibly because massage creates a sensation of safety kind of like the blanket but i wonder your thoughts on outside in work to create tone compared to inside out

And how would you define inside out as well? What I do is I separate it from strategies that I view as prostheses. So it's trying to hack it versus neural exercises. So like you were mentioning, what about increasing vagal tone? To me, that's not a valid question. The question is, can I develop neural exercises that recruit the vagal system and make that feedback circuit more efficient?

So it's a vagal, I call it vagal efficiency. It's become more efficient. And so like when you do breathing, breathing as you exhale functionally allows the vagal influence to the heart to increase. And when you inhale, you block it. But those are generalizations. But does breathing, does it form a neural exercise that facilitates an enhancement of those regulatory circuits?

And that's really where I've been going with this. Can we basically put the rhythmicities back into the body? And so what we have to start with is that the fact that all forms of stressors, not just life threat, result in a suppression of the brainstem's regulation of our bodily organs. So the rhythms, brainstem's suppression of the what?

bodily rhythms. So like the gut doesn't work, heart rate variability, a very simple thing to see doesn't work. And so those rhythms are gone. Going back to your specific point about like the electrical stimulation of the vagus, when you put it on, it's kind of like the model that Rolfing had. We move the organs and suddenly everything feels good. The question is, is it functioning as a neural challenge and exercise or

or is it a prosthesis? The issue is I don't know how much a challenge or how often the challenge needs to occur that it could be incorporated as an exercise. That's what I'm... What would you suggest is the highest leverage, I don't know, prosthesis or external tuning device to actually create...

meaningful, sustainable shift within the autonomic nervous system. Actually, I'm working on that. So this is where the whole goal in life was, can we put the rhythms back into a nervous system that has adapted to be in more states of defense and threat? Because to have rhythms, you're really saying I'm safe enough to take care of my organs. I don't have to worry about the external world. I mean, that's what the nervous system is telling you.

And the other important thought we have to have is what does our intentional brain do? What does our cortex do? What's its major job? Interestingly, it's inhibiting brainstem functions. In fact, what is mental effort? We actually, and this is where my research started. This was in the late 1960s that I noticed that when people attended, heart rate variability was depressed.

Which when you were looking at HRV or higher variability at the time, just from listening to you, it was considered having a more consistent HRV would be a good thing, right? And then that shifted like, oh, actually variability is, higher variability is good. It was worse. I was going to say it was much worse than that. People didn't understand that there was such a thing as higher variability.

So they assumed that you were just not a good scientist, that you had error in your measurements. Oh, it was like noise in your data. That's right, that you weren't controlling the environment. They thought the heart just beat. And if you got variability, either you were measuring it wrong or the context was causing it. So it was a very simplistic viewpoint, not in a view of endogenous neural regulation creating variability. And that was really my journey.

And so something that I want to talk about neuroception, which you've already talked about a bit without using the term neuroception. I also want to talk about the value of voice prosody and tone and such.

Can you touch on both of those a bit and how that adjusts the way that we feel and perceive the world around us, others, ourselves? Yeah. So there are three concepts that need to be separated. One is perception, the other is neuroception, and the third is introception. So when I was developing the theory and the model, I wanted to talk about the nervous system

perceiving literally a threat or not threat. And then I realized I couldn't use that word, I couldn't use perceive, because we think of perceive as a active behavior. And if I'm in the environment that I don't perceive threat and there is threat, I'm going to be blamed or I'm going to feel guilt. But if I have a better understanding that it's not my conscious brain

that is detecting threat, but something so primitive and so basic in my foundational survival circuits that my nervous system detects threat.

Then we start understanding the language of our nervous system. That is how intonation of voice, how sound, how movement, and how associations can trigger a threat. So the neuroception is not the perception of threat. It's the detection of threat and safety.

So virtually all living organisms, including plants, can detect threat. Even when, like a leaf is bit, it actually sends chemicals to counterheal. It's quite an amazing part of a feedback loop. Mycelial network. That's right. And we understand that threat neuroception is pretty universal. But what makes mammals, especially the more social mammals...

really special is they detect safety. And what does that give them? It gives them the ability to give up their threat responses.

So that's what we start calling about co-regulation and being sensitive or being a witness or just being there for others. We use all the right words. Yeah. And that's the gateway to healing. That's the gateway to getting out of the way. I mean, feel free to disagree or whatever, but hold it right there and say that's the gateway for healing of all levels of healing, even healing from surgery.

even healing from pathogens. The nervous system can't support the healing pathway if it's in a state of threat itself. Yeah, it doesn't have time for it. All it cares about is keeping you alive. That's right. Yeah, it's looking out for you. But all it cares about is like you need to survive.

So I had this wonderful experience, and I'm saying this almost sarcastically. Several years ago, I was interviewing for administrative roles at the National Institute of Health.

I had the opportunity to talk to the director of the National Institutes. I said to him, I said, we know too much to allow medicine to be practiced the way it is. I said, we have a responsibility to enable the patient's nervous system to be recruited as a collaborator in a shared journey of healing. He had no idea what I was talking about.

Yeah, well, it's like the opposite of allopathic. No idea, because I wasn't saying you shouldn't do surgery, you shouldn't use pharmaceuticals. I was saying the effectiveness of what you're doing can be enhanced if the body doesn't react to the treatment as if it's a threat. So that's polyvagal theory. It's talking about the physiological state as a mediator of other things that are happening in the world, including treatment.

Yeah, I think it's very interesting. It feels like there's almost like a binary nature in a way. I'm sure there's a lot more nuance to it than that. But to the nervous system of I'm either safe or I'm under threat. And if you are safe, suddenly...

you open up all of your capacity to be able to feel like you get out of the way of yourself to be able to start, to start the healing process. And that's what happens a lot of times when people go to a retreat or maybe you get into a relationship or something. Suddenly you're like,

Like I can finally fully exhale, which a full exhalation, that's going to be indicative of you accessing your parasympathetic nervous system. You being able to, you know, slow down the heart rate and being like, like the tone of everything can suddenly come into a place of like, okay, cool. We're, we're safe. And you can start the factory again. I'd go even further than that. I would say it allows you to explore your own experiences.

So I'm going to basically use a different example. I used to love to go on roller coasters with my kids. It was my excuse to go because the kids liked me too. And that was, you have this opportunity, literally, of falling out of a 10-story window, right? That's what a roller coaster is. But if you go to reasonably good or safe amusement parks, you now are given this privilege of getting that experience without any true life threats.

So it's like an expansive experience. It's almost like, say, a zen of rollercoaster riding because you're exploring these feelings that you don't normally get. And exploring them without fear, which is like you're now expanding your experience in the world. But the fear for some people is that, yeah, you can see the gritting of the teeth. They want to get out.

And so that whole expansive part of reality is not there for that. I want to take a moment to share about some interesting technology that I have been utilizing to mitigate some of the negative effects from non-native EMF exposure. Those are those tricky insidious frequencies that we're exposed to in the form of our Wi-Fi routers and our cell phones and the 5Gs and all of the stuff that we're bombarded by in our modern world that I believe is misuse.

making us sick. Leela Quantum Technology. Pretty interesting stuff. There has been 59 plus third-party studies done on Leela Quantum products that have been shown to increase the production of adenosine triphosphate, ATP, the energy currency in our bodies, by 20 to 29%.

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It's interesting stuff. They have jewelry. There's a necklace that I enjoy wearing. They have clothing that is protective with EMF exposure as well, as well as these very interesting and aesthetically pleasing blocks that you can have in your home. So if you're interested in checking this out yourself, giving it a try and getting 10% off, you can go to LeelaQ.com slash align for 10% off. If you do not notice a difference, then send it back.

get your money back but i think it's worth giving a shot uh 10 off leela q l e e l a q.com slash a lie i feel like the concept of introducing safety into the cell for the person or the patient or the client or the nervous system is is maybe the biggest idea in in medicine

It feels like that's like, it's something that I don't feel like I hear a lot about that. I think there's a lot of concepts that are important. You can't hear it because if you're trained to think that if something is broken, you can fix it. This is also in mental health. So you have manualization of therapies, right?

And it's like you treat someone, it's because they're doing this. And it's really kind of limiting about how we are as a species. And in fact, let's think even in terms of education. Education is about performing. It's like...

It's evaluation, education, medicine, work is all evaluation. There's no room for creativity and exploration if it's all evaluation. So it's just a strange world because we want creative individuals, but we don't create environment for creativity to express itself. So you have the safe and sound, do you call it a protocol? Yeah.

You have an app and you have a place where people can, can you share a little bit about that and how you can introduce sound as a tool to start to enter the nervous system? This was actually developed in my laboratory and then it became a commercial product about 2015. But I was developing it in the 1990s. It was really the recognition that prosophic voices calm people down.

And it goes into the notion of a baby. In fact, we recently did a study of mothers' voices after their babies were stressed and found out that if the mother's voice was prosodic, had intonation and melodic changes, the heart rate of the baby dropped 10 beats per minute almost immediately, and the distressful behaviors really disappeared. But if the mother's still engaged, but her voice was not prosodic,

No impact. Because the baby is getting the signal from the mother that she feels safe, so therefore the baby feels safe and all of their autonomic functions can come online as opposed to having to mobilize themselves. Yeah, because if your mom's scared, you're scared. Yeah, you have no other choice. Yeah. So the issue was I thought, well, you know, this is very interesting. What if I take vocal music and modulate like the prosodic features are?

basically filter it so that the frequencies go in and out, and you're basically being pulled in. Like you're adding a prosodic, a prosody filter to vocalizations, and even music, which is already prosodic. Can you refuse it? And I found that you can't refuse your body. You'll go there. And it was really very, I designed it initially for autistic kids who had auditory hypersensitivities.

because they were, in a sense, responding to sounds as if all sounds were potentially threatening. And they had literally retuned middle ear structures. And this gets into the science of all this. Basically, our middle ear structures are tied in that brainstem area with our vagus and our autonomic nervous system. So that when we're in states of threat, we don't hear human voice. We hear lower frequencies. We hear predator sounds.

And what happens if the system gets locked into a predator sound world? You basically have language delays and you can't process speech well. What happens if you come from environments that are really life-threatening and then you have to go into school and you're accused of not being able to follow directions? Of course, your body is like this. So I decide, let's see if we can change this. So I developed this acoustic. And not only did it

literally change auditory processing and reduce auditory hypersensitivities, increase also the vagal regulation of the heart. And it changed eye gaze. So, and actually I never published this paper, but it was a dissertation of a student, that with autistic individuals, after the intervention, they look directly in the eyes of others.

Tell me more of why that's important. I mean, I can deduce some reasons, but share more. What's interesting is with many autistic individuals, they have gaze aversion. And if you track their eye movements, they're looking for safe places, the nose or the sides of the mouth, not the upper part of the face. The mouth is really where we look at if the mouth is a biting organ.

So if we're in a state of threat, we're going to look towards mouths. But the upper part of the face is where exuberance shows. So the issue is you have to feel safe to look into the eyes. But the interesting part for me is about monkeys. You know, if you go into a colony of rhesus monkeys and you make eye contact, they interpret it as a threat response. And they'll throw, literally, they'll throw their feces at you.

And think about riding the subway in New York. Do you want to see? Go up to someone and make eye contact. So in a strange or a more hostile environment, eye contact is a threat. And so what it means is that if your physiology is prepared to be more in a fight-flight, eye contact is a threat response. What about...

the panoramic and myopic vision? Is there any tie or association to the visual tone? There is, because the pupil is also regulated by the autonomic nervous system. Yeah, if you're in fight-flight, the pupil's dilate, and you go into myopia. And what happens to acuity? It goes...

But you can see more peripheral. Yeah. So it's a well-tuned system. If we think of it as a system, it's really giving us a lot of clues. So the Safe and Sound Protocol was designed to basically exercise features of that social engagement system to foster more

auditory processing, face-to-face interaction. But what I want to mention now is that we developed a new one. It's with a colleague by the name of Anthony Gorey. He was a music producer, a composer, really talented guy. And I had these ideas, and I thought I'd never have an opportunity to implement them. And that was this technology to put rhythms back into the body.

And so if we want to think about it, if we watch or think, close our eyes and feel like we're being rocked gently in a very rhythmic, predictable way, like on the ocean, on a raft that we can't fall off of, most people's faces will start to glow because they're familiar with what that should feel like. And so I decided with him to see if we could embed in the composition of music our own endogenous biological rhythms.

which are basically slower than breathing. So I think we get misled by breathing and thinking it's a causal pathway. So when we put these rhythms into the music, people spontaneously start to breathe very slow, although that rhythm was not in the music.

their guts start to work. They could feel rhythms going through their body. It was really quite remarkable. And we were doing a whole series of clinical or let's say research studies. And in our first pilot, we looked at oxytocin. And basically virtually all of them had a rise in oxytocin after listening to 15 minutes of this.

Their body knows what it is, takes that state. And then I did a word cloud of what they thought was their experience. And the words that pop out are peaceful, relaxed, calm. Hey, you mentioned, oh, go on. I'm just going to say we know what these feelings are.

And so when our body goes there, we know what it is. You mentioned the research with babies being exposed to a more prosodic or like soothing voice from the mother. There's also research from here in Florida from Dr. Tiffany Fields, her book called Touch. And it was the particular study was around touch for babies, right?

premature babies in incubators. And before I was like, keep the baby sterile. You don't want to get any kind of bacteria or whatever. And then they had started introducing

I believe it was 15 minutes of massage for the babies twice a day. And it had a similar effect. Suddenly they start growing a lot faster. They get released from the incubators a lot faster. And it seems like all of your senses are gateways into the autonomic system. And even on things, saying words like, I think something that happens to me in this sometimes is I feel like the deductive nature of science can be

can almost be clunky in nature and reduce rhythmicity. And a lot of this stuff is like, what you really need is you've got to go find a partner and just take a dance class and pick up an instrument, play a didgeridoo, and go outside. See, I think science, you're defining science by what scientists do. I define it by what the, I say the vision of what I think science should be.

And I was always interested in methodologies to measure rhythmicity and develop these techniques to study the rhythmicity of heart rate. And even when people talk about heart rate variability, they have now glossed over the importance of the rhythmicity in the heart rate variability.

And that rhythmicity is really giving you a window into the feedback loops of how the nerves, the cranial nerves, in this case the vagus, is regulating the heart. And remember, it's not just down, it's coming back up to the brain step, and you're getting that whole feedback loop. So the wealth of information has been filtered out by a more two-dimensional static view of how our body works.

Yeah, yeah. Then we become imprisoned in that two-dimensional view and start to believe that that's who we are. We start to almost leave our humanity in a way. We become a textbook. Then you get trapped in the mind, and then you're disassociated from the body, and now you have some issues. Yeah, but what we're doing, there's a wonderful Calvin and Hobbes cartoon that I used to use in my talks. Calvin decides he's going to become two-dimensional.

Not three-dimensional, so he turns sideways and disappears.

And I would always use this in my talks because I said, you know, we're trying to flatten things out. And the nervous system is not flat. It's not two-dimensional. It's not merely three-dimensional. It's moving in time as well. And that complexity of dimensionality makes it difficult for many people who call themselves scientists to conceptualize. So I wonder your perception of the potential effect of

on things like non-native electromagnetic frequencies and radiation and alternating current, you know, as opposed to direct current electricity in the house and all that stuff, because it's the opposite of rhythmicity. It's just, it's, it's, it stays in a very consistent kind of like pulsating pattern. And from my understanding,

from people that know more about those things that I do that can create almost like a defensive inflammatory response from the body being like, oh, like there's something wrong with this as opposed to being in nature where it has a rhythm. Yeah. Well, I think it's probably true, but let's step back and say, how do we become resilient in a world that is dumping things into it that are not necessarily good for us?

Maybe a better question.

I had prostate cancer and actually twice out of recurrence. And the strategy that I wanted was this is nothing, something that's not good, but you need external help.

But you have to be welcoming to it. So even though it's a barbaric treatment, you have to welcome it because by welcoming it, you get another decade or so of life. So you want to embrace the goodness that may require some of the things that we really don't want to happen, don't want to happen to us. So it's kind of like, can you be resilient enough to be welcoming certain experiences that enable you to function better?

So the electromagnetic, we're getting is this, we're living in electric fields. We're living in all kinds of rhythms that we are literally filtering out of our lives. So I live by the ocean, which I find really lovely because the rhythmicity of the waves are wonderful. And I think our bodies crave that rhythmicity. And the way that it craves it is by not being too...

We have to be, in a sense, allow the opportunities for the information to come in. And basically, as the metaphor or as the trait statement is, you need to go with the flow. What does that mean?

It's like saying the rhythms are there. Enjoy them. Go for the ride. Yeah. And then social engagement is kind of like the top of the hierarchy. Social engagement and interaction with another person, particularly from the lens of like play. Engagement is your portal because we need social nourishment to feel safe enough.

to open up, get rid of our defenses or reduce our defenses enough to experience all the good stuff that goes on around us. So you grab yourself by the neck and get yourself a class pass or get on some community Facebook something and just pull yourself into the people. You connect with the people. The agency is, I have a more gentle way of saying it, is that when you feel safe, you're going to be pulled in anyway.

Yeah. So, so I actually use this metaphor and I'll leave this. This will be your, your final or my final statement. Do you have only one gift to give in our lives? And that's our own accessibility. Yeah.

And our own accessibility triggers in others accessibility. So it's like pyramids. And that enables, so when we talk about social engagement, it works when we become accessible. If we're arrogant and we are, in a sense, too much like this,

Yeah. Protected. Yeah. Uh, we're going to shrink. We're going to start disappearing. And that's the thing that happens a lot in, in romantic relationships, relationships in general. It's like, it's kind of like, I will do the thing when you do the thing. It's like, no, no, like you do the thing, just do the, just be the thing. And then that will open up the world around you. But you have to be courageous enough to be the safe person or be the vulnerable person or be the open person. And,

And the other part is you have to be courageous enough to trust. Remember, we are humans. We are humans. What does that mean? It means that we can easily feel that our trust has been violated. And that we have to now step back and say, that's a heavy price to pay because our whole portal of success and self-transformation is this capacity to trust, that accessibility to others.

Man, I appreciate you, Dr. Porges. Thank you so much for making time to do this. You're quite welcome. Good to meet you. Yeah, likewise. So where would be the best place people want to go deeper into your work or deeper into...

sorting their nervous systems out. Look at polyvagalinstitute.com or truly.org, I guess it is. And I have a personal webpage, which is stephenporges.com. But the Polyvagal Institute is probably a good place to go. And if they want to hear more about the new acoustic stimulation, the new music,

It's actually called Sonocia, S-O-N-O-C-E-A, and has a website. And if you're interested, just go in and put your email with that. Amazing. Thanks so much. I appreciate you. That's it. That's all. We'll see you next week.

Hope you guys enjoyed that conversation. Once again, there is a free trial to start the Align Breathing program. The free trial is absolutely invaluable. I am very confident people want to continue on with the program after that. There is a quick start guide as well. So if you're feeling anxious and you want to

breathing patterns to support that. If you want to work on your sleep, if you want to work on stimulating yourself without stimulants such as caffeine, there's a way to breathe your way into those states and we show you how. So if you want to check that out, jump over to alignpodcast.com slash breathe. And also if you want to learn more about your breathing, you can take the breathing architect quiz over at alignpodcast.com slash quiz. Okay, that's it. That's all. I appreciate you guys. I'll see you next week.