Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais - How Social Connection Combats Stress | Psychiatrist, Dr. Stephen Porges

Episode Date: August 18, 2021

This week’s conversation is with Dr. Stephen Porges, a distinguished university scientist at Indiana University, where he is the founding director of the Traumatic Stress Research Consortium. He is also a professor of psychiatry at the University of North Carolina and professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of Maryland. Stephen more than 350 peer‐reviewed scientific papers, published across several disciplines, have been cited in approximately 40,000 peer-reviewed papers. He holds several patents involved in monitoring and regulating autonomic state and originated the polyvagal theory, which emphasizes the importance of physiological state in the expression of behavioral, mental, and health problems related to traumatic experiences. So at its core, this conversation is about the triggers that either prompt us to feel threatened or safe… and why social connection or lack thereof plays such an integral role in which state we gravitate towards.Stephen is a legend in the field so I can’t wait for you to learn from him._________________Subscribe to our Youtube Channel for more powerful conversations at the intersection of high performance, leadership, and meaning: https://www.youtube.com/c/FindingMasteryGet exclusive discounts and support our amazing sponsors! Go to: https://findingmastery.com/sponsors/Subscribe to the Finding Mastery newsletter for weekly high performance insights: https://www.findingmastery.com/newsletter Download Dr. Mike's Morning Mindset Routine! https://www.findingmastery.com/morningmindsetFollow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, and X.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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stay present and engaged with my thinking and writing. If you wanna slow down, if you wanna work smarter, I highly encourage you to check them out. Visit remarkable.com to learn more and grab your paper pro today. We all have, all vertebrates have a neuroception of danger and safety is not the same as not having cues of threat. Safety is something special. It's the voice of the mother. It's a smiling friendship. It's the trust that makes us social mammals, social species. All right. Welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast. I'm Michael Gervais and by trade in training, I am a sport and performance psychologist, and I am fortunate to work with

some of the most extraordinary thinkers and doers across the planet. And the whole idea behind this podcast is to learn from those people. Not exactly those people, because I'm not bringing my clients on the show here, but to learn from folks that are so extraordinary at their craft and their mind that they're changing the way we understand human potential. And what we're trying to do is pull back the curtain to understand their psychological framework, to understand how do they make sense of things, and I'm talking about things inside of themselves, things that are external, like events and activities. We want to understand how do they use their mind, and our minds are our greatest asset. If you want to learn more about how you can train your mind, there's just a quick little note here, a little reminder, if you will,

that I want to encourage you to check out the psychological skills training course that I created using good science informed by those who are also on the frontier of human potential. And basically going to show you exactly how we train them in the same very way that we can train you. You can find that at findingmastery.net forward slash course. Now, this week's conversation is with Dr. Stephen Porges, and he is distinguished in what he does. He's a scientist at Indiana University, where he is the founding director of the Traumatic Stress Research Consortium. He's also a professor of psychiatry at the University of North Carolina and professor, Ametrius, at the University of Illinois at Chicago

and the University of Maryland. Let's just pause there for a moment. Think about that traveling, if you will. He's a legend. I'm so excited to, if you're familiar with his work, you know why I'm excited, but I'm so excited if you're not familiar with his work, to be able to better understand how his research can apply to you. So more than 350 peer-reviewed scientific papers published across several disciplines have made a difference in the scientific world. And he holds several patents as well. So not only has he, you know, got his nose in books and nose in, you know, the laboratory

process, but he's also an innovator. And these patents, they basically are about the monitoring and the regulating of the autonomic nervous system. And it was the origins of the polyvagal theory, which emphasizes the importance of physiological state in the expression of behavior, mindset and mental processes, as well as health, basic health, as well as health problems. And all of this related to traumatic experiences. It's a mouthful. There's a lot here. Takeaway is he's traveled across many universities. He has made a massive difference in research. And he has innovated both in patents, the applied part of his research, as well as the application of good science. And so at its core, this conversation

is really about the triggers that either prompt us to feel threatened or safe, and why social connection or lack thereof plays such an integral role in which state we gravitate toward. So certainly involves your psychology, and we also get into the importance of how your social and your cultural influences tend to influence you towards the triggers, the way you interpret things, to be either threatening or safe. Dr. Porges, he's a legend. And I cannot wait for you to learn from him, but more importantly, apply what he has come to understand at a very deep level.

So with that, let's jump right into this week's conversation with Dr. Stephen Porges. Dr. Porges, how are you? Fine. Nice to be with you, Michael. Oh, it's so good. First, I want to say congratulations on your body work. And it has been just a real treat to be challenged by your work. And because when I was in graduate school, the theory, your theory was not well-established or even well-known. And so they were still calling the vagus nerve the wandering nerve. And so here we are.

Like, so what a treat. Well, it's all about the lens that you look at life through. If you look at things as anatomical structures, you're missing the whole story. If you think of it as the vagus is amazingly nerve that is the largest nerve in the body going through from the brain to all the organs. If you view it as a cable that is a surveillance system that's really assessing how your body's doing, sending signals to the brain, the regulator, and then regulating those organs.

But it's a different lens and saying nerves do things, organs do things. We have to think in terms of a more integrated neural system. And the reason I wanted to have you on is for just that reason, is that you have changed the game from a physiological standpoint about how many of us understand optimized psychology. And so many people have heard the fight, flight, freeze mechanisms, but to actually understand what is the neurology that sits underneath of it, I think is materially important. So I want to talk about that. And I also want to talk about how you became you, meaning a person who's disrupted the field and added significance to it. And I'm talking about human flourishing, not just like sport and optimization.

So can we start with something as a flyover? If there was a handful of chapters that would capture your life, right? Your entirety of your life, what would those chapter headings be? Well, I couldn't give you the headings. I'd give you the theme. And the theme is, my work is who I am. And if we approach life in that way, where we can enable our work to be an expression of our who we are, I mean, our core, not merely our passion, but our core, then it's no longer work. It's a personal experience of growth. And more than that, it's an experience of connection with others. If your work is what it is to be a human being, then it's all about your work is about connecting with others. If your work is what it is to be a human being, then it's all about, your work is

about connecting with humanity. And I'm going to translate into your terms. It's all about enabling humans to flourish because they don't flourish unless they are able to connect with others. Okay. I'm right there with you. And I've got an axiom that i've worked on just to back you up on this thought is that um through relationships we become and so that's meant to be open-ended but it is the relationships with ourselves with others with mother nature you know with mistakes with successes it is through the relationships that we become who we're becoming. Yeah, I would even push it even further because we have people who talk about spirituality as if it were not a relationship. And so you end up with a bifurcation

in the world of spirituality. Those that reach a level of spirituality through connection with others versus those who in a sense reach connectedness with an abstract concept, the deity, which is much more dissociative and has with it, as we become more dissociative, we're really saying as we become separated from other, we lose all the attributes that social interaction gives us. When you asked about the flyover, it's actually something that's really coming into my mind about what is all this body of work. It's all about acknowledging that we're

the product of an evolutionary process of a vertebrate that became social. That's who we are. So our sociality is not distinct from our neurobiology and our sociality is not distinct from our health. And in your terminology, our sociality would not be distinct from flourishing as a human being. Okay. And would you say right now, this is, I'm going to pull out of science and philosophy for a minute and just ask you about when you think about the human condition let's just do the the states for a minute because we're both in the united states of america what how do you capture the human experience are we flourishing are we struggling well we're primitives because we violated the mandate of what it is to be a social species, and that is to be connected with each other.

And everything we're doing is about separation. And if you want to reflect on something, ask yourself or ask others. Or I would say you might get the wrong answer. Don't ask them, but kind of intuitively guess what their answer would be. Are they good witnesses of others? Okay. And then you start asking the question, when you're asking about like in the US, what's going on?

And then as people don't have a voice or feel they don't have a voice. And it has very little to do with retribution, has to do with identifying oneself as being real. So voices are taken from people. And that is really what creates this marginalization and literally a panic. Because as you take a person's voice away metaphorically, you're isolating them. You're marginalizing them.

And we see the impact in the politics and the social consciousness of the country. And the other part of what you see is that you're never going to convince people to be good witnesses or to give voice to others if those people themselves are in a state of threat, if they're threatened, if they're fearful, they're going to be defensive. And being defensive is not to care or even acknowledge that other really exists. So it all becomes proximal self-survival. Finding Mastery is brought to you by LinkedIn Sales Solutions.

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that I feel and think and perform. And that's why I've been leaning on David Protein Bars. And so has the team here at Finding Mastery. In fact, our GM, Stuart, he loves them so much. I just want to kind of quickly put them on the spot. Stuart, I know you're listening. I think you might be the reason that we're running out of these bars so quickly. They're incredible, Mike. I love them. One a day, one a day. What do you mean one a day? There's way more than that happening here. Don't tell. Okay. All right. Look, they're incredibly simple. They're effective. 28 grams of protein, just 150 calories and zero grams of sugar. It's rare to find something that fits so conveniently into a

performance-based lifestyle and actually tastes good. Dr. Peter Attia, someone who's been on the show, it's a great episode by the way, is also their chief science officer. So I know they've done their due diligence in that category. My favorite flavor right now is the chocolate chip cookie dough. And a few of our teammates here at Finding Mastery have been loving the fudge brownie and peanut butter. I know, Stuart, you're still listening here. So getting enough protein matters. And that can't be understated, not just for strength, but for energy and focus, recovery, for longevity. And I love that David is making that easier. So if you're trying to hit your daily protein goals with something seamless, I'd love for you to go check them out. Get a free variety pack, a $25 value and 10% off for life when you head to davidprotein.com slash finding mastery. That's David, D-A-V-I-D, protein, P-R-O-T-E-I-N.com slash finding mastery. Okay. So the witness piece, let's start with the witness and let's go to the voice. So are we good witnesses of others? And I think you would say,

and I want to get right into like a thoughtful definition of the polyvagal theory, but I think you would say that it's hard to witness another when we are constantly, our brain, and in particular, the wandering nerve, the vagus, is trying to figure out if we're safe. Well, the brain's trying to figure out if we're safe. And our nervous system has certain basic rules that it looks for. One is predictability, which means familiarity. But even if we have problems, we need to be able to be led on a journey of problem solving, not of chaos. And as a country, we've lived through the past few years have been very chaotic in the predictability. And the pandemic, of course, creates this uncertainty in people's lives. It still is. And we're not even witnessing what's going on. We're not truly witnessing that

the pandemic in itself creates a chronic state of threat to our nervous system, to our body, to our health, and for many people, to their financial security. And it's a real threat. And we are using terms like pre-existing conditions, like if you're obese or your heart condition, as being a vulnerability to the virus. And we're neglecting the history, the clinical history of the individual, like have they been traumatized, have they been raped, have they come from impoverished environments, has their nervous system already been retuned to be defensive long before the pandemic occurred, and then the pandemic is just that second blow to a vulnerable system, and it can't fight off the immune system. It says, enough. I read a statistic today that it was 40%, just under 40% of people during the pandemic

have put on 29 pounds of weight, when 10% have put on over 50 pounds of weight. And so if you think about the stress response, this makes some kind of sense, right? Because if we're stressed, we search for... If we throw out the word stress and replace it with a simple word, simple description, say our body is under a state of threat. Then you start understanding what your body, your nervous system is doing. When people say you're stressed out, it almost implies that you have agency or empowerment not to be stressed out. So we, in a sense, blame those who have already been victimized by the

environment. So if we have a better understanding that our nervous system detects cues and shifts bodily state, even to either from a state of accessibility, welcoming, friendship, and co-regulation, or to a defensive, self-oriented, I have to live preservation mode. And this is what we call being stressed out, and this is what we call being calm so we have multiple layers in which we're making interpretations of a simple uh let's say simple a script or a simple reflexive program that is outside the level of awareness and that is are we safe or are we under threat and our nervous system has literally packages of responses if it's's safe, we're like this. If we're not safe, we're like this. And this symbolically means I'm not open to you. And when you try to engage me, you're still a threat.

So I'm going to push you back. Yeah. So the two responses are we're interpreting threat or interpreting safety and our body is responding accordingly and yeah and so this would probably be a yep right and the perception of threat is materially not different than the actual threat right so our perception of threat there's the same cascade or the same system yeah but you see you slipped into a, let's say a dangerous area by using the word perception. Perception, in a sense, implies an awareness. And when you do that, you start giving agency to the, in a sense, the survivor or the victim of the threat.

And the part is so much of our nervous system functions outside of our realm of awareness. So certain cues change your body and then our big brains with the creativity start to create narratives. And in your life, I'm sure you've had arguments with people that you have no idea why an argument started or arguments are never really won. It was that something was going on in the background. People were highly mobilized, agitated, and the threshold to misinterpret a neutral cue or even a positive cue had changed and someone misinterpreted

or took something that you said with the intention, with interpretation that you intended to be hurtful and what you are seeing is that i call this the intervening variable what's in between the context of stimulus and our response and our interpretation is our physiological state and as a performance person dealing with athletes they often since they are highly mobilized during athletic exercises, their bodies are really so mobilized, they may misread cues of interaction as if they're threatening.

So if a person is, in a sense, a high sympathetic, high heart rate mobilized, then this social component of the autonomic nervous system, that ventral vagal system that's linked with the muscles of the face and head and the intonation of voice, it goes offline. And so if you're, let's say, playing football and someone on the opposing team knocks you down, hits you hard, gets up and walks away, what does your body do? It goes, wants to, as it's retaliating you have fights but if the person who knocked you down leans over and says can you know help you up it's part of the game the instance the narrative changes so our body reacts uh with major changes and the real

issue is how does our nervous system interpret those reactions how does our body interpret those actions as opposed to how does our mind interpret and then our body follows according to our mind yeah the mind is actually on for the ride the mind uh you have this bodily reaction and now your your mind or your cog you're aware part of your nervous system is trying to make sense of it. Now, sometimes the sense fits the reality of the situation. Sometimes it doesn't. But to your own awareness, your explanation is always the right one. Okay. So are you coming into this conversation as a top-down or bottom-up approach? And I think you're going to probably say both. Right, because we're a dynamically interactive unit.

So let me give you the example. Let's say that over your house, and you're on on the west coast obviously somewhere you're in seattle i presume or something uh actually i'm in hermosa beach today where's that yeah in uh california oh okay but let's assume you're you're in your house and even though it doesn't occur anymore a jet plane flies overhead breaking the sound barrier okay so there's this big concussive sound. Oh, that would be good in California. You think it's an earthquake, which is, again, the bodily reaction. And if you've been in California and you have felt an earthquake,

how does your body respond? There's a kind of startle response. And then there's, you know, and so there's a, it kicks on. It kicks on. Your body immediately goes into a threat reaction and then your mind interprets it oh it's an earthquake and i've been through those and you know it's kind of natural living there but if you have a person from the midwest who's and they experience that, what does their brain say? The place is going to fall down. So the top down, in your case, if you've had the experiences, down regulates that bottom up threat reaction because you have a history.

But if you don't have that history, your mind will support the threat reaction. Even more reason why for me, when I hear that, I go, right. That's why it's so important to have an increased awareness, to get to wisdom, to have many frames of reference, as many frames of reference as we possibly can. And I'm concerned because we are increasingly becoming muted in our stimulus. Well, separate. There are two things going on. There are things that need immediate reactions to, and there are things that one can, in a sense, think about to make a decision. You were really focusing on the latter, but the start of an earthquake or someone hitting their brakes or someone

hitting the horn of their car while you're crossing intersection require immediate responses. Your body is going to be jolted. And the question is you have to move usually. And then your issue is, how do you make sense of what has happened? In situations where it's more chronic, in the pandemic now is your example of that, there's a chronic threat to people.

And how are they processing that? How are they reading their body's cues, which are cues of threat? Are they confabulating a whole narrative of paranoia about the world and other people? So in a sense, the body is supporting defensive behaviors. Or many people have been confined during the pandemic in family units that were not safe to begin with, especially, let's say, adolescent children, children growing up. And how are they processing those experiences?

Your example about people gaining weight, ingestion of food is a self-regulatory behavioral pattern that has an agency to it, a voluntary component, and that is ingesting, stimulates the oral motor cavity. This is very polyvagal. And if you don't have social activity, which stimulates the same nerves, you'll eat. It's as simple as that. You'll try to calm yourself by ingesting in fact many people who have eating disorders have reduced opportunities for social interaction so they're and then add people who are addicted to various drugs it's the same thing they're heroically trying to find a

substitute to regulate their physiological state when historically, or let's say evolutionarily, their nervous system regulate threat by interacting with others. Okay. I want to do, okay, brilliant. And I want to start right at the top with you. Can you give a very pedestrian description of the polyvagal theory? Well, there's a knee jerk for me and that is the least like question from my perspective. I would imagine. But I always like to try to simplify it and get people to think in a different way and say, what does polyvagal theory tell you? It tells you that your physiological state is actually a mediator of how you react to the world. And if you start off there, you say, well, if your body's calm, you become more accessible, you become more sociable.

And if your body is highly mobilized, you become more defensive, more fight or flight. And if your body's shutting down, and there are many people who, when brought into a social setting, or even on the camera, they'll disappear. So that's shutting down. Then with those three states, you can map them into two different trajectories. One is a developmental one. So if you went back to the fetus, you can see that the shutting down response is actually the earliest one. And then the mobilization and finally the social engagement system, which for the newborn baby is the same system that regulates sucking, swallowing, and vocalizing. And that's why ingestion is calming, singing is calming, breath exercises engaging. We essence tap into that same system with social cues as opposed to ingestive cues.

So that's one trajectory. The other trajectory is to think of evolution. And if you look at evolution, there's something called phylogeny, which is really our evolutionary history. Who were our ancestors? So we're social mammals. And mammals evolved from asocial reptiles. That's as far as we need to go.

So something happened along that evolutionary pathway that enabled asocial reptiles to become social mammals. And that has everything to do with polyvatal theory, because a new part of the vagus evolved, the cardio inhibitory regulated and slowed heart rate, but it broke off the older branch and moved over in the brainstem to an area that regulated the muscles of the face and head. So now we regulate our physiology through our social behavior. So our sociality became physiology. It's the same thing. This, this, this is remarkable. This is really a

remarkable shift and your eloquence in the way that you have pulled it in into a very complicated internal ecosystem is this, this I love. And I I've read enough of your work to, to, to get excited about this point here, which is, you know, we wear our emotions on our face, you know, we wear our voice. Yeah. Okay. So, and. And the reason is because of where the nerve innervates. Yeah. There's another important take home there. You got the side of how we do, we're social. But this system has the capacity to immediately and reflexively down-regulate our defenses.

So the social part basically is inhibitory over our defenses. Think about a baby who's in a state of panic or crying or tampering. The mother looks at the baby, smiles, says a few words or sings a little bit. The baby just... It's the cues of safety are embedded in intonation and gesture and facial expression and they are stronger than our defenses our defense systems that's remarkable so that becomes so so then our social cuing is one of the great parasympathetic activators. Exactly. And I created a term, which I called neuroception, so that we have to use the word perception. So we could leave it to some unaware neural circuit that

reflexively did things. And it can very simply be stated that mammals are the only vertebrates that have a neuroception to detect safety. We all have, all vertebrates have a neuroception of danger. And safety is not the same as not having cues of threat. Safety is something special. It's the voice of the mother. It's a smiling friendship. It's the trust that makes us social mammals, social species. operating system that is looking for danger threat you know and we hear a soothing voice and we see the frontalis muscles looking soft and kind and gentle and we see kind of a doe-eyed expression on somebody but it doesn't work because there's something else under the system that says this is not trustworthy this is fake but really that person is coming from the right wholesome position of wanting to create safety. There's a complexity and let's actually play with words a little bit. First, if you're sympathetically dominant and you're there

because you have actively withdrawn that ventral vagal calming mechanism, it's really a statement that you have that attribute. You can still re-engage it. Okay. So when I was saying sympathetic dominant, I'm talking about somebody who is chronically stressed, overwhelmed, and they have a pattern, a pervasive pattern of being sympathetic dominant. So in one situation, the one I'm describing, it's adaptive to be sympathetically dominant. It says to retract that ventral vagus because I need the metabolic output.

I need the strength. I need to move. I need to move. But I can regain co-regulation, the attributes of co-regulation, if someone talks to me, if someone looks at me. And this is really the core of what team sports is all about. A thousand percent. A thousand percent. Yes. It's a sense you trust your teammates to give you the appropriate cues of when you need to be aggressive and defensive versus when you can now be accessible.

So it's a very interesting training plan. There's another group in terms of training, which is a very interesting model, and that is Navy SEALs. Do you know anything about Navy SEALs? I do. You know how they train them. You basically almost drown and you get resuscitated by a team member. And what that means is that even the immobilization, death, fading reaction of shutting down, you still have confidence that someone is there for you. So you never fall into the abyss. And so they make these very strong bonds. Now, the issue with that is they're bonded with their team but they may have problems bonding with their family so many of them this is actually a quote if my team is going anywhere in the world

i'll be ready in an hour now about my family i'd have to think about it so it's like this and in fact when you start getting into team sports, professional sports, for some people, there is that stronger bond within their team versus in their other parts of their social relationships, their families. Okay, I want to go back to the dilemma I set up. But on this point, is the suggestion that the reason that bond is so intense it's it's bigger than the oxytocin that happens from shared experiences it's something that happens at the revival of the feigning of the fake death if you will the voodoo well it's truly vulnerable death yeah yes it is the life threat the near death right yeah yeah And I would say that the people who develop these training programs have some intuition that this works and it does work. Okay.

All right. So now go back to that dilemma that I set up. The dilemma you set up was that of individual whose ventral vagal circuit was so withdrawn and depressed that they were living most of their time within a defensive, sympathetic mobilization state. And how do you get them back into a social engagement system? Even when they're seeing another that is like kind. Well, what I'm learning from the world of trauma is what you're describing are people who often have had traumatic experiences and survived them. And their body says been there, meaning trusted someone at some point in time, won't go there again. But their mental image of what they want in life is to be safe in

the arms of another. So their body still, who are protecting them from being injured, their mind says, really, I'd like to have relationships. And that brings them into therapy, because they're not happy in the world that they're in, which is everything is threat. So the answer is how do you reverse that? And how do you get cues of safety now to be cues of giving up defense? I use this kind of a metaphor of a continuum. On one side, it's vulnerability, and the other side is accessibility. And therapeutic models are all about enabling people to be accessible without the vulnerability overriding that accessibility. So since you're taking that risk, it's not an intellectual risk. Your body is saying, it's okay. I can give you a hug. Not, we can all see this. We're children and other

adults. You know, when we give people hugs, we know whether they're authentic or not. You know, there are people who will give you a hug and you feel like it's a steel, you know, fence that you're grabbing because their bodies are tense. They're not safe in that level of proximity. And they don't feel that they have, and then we use the word agency, that they are in a sense allowed to express how they really, that this is distasteful and uncomfortable for them. So they overlay a social acceptability of giving people hugs. And we also see this where people will make eye contact and they're really kind of makes them feel uncomfortable and their faces are not showing expressivity. So the first part is that sympathetically dominant is the critical part is the ventral vagus is withdrawn and all the features that we call social engagement are gone. body has rigidity. So they're broadcasting to others, stay away from me. And they see in others

as people that could hurt them. So we see the synergism developing, that they're detecting cues, misreading cues of approach, reflecting them out. And then when a person who's approaching gets those cues, forget it, they're not going to give any more cues of approach. Their bodies know that this is not safe to go towards. So the issue is how do you move that person through with methods of therapy? And that is titration, slow, a greater body awareness, giving the client's toolkits to regulate their physiology, such as breathing tools, because if you exhale slowly, the ventral vagus comes back on. And when people try to maintain their defenses, they shift their breathing patterns to have short exhalations and longer inhalations. But if you want to come down, you take a short inhalation and a long exhalation.

So we can actually have this portal to regulate our physiology. And let's talk about, just be precise, with the vagus coming back online. Is that what you're talking about, if I hear it correctly, that what the vagus nerve does, it becomes a moderate, it becomes the break, if you will, for the sympathetic nervous system. It down-regulates sympathetic. The ventral vagus does that. It basically, I would use a term, it contains it. Because the healthy individual wants sympathetic tone,

because that gives you energy and exuberance. So you want a person to be activated, but you want them contained with their sociality. So let's say dance and play are examples of movement with social engagement, and that's what you want. The science of breathing is coming online in a rapid form right now. And I'm curious if you're mapping any of the cadences of breathing that you're finding to me more precise than a long exhale. And there's some good research, but I'm just not sure if you're following it. There's a physiology underlying, whether we call breathing therapies or yoga breath or pranayama yoga, there's a neurophysiology and there are people working on that, but there's certain basic rules of how the nervous system works.

And many of these traditions of breathing therapies, even the ancient traditions are really, in a sense, intuitively based on good science, whether they knew it or not and that is the impact of that ventral vagus on the heart which is easy for us to understand and measure because it slows your heart rate up when you when that vagus is working and that occurs during exhalation so basically the breathing is a gating of them impact of the vagus on our heart to the heart's pacemaker. So slow exhalations enable the vagus to have more of a profound inhibitory effect on our heart and also on the other aspects of the sympathetic nervous system. It calms us down.

Much of the work also deals with abdominal breathing, pushing down on the abdomen and the diaphragm. And one can conceptualize those as amplifiers of slow exhalation because there's lots of sensory cues coming from the diaphragm. So there's a neurophysiology for every breathing pattern. And some of the people who do really great work with breathing programs, it's not all about calming down. It's about using breath to energize. So you, in a sense, go on journeys through your body and you start to appreciate these shifts in physiological state. In a sense, you become an experiencer of your own polyvagal states. You can shut yourself down, you can mobilize, and you can become very accessible.

And as you do that, you are, this is becoming, you're honoring your own body, you're becoming aware of your own body. And it's not only that you're, it's becoming healthier, but you're also learning tools of self-compassion. You're allowing yourself to calm down. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Momentus. When it comes to high performance, whether you're leading a team, raising a family,

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One is disruption of agency and the other one is how do you use agency? Disruption of agency is a trigger of threat. And it's really quite profound. We like to be in charge of our own body. And we like to be at least have enough control of what's going on around us. For me, agency is this notion of it's having control and loss of control is a trigger for anyone wanting to become scared or defensive. That's why people get frightened of anesthesia. They don't like masks put over their face. They don't want, they want to be awake. They want to be there. And this is buried into our nervous system of our own, I would say, own surveillance

of who we are. And the way that you give that up is through trusting the other. And so if you're already a quote, what you're calling stressed out person or a person in my terminology, in the state of chronic threat, how do you even go under anesthesia how do you trust the physician how do you feel safe enough to put your body in the hands of another if you can't even allow your body to be in a hug of another and we have this conceptualization of disease as something that we fight which and we use term fight, we're talking more about sympathetic aggressiveness, as opposed to that we understand, and almost like we welcome disease,

so we can understand it. And then we can reject the disease because we no longer need it, or our body can reject it. I think the agency that we're missing is the agency of what the body does on its own. So the body is really an organ of self-healing and regeneration. And we have given those attributes to treatments outside the body, to the physician, to surgery, and to pharmaceuticals. And we've neglected to understand what the body can do for itself if it's not under a state of threat. So when our bodies are under external threat, then the ability to deal with internal threat or illness becomes compromised. And we always hear these stories of people who have diseases that get worse when they're under quote stress, and then they miraculously heal

when they are in loving situations and feel supported. And it's not like these are unusual. It's like, that's how the body works. So the body wants the agency to heal itself, but it can only take that agency when the context is a safe context so that the nervous system doesn't have to go to states of defense. So let's create a modern situation is that people are going back to work soon-ish. We don't know when that exactly is. And many companies are

suggesting a 3-2 model, three days in person, two days at home, or some flex system. That being said is that if people are chronically stressed, is if they're under a chronic state of threat, which the pandemic certainly has amplified, but also I'm not sure that many of us have had the skills to be able to properly regulate our nervous system prior to the pandemic so it's like it accelerated this awareness that hey uh we we're barely managing chronic stress before and now it's like spilling over okay so we're going to go back to work we were the conditions is that most people have a heightened state of chronic stress we're going to go back into a work environment we haven't seen people we're not sure who's caring who who's not, if it's safe, if it's not. And we also have the pressures

that come with high stress work environments, high pressure environments. And so how would you suggest that when people go back into work, that if companies are trying to solve for agency and they're trying to solve for good working environments, where would you begin to guide companies to say, hey, this is how you'll take care of your people so that they have agency, so they can do their best work, so they can downreg tends to be missing in the whole treatment and even public health treatment towards the pandemic is the need of humans for social interaction. So we misuse terms like we use the word social distancing when we really mean physical distancing. So the first thing is we have to maintain social relationships. That's what our bodies are really crying for. And that's how the history of humanity, that's how people mitigate their stress or threat reactions was through interactions with others. Now, a lot of people like to go to work and no one's asked the question, why did they like to go to work? You know, it's always

like, this is a drain. I can work from home. I can get more done. But a lot of people like to go to work to see their colleagues. They like the social engagement behaviors. So if we're going to a 3-2 or 2-3 or some hybrid model, Where are the people getting their social interaction? It's been a remarkable experience. I'll use a term called turkey, and I'm going to talk about myself for a moment, because I was, you know, giving talks in places at least once a month, and really enjoying the travel. And then my last talk was a year ago, last March. It was when the pandemic hit New York City, and I was talking in New York City. And I was giving people hugs, and I said, well, you know, I'll do it tonight or today, but in a month I'll think about it.

By the time we got home, places were already shutting down. And interestingly, we went to dinner with friends of mine and there were four couples. There were eight of us at dinner. Three people of those eight had COVID by Monday. So it was like, it was really close. You know, we didn't get it. We, I don't know if I was just asymptomatic or immune, but I wasn't taking any chance. And the issue was, it was very hard in the beginning. And then it became very hard to see people. And we've had our shots and I've gone to restaurants, but I get exhausted in the presence of other people. So my nervous system retuned. And this I don't view as healthy. So in a sense sense not that I think of myself as a stressed out person

but obviously there's been some subtle retuning of how I respond to other people so it's where people become a threat and this is really a I have difficulty figuring this one out because I have no fear about getting infected. I have a fear about being around people, not fear. I have a discomfort. So it's this whole experience of the pandemic has had a traumatic impact. So what your question is much more targeted. It's saying in the real world where people go to work to make a living,

they have to so that they're not food insecure, home insecure. It's extraordinarily important. And many people, for many, the pandemic has made them food and home. And basically, their families are insecure from that. And so they have this whole other layer where they need a job. And jobs are not just about getting money. I mean, it's important to have money. I'm not dismissing that as a substrate, but jobs have a history of being used

to define who we are, how we express ourselves. And companies need to start thinking about how they can create a type of social networking, whether it is a hybrid social networking or it's virtual. They need that level of interaction. And so how are we going to do it? Because if we start to thrust people who are, again, I'll use that language, sympathetic dominant, their vagus nerve is not working quite properly.

The information, the nerve works, the information. Yeah, the information. nerve works the information yeah the information's yeah right yeah yeah the program's not been implemented because there's a different program uh that takes a higher priority that's a survival i'm under threat so what what do we do i mean we're we're talking about enhancing recovery systems to help make ensure that people are sleeping eating moving thinking well we are strong down the lane for optimism training gratitude training mindfulness work um we're teaching breathing training well where else do you go well i you age It's where you go. Oh, my God. Okay.

Yeah. Okay. So, and I say that because as I'm getting older, I would say the panic or the expectation gets tempered because you see patterns over time. And what you're seeing is a culture that is very bottom line oriented. So, you know, my life has been in universities, but universities, when I went into them was the idea that they, they would have almost a church-like safety net that you went there for scholarship. You went there to learn and they would protect you as long as you did your service, you worked on your tasks. But they changed. They became grant-oriented, bringing in money. And they became very pragmatic about what success was. And so you adjust and you

become successful at what they want. And you still do what you want. But for many people, they didn't have that type of flexibility. And so you start creating within academics, in a sense, a poorly run business. And you have to approach it in a more integrated way about what is your real product. Your product is to change, if a university, from my perspective, when I entered it, it was to change the world, make the world a better place. I mean, you know, these are simple statements people hear, but many of us went into that as our, quote, calling, because we thought that would be a home that would allow us to be expressive and creative to make the world better. And the years this was very uh let's

say gradually and more quickly adjusted to how much grant money did you bring in you know so it became in a sense a business model so the question now is these very successful businesses can they take a different model because you can't go back to the universities and say the universities have figured it out the universities mimic the big corporations they paid their upper administrators big bucks and they squeezed on the younger faculty and they pushed out uh i mean salaries salaries or even in basically, there's an underlying indexing, not that they will really tell you this, based on discipline. So if the disciplines are more likely to bring in grant money and are more competitive or another university would want you, you get a better salary than if you're in the humanities. So actually on television this morning,

it was Howard University was closing their classics department and it was triggering a major reaction across the country because what is it to be an educated person is to understand the history of what it is to be a human. So I'm just saying that universities have kind of lost their mandate and have had a similar mandate to businesses in which management is well paid and workers are replaceable. Several years ago I did an interview for Fast Company and it was about working for reptiles or working for mammals. And in a sense, an organization that is reptilian

oriented treats its workers as replaceable. An organization that is mammalian oriented supports its youth, enables them to develop. So you start getting a more family structure. And what I'm really saying is universities as well as companies became very reptilian oriented because they just really wanted productivity in terms of numbers and cash flow. And we have to take a more, I'm going to say, a deep ethical view of corporate and institutional responsibility. And what I'm really saying is much has to be thought about in terms of development of human beings within the workplace. And there is a Hebrew word called avodah, which is the Hebrew word for work. But the actual translation of it is sanctification through work. And if we thought of work as sanctification, as a personal experience, an expression of who we are, then work would be more than someone buying our hours.

What a cool word. Yeah. At least that's my recollection of what it is. But it changes things because you know i get up in the morning and i look at people or listen to people watch the news people are interviewed or now that i get out a little bit i see the jobs that people do whether they're dentists or physicians the people i will see or they work in clerical positions like the grocery store and And I asked myself, could I have handled an hourly job? You know, could I even being, let's say an accountant or dentist or a physician, could I deal with that type of day-to-day interaction? And compared to what my life has become, which is a life of ideas and interaction and trying to understand the human condition. So I've, in a sense, gone through my own journey.

Now, I did, quote, work hourly at times, you know, and jobs and teaching and a variety of other things. But what is it that I really want to do? And what does the working as we use human resource, how we constrain it? Are we interfering with the creativity and productivity of what it is to be a human? And that's what's reverberating in my mind. And what you're asking me is, what is the role that companies could play in enabling people to feel safe in the work environment that would enable them to be bolder and more creative and the products more worthwhile. Amen. Because we talk about growth mindset and agency and great culture, and those are good psychological terms, but when people's physiology is, is dysregulated in a way that

they're sympathetic dominant, you cannot have a growth mindset. If you are, if you're Vegas, the polyvagal theory is truly an act, right? Yeah. Okay. Well, we have to step back from that, that statement because that statement has embedded it, embedded a lot of evaluation. Okay. Okay. And so if I were listening to you tell me that and I was a person in a sympathetic state, it wouldn't go down well. Right.

Because my body is in a state of threat and it's the agency of not being in threat. I don't have that. I don't have that control so now i'm being blamed for being who i am now and that's the toughie so the issue is how do we witness this is where the compassion comes in how do we hear the voice of the other and in witnessing what happens to the voice of the other does the voice of the other. Does the voice of the other start to, does the threat start to dissipate as a good witness is supportive and basically expresses true compassion without trying to fix or change the individual.

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Or it becomes something like this and there's nothing in that. That's a highly stressed person as well, right? Where there's lack of sing song to it. Yeah. But you see, don't take that as a voluntary behavior. Take it as a reflection of that physiological state. That's right. Be polyvagal informed for a moment, okay?

So the voice is projecting the state of the other. Now, if you understand that that person's voice and facial expressivity is that of stressed out or in a state of threat, and you want that person to move out of that state. How do you do that? You do that by witnessing, by listening, by inviting the person to tell their story,

to have them do some breathing and have them share what they're feeling as they do the breathing, as they now literally go into a journey into their body and experience these different physiological states are these states frightening to them they may be because uh immobilization or calmness might be vulnerability that's but that's that sounds like therapy not what is what a right which is not what a trained manager or director is even capable of doing because they you know the dilemma is a dilemma set up there

not necessarily let's say that intuitive people always uh are good managers some people are what i call super co-regulators their presence enables others others feel good you're pretty good yourself you know you're you're you know probably a super co-regulator in settings you know people say look i i meet you i just feel much better i can tell you these things i feel good i don't have to be like that now their managers should do that. As I was telling you, aging out of systems, I am really tired of hearing that people will grow into positions, whether it's a chairman or a dean or a college president. Listen, no one grows into those positions. They either have the capacity, capabilities of being a good witness, a good co-regulator, or they don't.

You can send them to these special workshops for university administrators. They'll come back just with some scripts and spreadsheets and questionnaires, but they're the same person. You know, I think you just got there somewhere that I wasn wasn't able to get to which was co-regulators and um internal capabilities so i'm i'm down the path on internal capabilities right like i even will say like that's your responsibility as being a human is to have these capabilities and put them in place and that and sometimes people that are sympathetic dominant don't want to hear that but then you know if we can do it and come at that conversation in many ways i think i would i would temper it i would say it's your responsibility to be aware of the state that you're in oh yeah okay good i mean i'm coming

at it with a little fire right now i appreciate you yeah i appreciate you there and then yeah but the other piece that that i wasn't able to get to was being a co-regulator. So if you want to create an environment with high agency, with proper creative thinking, with proper memory expression, with proper witnessing of others and the collaboration required to do the extraordinary, we need to be co-regulators. Super co-regulators super co-regulators that's cool you know you're basically welcoming you're witnessing welcoming and appreciating i mean you're learning how to be a supporting person to support others if we go back to really where dialogue started and that is what is our biological imperative? Our biological imperative is to be connected with others. That's how mammals survived and were a social species.

Not to, in a sense, be self-regulated because what we've learned is that self-regulation is derivative of being co-regulated. So a good parenting model supports the child. The child becomes bold and doesn't need to be parented. They can just run off. But they have in their head these images of love, unconditional love, unconditional support. And when you start dealing with families that are so aggressive and disruptive, where children are removed by family services and then you try to work with those children you learn that the children have no visual image of that safety

of a mother holding them so they're very hard to work with and their outcomes become very risky even more challenging that our social mores don't allow us to hug and touch and in work environments you know barely even in therapy you know like there's there's a thing that like you got to be careful you know how you touch and so and it's such a powerful because of the afferent nerve and you know right it's such a powerful stimulus. It's really quite remarkable. And actually I've had some, you know, being around for a number of years and basically talking about the theory gives people create their own image of who I am or I might be. And for some people it serves, let's use the term, a useful archetypical expression of a male

that's not threatening to them. So when I give talks, people will come up and ask me questions, but often they'll download their history, which often is really, you know, they've had a trauma history and they'll share it with me in a very few words and I'll look at them and I'll smile at them and I'll ask them if they'd like

a hug. And I would say universally, they'd say, yes, I'd like a hug. And I give them a hug. And I've gotten emails back from, from women who said, you're the first male that I let give me, let give me a hug in 20 years. And what that is really saying to me, their body, they wanted hugs, but their body was not safe enough. But I was safe enough for them to enable them to experience that. And, you know, if that, you know, puts a smile on my face, you know, it's like saying, what a wonderful experience to be able to share a the body in a way gets in the way of them being connected because the body says this is dangerous it sends the cues

and the body goes into these states defenses so Stephen are you saying there's two mandates from the brain one is threat detection safety safety this called threat detection for more simplicity and then the second is to be connected with others is that the are those the two mandates of the brain well let's modify let's put something in the middle okay okay and let's say we're threat detectors that's neuroception of threat but a neuroception of safety which down regulates the threat and so you can have that threat response but if you get the cues of safety like the woman who said yes i'd like a hug she got cues of safety from my presence then her defenses to fight and to become rigid as opposed to having

a conforming hug she was able to give me this hug, which was just wonderful. And so that's kind of like there are two parts. Threat, everything. Turning off threat, special. And if you can turn off threat, then you can connect. You can't connect unless you can turn off threat. Okay, but is it a primary mover to want to connect? Because it is a primary mover to detect threat.

It all depends on where in evolution you're raising, turning the clock or the flag. It is the primary mover of social species is to connect. So our biological imperative is to connect. And that's, I'll even get a little more on this. In the world of therapy, people talk about all the successful clients they have. They're so successful in the world

and they're in for therapy. And the answer, the problem is, how do we define success? And so if you want to know what the primary mover is, it's whether you have good relationships. The people who have lots of money, I mean, billionaires now, there are a lot of billionaires now,

they are not necessarily uh successful people and because they don't have relationships and we can say they're workaholics or this or that or they're on spectrum we can come up with all kinds of narratives but you can ask them basically if you want to say are you successful they will probably say miserable yeah okay i'm with you all right i like that as the those uh you know those prime drivers that we're talking about the social connection as well as threat detection and um this is why i think one of the reasons why optimism training, gratitude training, mindfulness work, breathing has been so powerful is because it's helping to downregulate and actually damp down the threat response.

Yeah. So if you map the, if you use this notion of biological mandate to connect, as the driver, we want to connect and to connect we down regulate our defenses through cues of safety then you have the model there's cues of safety are so we go back to even to the corporate world if we want a synergistic workforce that is generative, that creates, creates new products, creates new ways, innovations in product development, then we create this type of, going back to the word agency, we allow movement. So again, this is the notion again about quote keeping people in their place uh the agency to move to uh to succeed to become better at is part of what is built into humans they want to explore they want to create and they want to

connect i don't think i see i actually have this kind of belief that as you feel more secure through your connections, you become bolder, which means more creative. I love it. Did you go in that order, explore, connect, create? I've always been an explorer and always been a creator, but I also was an aware person. And I still mentor junior faculty, and I tell them you have to feed the beast. Know where you're working. So feeding the beast in a university setting is you need to publish, you need to get grant money. And, you know, these are the rules.

It doesn't mean that you can't be creative, but is, these are the rules. It doesn't mean that it, that you can't be creative, but you have to understand the rules. So you, once you, it says, uh, uh, it basically conform, or at least establish yourself following the rules. You can leverage them to become, do amazing things. So that's my model. My model was, aware of where you are and attempt to navigate. It's not going to be perfect. Work environments are not perfect. And your goals in life may not always map into the work environment. But you need to think about how you can leverage this to do things. So in my own personal life, my own journey, as an academic was, I first identified what was the most frustrating thing to be an academic. And that was the translation of ideas into practice.

And that came at the end of my career. And because I had to leverage 40 years or plus, I started off, I was an assistant professor in 1970. So I have a long history here. And so I remember when my son was starting college, it was like 30, I remember it was 35 years of being a faculty member. And he came into my office and he said you know you're really excited i said yeah i'm really excited because i am uh doing you know i'm implementing one of my ideas into into a practice model he said how long did it take you i said 35 years yeah you have to be uh not just patient you have to be persistent and you have to understand the system that you're working in. And it's a long, for people with academic mindset,

it's a long road, but you have to maintain your dreams and you have to since overcome those frustrations. And I feel in overcoming those frustrations, meaning translating the ideas into practice. And is that the safe and sound protocol? That's one of the things. I have some other patents and other things. Yeah. Yes. But that's impacting on thousands of people. And you can sit back and say, wow, this is really remarkable. You get these emails from parents and

families of transformative experiences. And you say, oh, what a wonderful, you know, this is wonderful that you're able to see your work do something positive. And it fits not only the work being helpful, but the work fits the theory. The work would never have occurred if the theory wasn't there. So it's like a discovery of basic principles

of what the body requests to be safe. And that's what the acoustic stimulation is. It's a computer alteration of vocal music, amplifying cues of safety. And to see it work, it's just an amazing thing. Each time it happens, it's like this big smile and I can't believe it's happening. Finding Mastery is brought to you by iRestore. When it comes to my health, I try to approach things with a proactive mindset. It's not about avoiding poor health. This is about creating the conditions for growth. Now, hair health is one of those areas that often gets overlooked until your

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Well, the way, okay, since again, when you're an academic, you try to find the language of an academic, you try to let it fit in. I mean, functionally, basically listening to music through headphones that's computer altered has these remarkable effects. But why? It's because it's basically a neuromodulation intervention in which the feedback of listening to these acoustic sounds acts like an acoustic vagal nerve stimulator. So in a sense, you're stimulating this calming vagus through sound and then the neural the middle ear through the middle ear through recruiting the middle ear right uh and this was again so like this was a disruption to have the speech and hearing scientists wanted to see their system so even though it works that way you can just say well we all understand that music

calms the person okay what does calming mean it means that the ventral can just say, well, we all understand that music calms the person. Okay. What does calming mean? It means that the ventral vagus is coming on board. And when that system comes on, the neural regulation of the middle ear muscles is part of that ventral vagus circuit. So, and the face is light up. You see these upper face smiling. So you can see the circuit going on and getting emails from people. One person was using it with his daughter who was diagnosed with schizophrenia. She's now down, she's back in school and her drugs are down 50%. You know, you're getting these stories that are just remarkable. And we're doing a pilot study with a joint mobility disorder called ehlers-danlos hypermobility

and that is double jointedness and they have a lot of visceral pain and we're starting a pilot study using the sound stimulation to deal with chronic pain in that group and we're doing a chronic pain uh with people with back pains and we're doing a project with people with parkinson's now to see if that will alleviate some of the symptoms and is is this essentially a way to down regulate it's a way of uh recruiting that ventral vagus which means to down regulate our defenses and what happens with that is it becomes, even in terms of inflammatory disorders, it downregulates inflammation. It's sending cues to your autonomic nervous system. Everything's okay. Calm down. And that inhibits inflammation in others.

And so this is a time-sensitive protocol, meaning that there's a certain amount of time that we do it and the timing of it matters. It's interesting. It started off as a five, one hours program, one hour a day. of people with trauma histories and mental health histories, it starts to be titrated and with clinicians, and sometimes it may be a half hour a week. And so they progressively go through it based upon the client. And then they might not just do the five hours. They may do, wait a week or two and do another five hours and keep going like that. It's like it's like exercise. I even call these things neural exercises.

So if your body hasn't recruited these neural circuits, the recruiting of it can be extremely exhausting. And so you titrate and the body kind of resolves and gets used to it. And then you can expand the duration of the intervention. What do you think of binaural beats? I don't know too much about that. So it was never the world I'm in. And also I haven't focused on rhythms or different types of music.

I was using music that was conveying cues of safety, meaning that the frequency band was always going to be that of a mother's lullaby. So I had basically a model beforehand. It doesn't mean that these other things can't be helpful. And so it was mother's lullaby is the cue. The physiology is that our neuroanatomy is that the transfer function of the middle ear structures of mammals. That means if I put sounds outside the ear, what gets into the inner ear, that is actually based on the physics of the middle ear structure. So all mammals have a frequency band of social communication based on the size of the middle ear structures. So we could actually make non-human mammalian acoustic interventions as well.

And would you, so it's not the hardware, it's the music that you've chosen for this protocol? Well, it's the frequency band, it's not's the music that you've chosen yeah well it's the frequency band it's not even the music so it's so i remember when i was developing developing this uh some uh child wanted to hear a boy's band that we had n sync and we filtered that and it had good effect as well we kind of standardized it to more female vocal music because it's more comfortable. We're also going to go back and create an instrumental version because some of the vocal songs have lyrics that are triggers to people from different cultures and we're trying to make it more universal. And can you drive, before we tell people where to go buy and get it is this just for

licensed folks or it's for can anyone buy it it's not a consumer product and there's good good reason and that is as we moved into the uh applications in the world of trauma uh the uh it started to have some interesting unpredicted reactions, which makes sense now, but didn't when I started. That is, people start getting very anxious and had some destabilization since their sympathetic fight flight came in. And that's because cues of safety

were now cues of threat because they had been violated when they felt safe with someone. So the system remembered those bodily feelings of being accessible, but those were now triggers. So with trauma-informed therapists, they kind of like allow the person to touch those feelings and then to become more comfortable and resolve it. And then the power of them as being destabilizers disappear. So the providers are licensed practitioners in different disciplines. Can healthy individuals, could healthy individuals benefit from this if under the guidance of a psychologist or licensed professional,

like an athletic team? Well, we are doing a pilot study in Germany with a team. Actually, it's going to be the German Olympic team listening to this to, in a sense, enhance recovery after daily trainings. So we think about it as cues to enable the body to relax and to recover after the strenuous exercise. It may be a facilitator of training. So the idea is that the body knows what homeostasis is. So it knows how to, in a sense, self-heal and regulate itself. The issue is it also knows that it's often in context of threat. And when it detects context of threat, what does it do? It turns off its homeostatic functions, therefore would interfere with its recovery cycle. There you go. And also impairs

digestion as well, which is one of the big drivers for recovery. Yeah, but the interesting thing, you inhibit digestion when you're mobilized. It's the natural reaction. So the sympathetic nervous system turns off sub diaphragmatic organs. You know, that's obvious. Now the question is, when do you want to give the cue to your enteric system that everything's okay. And that comes from the ventral vagus. So the ventral vagus doesn't regulate your gut, but it tells your gut, everything's okay. Do your job. It's okay. Yeah. Yeah. It's okay.

Absorption and digestion. I should get both of those in there. Yeah. Okay. You must be having just a field day with heart rate variability and the wearables that are tracking, I guess, what would be a downstream effect from the vagus nerve. But you must be just having a field day with this right now. Well, you have to know my full history because I'm the guy that published the first study

on heart rate variability in the 60s. No, I do know that. Yeah. And so that was the journey. The journey to polyvagal theory came from measuring heart rate variability to try to figure out what it was, what it meant. 1964, right? 60, no, 69. from measuring heart rate variability to try to figure out what it was what it 1964 right 60 no 69. okay i thought i read your first paper on polyvagal was 64. so 60. no 69 was the first

one heart rate variability polyvagal as a word is uh first published in 1995. So the answer is, yeah, it's both exciting, interesting, and a little bit disappointing. Because many people lost the focus of why heart rate variability is useful and important. And that it's a physiological response that carries with it a neural component that is an accurate measure of that ventral vagus. But you have to know how to extract it appropriately because it is a mathematical or the psychometric challenge to get that. It's a single processing challenge to get that component out. So you're saying that the G1, Generation 1 measurement tools need some tooling. Okay. I think that people have focused on the sensors and not on the extraction of the neural component.

And I didn't. I wrote it about a year and a half ago, I was just, I was awarded a patent on extracting of neural signals from physiology, from physiological signals in which the patent describes this, exactly this, the sequence of how to do this. First of all, I didn't think it was patentable. But what I realized when the patent examiner says, he says, basically, no one has done this before. No one has extracted or written a patent about extracting neural signals from physiology. Neural signals.

So this is tone, like vagus tone? Vagus tone, but there are other things you you can extract as well so you know based upon how you approach the uh signal and so i got a patent on that and i also got a patent on how to use that signal in a closed loop feedback model so where one could actually change environment based on physiological state. So this is not a tool that is reading, but a tool that is actually an intervention? There are two parts. The one that reads it, and that's what I was calling the neurometrics. That's the neurometrics. And then that becomes a signal to another regulator that can change the context for stimulation have you seen

have you seen what apollo neuro is doing have you tracked their technology actually the name is ringing about what is their device it's a device that is you put it on your wrist predominantly but it's a sound slash vibration oh yeah yeah i know i know yeah it's supposed to those those vibrations are supposed to have a vagal impact as well i don't know i have to look more carefully at someone sent me the link yeah cool yeah and i'm happy to connect you with them or some research or whatever the research is interesting and promising and um i notice it um a down regulated effect when i wear it so yeah from an n of one but their research is really interesting and promising so they've got something there but it sounds like what so you you your next step is to build out

that product well it's two points i'm starting to build out part of the metric side because I now have a new metric called vagal efficiency, which is really the assessment of that feedback loop of that vagal tone to the heart and how the heart will actually change. So if you have low vagal efficiency, you can change that vagal component of the heart rate and it's going to have little impact or little predictable impact on your heart rate. So from a coaching model, especially with athletes, you want very efficient vagal tone. You want the signal to be able to be retracted to get the metabolic output rapidly and then to be put back on to calm down.

So it's assessed during simple posture shifts. So we have supine seated and standing. So there's no psychological component and we get really a range of individual differences and trauma history is greatly related to having lower vagal efficiency. And if you want to take a metaphor, vagal efficiency is a metaphor for the feedback loop of the brain regulating your cardiovascular system. And with stresses or traumas, you start to dampen that regulation. And then over time, the end organ, in this case, the heart or other visceral organs, are not being regulated through the autonomic nervous system so tightly. So the surveillance system of your autonomic nervous system is not sending cues that are having great impact on the organs.

And so you have end organ disease. So this now provides the explanation of how you can have a progressive deterioration of feedback loops in the body that would lead to organ dysfunction. And I think this measure, vagal efficiency, is going to map very nicely into dysautonomia, which became a disorder that no one knows what it is. And I think it really means the feedback loops of the autonomic nervous system aren't working. I started this first study I did in 1999, and then I resurrected the measure two years ago with preterm babies and was able to show maturation of it and the impact of a preterm intervention on it. And then we did a study with vagal nerve stimulation on the ear and we're able to detect individuals in which the intervention would work to reduce gut pain. So it's, we're having fun with that one. That one's going to be available in the device within, I hope, six months. Oh, whatever I can do to support your efforts there because I think the world needs what you're creating right now.

Well, thank you. Yeah, absolutely. Okay. What a treat. I've read your work for a long time. I've referenced you in so many lectures and talks and you've been in my consciousness you know your work has been for for decades and so to have this conversation with you I I hope that we've done

justice to your insights because they're profound and they're disruptive and materially important for the quality of people's lives so not not only performance, but flourishing in general. So I just want to say thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Mark. I think when we think about ideas, especially thinking about polyvagal theory, I think of it merely as the solving a Rubik's cube puzzle in which other people basically create all the foundations. And I was able to turn the puzzle and come up with a organizational model. And that fits the intuition of good observers. So if the polyvagal theory didn't explain your own experiences, it would not be useful to you. And to me, it's always a remarkable treat to hear that it has explanatory use for sure it does yeah and then you know we didn't get to the skills but they're not

they're not complicated it's like there's a couple interesting ones but like we talked about meditation and breathing we talked about um optimism, sleep, gratitude training. But, you know, we didn't talk about sex as one of the vagus nerve modulators, including the coming on board of oxytocin. But we also didn't hit gargling as something that people don't talk about, but it's actually a vagal stimulant. Do I have that right? Yeah, humming is too. Humming too. Chewing gum.

Ingestion. Swallowing. Yeah. Yeah, there you go. Okay, so listen, if I can be a resource in anything that you're doing, I'd be honored to. And I just, again, thank you for the brilliance and the contributions you've made to the field of science and so many people that want to live a meaningful, healthy life. Well, thank you, Michael. My closing word is really that it's an optimistic one. And that is, even though we can be retuned to be defensive,

we can recover and be retuned to be optimistic and connected. So thank you for inviting me to join you. All the best. All right. Thank you so much for diving into you. All the best. All right. Thank you so much for diving into another episode of Finding Mastery with us. Our team loves creating this podcast and sharing these conversations with you. We really appreciate you being part of this community. And if you're enjoying the show, the easiest no-cost way to support is to hit the subscribe

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