Polyvagal theory - a very simplified overview
Poly = Many
Vagal = Refers to the vagus nerve, which is a very long nerve that spans throughout the body.
Polyvagal Theory = A theory on how stress is stored and responded to by the body, its states that we have many states of stress or nervous system activation, more than just the well-known flight or fight stress response.
Dr Stephen Porges who invented polyvagal theory found multiple states that our nervous system enter. These states include, ventral vagal and social engagement, both of which are about 200 million years old, these are the stress states that operate when we are engaging with other people. In these states our nervous system can connect and relate to other people, when you’re in these states you can feel empathy, interpret facial expressions and have access to love, joy, emotions etc.'
The Sympathetic activation state, which is around 400 million years old, is the house of flight or fight, it’s the body’s main centre of responding to stress, in this state your body is mobilised and ready for exertion. This is also a state where you get a lot of locked-up muscles around your back. This is because the sympathetic nerve ganglia,( the actual physical sympathetic nerves system) runs down your back, along the front of the spine. And lastly, the dorsal (rear) vagal shutdown response, It’s about 500 million years old and is a place of immobilisation, freeze, and sedation.
Now, if you stayed under sympathetic stress all the time, eventually you would die. Your heart would explode, and your body would be decayed. Since these systems are millions of years old, built for a world that doesn’t exist anymore, these systems are not evolved for modern life and our sympathetic nervous system is activated all the time, even if it’s just moderately. Over a prolonged period, this will, of course, become very dangerous to your health. In comes the dorsal vagal nerve... it acts like a “regulator” because it knows sympathetic stress on the body cannot be sustained, so it comes to counteract it, the dorsal vagal system works to “shutdown’ the sympathetic stress activation in the body. This should be considered if you ever come across someone who is unexplainably and very overly, numb, chill or tranquil. The other way this can show up is in sudden extreme outbursts of anger or emotions, because if the individual gets pushed out of the state where their dorsal nerve is no longer in control, moderating the body’s stress condition. Their sympathetic gets pushed in and activated with all the pent-up backlog of stress the dorsal vagal shutdown has kept quiet.
Being in any of these sympathetic states, the sympathetic activation or the dorsal shutdown is the body's take on survival. There’s an act of self-preservation happening within you. Being in these states will deeply sensitise you to pain since your body is being signalled there is danger and will therefore extensively watch out for threats. What this means is it changes the way your brain perceives the world; your brain will start to interpret pain in situations that shouldn’t be painful. If you’re in sympathetic or dorsal vagal shutdown, it really inhibits your mental capacity and performance, specifically when it comes to relating to others, if simple facial expressions are getting interpreted as threatening, this makes it nearly impossible to have consistent thriving relationships with partners, colleagues and any other individuals in our lives.
This Is a bottom-up system. This is not about thoughts or changing your mindset. This is about your physiology and since a lot of this is going on in the body unconsciously or without active input from the mind, physiology should be the focus when down-regulating and healing these systems.
