- Today, I'm gonna answer the question, what is Polyvagal Theory? So it seems like basically
every conversation that I've been having over the past couple of years around pain, stress, tension, horses, has somehow circled back
around to this concept, to this Polyvagal Theory. And today I'm going to give
you a simple explanation of how Polyvagal Theory is
related to how we store stress in our bodies and what
you need to know about it, why you need to know about it, and again, I'm gonna
keep it really simple. (upbeat music) Hey, beautiful humans. I'm Sukie Baxter, founder
of Whole Body Revolution, where I help you to rewire yourself for greater health,
happiness, and success, by breaking the pattern of pain, stress, and tension in your body and in your life. If you're new here, make sure you click that subscribe button and hit the bell to get notified every time I release a new video and anything that I mention in this video you can find linked in
the description box below. Let's get into it. Okay. So what is this Polyvagal Theory with all of these big words and why
do you need to know about it? Let's just start with the word. So Polyvagal Theory, poly means many, vagal comes from the word
for your Vagus Nerve. Your Vagus Nerve is a very long nerve that wanders throughout the body. And that's how it got its
name because Vagus comes from the Latin word for
wonder or so they tell me. I don't know, I don't speak
Latin, but I trust them. So Polyvagal Theory means many and then vagal nerve and then theory. Right? So what does that actually mean? Well, Polyvagal Theory came about, it was developed by a man by the name of Stephen Porges, and he really revolutionized how we saw our body's stress response, how we process stress in our bodies. Before Stephen Porges
developed his theory, stress was really seen
from a binary standpoint. So it was either stressed or not stressed. It was on, or it was off. Something would happen, it would stimulate your stress response, it would mobilize you,
you would take care of it, you would go into what
they call fight or flight, you've probably heard of this and you would dispatch the threat and then when the threat had passed, you would go back into what
they would call your rest and digest system. And it was a bit like a light switch. So it's on or off, on or off. There wasn't really a lot of nuance there, it was stressed or not stressed. And this is actually what a lot of our stress management theories and practices that you'll
come across in pop culture in basically modern
personal development spheres are based on is this idea of not being in that stressed place. What Stephen Porges figured out was that it's a lot
more nuanced than that. And he discovered that we
actually have multiple states of stress or multiple states of nervous system activation really, almost like circuitry that runs us. So the three different
states that he found are, Ventral Vagal, social engagement,
sympathetic activation. and Dorsal Vagal shutdown. Now don't get too hung up on those words. I know they're kind of big and complex but the words aren't nearly as
important as what they mean. I'm gonna explain that now, and it's actually pretty simple. So Ventral Vagal social engagement is exactly what it sounds like. Social engagement. It's the place in our nervous system. It's the state in which
we are able to connect and relate to other people. I actually did a whole
video on co-regulation. So I will link to that in
the description box below which talks about social engagement and how we regulate our
nervous systems based on our connection to other people. And the social engagement
circuitry is part of how that functions. So when you're present with another person you should be able to connect with them, feel empathy for them, interpret their facial
expressions in a, an accurate way. And you also should have access to things like joy,
playfulness, love, connection. Like I said, so Ventral Vagal is a place where we are present with ourselves, present with other people,
we're in the now moment, and we feel safe, secure,
and generally pretty good. This is the happy place. Moving down one step, so I'm kind of looking at this from a Polyvagal ladder standpoint, which comes from the work of Deb Dana. And she wrote a book called the "Polyvagal Theory in Therapy." I'll link to that as well
in the description box below if you wanna check that out. So from her Polyvagal ladder standpoint, if we go down the ladder one rung now we've got sympathetic activation. Sympathetic activation is
what you probably associate with stress. This is a state of mobilization. It's where you want to get up and run or you wanna get up and
fight something off. It's where you wanna take action. You are motivated to dispatch the threat whatever that threat may be. It's also correlated with tension, feeling chaotic, frenzied, anxiety, all of those sort of hyperactive states that we tend to classically associate with the general concept of stress. You're gonna find those
in sympathetic activation. Sympathetic activation is also
the place where you get a lot of locked up muscles around your back. So this is really important and when I'm talking to people
who are dealing with pain, this is really a big deal because the sympathetic nerve ganglia the actual physical
Sympathetic Nervous System which evolved about 400 million years ago in terms of human mammalian evolution, it resides a long the front of your spine. And when it is activated,
the back muscles, your back muscles will tend to
be very tight and very rigid. So what I have found in working with people who
have chronic back tension that doesn't seem to be affected by stretching, massage, foam rolling, all of the usual suspects
is that downregulating or not necessarily down-regulate, I'm gonna talk about the
next step down the rung but basically regulating
the nervous system bringing you out of sympathetic threat and into that more Ventral
Vagal social engagement state, where we discharge the activation of the Sympathetic Nervous System, that tends to have a very powerful effect on releasing the tension
in those back muscles. It's not just back
muscles that are related but it's commonly found, at least I have commonly
found that to be correlated to issues of chronic back tension. So just something to note there if you're someone who's dealing with a lot of discomfort, pain, tension, I talk to a lot of people for
whom stretching doesn't work. They say, "Every time I do my stretches it feels like the very first
time I've done my stretches. It never gets any better." This is why. So moving down that Polyvagal
ladder one more rung, now we are in what's called
Dorsal Vagal Shutdown. So remember at the top
we have Ventral Vagal social engagement, ventral means front. So that is the branch of your Vagus Nerve that's more towards
the front of your body, and Dorsal Vagal is the branch
that's more towards the rear. Now the dorsal branch of your Vagus Nerve, this part of your nervous system evolved about 500 million years ago. So it's about a hundred
million years older than your Sympathetic Nervous System and your ventral branch
is really only about 200 million years old. So that, that ability of us
to be social and connected and engaged and present that
ability to regulate stress in that way is about
200 million years old. This shutdown response,
500 million years old. So it's a much more primal part of us. And what Dorsal Vagal shutdown means, is you could say it's
similar to playing possum. It's a place of immobilization. This can show up in two ways. So one is a state of collapse where a person just (blowing)
kind of has no agency, they're a bit flacid. I find that Dorsal Vagal
shutdown is related often to states of hyper mobility. So people who have hypermobile
joints often have little bits of this shutdown in their nervous system. Not always, there are some health conditions that are related to
hypermobile joints as well but this can be a piece of that. And the other way that this plays out is in a freeze response. So where you get a bit petrified and you're just unable to mobilize, you're unable to take any action. You feel kind of stuck. So now where sympathetic is related to that chaotic frenzied
anxiety state of stress, Dorsal Vagal shutdown
is much more correlated with feelings of lethargy, despondency, inability to self-motivate,
hopelessness, shame, a lack of feeling capable, a
lack of feeling any agency, all of those more heavy sedated, moving through molasses stuck at a bottom of a well kinds of emotions. That's where you're going to find those is in this shutdown response. So these are basically
the three different states that we can have. Now I broke that down very simply, it is a little bit more complex than that. So when you're in sympathetic activation, what happens is that
from a health standpoint, your body cannot sustain that for a prolonged period of time. You've got so much adrenaline running, you've got so much cortisol
flooding your system, and eventually your
heart would just explode if you stayed in sympathetic
activation all the time. Now let's think about
modern life for a second. Stresses are unrelenting. We have things that just
go on for years and years, we have our jobs stress, we have things like traffic
living in busy cities, just the environment that
we're in can be really chaotic. So there's a lot of
stressors that biologically, remember, these systems are
500, 400 million years old. Biologically, these systems
didn't evolve for modern life and this stress that
just kind of keeps coming and coming and coming, what happens is you and
also it compounds, right? So not only do you have your job, you have your kids and you have, you know, your mother broke her hip
and there's, you know, societal stresses and culturals and all of these layers and
layers and layers of stress. It's not just like, not
just the tiger, you know, if we were living out on the Serengeti it's not just the tiger
that's chasing you. And it's like all of these
other things on top of it. So these unrelenting
compounded stresses put us into that sympathetic activation even if it's just slightly, even if it's just a moderate activation, over a prolonged period of time, that actually will become
dangerous to your health. And so your body in a self-preservation in an act of self preservation, uses that Dorsal Vagal shutdown to modulate your sympathetic activation. So your sympathetic rises, right? Activated, activated,
and your body's like, "We can't sustain this, we need to put a cap on it." So people will often have this like ball of sympathetic activation and then on top of it, a
bit like a pressure cooker, is that Dorsal Vagal going, "No, we can't sustain this
for a long period of time." So they can appear very calm. So if you've ever met
someone who just seems like really, really chill, like really tranquil, like a little overly tranquil, and you get this sort of uneasy feeling when you're around them, that is often this hidden or capped Sympathetic
Nervous System response. The other way that this can
show up is in sudden bursts of anger, outbursts of
anger, or strong emotion. Definitely observed this
in people in my life, friends, family, and definitely clients. So sometimes what happens
is that we have that ball of sympathetic activation and
this modulating response here and that sympathetic gets
pushed a little harder and we get explosive. Because remember that ladder, Ventral Vagus at the top and we have sympathetic in the middle and Dorsal Vagal shutdown at the bottom, a lot of times if someone
is in that Dorsal Vagal that shut down playing
possum immobilized state, when you start to up
their energy a little bit, or you push them a little bit, they move through that sympathetic. They don't just jump over it and go into the Ventral Vagal. So sometimes these things
are playing together. So it's, again, it's not a binary state
as stress was seen before, but more of this concert, and it can be even more nuanced than that. You can have all three
of these somewhat active in your system at various times. So this is a pretty simple
overview of Polyvagal Theory but I wanna make sure it's making sense. So if you're still with me, give me a like on this
video and comment yes below so that I know
that we are tracking here and this is kidding across the
way that I am wanting it to. Okay. So why is it important to
understand Polyvagal Theory and understand these stress states and how does it relate to issues like pain and stress and tension in your body? Well, obviously it's
how we process stress, as I mentioned a couple of times and I talked a little bit about how sympathetic
activation can be related to those tight muscles. The fact of the matter is that being in either of these activated states, the sympathetic or the
Dorsal Vagal shutdown constitutes a survival state in your body. There's an action of
self-preservation happening in your nervous system. And being in these states
will sensitize you to pain. It also changes how you see the world. So the world suddenly
becomes really threatening. And this has been shown. So your hearing will
actually shift to tune into low frequency sounds
like the growls of a predator. Things like neutral facial expressions will start to look more
angry and aggressive, even though there's no anger
or aggression coming at you. It just totally changes how
you perceive your reality and reality, as we know,
reality is perception. So the world starts to
look really dangerous. What that means on a neurological level is that your brain
starts to interpret input as really dangerous which means that sensory stimulation that shouldn't be painful will be interpreted as
painful by your brain. It also really caps your performance. In life, in your body and in your life. So from an athletic standpoint, if you're dealing with
these dysregulated states, you don't have as much energy
available for performance, your body's not replenishing itself because when you're in
these nervous system states, it's for example, in sympathetic, your body's not really
focused on digesting and assimilating your food because it's much more
important to get away from something that's going to kill you. Basically, if you're running
away from a serial killer, it's not really important
to digest your lunch. And on an ongoing basis, this can impair your digestive function, it can impair your physical recovery, but it also impairs
your mental performance, your cognitive performance, your ability to connect to other people. Remember that Ventral Vagal
state is social engagement. If you're in your
Sympathetic Nervous System or your Dorsal Vagal shutdown, and people are looking really threatening, how do you think you're going
to relate to your partner? How do you think you're going
to relate to groups of people? How do you think you're going to relate to your business colleagues,
your team, right? So if everything is
relationship for people, and we are relationship creatures, and then being in these stress states makes it really difficult to
cultivate powerful, strong, heartfelt, authentic, for
lack of a better word, relationships with people. So on every level it's affecting us, physical health, emotional
health, mental health. Now I wanna be really, really clear here. This is not about changing your thoughts. This is not about changing your beliefs. There's a lot of really
great programs and books and things like that around
becoming aware of yourself, becoming aware of your patterns, becoming aware of what has
influenced or shaped you. I think those are valuable insights but they're mostly up here. This is really physiology. Remember these branches
of your nervous system are 400 million years old,
500 million years old. They don't know language exists. You can't have a rational
conversation with them. The way that we access them
is through your physical body, through physical sensation, through practices that interrupt and disrupt these neural processes to bring you back to that
state of social engagement. So the first thing that
I recommend that you do is start to become aware
of what state you're in and how your body is
responding to certain contexts because this is going on all the time beneath your conscious awareness. So even if you don't really feel like there's a thing in your
life to be stressed about maybe things are pretty good, you can have stress states in your body. We learn these, we inherit them. Like I said, go check out that video on co-regulation to
learn how it's not just about your nervous system but how we balance our
nervous systems based on other people. And so that can influence the
state of your nervous system. So starting to become
aware is the first step. If you want some help with that, go ahead and check out
my "Pain Free At Any Age" video series, I talk about Polyvagal
Theory in that video series and I give you some worksheets and tools to start to become aware and start to actually
down regulate any states of activation or to regulate
any states of activation 'cause sometimes we are
upregulating as well that are frozen in your body. So you can click the link on your screen to go check out the "Pain
Free At Any Age" video series I'll also link to it in
the description box below. If you found this explanation
of Polyvagal Theory helpful and clear, please give it a like, if you didn't give it a dislike,
I'd love to know that too. And leave me a comment below with any questions you
have on this, any insights, let me know what was the
most powerful thing for you. Thanks so much for watching, before you go make sure you
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