We all understand the theory. We need the way out. Nothing else. Just pure help and guidance and protocol and consistently delivered so people can feel better.
What a gentle, sensible man, he really impressed me, and I am so grateful for all the information and the way he presented it. As well as for the decision to be the voice for his brilliant father's lifetime efforts - thank you both gratefully! ❤
Thank you Seth! I have spent hours/days trying to consolidate autonomic nervous system information for my therapy clients suffering from PTSD, anxiety, etc.. You have done it for me!
I really liked the way seth porges talks about Dr Porges ..respect love but non competative ..He is standing tall by himself ..bravo to both ths father and son ❤ what a legacy to leave to next generation . Profoundly moving to each of us as a parent and an adult child ! Intergeneration bridges of healing .namaste to both.❤🎉❤
Just brilliant. By the second meeting with a patient I ask them, “Close your eyes and allow an image to arise which brings a sense of safety,” if they are stuck, I’ll say that the image can be a person, animal, place in nature or event. I then have them imagine feeling the safety of that image using all senses . Then I suggest they they create that image or find it with an internet search. I then suggest that they print out a wallet size and larger image. The small image goes in their wallet or purse, which they can access whenever they want to or need to. One patient had the image of a Christmas tree.
My counselor used some polyvagul techniques and was very perceptive to my body language while going through our first session. I felt heard, engaged, and confident. Truly thankful to have found my counsels. She gave me this as homework before our next session
It's great information, and also: you spoke so fast that words were hard to distinguish sometimes, and my nervous system tended to go into a sympathetic state as I was listening. It's hard to present and I'm grateful for the information.
I hear you 😊 I appreciated Seth’s passion, excitement and sharing of this information. But I did adjusted the playback speed to progress slower to compensate for my listening requirements.
I felt the same way at first, but I was so excited to hear the information without having to pause and Rewind that I just put him at 75% speed on UA-cam and it's perfect! Thanks so much Seth!!❤
I believe that common or garden anxiety is what helps form our personality. The way we respond to this creates our individuality... ...and now, as you say, Seth-= our world crowds in on us- directly and indirectly. Overseas wars beamed into our personal space- so we need to connect and find contact, contact and partnership of all kinds. I think there are solutions...
Anxiety is essential to life. Fear when we see or hear the source. But if fear persists, trauma sets in. We operate with the world at large- and with caregivers- on a punishment and rewards system. Where we work out right from wrong. what works and what don't. But if we get a surfeit of all this we end up feeling abandoned by the whole wide world. And, what is more dire, is that we lose our capacity to learn.
Yes! You might like to explore the courses and trainings we offer with Jan Winhall and her Felt Sense Polyvagal Model, which offers a shift in how we view and treat trauma and addiction. Jan also has a book by the same title.
My autistic child was sent to a mainstream school and cycled through fight/ flight. I said she isn’t safe hence the response. They said behaviour. They then said she is safe as we built a fence that she cannot climb over! I said this isn’t making her sense safety, she is still perceiving threat only she cannot escape anymore so you feel she is safe! Schools need to understand the neuroception of safety and threat. Adding in fences does not increase safety!
Love the clear presentation. I have wondered why it’s named polyvagal when it’s only two major branches. Are there any other less significant branches unnamed ?
So what do you do if you do not have anyone who makes you feel safe? What if you have never felt safe so you have never created bonds and your older now and have no idea how?
What about the products that are on the market nowadays that say that they can activate the vagus nerve so as to put the person into the parasympathetic state? Can you talk about the effectiveness of those devices, what they could be used for? I've already ordered one, I'm a person with Asperger's syndrome and some CPTSD so I'm hoping this will change things. I don't have severe autism though like some people do, where they simply can't function.. And I did hear the main point of your talk in that the main thing is we need to feel safe, and that socializing is actually good for us and important... 🙂
Hello and thank you for being here! We are working to create more resources for our audience around the vagus nerve and vagus nerve stimulation devices, but in the meantime please visit our friends at the Vagus Nerve Society, a great resource founded by physicians and researchers working in this area. Best wishes to you on your healing journey!
I agree with one other person here everyone should know this. This would solve a lot of social problems if more people knew this. Just need to find a way to make people feel and be safe... I like it when you were talking about how it's actually good to do social things. We shouldn't feel guilty about doing social things, because it's really needed... 🙂 Also interesting that it answers a lot of questions about like what autism is... He says those people never feel safe so their social system never gets activated... (I think it's also clear that a huge number of advertisers have tapped into this, trying to make people feel afraid, saying "oh you have to have our product" ...)
"The ability to play is one of the principal criteria of mental health." Ashley Montagu "Never do anything that isn't play." Marshall B. Rosenberg "It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change, that lives within the means available and works co-operatively against common threats." Charles Darwin
"In a world of stressful lack of control, an amazing source of control we all have is the ability to make the world a better place, one act at a time. This is the critical point of this book: if you are that zebra running for your life, or that lion sprinting for your meal, your body’s physiological response mechanisms are superbly adapted for dealing with such short-term physical emergencies. For the vast majority of beasts on this planet, stress is about a short-term crisis, after which it’s either over with or you’re over with. We live well enough to have the luxury to get ourselves sick with purely social, psychological stress. Essentially, we humans live well enough and long enough, and are smart enough, to generate all sorts of stressful events purely in our heads. When we sit around and worry about stressful things, we turn on the same physiological responses --- but they are potentially a disaster when provoked chronically. A large body of evidence suggests that stress-related disease emerges, predominantly, out of the fact that we so often activate a physiological system that has evolved for responding to acute physical emergencies, but we turn it on for months on end, worrying about mortgages, relationships, and promotions. We all seek out stress. We hate the wrong kinds of stress but when it's the right kind, we love it - we pay good money to be stressed by a scary movie, a roller coaster ride, a challenging puzzle. We love stress that is mild and transient and occurs in a benevolent context. But if you get chronically, psychosocially stressed, you're going to compromise your health. So, essentially, we've evolved to be smart enough to make ourselves sick. Stress is not a state of mind... it's measurable and dangerous, and humans can't seem to find their off-switch. Digestion is quickly shut down during stress…The parasympathetic nervous system, perfect for all that calm, vegetative physiology, normally mediates the actions of digestion. Along comes stress: turn off parasympathetic, turn on the sympathetic, and forget about digestion. Stress weakens frontal connections with the hippocampus --- essential for incorporating the new information that should prompt shifting to a new strategy --- while strengthening frontal connections with more habitual brain circuits. Sustained stress has numerous adverse effects. The amygdala becomes overactive and more coupled to pathways of habitual behavior; it is easier to learn fear and harder to unlearn it. Stress can be bad for you. We no longer die of smallpox or the plague and instead die of stress-related diseases of lifestyle, like heart disease or diabetes, where damage slowly accumulates over time. It is understood how stress can cause or worsen disease or make you more vulnerable to other risk factors. Much of this is even understood on the molecular level. Stress can even cause your immune system to abnormally target hair follicles, causing your hair to turn gray. Subjected to enough uncontrollable stress, we learn to be helpless-we lack the motivation to try to live because we assume the worst; we lack the cognitive clarity to perceive when things are actually going fine, and we feel an aching lack of pleasure in everything. This brings up a key concept, namely the inverted U. The complete absence of stress is aversively boring. Moderate, transient stress is wonderful --- various aspects of brain function are enhanced; glucocorticoid levels in that range enhance dopamine release; rats work at pressing levers in order to be infused with just the right amount of glucocorticoids. And as stress becomes more severe and prolonged, those good effects disappear (with, of course, dramatic individual differences as to where the transition from stress as stimulatory to overstimulatory occurs; one person’s nightmare is another’s hobby). Fear is the vigilance and the need to escape from something real. Anxiety is about dread and foreboding and your imagination running away with you. Much as with depression, anxiety is rooted in a cognitive distortion. In this case, people prone toward anxiety overestimate risks and the likelihood of a bad outcome. One last bit of bad news. We’ve been focusing on the stress-related consequences of activating the cardiovascular system too often. What about turning it off at the end of each psychological stressor? As noted earlier, your heart slows down as a result of activation of the vagus nerve by the parasympathetic nervous system. Back to the autonomic nervous system never letting you put your foot on the gas and brake at the same time --- by definition, if you are turning on the sympathetic nervous system all the time, you’re chronically shutting off the parasympathetic. And this makes it harder to slow things down, even during those rare moments when you’re not feeling stressed about something. How can you diagnose a vagus nerve that’s not doing its part to calm down the cardiovascular system at the end of a stressor? A clinician could put someone through a stressor, say, run the person on a treadmill, and then monitor the speed of recovery afterward. It turns out that there is a subtler but easier way of detecting a problem. Whenever you inhale, you turn on the sympathetic nervous system slightly, minutely speeding up your heart. And when you exhale, the parasympathetic half turns on, activating your vagus nerve in order to slow things down (this is why many forms of meditation are built around extended exhalations). Therefore, the length of time between heartbeats tends to be shorter when you’re inhaling than exhaling. But what if chronic stress has blunted the ability of your parasympathetic nervous system to kick the vagus nerve into action? When you exhale, your heart won’t slow down, won’t increase the time intervals between beats. Cardiologists use sensitive monitors to measure interbeat intervals. Large amounts of variability (that is to say, short interbeat intervals during inhalation, long during exhalation) mean you have strong parasympathetic tone counteracting your sympathetic tone, a good thing. Minimal variability means a parasympathetic component that has trouble putting its foot on the brake. This is the marker of someone who not only turns on the cardiovascular stress-response too often but, by now, has trouble turning it off. Oxytocin is a Teflon hormone - bad news rolls off it. Obviously, oxytocin and vasopressin are the grooviest hormones in the universe. Pour them into the water supply, and people will be more charitable, trusting, and empathic. We'd be better parents and would make love, not war (mostly platonic love, though, since people in relationships would give wide berths to everyone else). Best of all, we'd buy all sorts of useless crap, trusting the promotional banners in stores once oxytocin starts spraying out of the ventilation system. Oxytocin, the luv hormone, makes us more prosocial to Us and worse to everyone else. That’s not generic prosociality. That’s ethnocentrism and xenophobia. In other words, the actions of these neuropeptides depend dramatically on context --- who you are, your environment, and who that person is. To out-group-members, oxytocin makes you crappier - less cooperative and more preemptively aggressive. It's not the luv hormone. It's the in-group parochialism/xenophobia hormone. Until you appreciate something crucial - It is incredibly easy to manipulate us as to who counts as an Us, who as a Them. The most important point of [Susan] Fiske's work is that it provides a taxonomy for our differing feelings about different Thems - sometimes fear, sometimes ridicule, sometimes contemptuous pity, sometimes savagery. ⬇ Continued
An open mind is a prerequisite to an open heart. Brains distinguish between an Us and a Them in a fraction of a second. Subliminal processing of a Them activates the amygdala and insular cortex, brain regions that are all about fear, anxiety, aggression, and disgust. Powerful support for an amygdaloid role in fear processing comes from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In PTSD sufferers the amygdala is overreactive to mildly fearful stimuli and is slow in calming down after being activated. Moreover, the amygdala expands in size with long-term PTSD Importantly, rather than promoting aggression, testosterone promotes whatever is needed to maintain status when challenged. It's probably even the case that if you stoked up some Buddhist monks with tons of testosterone, they'd become wildly competitive as to who can do the most acts of random kindness. Testosterone has far less to do with aggression than most assume. Within the normal range, individual differences in testosterone levels don’t predict who will be aggressive. Moreover, the more an organism has been aggressive, the less testosterone is needed for further aggression. When testosterone does play a role, it’s facilitatory --- testosterone does not 'invent' aggression. It makes us more sensitive to triggers of aggression. Also, rising testosterone levels foster aggression only during challenges to status. Finally, crucially, the rise in testosterone during a status challenge does not necessarily increase aggression; it increases whatever is needed to maintain status. In a world in which status is awarded for the best of our behaviors, testosterone would be the most prosocial hormone in existence. Being fearless, overconfident, and delusionally optimistic sure feels good. No surprise, then, that testosterone can be pleasurable. The problem isn't testosterone and aggression; it's how often we reward aggression. And we do: We give medals to masters of the "right" kinds of aggression. We preferentially mate with them. We select them as our leaders. Dopamine is not about the happiness of reward. It's about the happiness of pursuit of reward that has a decent chance of occurring. In other words, once reward contingencies are learned, dopamine is less about reward than about its anticipation. Similarly, work by my Stanford colleague Brian Knutson has shown dopamine pathway activation in people in anticipation of a monetary reward. Dopamine is about mastery and expectation and confidence. It’s “I know how things work; this is going to be great.” In other words, the pleasure is in the anticipation of reward, and the reward itself is nearly an afterthought (unless, of course, the reward fails to arrive, in which case it’s the most important thing in the world). If you know your appetite will be sated, pleasure is more about the appetite than about the sating.fn48 This is hugely important. Robert M. Sapolsky, Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers: The Acclaimed Guide to Stress, Stress-Related Diseases, and Coping
Hello! Check out Our Polyvagal World by Stephen Porges and Seth Porges, or Anchored by Deb Dana for accessible content about Polyvagal Theory! We have a bookstore on our website where you'll find a range of titles: polyvagal.org/bookstore
I also see what you're saying, such counterproductive methods that have been used in America's classrooms for probably centuries... Using punishment and strict discipline and so on. All that does is intimidate the child. No way that can have a long-lasting positive benefit.... Pronouncing rule after rule after rule as if that's going to make things better...
You missed an important thing Seth: community building should be our full time job. Feed your next door neighbor and find a need and provide it. They teach this to entrepreneurs about creating a business. For Goodness sake, you are as rich as the number of friends you nurture. Jesus taught this with the way he lived. Go to any American church today and the preacher is on a pedestal like a performer doing a job. After service, his job is done. Jesus was on call 24/7.
What do you do when you know all this information and keep trying to learn more because none of the techniques are working, and you can’t work so you don’t have any money to get help, or any friends or family because you’ve been in self-isolation for years unable to get up even for basic daily self care and everyone sees you as a burden so you don’t have anyone to speak to even though you want to and try to. Also, I’m safe, and I actually feel safe, so that’s not the problem.
Thank you Seth Porges for your excellent presentation.
We all understand the theory. We need the way out. Nothing else. Just pure help and guidance and protocol and consistently delivered so people can feel better.
What a gentle, sensible man, he really impressed me, and I am so grateful for all the information and the way he presented it. As well as for the decision to be the voice for his brilliant father's lifetime efforts - thank you both gratefully! ❤
Thank you Seth! I have spent hours/days trying to consolidate autonomic nervous system information for my therapy clients suffering from PTSD, anxiety, etc.. You have done it for me!
So glad this is helpful in explaining Polyvagal Theory to your clients! Thanks for watching.
I really liked the way seth porges talks about Dr Porges ..respect love but non competative ..He is standing tall by himself ..bravo to both ths father and son ❤ what a legacy to leave to next generation .
Profoundly moving to each of us as a parent and an adult child !
Intergeneration bridges of healing .namaste to both.❤🎉❤
Just brilliant. By the second meeting with a patient I ask them, “Close your eyes and allow an image to arise which brings a sense of safety,” if they are stuck, I’ll say that the image can be a person, animal, place in nature or event. I then have them imagine feeling the safety of that image using all senses . Then I suggest they they create that image or find it with an internet search. I then suggest that they print out a wallet size and larger image. The small image goes in their wallet or purse, which they can access whenever they want to or need to. One patient had the image of a Christmas tree.
This is a wonderful way to make use of daily "glimmers!" Thank you for sharing.
What a great idea! Thanks for posting. I will introduce this into my practice with clients.
I like how simple he explains it! Thank you for that!
My counselor used some polyvagul techniques and was very perceptive to my body language while going through our first session. I felt heard, engaged, and confident. Truly thankful to have found my counsels. She gave me this as homework before our next session
So glad he speaks quickly, this actually kept me interested and not sleepy. tY! 🎉great info!
Seth’s ability to clearly articulate PVT to the majority of people is as important as his father’s work in defining PVT! Absolutely worth the watch!
Seth thank you for developing such a succinct and simple way of explaining your fathers work - brilliant
This information is definitely a world view lens and makes a lot of sense
It's great information, and also: you spoke so fast that words were hard to distinguish sometimes, and my nervous system tended to go into a sympathetic state as I was listening. It's hard to present and I'm grateful for the information.
I hear you 😊
I appreciated Seth’s passion, excitement and sharing of this information. But I did adjusted the playback speed to progress slower to compensate for my listening requirements.
Thank you for the feedback on Seth's presentation!
I sped it up.
Thank you for your feedback and for watching!
I felt the same way at first, but I was so excited to hear the information without having to pause and Rewind that I just put him at 75% speed on UA-cam and it's perfect! Thanks so much Seth!!❤
Excellent presentation. Very informative as well. You spoke well and fluently which your nervousness accented your character.
I LOVE your nerdy transmission of PVT! Hulk is just perfect, Gremlins might be a great exemple too 🙂
Our system is screwed up. Everybody should know about this.
True
Incredible talk. Thank you!
I believe that common or garden anxiety is what helps form our personality. The way we respond to this creates our individuality... ...and now, as you say, Seth-= our world crowds in on us- directly and indirectly. Overseas wars beamed into our personal space- so we need to connect and find contact, contact and partnership of all kinds. I think there are solutions...
Excellent presentation Seth! Thank you PVI for making available 🙏🏼
Glad you liked it! It is a really great and accessible explanation.
Wow thank you for the simple language - I can put my dictionary away now Seth 😅😅😅
Thank you so much!
Anxiety is essential to life. Fear when we see or hear the source. But if fear persists, trauma sets in. We operate with the world at large- and with caregivers- on a punishment and rewards system. Where we work out right from wrong. what works and what don't. But if we get a surfeit of all this we end up feeling abandoned by the whole wide world. And, what is more dire, is that we lose our capacity to learn.
Thank you so much for sharing this very insightful presentation!!
I remember being in this audience. Great group of people.
Thanks, Laurie! We hope to see you again soon.
41:09 "Addiction rarely exists without trauma" Yes, something to think about..
Yes! You might like to explore the courses and trainings we offer with Jan Winhall and her Felt Sense Polyvagal Model, which offers a shift in how we view and treat trauma and addiction. Jan also has a book by the same title.
My autistic child was sent to a mainstream school and cycled through fight/ flight.
I said she isn’t safe hence the response. They said behaviour.
They then said she is safe as we built a fence that she cannot climb over! I said this isn’t making her sense safety, she is still perceiving threat only she cannot escape anymore so you feel she is safe! Schools need to understand the neuroception of safety and threat. Adding in fences does not increase safety!
Love the clear presentation. I have wondered why it’s named polyvagal when it’s only two major branches. Are there any other less significant branches unnamed ?
So what do you do if you do not have anyone who makes you feel safe? What if you have never felt safe so you have never created bonds and your older now and have no idea how?
Btilliant! Thanks a lot! 🙏🙏🙏
What about the products that are on the market nowadays that say that they can activate the vagus nerve so as to put the person into the parasympathetic state? Can you talk about the effectiveness of those devices, what they could be used for? I've already ordered one,
I'm a person with Asperger's syndrome and some CPTSD so I'm hoping this will change things. I don't have severe autism though like some people do, where they simply can't function.. And I did hear the main point of your talk in that the main thing is we need to feel safe, and that socializing is actually good for us and important... 🙂
Hello and thank you for being here! We are working to create more resources for our audience around the vagus nerve and vagus nerve stimulation devices, but in the meantime please visit our friends at the Vagus Nerve Society, a great resource founded by physicians and researchers working in this area. Best wishes to you on your healing journey!
I agree with one other person here everyone should know this. This would solve a lot of social problems if more people knew this. Just need to find a way to make people feel and be safe...
I like it when you were talking about how it's actually good to do social things. We shouldn't feel guilty about doing social things, because it's really needed... 🙂
Also interesting that it answers a lot of questions about like what autism is... He says those people never feel safe so their social system never gets activated...
(I think it's also clear that a huge number of advertisers have tapped into this, trying to make people feel afraid, saying "oh you have to have our product" ...)
"The ability to play is one of the principal criteria of mental health."
Ashley Montagu
"Never do anything that isn't play."
Marshall B. Rosenberg
"It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change, that lives within the means available and works co-operatively against common threats."
Charles Darwin
"In a world of stressful lack of control, an amazing source of control we all have is the ability to make the world a better place, one act at a time.
This is the critical point of this book: if you are that zebra running for your life, or that lion sprinting for your meal, your body’s physiological response mechanisms are superbly adapted for dealing with such short-term physical emergencies. For the vast majority of beasts on this planet, stress is about a short-term crisis, after which it’s either over with or you’re over with.
We live well enough to have the luxury to get ourselves sick with purely social, psychological stress. Essentially, we humans live well enough and long enough, and are smart enough, to generate all sorts of stressful events purely in our heads.
When we sit around and worry about stressful things, we turn on the same physiological responses --- but they are potentially a disaster when provoked chronically. A large body of evidence suggests that stress-related disease emerges, predominantly, out of the fact that we so often activate a physiological system that has evolved for responding to acute physical emergencies, but we turn it on for months on end, worrying about mortgages, relationships, and promotions.
We all seek out stress. We hate the wrong kinds of stress but when it's the right kind, we love it - we pay good money to be stressed by a scary movie, a roller coaster ride, a challenging puzzle. We love stress that is mild and transient and occurs in a benevolent context.
But if you get chronically, psychosocially stressed, you're going to compromise your health. So, essentially, we've evolved to be smart enough to make ourselves sick.
Stress is not a state of mind... it's measurable and dangerous, and humans can't seem to find their off-switch. Digestion is quickly shut down during stress…The parasympathetic nervous system, perfect for all that calm, vegetative physiology, normally mediates the actions of digestion. Along comes stress: turn off parasympathetic, turn on the sympathetic, and forget about digestion.
Stress weakens frontal connections with the hippocampus --- essential for incorporating the new information that should prompt shifting to a new strategy --- while strengthening frontal connections with more habitual brain circuits.
Sustained stress has numerous adverse effects. The amygdala becomes overactive and more coupled to pathways of habitual behavior; it is easier to learn fear and harder to unlearn it.
Stress can be bad for you. We no longer die of smallpox or the plague and instead die of stress-related diseases of lifestyle, like heart disease or diabetes, where damage slowly accumulates over time. It is understood how stress can cause or worsen disease or make you more vulnerable to other risk factors. Much of this is even understood on the molecular level. Stress can even cause your immune system to abnormally target hair follicles, causing your hair to turn gray.
Subjected to enough uncontrollable stress, we learn to be helpless-we lack the motivation to try to live because we assume the worst; we lack the cognitive clarity to perceive when things are actually going fine, and we feel an aching lack of pleasure in everything.
This brings up a key concept, namely the inverted U. The complete absence of stress is aversively boring. Moderate, transient stress is wonderful --- various aspects of brain function are enhanced; glucocorticoid levels in that range enhance dopamine release; rats work at pressing levers in order to be infused with just the right amount of glucocorticoids. And as stress becomes more severe and prolonged, those good effects disappear (with, of course, dramatic individual differences as to where the transition from stress as stimulatory to overstimulatory occurs; one person’s nightmare is another’s hobby).
Fear is the vigilance and the need to escape from something real. Anxiety is about dread and foreboding and your imagination running away with you. Much as with depression, anxiety is rooted in a cognitive distortion. In this case, people prone toward anxiety overestimate risks and the likelihood of a bad outcome.
One last bit of bad news. We’ve been focusing on the stress-related consequences of activating the cardiovascular system too often. What about turning it off at the end of each psychological stressor?
As noted earlier, your heart slows down as a result of activation of the vagus nerve by the parasympathetic nervous system. Back to the autonomic nervous system never letting you put your foot on the gas and brake at the same time --- by definition, if you are turning on the sympathetic nervous system all the time, you’re chronically shutting off the parasympathetic.
And this makes it harder to slow things down, even during those rare moments when you’re not feeling stressed about something. How can you diagnose a vagus nerve that’s not doing its part to calm down the cardiovascular system at the end of a stressor? A clinician could put someone through a stressor, say, run the person on a treadmill, and then monitor the speed of recovery afterward. It turns out that there is a subtler but easier way of detecting a problem.
Whenever you inhale, you turn on the sympathetic nervous system slightly, minutely speeding up your heart. And when you exhale, the parasympathetic half turns on, activating your vagus nerve in order to slow things down (this is why many forms of meditation are built around extended exhalations).
Therefore, the length of time between heartbeats tends to be shorter when you’re inhaling than exhaling. But what if chronic stress has blunted the ability of your parasympathetic nervous system to kick the vagus nerve into action?
When you exhale, your heart won’t slow down, won’t increase the time intervals between beats. Cardiologists use sensitive monitors to measure interbeat intervals. Large amounts of variability (that is to say, short interbeat intervals during inhalation, long during exhalation) mean you have strong parasympathetic tone counteracting your sympathetic tone, a good thing.
Minimal variability means a parasympathetic component that has trouble putting its foot on the brake. This is the marker of someone who not only turns on the cardiovascular stress-response too often but, by now, has trouble turning it off.
Oxytocin is a Teflon hormone - bad news rolls off it. Obviously, oxytocin and vasopressin are the grooviest hormones in the universe. Pour them into the water supply, and people will be more charitable, trusting, and empathic. We'd be better parents and would make love, not war (mostly platonic love, though, since people in relationships would give wide berths to everyone else). Best of all, we'd buy all sorts of useless crap, trusting the promotional banners in stores once oxytocin starts spraying out of the ventilation system.
Oxytocin, the luv hormone, makes us more prosocial to Us and worse to everyone else. That’s not generic prosociality. That’s ethnocentrism and xenophobia. In other words, the actions of these neuropeptides depend dramatically on context --- who you are, your environment, and who that person is.
To out-group-members, oxytocin makes you crappier - less cooperative and more preemptively aggressive. It's not the luv hormone. It's the in-group parochialism/xenophobia hormone.
Until you appreciate something crucial - It is incredibly easy to manipulate us as to who counts as an Us, who as a Them. The most important point of [Susan] Fiske's work is that it provides a taxonomy for our differing feelings about different Thems - sometimes fear, sometimes ridicule, sometimes contemptuous pity, sometimes savagery.
⬇ Continued
An open mind is a prerequisite to an open heart.
Brains distinguish between an Us and a Them in a fraction of a second. Subliminal processing of a Them activates the amygdala and insular cortex, brain regions that are all about fear, anxiety, aggression, and disgust.
Powerful support for an amygdaloid role in fear processing comes from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In PTSD sufferers the amygdala is overreactive to mildly fearful stimuli and is slow in calming down after being activated. Moreover, the amygdala expands in size with long-term PTSD
Importantly, rather than promoting aggression, testosterone promotes whatever is needed to maintain status when challenged. It's probably even the case that if you stoked up some Buddhist monks with tons of testosterone, they'd become wildly competitive as to who can do the most acts of random kindness.
Testosterone has far less to do with aggression than most assume. Within the normal range, individual differences in testosterone levels don’t predict who will be aggressive. Moreover, the more an organism has been aggressive, the less testosterone is needed for further aggression.
When testosterone does play a role, it’s facilitatory --- testosterone does not 'invent' aggression. It makes us more sensitive to triggers of aggression. Also, rising testosterone levels foster aggression only during challenges to status.
Finally, crucially, the rise in testosterone during a status challenge does not necessarily increase aggression; it increases whatever is needed to maintain status. In a world in which status is awarded for the best of our behaviors, testosterone would be the most prosocial hormone in existence.
Being fearless, overconfident, and delusionally optimistic sure feels good. No surprise, then, that testosterone can be pleasurable.
The problem isn't testosterone and aggression; it's how often we reward aggression. And we do: We give medals to masters of the "right" kinds of aggression. We preferentially mate with them. We select them as our leaders.
Dopamine is not about the happiness of reward. It's about the happiness of pursuit of reward that has a decent chance of occurring.
In other words, once reward contingencies are learned, dopamine is less about reward than about its anticipation. Similarly, work by my Stanford colleague Brian Knutson has shown dopamine pathway activation in people in anticipation of a monetary reward. Dopamine is about mastery and expectation and confidence.
It’s “I know how things work; this is going to be great.” In other words, the pleasure is in the anticipation of reward, and the reward itself is nearly an afterthought (unless, of course, the reward fails to arrive, in which case it’s the most important thing in the world). If you know your appetite will be sated, pleasure is more about the appetite than about the sating.fn48 This is hugely important.
Robert M. Sapolsky, Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers: The Acclaimed Guide to Stress, Stress-Related Diseases, and Coping
You should write your own book
@@ginaiosef Thank you Gina, that's very kind. 🥰
@@chuckheppner4384This was so interesting. Many thanks for sharing 😊
26.00 the power of slow breathing 🙂
Also, what are some books that the average individual could read to learn more about this?
Hello! Check out Our Polyvagal World by Stephen Porges and Seth Porges, or Anchored by Deb Dana for accessible content about Polyvagal Theory! We have a bookstore on our website where you'll find a range of titles: polyvagal.org/bookstore
32:32 What if we don't feel safe around anyone, family included?
39.18 oxytocin.. Really interesting.
I also see what you're saying, such counterproductive methods that have been used in America's classrooms for probably centuries... Using punishment and strict discipline and so on. All that does is intimidate the child. No way that can have a long-lasting positive benefit.... Pronouncing rule after rule after rule as if that's going to make things better...
What a wealth of knowledge he possess at such a relatively young age but he needs to slow down. He is giving me anxiety just watching him speak.
You guys and gals can slow down or speed up any youtube video. NP
You missed an important thing Seth: community building should be our full time job.
Feed your next door neighbor and find a need and provide it. They teach this to entrepreneurs about creating a business. For Goodness sake, you are as rich as the number of friends you nurture. Jesus taught this with the way he lived. Go to any American church today and the preacher is on a pedestal like a performer doing a job. After service, his job is done. Jesus was on call 24/7.
Slow down please.
16 min mark
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🧞Thanks 🧞
🤍☸ ☯ ☸🤍
What do you do when you know all this information and keep trying to learn more because none of the techniques are working, and you can’t work so you don’t have any money to get help, or any friends or family because you’ve been in self-isolation for years unable to get up even for basic daily self care and everyone sees you as a burden so you don’t have anyone to speak to even though you want to and try to.
Also, I’m safe, and I actually feel safe, so that’s not the problem.
So sorry but to hear