Do you know when you’re activated? - A Beginners Guide to Polyvagal Theory

If you haven’t been inundated with pop culture references to “nervous system regulation” (and even if you have), let’s take a moment to make sure we’re on the same page about polyvagal theory and the nervous system.  

The nervous system is shorthand to refer to a complex set of networks that run the length of your trunk connecting your vital organs, brain, and motor functioning. These networks scan for cues of safety and danger, tell your body what to do, and function to keep you alive and protected. Over the course of our evolution, they’ve become increasingly adept at not only helping us to survive but also to connect and to experience a wider range of emotions and social connection. 

Our systems are uniquely designed to recognize safety and threat and to mobilize in service of survival. 

In its earliest expression, our nervous systems helped us to regulate movement and body temperature and find and digest food (think lizard brain).

From there, our capacity expanded to be able to allow emotion, register signs of safety and danger, and mobilize to move away from harm or toward safety (think a deer who perks up its head if it hears a sound).

Most recently, our evolution has made way for the capacity to form deeper social connection (call to mind the face of someone you love and notice how your body automatically responds). 

Our nervous systems are constantly scanning our environment for signals of safety or threat.

This scan uses a process called neuroception. Neuroception is both unconscious (have you ever woken up in the middle of the night because you smell something funny or hear a weird noise? That’s neuroception.) and lightning quick (have you ever turned your head before you registered that you’d heard a sound?). Neuroception is fully and completely in service of survival.

When we register a threat, it activates our nervous system to mobilize us. Our breathing quickens which speeds up our heart rate, increasing the flow of oxygen to our muscles. Our stomach and intestines stop digesting and prepare to empty, if needed, to support us in responding with as much speed or power as necessary to navigate the threat. Our hearing shifts to focus only on sounds of danger, and our attention, including our vision, narrows to drown out any extraneous information that might distract us from survival. 

If our system perceives that this won’t work, we automatically shift. Now everything is slowing down. Our breathing slows, our heart rate slows, the amount of oxygen flowing to our vital organs decreases. Our body is preparing to withstand an attack–in its wisdom, it’s preparing us to not bleed out if we’re injured and to decrease the amount of pain we feel through this experience.

Once our system perceives that the threat has passed, it discharges the leftover energy and reengages the social engagement system. (Think back to the sound you heard in the night and how you fell back to sleep after you realized it was just rain on the window.) This allows our heart rate to return to normal, our digestive system to reengage, and our ocular and cochlear muscles to resume taking in the full range of information. 

This is how it is supposed to work. It’s intricate. It’s beautiful. It’s protective. 

But trauma, especially childhood trauma, impacts this. Our nervous systems first learn to regulate in the context of a caregiver. If there aren’t reliable or sufficient experiences of safety while we’re developing, if our early life experiences are of misattunement, threat, or actual danger, and we’re not able to complete the cycle by returning to safety and social connection, then we may begin to get stuck in states of hypervigilance or immobilization.  The first step to changing this is learning what your individual system feels like when it’s activated.