Our Polyvagal World: How Safety and Trauma Change Us

by Stephen W. Porges

How safe we feel is crucial to our physical and mental health and happiness.

When we feel safe (notice it says “feel” safe and not that we actually are safe—this is an important distinction we’ll come back to repeatedly), our nervous systems and entire bodies undergo a massive physiological shift that primes us to be healthier, happier, and smarter; to be better learners and problem solvers; to have more fun; to heal faster; and generally to feel more alive.

If the body is a symphony, full of discrete systems and sections charged with fulfilling specific functions, then the vagus is the conductor: the shared link that allows the body to work together as a cohesive unit.

The Polyvagal Theory is a new model for how our nervous system and entire body responds to, and changes with, how safe or threatening the world feels to us.

I saw things differently and proposed that human behavior was actually the result of a “stimulus-organism-response” (or S–O–R) model. With an S–O–R model, the organism itself (that’s you, or me, or anybody, really) is a key variable that sits in the middle of this machine and influences how we respond to the world around us.

An S–O–R model posits that all humans are different from one another—and differ among ourselves at different times—and that these individual differences (basically what makes us us) can influence how we respond to different stimuli or scenarios. So the same experience might be pleasant to one person and frightening to another. And depending on how we feel or what autonomic state we’re in, the same thing might bring us joy in some circumstances, and grief in others.

Key to this model is the idea that our conscious intent (what we think) and bodily state (what we feel) are often at odds with each other. So our higher thinking might want to respond to something one way, while our body pushes us in a different direction.

Our nervous systems are in charge, and until you’ve been in a situation where you’ve lost control of your body, you simply have no idea. Unfortunately, many people require personal hardship to feel true empathy.

“Who or what is sending me messages that make me feel unsafe, and who or what benefits when I feel this way?”

If you’ve ever seen studies suggesting that music education makes students perform better at subjects such as math, this is likely why. The acts of listening to and making music help us activate the vagus and access the Green state, which enables our bodies to better access neural pathways that are conducive to all types of learning, problem-solving, and creative thinking.

Approximately 80% of the vagus’s fibers go from the body up to the brain, while only about 20% go from the brain down to the body.

Because of this mismatch, our visceral sensory experiences may be far more important than conscious thought when it comes to determining our autonomic state. This is why, as far as our nervous system is concerned, feeling safe is much more important than consciously thinking we are safe.

We are body-first organisms, and our bodies truly are oriented to feel the world, rath...

“If I have the time to breathe slowly, I’m probably not actually running for my life. Maybe I am safe, and we can turn things down a little, autonomically speaking.”

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Understanding that each of us has a different level of resilience is especially important when it comes to how we treat others who may be enduring trauma.

Eventually, patients get used to these feelings as just feelings, and not as triggers for trauma. When this happens, these feelings lose their disruptive power. We can acknowledge them, honor them, feel them, appreciate them. But then also move on from them.

In many ways, the modern workplace seems almost scientifically engineered to make us feel unsafe.

We all need an opportunity to disengage and heal. These days, many of us are never afforded that necessity.