How to Rewire Your Body's Response to Stress, Trauma & Anxiety Feat. Dr. Stephen Porges

It's a dive into the deep end of understanding you and I'm with Dr. Steven Porgis, who

you hear about in a minute, but we don't waste any time. So we're going to use terms that many of you have been heard of before like HRV, which stands for heart rate variability and that's the variation in your heartbeat, not your heart rate, but your heart variability. And that matters because they believe in modern science, that that's an indicator of

what physical state your body's in, the neurostate that you're in. You'll hear about parasympathetic and sympathetic state.

“All you need to know about that is the sympathetic state is sort of considered fighter”

flight mode in most circles. And the parasympathetic state is known as more of like a peaceful or flow state. The vagal nerve or the vagus nerve, it's just a nerve that runs really, it's the longest nerve in your body.

And this nerve when stimulated, they believe changes that state that you're in.

These are new terms to most of, you know, most of you and most people who are listening to this, but it won't be over the next five or 10 years. These will be very commonplace terms that you'll know about. So when you hear those terms today, don't be intimidated by them or anything like that, but I wanted you to have this foundation because we're going to go right into it here

when you hear this conversation. And so stick in there because although it's complicated in the beginning, by the middle and end, there's a big bow put around it that I think will increase your level of understanding particularly to the very end this week. All right, guys, here we go.

All right, welcome back to the show, everybody. So I wanted to talk to this man for a long time. What I did it know is he lives down the street from me. So we're doing this, if you're watching this on Zoom today or on YouTube, we probably could walk to each other's house and do this interview together, but nonetheless, we've chosen

to do it digitally, but I've been fascinated by his work because it goes to the root of

“what I believe is modern date, change in human beings, not just platitudes or means or motivational”

sayings, but this man's work matters. And he's been doing it since, you know, since before a lot of you were born. And he's an expert. His name, by the way, is he told me, please call him Steve, but I'm not doing that until we get going.

Dr. Stephen Porgis is my guest today. He's affiliated with a bunch of different universities, one of them is the University of Indiana. So go who's yours in the national championship that's coming up, but it's written a bunch of a bunch of stuff on books that matter to me. The most recent book that I want to talk about is called Polyvagal Perspectives, Interventions,

Practices and Strategies. And we're going to talk today about the neuroscience of you, is what we're really going to talk about today with Dr. Porgis.

Finally, welcome to the show, neighbor.

Good to have you here. Well, it's a pleasure to finally meet you and sometimes it will be face to face. Yes. I told you my location will now be disclosed and other people are looking forward to it. So can we do something basic first of all, because I want to, I really believe that what

you've been doing for a long time is going to become the modern day conversation in kind of my area of human change, understanding oneself. You call it being a witness to ourselves is actually what I've seen in your work, which I love that term.

“So everybody, leave in today, if you want to improve and change your life or maybe just”

understand yourself better, can you start just overall basic about what's going on inside of us? You call it neuroception, the vagus nerve, all that thrown into one bunch, just start us out with some fundamental basic stuff so that we can have a conversation beyond that. I'll start off by really saying we've all been this led.

We've been this led from almost a moment we were born, certainly from the moment we walked into a classroom and the whole notion was that our behavior was determined by our intentions. And so that if we were sad, if we were kind of withdrawn, it was we were doing that to ourselves. And very little respect for the importance of our physiological state, our autonomic nervous system, our gut is working, our heart is beating.

How our physiology, which is the platform upon which our cognitions, our emotions and our behavior exist, that when our physiology is challenged, like if we have a high fever, if we are out of breath and for exhausted our ability to socialize, let alone cognitively function is greatly compromised. So the main message here is our physiological state determines much of our experience as

being humans and what that means is that part of our responsibility is to be aware of what our body is doing and then to learn how to navigate with our body, not to blame it, but to understand it, not to scream at it, but it times to honor it.

the, literally, the furnace, the engine, it's the, it is the, it's the whole mechanism that

“moves everything, is what you're saying.”

It's, it is the motor system, it's the, it says it goes down, even do Mipabolic. And you might have had some guests who talk about the mitochondria or where they talk about the biome, it actually goes down to even those levels, but if our body doesn't metabolize, it's energy, we don't move, and if we are have certain physiological signatures are brain, this is the where that word neurosception comes in, are brain interprets the

world as being a very, very unpleasant place. So the part that I really want to emphasize is that we can to take responsibility for whatever we've happened to us, as opposed to kind of like honor what our body and nervous system is doing with the signals in the world, and to be aware of that. So the first stage that we're really going to get to is how do I develop and awareness

of what my body is doing? It's okay.

So to say that it's the driver, you're saying it's even more powerful, it's the entire

engine. So let's, let's step back for a moment because when you use the word driver, and it's

“a, if you remember, forms a speech, that's an active or transient for your driving something.”

So you're empowering something to do something, and that's where we have to step back, and that is the engine itself, it's capacity, what we need to be aware of. So in your world, you're going to be talking about trying harder. There's at a point where trying harder is actually destructive. Well, by the way, I completely believe that, particularly when I work with athletes, and

they end up increasing pressure, they end up increasing the sympathetic state that they may be a time, and it actually, they become less functional under stress. But that's, that's a good segue, because that's the physiological state that does not have flexibility, because it's roots when you become instance, sympathetically dominant and you're more in a panic or fight flight or you're angry at yourself or angry at other

people, you lose your ability to have flexibility, and you lose your awareness of others as well. So you're not a good social partner either. Do you believe that this is conditioned, in other words, the state that we find ourselves in, is this because of some, you know, I was raised by an alcoholic till I was 15.

And I sometimes wonder, is the fact that I seem to be almost in, you're saying it's not even a show, am I, my body appears to be addicted to the sympathetic state most of the time that it's in, is could that be conditioning from childhood or there's a couple things here, right? We're not going to dismiss experience, and we're not going to dismiss learning or adaptive

or conditioning, but we're really going to put something else into it. The ability to be aware of what your body is doing. So in the sense, we're not saying that if your body gets retuned because you lived in a threatening environment as a child, that you're going to be reactive, we're going to acknowledge that you may be more reactive, but we're going to give you kind of a instruction

set of how to navigate with that body. So you follow where I'm going, it's not like saying, oh, because you have that body, of course you're going to be able that way. We're saying, of course your reactions may be that way, but that's not destiny that it can be.

If you reverse or undone, so does that. Undone, impart through what is really kind of a popular construct now, and that is body awareness, become more embodied. So this whole movement in psychotherapy towards somatic therapies is really about being more embodied, where in a sense, feeling your own body.

Okay, let's go back a little bit for everybody here, because everybody what we're doing

“now is I think for the majority of you, I'm introducing you to a new understanding of yourself,”

and it has been from me for the last five or eight years in the work I do privately with people, so that you don't just try harder, or I'm just going to be happier, focus on being happy, focus on what you're grateful for, right? Like I think the vast majority would say, well, it's moved the needle a little bit, but

I'm still kind of the way I've always been.

And so let's just, let's go back for a second, and first off, are there two states? Is it fair to say that there's a, your body is either in a sympathetic person? I would not, I would not go there, okay? I mean, because you start stepping into the messy stuff, okay? Because you create a either/or, a binary system, when in reality, the system that we

And what it does, all of the aspects are, quote, adaptive, there is no bad state, and when

we start getting into things, it starts saying, I got to get out of that, as opposed

“to saying, why is my body in a defensive state now?”

Okay. Is it fair to say that the sympathetic state is considered the defensive state, or, or let's reframe it, is fair to say that I recruit my sympathetic nervous system when I am in states of defense, but when I play, when I enjoy myself and I'm moving, like when kids play their faces are smiling, that's not a defensive state, that's play, that's acting

in a reciprocal way, it's co-regulation. So it's the difference, you know, when athletes lose the ability to, quote, play, because they're no longer enjoying the interaction, that is, they're missing the co-regulation. So the concept of playing with someone is like dancing with someone.

“You move, they move, and it's that reciprocity that our nervous system loves.”

What's the biggest misconception, I guess, then, about trauma that will probably vagal theory sort of adjust or corrects? Well, what most people think is it's an event, get over it, as opposed to, it's an event that

is so powerful to your nervous system, that is a life threat that gets, is that's a hardened

imprint in your nervous system, and your body just won't give up on it, because it was so threatening, it says, you can make the mistake and think everyone is threatening, but you won't get hurt. So it is says, think about a fellsafe system that says, you hit my threshold, and now I'm really porous, and I'm not going to allow my body to be in close proximity with anyone.

And the adaptive response for many people with trauma histories is they either totally withdraw, so they are not in any contact with others, or they become numb to their own bodily feelings. And that's probably the more prevalent one, where people lose their own bodily feelings. How do you access this, okay?

How do you, you said, being able to become aware, neuroception, being aware of what your body is doing or telling, how does one sense that, what are some of the tools, let's just start off with life's experiences, okay, let's get an example of neuroception, a, your, your, your, at dinner with a friend, a table behind you, some mail voice, very powerfully start yelling at someone, okay, how are you enjoying your meal with that, or

you get a visual feeling. So your nervous system goes into a state of defense or threat, because you'll have associations, and it's not merely that you had associations, we are wired to react to certain types of sounds and movements around us, that's, that's important, I don't interrupt you, but that is important, meaning that you're, it's not just that maybe you've had a traumatic

conditioning, something, you could be pre-wired, the interesting part of trauma is that it starts off pre-wired, but it gets to a point of being really tuned, so let's talk about trauma, like let's say someone is raped or they're in a hospital, they get a medical trauma, the important thing is what happens next, are they in the arms of safe loving people, are they comforted, or are they interrogated, so in the sense we are a society, the

things of trauma as or let's say rape, as we need to find out the perpetrator and we need

“retribution, and I think there's been a wonderful example of the Epstein's women, Epstein's”

women, because they didn't want retribution, they wanted their own voice back, and so what

happens is that the body basically goes into what I call the deep abyss through withdrawal,

and the way you get the body out of that is through safe loving engagement, melodic voices, friendly faces, gestures, but above all respect for the vulnerability of the other. Can I, you know, interpersonal relationship, friend, loved one, husband, wife, significant other, am I doing things unconsciously, that makes someone feel unsafe, that triggers

because it's how we how you phrase the question, and the point is you have a real

“accessibility to you, I can feel it, I can see it, so I'm feeling something that I see”

even on a two-dimensional screen, and that is an international voice, a facial expressivity, an openness, and even in terms of your physical presence, it's an open, so you're doing many of the right things, which makes you probably an outstanding coach for those reasons, and you probably get the feedback from others where people say, you know, I feel so comfortable with you, I can share these things with you, so when they're saying is I'm safe in your presence,

and when people are not safe in them, those presence, their bodies tend to pick that up, but that is neuro-oception, the nervous system is detecting those features, and we can talk about some of the wired-in features, one is facial expressivity, head turning away, you engage me and I do this, or I do this, look at my watch or where's my phone, I gotta get no,

“the issue is I disengage you while you are trying to engage me, and you have a feeling,”

and you've had hope, you've had guests that when you were on with them, you're trying to figure out why are they even there, because they're in some other space, but you know that, you are intuitive, you like people, you do that for a living, but these are your body picks it up, and for some people, just the turning away is enough to get them to jump out their skin and scream. Hey, I gotta tell you something, I love butcher box,

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“state your body is occurring? Okay. You, you have to understand my history there. And you've”

probably don't understand. I was the first person to quantify HRV in the 60s. Oh, I know it's

right here in my notes. I just want the audience. Okay. I often don't want to take any credit for it because it's been misunderstood. I wrote a paper recently. It's called Polyvagal Theory, a journey from observation to innovation to application. And HRV was observation. Okay. So I saw heart rate patterns. I saw when people paid the attention. They stabilized. I saw that when people had more B to be very guilty. They were more resilient or more flexible. But I asked

innovation that is causing that HRV? And it's complicated, but there's a component of it

“that is related to heart of the vagus, not the entire part of the vagus. And this is the part”

of the ventral vagal complex, which is also related to intonation of voice. So intonation of voice is just a valid indicator of vagal state than heart rate variability. Wow. So if someone finds themselves like myself with, um, I want everyone lean in. I know this was a little bit complicated everybody, but it's not as complicated as you think. So stay with us. If someone like myself has, uh, what is considered to be very low heart rate variability, mine is often in the single

digits. What has your it? Does that mean, is that indicative of somebody who's living primarily in a sympathetic state most of the time? No, but you see your numbers are not really valid numbers of the ventral vagal complex. The numbers are because the quantum way you're quantifying, which is probably off of a Fitbit or Apple Watch or something like that, they're measuring or clumping together all variations in heart rate, which can include a breath of me as. So you can get really

impressive HRV measures within a breath of me. Okay. So that's your first warning. Okay. The second

one is that the type of analysis that they're using is not a accurate one for extraction of neural influences. So this is heart rate variability is not uh, there's something in there that is of value, but the value of what you can get out is a function of the sophistication of your signal processing or extraction tools. It's like mining and we just get a bunch of rocks that I have a gold mine, or would you kind of be a little bit more careful? I understand. So earlier you said,

there's not a good or a bad state. So sympathetic isn't necessarily bad, parasympathetic isn't necessarily good. But our most is there a risk if you're in a cheever, like I just I just use myself. So let's

“assume that I at least I think this is debatable, but I'm sort of one of those people that's like”

always competing, always wanting to grow, always the next thing, right? And I see people like me.

So I'm a witness to myself, but I'm probably better at seeing this in other people. Many of my achiever type quote unquote friends. I sometimes fear, including myself, that somehow I've become addicted to the stress. I guess the way to say it is the stress of achievement, is is is that could well, you can just play out. We get used to, I would help you revert your narrative, okay? You just made your narrative pathological. Now you could say, you know that this desire to explore

his curiosity is how I grow, how my brain grows, and what I find of interest. And that's a more let's say positive view of who you are, as opposed to, you know, the word is really curiosity. And you may be driven to learn about people or learn about it. It's something that may be what you think is working hard. Now if I go back to my near early research, it was on heart rate variability, but it was on heart rate variability during mental effort. And so when people would pay attention,

the heart rate variability would flatten out. It would stabilize. And in 1969, when I observed that in the early 70s, I thought this was really remarkable that we could link this literally into education and transference or transmitting of information. That if you could suppress your heart rate variability, you could process more information. What I didn't understand at that point in time, it took me over a decade was that that was a disruptor of our homeostatic functions. And this

“is an important concept. The heart rate rhythms that are naturally occurring, not the very”

ability per se, but the rhythmicity that creates the variability are really reflecting the feedback loops of our body is taking care of itself. And so when we talk about healthy bodies, the healthy body has these feedback loops that support digestion, oxygenization, our metabolic activity, it's a rhythmicity. And when we use words like stress, which are really loaded words, difficult words to understand, we can give a very simple operational definition.

Oh my goodness, it's so good. Do you think, here's a basic question. Do you think in general,

I already know that you're going to jump on this. Do you think in general, somebody who lives in a sympathetic state? And let's just assume their heart rate variability is low, that they are going to, they are less physically healthy long term than somebody who lives in a parasympathetic state. Well, don't get binary, okay. Let's say that a person who has the resources to switch into a sympathetic state and then to recover and be in a health restoration state

with the parasympathetic system is going to be more flexible and more healthy. So it's not like

I'm living in calmness. No, I have great enthusiasm, great excitement. I have passion. So I have

a lot of physiology and a lot of suppression of vagalactivity. But my body's sick of what's being said enough is enough. I now need to relax and the interesting part about our species is that it does fine with those challenges as long as you give the body sufficient recovery time. So the

“real secret is good recovery. It's not the sympathetic tone. It's the recovery of taking away that tone,”

because the sympathetic nervous system is metabolically costly the main thing. Okay. So it's metabolically costly. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. That's in my layman's view of things. I go, well, that can't be really good long term if it's metabolically costly. Right. But you might lose some weight. You see, the other people say, I'll lose weight. It's their way. So help us out here. Give us, I'm wondering with you. You're the expert. By the way, you guys listen to this man and I don't think he might

be telling you this. He's 81 years old. You imagine, you imagine, I know that as those you that are on the audio, I mean, his cognitive abilities, his articulation, is better than anybody I know that's in their 30s. And I have to think that somehow this work, this stimulation of this

“life's work helps in that regard. Let me ask you a question. Can you at your stage now or could we?”

You could just, can I, can I observe stage, by the way, what I mean by that is the duration of that you've spent in this world and studying it as the expert on it. Can you observe in your, could we learn to in our partner or in an negotiation of business environment? What state perhaps we have triggered the person? Oh, yeah. Oh, but we do it intuitively. You may not say we do it, but we do it. We react to people when their eyes move to the side or the faces get flat.

When, if they're not, if their voice loses its intonation, we will say, what do you man it me or something like that? What did I do? We live in too much of a virtual world.

I always like to use the use of email in the very beginning as a perfect example. When email

first speaker started to become a popular, people got very upset because people would just respond with curse points and then the culture shifted and we just talk and engage in that curse way. But our bodies had grown up with the notion of, like, how are you? Nice to see, you know, it has since these few innocuous pleasant words. But we've gone into this efficiency of communication that makes communication lack, it makes it lack its social value. So I like to use the words

"sociality" and think of "sociality" as one of our humus-static processes that, so since our health giving behaviors with others, our trust, our engagement,

“our ability just to be present with another is extremely important. And for many people,”

they can't be with another human, but they can be with their pets. That is interesting. By the way, that's become more and more, at least obvious to me, in this digital era that we live in. So it's based on that. You've used the word homey of states as a couple different times. If you could have one way for the word for like healing or leadership, you know, based on what work you've done, what is there is there one? Oh yeah, so actually it's the work

I mean, even doing now it's one one might say to allow the really static rhythms to re-emerge. And I'm actually building a technology to put those rhythms back into the body. And I'm using acoustic rhythms and we've just completed the study. It's really quite remarkable.

And I built it with the musician composer by named Anthony Gory. And what we do is

literally music is modulated in rhythms of the body. So it's not like the simplest way of thinking of it is that we were used to having tempo. But this music doesn't have a fixed tempo. It has a modulation tempo that fits our endogenous biological rhythms. And when we hear that our bodies go like that. And so we're building tools for

“basically medical procedures that's incredible. So the point this is really where I think”

part of our conversation has kind of cause I would say escape across the surface. And that is

how do I signal my body to relax? Yes. And the answer is it's not an intentionality.

It's almost paradoxical. If I try to relax, I can't relax. But if I allow my body to follow the rhythmicity of what we have created, the body knows what to do. So absent that, absent that, you're saying the more you tell someone to relax, the harder it is for them to do. The more you tell yourself calm down and hold it as to calm down. I mean, I can say that. You will still say it to someone. And I will still say just

relax, what did you anxious about? Or what do you depress about? I mean, that to me is the the most favorite one for me is coming out of this world of mental health issues that people would say to another, why are you depressed? You have so much to live for. With is really a misunderstanding of what depression is or that physiological state that enables depressive feelings to through just emerge and grow. So when we start thinking of that physiology, that physiological state,

“and that's what we start the whole conversation on. That's the platform upon which anxiety,”

and depression and trauma features come out. So the project that we were doing, and this is kind of nifty because I just have looked at the data, it was to work with long COVID. Really? Okay. Yeah. So long COVID is a, what makes long COVID of interest is the body is not suffering from a disease, it killed the virus, but somehow the body did not get the message, the signal, that it won't the war. Okay, if our chronic pain is the same thing, we have the signals, even though the

structure has healed. So it's a neural signaling problem. And so that's what this acoustic intervention was about, signaling the nervous system that it was safe enough to move back into homoesthetic functions. So we did a four-week study in which a vagal nurse simulator

“was given to one group, the acoustic to another, and both to another group, and the fourth group,”

got nothing. And the group that got nothing got worse or nothing, but the group that got either of the interventions showed remarkable reductions of symptoms. And if they got both them together, it was even worse synergistic. And it was done because the customer, and I can't mention the customer, this is what you get into in your researcher. Well, on it to know about the next pandemic, is there a way of treating symptoms of, let's say, chronic illness when

that's scalable, that doesn't require a physician or nurse or someone to do it. So this is all

done online. There's incredible. So everybody, let's go way above really quick. I'm going to

ask a question that you just answered actually, but I want to hear you speak to it. If you get nothing out of today, everybody, here's one baseline thing that would be a new revelation for you. Most of your existence is a physical state you're in. I just accept that. Like, wow, it's a full state I'm in. And so just that in another self is a breakthrough for so many different people, because there's thinking I could just think myself into changing this or if I just intended to want

to be happier, I'm going to change this. But it's actually a physical, I earlier called it a driver, and that wasn't enough for him. It's got engine. So think one step further, and that is the ability to use the concept of feeling safe. You don't have permission to feel safe when your body is destabilized. When your homesteadic processes aren't working right. If you have like you have got

positive feelings. So, but if you think of that way, you start realizing, yeah,

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“everyone said on the show. Of all work, well, it's just true of all the high performance, self-help,”

stuff in this space, that's in one place. That right there is really, really profound. It doesn't give you permission, too. Can I ask you, I already know the answer to this. You just described it.

I've always been curious about these Vegas-Learner stimulators. I won't name them because there's a bunch

of, I've tried many of them. I was going to say to you, do you believe that any of them actually work, but it sounds as if, based on this stuff, just did you do? You don't believe that? I don't know. Yeah, because actually, when we get together, there is another person who lives in the left B2, I basically invented a vehicle nurse stimulator in this part of a major company. And actually, he is my collaborator on this long-COVID study. Got it, stuff. So, the issues,

yeah, they do work, and they're clinical trials on this. And what I found remarkable about them is that they are only being used for a few minutes in the morning and a few minutes in the evening. And so we create our acoustic to parallel that. So, his was using formats in the morning and formats in the evening. We used 15 minutes of sound in the morning and evening. So, it's the same protocol. And the effects are very parallel, but they're a little bit different. And if the reaction,

the selectivity of the dimensions of the nervous stimulator is more on the physiological one, the acoustic is much more integrated. So, he has more on a higher level. I have purpose in life or feeling better. But also, these other physiological symptoms were greatly

“reduced as well. So, interesting, you guys. Is there a telltale sign that you're living in survival?”

To me, there is, yeah. So, the issue is, this is terms, I create a foundation called the Polyvacal Institute and we run meetings and I would start off by saying what the goal of it was was to create a network of people who felt safe enough to be who they are. So, I just wanted to kind of like meditate on that statement because the brilliance of humanity is dependent upon being safe enough to explore and to create. So, the part was the telltale step,

I slipped. So, we're going on telltale signs. So, they always, the clinicians really want

into this notion of being called Polyvacal informed. And what that gave them was the ability to infer that physiological state of their client from face, voice, and gesture. So, rather, and I would say, you don't need that polygraph, you don't need the electrodes, you just need to be a better observer. It's interesting. The basis of all of this for me, everybody listening, and again, you can tell pretty early in this conversation. There's an IQ, just a differential, and

aged, aged does things. So, please be, I have you generous, but I feel that so many of you live in a state where if you were a witness to yourself to use Steven's term,

world today. And although I know it's a physiological state, Steven, I just feel like the breakdown

of human relationships that you described earlier. You want our phones, what we see on our TV's every day is screaming at us. You're not safe, you're not safe, you're not safe. My overall belief, and I know it's okay, they even disagree to about this. But humans who don't feel safe may not be the best version of themselves and treating other humans well, which then sort of situates this lack of everyone feeling safe. Well, you're describing what our politics

was happening in our country. And it's very predictable from the political theories, as if you keep

people and say it's frightened, scared, and angry, their bodies are going to be defensive.

“No one will be led in. They're going to be like this. And that's what's happening.”

As long and it's really simple, from even the financial situation of most families. But to me, it's remarkable that the median net worth of a family is close to zero. I mean, this think about that, there's no security net. So it means that most people in this country, those families are living paycheck to paycheck. So they're vulnerable to how they're not safe by operational definition. And then the politics say, if we make people safe, they won't work.

So you start getting this kind of strange job with the ends kind of justify the means. And they say, well, we can get them for less money per hour, which is what you end up getting because that's the marketplace. So you create these types of situations that are not generous and not protective. And then if you start becoming generous and protective, you treat as a socialist or communist. So it's really kind of a paradoxical thing, as opposed to saying, you know, human beings

in general want to be helpful. In general, they want to solve problems. They want to generate. They want to do creative things. It's only when they are locked into states of threat and fear that the range and flexibility of their behaviors become extremely predictable and not very compassionate or benevolent. It's interesting you say that because I was thinking about myself as a young businessman and what my style of leadership was when I was younger. And in retrospect,

I think I made people around me feel unsafe through almost like intimidation, be almost the

“way that I led. And I used to think that's why I'm successful. And when I learned as I got older,”

those of you that are business people or parents, I was having some success, I think, in spite of the fact that I did that. And as I got a little bit older and I started to realize that the more I could begin to treat people in a loving and kind way and that they more than that, they thought I believed in them, like the sense of level of belief in them, that that created, I actually believe a leader's number one role now is to make people feel safe. And when they do feel safe, they actually

will perform even better. And go ahead, I think you were going to agree with me. Yeah, it was because I took on some roles as like being department chairman and running organizations. And I realized the role of leadership was not to dictate, but was really to give voice. Now you have to make the decisions, but I also realized that most people didn't really expect you to do what they want

you to do, but they want to be heard. And so you can never get at the consensus, but you could

“respect the communication. So I think you're getting on to a very important point and that is”

being in the physiological state of fear and anger or defense, which is not very open to others. It's right. And by the way, I know where you go. Oh, Ed's getting, I really want to look at that. The way that you lead your family, or the way that you lead your company, your department, wherever you are. Like, you know, I think a lot of you were raised thinking, well, if people feel safe and believed it and loved around me, that they're going to get a little too comfy.

And you got to keep what arms length, you got to keep them with a distance. You got to keep them hungry as you come earlier. Or by the way, you know, what I think a lot of you think about you, those of you that are achievers. I'm going to tell you something. I hear people say this. Well, I got to spend all the money that I make, so I'm still hungry. I have got to constantly

that if you would keep yourself feeling unsafe, that some, but that's a recipe to your long-term success. Well, let's find into this for a moment, because what you're describing is it's giving them the mobilization to stay alive because they have not created, let's say, a series of deeper goals or higher level goals. So acquisition or stuff became how they, uh, it graded themselves on success. It's a strange world when we don't have a mark of sending, when do I have enough?

That's true. By the way, you're 100% right as someone who has acquired a lot of stuff.

“I think that's why so many people that acquire a lot of stuff arrive there and say,”

I'm still afraid. I mean, you'll say, no, they phrase it differently. I'm not happy. I'm not at peace. Yeah. But what it really saying is I'm still at my body is still physiologically to your point conditioned to an in a state of not feeling safe. It's under and every one of you listening to this today, you need to be evaluating how much of that game and for how long you want to play it. Yeah,

and it's worthy of your witnessing yourself to use that term for the third time in the interview

today. I want to ask you a question about, you know, we're running out of, by the way, I really enjoy this. And I know that it's a little bit of the deep and everybody, but I think if you've stayed to hear, it starts to put a little bit of a bow around everything. I'm wondering that as a leader, let's just say as a parent, is there a way to repair a moment, perhaps in your life or as a leader in

“business where maybe you did create a really unsafe environment? I'll give you an example. I remember”

one time, I'm only done this once in my life, and I literally bothers me to this day. My little boy, my son, who's now 24, he's not a little boy anymore, but I remember one time when he was very young, I reminded me of my dad with me and I didn't like that I had done this. I really yelled at him and got, I grabbed him actually when he was six, seven years old, and I'm not even going to talk, I just bothers me. I just, I just didn't raise my voice. I yelled at him and kind of got in his little

face, you know what I mean? And I scared him. Yeah, and I remember seeing this look on his face, and I know that look because I lived with it as a child when I was a 15. And so there's a lot of parents here that go, I'm not, I made this mistake, or as a leader I did this, or is there a way to

repair an event like that? There's always, so the issue is people always say the word sorry,

and we're really trying to get the guilt from themselves when they really want to listen to the other person. So I use a term that if you trip me, I don't want you to say you're sorry and then trip me tomorrow, I want you to look at me and understand that I fell, and that you were part of

“that, and I know that the intention wasn't to trip me, but I did fall. I think we want to know,”

in a sense, first of all, and I want to basically let you know that you are a product of the world you grew up in, and the world that we're part of, and part of the parenting manual

is for fathers to be basically a rule makers, and try to get kids to adhere to that,

even without any acknowledgement of the great range of difficulties that many kids have in regulating their own bio behavioral state. And that to me took decades, so I had two boys, they're now in their 40s, but they were not easy to raise, and the theory evolved with them. And I would say that I became a better father, and I also became a better son, when I started to understand that behavioral regulation is not a, let's say it's not an

operant, meaning it's not under control. If I say regulate your behavior and you're out of control, it's not going to happen. I say regulate your behavior, or I'll give you a spanking. It's not going to happen, or if I give you a nice green cone, but if I take my son's hand, and say let's go for a walk-out side, or let's play, or with one son, it was more like, have you eaten? So we used to have a rule, and that was when he would come home from school,

we wouldn't interrogate and control what happened in school. We would say sit down and eat something, and then we'll talk. Is that because you believe if you change someone's physical state,

once he ate, he was certainly a lot calmer and engaging. It was remarkable. So the issue was

“we're not, we can't as adults. I don't understand the, the fragility of the physiological”

states of young kids who may get hungry, really hungry, and it may represent not a period desire to eat, but their bodies need for food. And even if something is simple, so that's really

powerful, but even if something, you're saying that even with your children, or even ourselves,

actually physically getting up and moving our body on a wall, changing physiology, and change behavior and feelings. So I've gone over the decades, great respect, and insights from the dance movement therapists who work with people with tremendous challenges, like trauma histories, adversity histories, and they utilize movement with facial engagement. So if our body is moving, that sympathetic nervous system is on board, but now the faith is also on board, so you have

play in regulation, but if you have them sit down, you're asking them to put that sympathetic nervous system away, and they can't. It's not super interesting to me. Interesting. Is that why some people just say, "Man, my whole day, I got to have my workout in the morning, because after my workout, I'm just a completely different person." You're saying there's actually truth to that,

“in the sense that, you know, theology. I would, I would be okay. I think those are interested.”

I've worked out in the morning for a reason, which is different than theirs. I figured that if I don't work out in the morning, I don't have permission to sit at my desk. So it's like, if you sit in a desk for six or eight hours, it's just not healthy, but if you take an hour and a half

and you exercise, you have permission. That's my own way of dealing with it. But the answer is,

our bodies evolve to move, not to sit, and we can, again, this is the world in which we elevate cognition as if cognition can live independent of the rest of our physiology. Here we go. That's the lesson of the entire podcast. It's about it. Is that, you know, you're not going to just say or think your way through this, that there's a physical edge of your edges. That's a lot of it. Just so good. So good today. I wish we had like nine hours

and you and I are probably nine hours now that I know that we're neighbors. It's just, it's a basic thing. Someone's listening to this today and they say, I'd like to start to create some sort of change in myself and all of this is new to me, HRV, simple, that is a little nerve, blah, blah, blah. Is there a daily practice? You'd say, hey, start with this. Start with this. This will help you in your witnessing yourself or creating change or whatever it might be. That's a real good question.

And the part is, the daily practices would be more about being aware of when's own body. A breath practice is our good for that. It's a done well body scanning where you kind of feel your body. Now, what many people don't realize, if you carry a trauma history, there's a high probability that you're pretty numb to your own body feelings. And that's not something that is bad. It's how your nervous system adapted to be a successful, at least,

successful in the world. Person, you was basically to pack off all those feelings of your body. The issue to that is that that creates other consequences, including feedback loops of health. So a lot of people who have trauma histories become vulnerable to illness and actually our own research during the pandemic found that if you had a trauma history, you were more likely to get infected during the first wave of the pandemic. That's crazy. Do you think that someone who lives

in with stress or chronic trauma disout their question? You weren't ready for this one.

“I didn't know I was going to ask it. Do you think it can affect gene expression at some point?”

That's a good question because the world of epigenetics is very important now. And the issue is even the reverse ability of gene expression. So the idea is, let's take an optimistic viewpoint and say, yeah, you could kind of adapt and your body becomes locked now into a more defensive organism. But let's take an optimistic viewpoint that we can change that imprint. That's really what we're saying. And the directions of modifying that imprint are

always the same. Warm, loving, co-regulatory interactions, basically investing or involving

vetalactivity and triggering endogenous oxytocin. Not exogenous. Don't take pills. And I'm not the biggest fan for electrical stimulation. I can see how it can be used. But I really want the

This is tremendous. Everybody you're welcome. I know we we took you in a direction that you're

“not used to today and you're going to get very used to this direction because I believe that the”

foundation of this man's work is going to be built upon over the next decade. He'll be still

central to it. You can tell at 81, we'll be back on 91. But this is really the frontier of understanding

you, understanding you and being a per witness of you and the more you begin to dig deep. And here's

“how you dig deep. Go get polyvagal perspectives. Go buy his book and start there. How about anything?”

Anything else you're going to tell me? Yeah, I was looking for the readable book. There was a very

readable book called our polyvagal world that I've wrote with my younger son and it's extraordinarily readable. Polyvagal perspective is an archival book. And so that if you really interested, I need to dedicate to learning about it since more of the science. But polyvagal world is a paperback. It's very readable. And my son is a movie maker and journalist. And so it is you'll understand it. Let's go there then. Everybody else. By the way, we both are gifted with a voice for

broadcasting. Like your voice is so it's authoritative but very pleasing and welcoming too. It's a great voice to God. Yeah, that's that's neuroception. That's that's that's your

“neuroception of me. Oh, that's how it resonates with me. Yeah, that's the issue that that's when the”

talk is effectively conveying the person. Very good. So everybody that was Dr. Stephen Porjes, my friend Steve was with me. Thank you, my friend. Thank you, my friend. It's pleasure to meet you. See you soon. God bless you, everybody. Max out your life.