Become an Active Operator of Your Nervous System | Deb Dana
Deb Dana, a clinical social worker and author of "Anchored," explains Polyvagal Theory, detailing how understanding and actively operating your nervous system can lead to greater regulation, improved relationships, and overall well-being. She provides practical tools and exercises to reshape the nervous system.
Deep Dive Analysis
10 Topic Outline
Introduction to Polyvagal Theory and its Importance
The Nervous System as a Social Structure: Neuroception
Understanding the Three Nervous System States: Hierarchy
The Biological Imperative of Co-regulation
Reshaping the Nervous System: Glimmers and Practices
The Vagal Break: Controlling Heart Rate and Transitions
Bottom-Up vs. Top-Down Approaches to Nervous System Change
Re-storying: Changing Narratives as States Shift
The Role of Community in Nervous System Regulation
Connecting Nervous System Regulation to Broader Well-being
7 Key Concepts
Polyvagal Theory
A theory developed by Stephen Porges explaining how the nervous system works, based on three organizing principles: hierarchy, neuroception, and co-regulation. It helps understand the biological underpinnings of thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and stories.
Neuroception
The nervous system's unconscious way of listening for cues of safety or danger, both inside the body (viscera, lungs, heart), in the external environment, and in the space between individuals. It operates below conscious awareness, influencing how we feel welcomed or warned by others.
Hierarchy of States
The three basic states the nervous system cycles through: Ventral (safety, connection, regulation), Sympathetic (fight/flight, overwhelming energy), and Dorsal (shutdown, collapse, disconnection, draining of energy). These states dictate our capacity for engagement and survival responses.
Co-regulation
A biological imperative, a lifelong need for safe connection with others, where one nervous system is met by a regulated nervous system. It's essential for survival and well-being, allowing individuals to feel safe enough to connect and regulate.
Glimmers
Micro-moments of regulating energy or 'okayness' that are often overlooked due to the negativity bias. Noticing, savoring, and reflecting on these moments helps strengthen the nervous system's ventral pathways and build capacity for regulation.
Vagal Break
A specific ventral vagal circuit connecting the brainstem to the heart's pacemaker, controlling heart rate. It allows for speeding up and slowing down, enabling smooth transitions between activity and calm, and is crucial for engaging in back-and-forth conversations.
Re-storying
The process of explicitly noticing, naming, and expressing the new narratives that emerge as one's autonomic state changes. Since stories arise from the nervous system's state, reshaping the nervous system naturally leads to new, more adaptive stories about experiences.
9 Questions Answered
Polyvagal theory, developed by Stephen Porges, explains how the nervous system works through three organizing principles: hierarchy, neuroception, and co-regulation. It provides a framework for understanding how our biology translates into our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.
Understanding polyvagal theory helps us comprehend our embodied biology, allowing us to become active operators of our own nervous system. This awareness enables us to shape our responses, engage with the world with more intention, and foster healthy relationships and self-care.
Our nervous system is a social structure, constantly communicating with other nervous systems through neuroception, which listens for cues of welcome or warning. This micro-moment-to-micro-moment communication happens below conscious awareness, influencing our feelings about others and our ability to co-regulate.
The three main states are Ventral (safety, connection, regulation, where the prefrontal cortex functions optimally), Sympathetic (fight/flight, characterized by a flood of chaotic energy for survival), and Dorsal (shutdown, collapse, disconnection, marked by a draining of energy and immobilization).
We can reshape our nervous system by consistently engaging in small practices, such as seeking out and savoring 'glimmers' of okayness, using breath practices like intentional sighing or longer exhales, and engaging in movement practices that help navigate between states.
The vagal break is a ventral vagal circuit that controls heart rate, allowing it to speed up on inhalation and slow down on exhalation. It enables us to access mobilizing energy without triggering full fight-or-flight responses, facilitating smooth transitions between activity and calm, and supporting back-and-forth social engagement.
The vagal break can be strengthened through breath practices, play (which involves speeding up and calming down), and movements that require alternating between fast and slow actions. Anything that necessitates speeding up, slowing down, engaging, or disengaging helps exercise this circuit.
Top-down approaches use the brain and cognitive processes to create change, while bottom-up approaches focus on embodied experiences to initiate change. Both are interconnected in a mind-body system, with bottom-up practices often being guided by top-down instructions to bring about physical and emotional shifts.
Community provides essential co-regulation, offering a sense of safety and welcome that is biologically necessary. Being with people who understand and accept one's nervous system states, even in messy moments, helps foster well-being and allows for reaching out and receiving support.
22 Actionable Insights
1. Become Nervous System Operator
Understand how your nervous system works to actively manage your responses, engage with the world with more awareness, and create healthy relationships and self-care practices.
2. Recognize & Return to Ventral
Learn to identify when you’ve moved out of regulation into a survival response (sympathetic or dorsal) and practice finding your way back to the ventral state of safety and connection, building nervous system flexibility.
3. Seek & Savor Glimmers
Actively look for and stop to savor micro-moments of regulating energy or ‘okayness’ (glimmers) throughout your day, bringing them into explicit awareness to build ventral capacity.
4. Utilize Ventral Vagal Anchors
Identify specific people, places, objects, or times that predictably bring you moments of okayness and intentionally engage with them to strengthen your nervous system’s ventral pathways.
5. Practice Story of Three States
Reflect on a simple experience by interpreting it through the lens of ventral, sympathetic, and dorsal states to build awareness that your autonomic state creates your story.
6. Intentionally Sigh for Regulation
Use intentional sighing to disrupt dysregulated states like despair (dorsal) or frustration (sympathetic), and to savor moments of relief or contentment in ventral.
7. Breathe with Longer Exhale
Change your breathing ratio so that your exhale is longer than your inhale, as this directly contacts the nervous system to bring more ventral energy.
8. Engage in Resistance Breathing
Practice resistance breathing, such as blowing through a straw or bubble wand, to encourage a long, slow exhalation that brings more ventral energy to your nervous system.
9. Regulating Movement Practices
Find a movement that feels regulating (often rhythmic or circular) and practice imagining or enacting it to connect with and strengthen your ventral-regulated nervous system.
10. Process Sympathetic Energy with Movement
When experiencing overwhelming, chaotic sympathetic energy, allow jagged and disjointed movement to come to life, then slowly guide it towards rhythm and regulation to transition back to ventral.
11. Gently Re-engage Dorsal States
In dorsal shutdown, gently invite subtle movement or notice bodily sensations like breath or rubbing your feet on the floor, to bring awareness back to the present moment and re-engage.
12. Use Music for State Management
Select music to help you find your way to ventral states of joy or awe, or to healthily engage with and process sympathetic (fight) and dorsal (despair) feelings without feeling alone.
13. Seek Everyday Moments of Awe
Be on the lookout for everyday moments of awe, which involve feeling small yet connected to something larger than yourself, to foster self-transcendent experiences and ventral connection.
14. Exercise Your Vagal Break
Engage in activities that require you to speed up and slow down, or engage and disengage (e.g., playful interactions, alternating walking speeds), to increase the efficiency of your vagal break.
15. Curiosity in Other’s Neuroception
When you feel something coming from another person’s nervous system, be curious about what’s going on for them rather than making immediate assumptions.
16. Communicate Nervous System States
If you sense dysregulation in an interaction, name your observation (e.g., ‘I’m noticing something interrupted our flow’) and ask curiously about the other person’s experience to open a conversation.
17. Make Relational Repairs
After a relational rupture caused by dysregulation, consciously make repairs by returning to connection (nervous system to nervous system, brain to brain) to strengthen the relationship.
18. Re-story Your Experiences
After regulating and reshaping your nervous system, explicitly re-story your experiences through words, art, or movement to appreciate the new narrative that emerges from your changed autonomic state.
19. Cultivate Micro Community
Actively seek out and build a small, dependable ‘micro community’ of people with whom you feel safe, welcomed, and understood, even in your moments of messiness and dysregulation.
20. Downsize Dysregulating Relationships
Evaluate relationships that consistently dysregulate your nervous system and consider downsizing them, while actively seeking out new connections with people who foster regulation and welcome.
21. Offer Ventral Regulation Benevolence
Use your capacity to stay in a ventral-regulated state as a ‘public service’ or ‘human responsibility’ to offer benevolence and healing to others, especially in a world where many are dysregulated.
22. Personalized Regulation Menu
Create your own menu of regulation practices, including easy and challenging options that vary in time commitment, to ensure you have true choices that fit your nervous system’s needs at any given moment.
7 Key Quotes
We can become active operators of our own nervous system.
Deb Dana
80% of the information is traveling the pathways from your body to your brain. 80% and 20% is coming back from the brain to the body.
Deb Dana
My goal in life is to help people to become fluent in this because it changes the way we look at others. It changes the way we can have curiosity and self-compassion.
Deb Dana
The goal is to be regulated when I can and to know when I've moved out of regulation into a survival response and be able to find my way back to ventral.
Deb Dana
My state creates my story.
Deb Dana
My nervous system is going to work on my behalf anyway, but when I can engage with it, partner with it, then it feels very different.
Deb Dana
It's our responsibility as humans to find our way to shape our systems and to offer that. We come to regulation, we come to ventral, but then benevolence is the active use of that ventral vagal energy and service of healing.
Deb Dana
4 Protocols
Finding Glimmers of Okayness
Deb Dana- Be on the lookout for micro-moments of regulating energy or 'okayness' in daily life.
- When a glimmer is found, stop for a moment to savor it.
- Recognize and bring explicit awareness to the glimmer.
- Reflect on the experience to bring it alive again in your biology, strengthening the ventral pathway.
Story of Three States Reflection
Deb Dana- Choose a simple past experience.
- Reflect on how that experience was interpreted and storied when in a sympathetic (fight/flight) state.
- Reflect on how that experience was interpreted and storied when in a dorsal (shutdown/collapse) state.
- Reflect on how that experience was interpreted and storied when in a ventral (safety/connection) state.
- Notice how the brain creates very different stories based on the autonomic state.
Movement Practice for Nervous System Flexibility
Deb Dana- Start by imagining a movement that feels regulating (often rhythmic and circular) to connect with your ventral-regulated nervous system.
- For sympathetic states (overwhelming energy), allow jagged, disjointed movement to come to life, then slowly help it organize into a rhythm and regulation.
- For dorsal states (absence of energy), focus on noticing the breath and inviting very gentle movements (e.g., rubbing feet on the floor) to bring presence and energy back.
- Practice moving down and back up the hierarchy of states through these varied movements to build flexibility.
Breath Practices for Ventral Engagement
Deb Dana- Experiment with changing the ratio of inhale to exhale, making the exhale longer than the inhale, to bring more ventral energy.
- Practice resistance breathing, such as blowing through a straw or blowing bubbles, which requires a long, slow exhalation and engages the vagal break.
- Intentionally sigh, whether it's a sigh of despair (to interrupt dorsal), frustration (to disrupt sympathetic), or relief/contentment (to savor ventral).