Have you ever noticed how your body reacts before your mind catches up, like your heart pounding before a big presentation, or a sense of calm when you’re with someone you trust? These reactions are more than just nerves or habits, they’re part of your body’s built-in system for sensing safety and responding to danger. One theory that helps explain this is Polyvagal Theory, and while the name might sound a bit technical, its insights are deeply human and surprisingly useful in both everyday life and therapy.
What is Polyvagal Theory?
Developed by neuroscientist Dr. Stephen Porges, Polyvagal Theory explores how our nervous system responds to different levels of safety, danger, or threat. At its heart is the vagus nerve, a long, wandering nerve that connects the brain to many parts of the body, including the heart, lungs, and digestive system.
According to Porges, our nervous system has three main states that help us respond to what’s going on around us:
Social Engagement (Ventral Vagal State): This is our calm and connected state. When we feel safe, our heart rate steadies, we breathe more easily, and we’re open to connecting with others. It’s the state where curiosity, compassion, and conversation flow.
Fight or Flight (Sympathetic State): When something feels unsafe, our system shifts into action mode. We might feel anxious, restless, angry, or panicked. Our heart beats faster, muscles tense up, and we’re ready to fight or run.
Shutdown or Freeze (Dorsal Vagal State): If the threat feels overwhelming or we believe we can’t escape, we may shut down. This can look like numbness, fatigue, disconnection, or a sense of hopelessness.
These states aren't choices we consciously make. They’re automatic responses, shaped by our history and environment, designed to protect us.
Why This Matters in Everyday Life
Understanding these states can help explain a lot of the “why did I react like that?” moments we all experience. Maybe you suddenly snapped during a stressful conversation, or felt like retreating and going silent during a conflict. Polyvagal Theory helps us reframe these moments, not as failures of willpower or personality flaws, but as our nervous system doing its best to keep us safe.
It also helps us make better sense of physical reactions we might not have previously linked to our nervous system. Things like a racing heart, tight chest, butterflies in the stomach, or sudden tiredness can all be nervous system responses to perceived threat, even when we’re not consciously aware of feeling unsafe. Polyvagal Theory gives us a language for understanding these signals as the body’s way of communicating with us.
It also highlights that safety isn’t just about physical danger. Our nervous system is constantly scanning for cues of safety or threat, something Dr. Porges calls neuroception. This scanning happens below the level of conscious awareness and includes subtle things like facial expressions, tone of voice, or even posture. If you’ve ever felt uneasy in a room for no clear reason, that might be your neuroception at work.
By becoming more aware of our own nervous system states, we can learn to better understand ourselves, regulate more effectively, and show patience, to ourselves and others, when stress reactions arise.
How It Shows Up in Therapy
In therapy, understanding Polyvagal Theory can be incredibly helpful, both for clients and therapists.
Many people come to therapy feeling “stuck” in anxiety, panic, shutdown, or numbing. They might say things like “I just want to feel like myself again” or “I don’t know why I can’t move forward.” Polyvagal Theory offers a roadmap for understanding these experiences. Rather than seeing symptoms as something “wrong,” we can understand them as nervous system states that developed to protect us, especially if we’ve experienced trauma, chronic stress, or difficult relationships.
When clients learn about the different states, they often say, “That makes so much sense now.” It can be incredibly validating to realise your reactions aren’t random or irrational, they’re part of a biological survival system.
Therapists trained in trauma-informed approaches often use this lens to help clients develop tools for regulation, ways to gently move out of distress and toward safety. This might include breathwork, grounding exercises, or simply learning to notice body cues and respond with understanding.
Over time, therapy can help “rewire” the nervous system by creating repeated experiences of safety and connection, both within oneself and in relationship with others.
Small Ways to Apply It in Daily Life
Even outside of therapy, you can begin to explore your nervous system and support it in simple, meaningful ways. Here are a few ideas:
Notice your state. Are you feeling calm and connected, anxious and on edge, or flat and disconnected? There’s no right or wrong, just awareness.
Support your system. When you feel anxious, grounding through the senses (e.g., noticing five things you can see, four you can touch, etc.) can help. When you feel shut down, gentle movement, music, or reaching out to someone you trust can help reawaken connection.
Seek cues of safety. Spending time with people who feel safe, being in nature, or listening to soothing music can activate the calming ventral vagal system.
Be kind to your responses. Instead of judging yourself for being “too sensitive” or “overreacting,” try asking: “What might my nervous system be trying to tell me?”
A New Way of Seeing Ourselves
Polyvagal Theory doesn’t offer a quick fix, but it offers something more powerful: understanding. It invites us to be curious about our own biology, to notice when we’re moving in and out of different states, and to recognise that healing and growth often begin with feeling safe.
Whether you’re starting therapy, deep into the process, or just looking for a new way to understand your responses to life, Polyvagal Theory offers a compassionate, science-backed lens. It reminds us that we’re not broken, we’re wired for survival, connection, and resilience.
If you're curious about how this applies to your own experience, I’d be happy to explore it with you in therapy. I work with individuals who want to understand themselves better and feel more at ease in their daily lives. Feel free to get in touch to see if working together might be a good fit.
