Accessing the Healing Power of the Vagus Nerve: Self-Help Exercises for Anxiety, Depression, Trauma, and Autism

Nearly one in five women (18%) and one in seventy-one men (1.4%) have been raped in their lifetime.

When two people are socially engaged and communicating face to face, they pass information about their emotional states by small movements of facial muscles. This also stimulates the nerves in the muscles of each person’s own face, so that their fifth and seventh cranial nerves give them ongoing feedback and a clear idea of what they are feeling th

(To get an appreciation of how fine and delicate this tissue is, go to YouTube and search “Strolling under the Skin.”)

Before the Polyvagal Theory, we did not adequately differentiate between these two branches of the vagus nerve.

To avoid the confusions that arise from the word “stress,” I prefer to use Stephen Porges’s description of the fight-or-flight state as “mobilization with fear,”

My clinic is in a building in a charming old neighborhood in Copen-hagen. There is no elevator, and my office is one flight up. One day I was expecting a new client, a forty-four-year-old man

Prior to the Polyvagal Theory, depression and depressive behaviors issues lacked a physiological model in terms of the nervous system.

Medical doctors often treat mental manifestations of dorsal branch activity biochemically, with antidepressant medications, many of which work as stimulants and create an aroused state in the nervous system. This helps people to mobilize generally, but it does not bring about desirable social behaviors, or states of happiness or joy.

The fourth state is a hybrid that supports friendly competition, or “mobilization without fear,”

The dorsal vagus, the older of the two, is not myelinated.