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

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,”

fighting in order to overcome the threat or fleeing to avoid a threatening situation.

“immobiliza-tion with fear.”

When treating post-traumatic stress, therapists tend to focus on the trauma itself rather than the psychophysiological fixation that followed the event.

Although many people talk about being stressed, a large percentage of them are not actually stressed in terms of spinal sympathetic chain activity. Physiologically, some of them are actually in a state of dorsal vagal activity (shutdown or withdrawal); in emotional terms, they are in a depressed state.

The ventral branch of the vagus nerve relates to positive emotions of joy, satisfaction, and love.

improve their communication and social skills.

If scientific research confirms that the state of the autonomic ner-vous system is a factor in psychological issues, it may be interesting to explore the possibility of improving heart rate variability and the func-tion of the ventral branch of the vagus nerve as a first step in treating psychological problems, without immediately resorting to