Polyvagal Theory: Why You Feel So Anxious All The Time - Dr Stephen Porges - #1128

“And basically the intervention was vagal nerve stimulator, which was developed by a colleague of mine. And another intervention, a sound intervention that I had developed.”

“It's a new stuff that I've developed with a colleague called Anthony Gorey. And what it does, first of all, vagal nerve stimulator, you know what it does. It's sending a signal to the vagus. And it's basically trying to tell the vagus that everything is okay in your body.”

“And basically the sounds had the same effectiveness as the vagal nerve stimulator was very profound in terms of what it did over a four week period. And so basically we had massive effects on all, basically all the parameters we had were measuring on, they were all, uh, questionnaires and symptom arrays.”

“And whether they were anxious or depressed and basically all the indicators improved in a very, let's say, powerful way, which provided the whole model, whether it's a vagal nerve stimulator or the sound is that if you know what the signal profile is that your nervous system is looking for, you can get it.”

“That's interesting. Okay, so what about vagus nerve stimulators? That's something else that you mentioned earlier on. How much is real and how much is bunk with regards to that? Oh, I mean, number one, it's real.”

“That's where I get the highest oscillation between top and bottom. That's where mine is. Okay. So vagal nerve stimulators, good, but being used in the right context. Resonant breathing, interesting and may also play a good role. Also good. But remember what you were doing, you were doing a lot of interoception with your resonant breathing.”

“transmission and a lot of other neurotransmission and fish oil. So I've been taking a lot of precursors that are useful in neurotransmission.”

“tumor. So I started to take high doses of fish oil, and the tinnitus disappeared. Fish oil has an anti-inflammatory. So what I'm saying is that what I was getting, my tinnitus was due to the actual nerve being inflamed. And I could control that with fish oil. So I was very fortunate. And now I don't even know that I have tinnitus.”

“So like I have a Fitbit, and the Fitbit is just giving me measures of variance, which is a descriptive statistic. And I worked on this for decades to develop technologies to pull out the specific vagal influence in the heart rate activity.”

“Now I will tell you what are my exercises every morning. Yes. I have a backswing, basically a tilt table in the basement. Yeah. Ever seen when the back swings? So it tilts down like that. And you can go. Upwards like that. To in like an inversion table. Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't go on. I can't rotate, but I can go like 70 degrees down, 70 degrees up. Yep. Yep. Yep. I have seen that. Why?”

“The answer was there are supplements that kind of signal the mitochondria to come out and play again. And the one I took was called L-Carnitine. It's it's off over the counter.”

“And breathing tends to be quite a bit faster than a vascular oscillation. I did a bunch of assessments. I love this product. It's called Ohm, Ohm.Health. And it's a HRV resonance breathing lamp. And you grab this thing. Anyway, my frequency is 4.5 breaths a minute.”

“You know, so we put on the television while we're on treadmills. We don't take the exercise as a moment of Zen. Why is that important? Why is it important to feel the thing that's happening?”