wmu9
Jedi Master
I was intrigued by the reptile social life mentioned in this thread, and I saw this study pop up
The Polyvagal Theory - Stephen W. Porges
- Thread starter Gawan
- Start date
One of the things that both Porges and Dana say is that when the ANS detects threat it over-rides the conscious decision making process. One of the examples given is that in rape trials it is common for the perpetrator to get off without charge when there were no signs that the woman fought back or physically resisted. Porges think that this is a gross miscarriage of justice because there is every probability that the woman went into dorsal vagal shut down controlled entirely by her own physiology as the ANS has deemed that this gives her the greatest chance of survival.
It's true that some women fight back and some don't, but the ability to do so can be moderated by both the resilience of the nervous system and how it has been retuned due to traumatic experiences. Those that don't act when they think they should have often experience shame, but Porges and Dana counter this with the idea that the ANS was doing the best that it could to save the individual under the circumstances and so deserves some acknowledgement for that.
Often if someone is carrying a load of toxic shame, it can be felt as feelings of disgust and when processed can be expressed as nausea - not necessarily to the point of vomiting, but it can be.
In any case, rebuilding resilience in the nervous system and it's capacity to flexibly move through different states is one of the points of PVT.
Recently Turgon shared some of the work of Irene Lyon that is super helpful too and gives more practices to help shift trauma responses from the perspective of patterns of tension in the body, movement therapy and Peter Levines work in somatic experiencing. Her video on the functional freeze is very helpful. The movements or actions that the body wants to engage in to release trauma are often quite primal and things that we suppress due to socialisation. If not for socialisation we may have allowed our body to complete movements and actions that could have been restorative. Obviously, these movements or actions are best not always done in social situations, but by getting in touch with our bodies and tension patterns they can inform practices that can be done at home. One story she tells is of a man who had a chronically tight jaw and when that was processed it turns out that he wanted to bite the person that he felt hurt by but suppressed the urge.
As always, taking things slowly, gently and titrating until ANS capacity is built to is important to overall advances. One sign that Irene Lyon gives that perhaps an intervention has gone too far too fast is that there may be initials signs of improvement for a short period, but then the person sinks into depression. This indicates that the ANS was overwhelmed as is attempting to freeze again.
It's true that some women fight back and some don't, but the ability to do so can be moderated by both the resilience of the nervous system and how it has been retuned due to traumatic experiences. Those that don't act when they think they should have often experience shame, but Porges and Dana counter this with the idea that the ANS was doing the best that it could to save the individual under the circumstances and so deserves some acknowledgement for that.
Often if someone is carrying a load of toxic shame, it can be felt as feelings of disgust and when processed can be expressed as nausea - not necessarily to the point of vomiting, but it can be.
In any case, rebuilding resilience in the nervous system and it's capacity to flexibly move through different states is one of the points of PVT.
Recently Turgon shared some of the work of Irene Lyon that is super helpful too and gives more practices to help shift trauma responses from the perspective of patterns of tension in the body, movement therapy and Peter Levines work in somatic experiencing. Her video on the functional freeze is very helpful. The movements or actions that the body wants to engage in to release trauma are often quite primal and things that we suppress due to socialisation. If not for socialisation we may have allowed our body to complete movements and actions that could have been restorative. Obviously, these movements or actions are best not always done in social situations, but by getting in touch with our bodies and tension patterns they can inform practices that can be done at home. One story she tells is of a man who had a chronically tight jaw and when that was processed it turns out that he wanted to bite the person that he felt hurt by but suppressed the urge.
As always, taking things slowly, gently and titrating until ANS capacity is built to is important to overall advances. One sign that Irene Lyon gives that perhaps an intervention has gone too far too fast is that there may be initials signs of improvement for a short period, but then the person sinks into depression. This indicates that the ANS was overwhelmed as is attempting to freeze again.
Thanks for this.
It has me thinking about stigma and social media. There are people who are ostensibly involved in a facilitated trauma release process of some kind, and make videos, and share this. For instance, in one video of a men's group, each man is cradling another man, who is weeping. In another video, a group of women with sticks in the forest are howling and beating the ground. That kinda thing.
I don't know what to make of these vids or how to interpret the raw emotion on display. These kinds of videos are pretty harshly mocked, though. The men holding each other and weeping are 'gay', or evidence of the decline of men in Western civilization. The women in the woods are 'crazy eco-feminists', and also evidence of the decline, this time of women, in Western civilization. Meanwhile, there's no real way to understand precisely what is going on with either group.
I've read that in older cultures, the social nature of release would be much more normal. For instance, there are Celtic stories of men coming home from war. It was apparently all done very consciously. The returning warriors were cared for by the whole village, and a welcoming space was created for all of that war intensity to come out in the proper way. They were bathed in water order to cool the violent fires in their blood. It also included the women meeting the men with their breasts bared, maybe to set the tone of vulnerability - the vulnerability of childhood, as well as the vulnerability of lovemaking. They probably knew that otherwise, the men could develop an emotional complex which could not be allowed to fester in a small village. Anyways, lots of talk of initiation, rites of passage, and ancestors these days. A 'return to the old ways' has generally been the refuge for those in the midst of social collapse. Strange that New Age stuff can have a return-to-the-old-ways flavour.
IMO part of the reason for the stigma and mockery is because the ones doing the mocking are convinced that they're 'normal' and that everyone should also be 'normal'. In other words, they're convinced that they have no shadow, no trauma inside, and have never seen shadow work being done. Maybe one definition of 'normies' is that they don't know that the shadow exists. Many normies are scared of feeling. And they're also scared of sharing. They're doubly scared of sharing feeling, because socialization and trauma trained them to put a lid on it. So it arrives as something that looks like it belongs in an asylum.
And maybe some of it does? There is a trend on social media where people are encouraged to TikTok their panic attacks, mental breakdowns, unhinged rants, etc. Some really cash-in on this an attention-seeking drive, and it seems to me that it's more of a reinforcement of their agitated state, and not an attempt to move through it in a healthy way. At the extreme end of this would be the woke screaming without much recognition of what is happening to them. It's a mechanical process, and when one gets social points for trauma and victimhood - then the reward centre establishes a circuit for its continuation. It's the opposite of repression, more like expression to the point of ritual projectile vomit.
Anyways, I don't know what it is. The weeping men-holding-men, or the women in the woods with sticks could be involved in shadow work, a return to the old ways, or something New Age, or the woke mind virus.
I can definitely relate to the (often startling) primal nature of release mode, both in terms of movements and vocalizations. It's been an intense time. But getting better.
The socialization angle is interesting to think of in continuum - how we suppressed it 'back then', and noticing how and why it is suppressed now. Which is what I'm getting at with the above paragraphs - attitudes towards non-normal behaviours.
Anyways, on a personal note, when I had an EEG done recently, and my neurological manifestations started, the poor lab tech who was in the room with me was pretty concerned, even though she was forewarned. And that was just with the movements, not vocalizations! My vocalizations can be a sort of infantile howling at times. I think it was the first time I manifested symptoms in front of someone who I didn't know, which was a good milestone to reach. Previously I had generally done my shaking alone.
I'm not really versed in the material, but this came up on my youtube feed. It was an intro into dorsal vagal shutdown, the triggers and how to start getting out of it:
Justin Sunseri - Understanding Dorsal Vagal Shutdown: Numbness and Trauma (SNB192)
Then I saw one of those browser article highlights and this one on Functional Freezing came up. I wonder if it's just a rebranded term and they're dumbing it down?
www.usatoday.com
Justin Sunseri - Understanding Dorsal Vagal Shutdown: Numbness and Trauma (SNB192)
Then I saw one of those browser article highlights and this one on Functional Freezing came up. I wonder if it's just a rebranded term and they're dumbing it down?
Bed rotting every night? You're actually in a 'functional freeze.'
Mental health professionals encourage people to watch out for warning signs of \
www.usatoday.com
In some of their later videos both Porges and Dana acknowledge the existence of blended states. They talk about play being a blend of sympathetic fight/flight and ventral vagal safe/social/connected, sleep being a blend of dorsal vagal shutdown and ventral vagal safe/social/connected. As far as I know, they haven't addressed the functional freeze by that term, which I'm guessing is a blend of dorsal vagal shutdown and sympathetic fight/flight, but Irene Lyon does and has some good videos on it.
I love what you wrote. I was reminded of the 'Seven Fires Prophecy', especially regarding turning to more tribal/natural means of healing.
"He said, "In the time of the Seventh Fire, New People will emerge. They will retrace their steps to find what was left by the trail. Their steps will take them to the elders, who they will ask to guide them on their journey."
"Could it be that the road to technology represents a rush to destruction? The road to spirituality represents the slower path traditional Native People have travelled and are now seeking again."
Granted, you need to read the 'Seven Fires Prophecy' entirely (not too lengthy) to understand how this is relevant...but in my opinion, it's worth reading.
Ugh, sorry. Apparently it's a Canadian site. (I thought us Canadians liked to share, eh?)
If you search 'Seven Fires Prophecy' you should be able to find sites that you can access. I was just trying to make it easier. *sigh*
In longevity circles, high heart rate variability (HRV) means top health. Well, I did a sleep apnea training last year, and I was surprised to learn that in that domain, the world's best experts interpret high heart rate variability at night as a possible sign of significant pathology.
The devil is in the details, though, and one could say that it's a matter of interpretation and physiological reading parameters. Nevertheless, I thought that I would clarify because I already encountered someone whose Oura ring was giving the highest heart rate variability ever recorded in what was one of her worst nights ever due to an asthma attack. We thought the ring was bogus, but maybe it was just faithfully reporting what it was reading...
First, I'll clarify what happens while we sleep.
There are 4 stages during a sleep cycle. In the first stage, there's still some vigilance, and this is when snoring people can hear themselves. Muscle tone decreases.
During the second stage, muscle tone goes down even further. However, there can be sympathetic activity with blood pressure variations during what are called "K complexes" that appear during an EEG (electroencephalogram) which come from activity in excitatory cortical neurons. Despite the fluctuations, the important thing to remember, is that there's parasympathetic dominance with a decreased sympathetic activity.
In the third stage, there's very little muscle tonicity. It's the typical deep sleep when it's extremely difficult to wake up. There's dominant parasympathetic activity with reduced sympathetic activity, decreased heart rate, decreased blood pressure, slower respiratory rate, there's a moderate drop in cardiac output. There's even further decreased muscle tone.
When we transition from stage 1 and 2 towards stage 3, there are parasympathetic outbursts and that can translate in certain bradycardias and atrioventricular blockages (when the electrical activity of the heart goes very slowly or is blocked altogether).
The last stage is REM (rapid eye movement) which has two activities: the tonic component and the phasic component. The tonic component is always in the background, and it refers to the fact that we are actually "atonic", that is, we have no muscle tonicity. There's complete atony of all the striated muscles, except for the diaphragm (we're still breathing). There's a very strong cholinergic vagal tonus, with decreased heart rate and blood pressure. There are parasympathetic bursts which can favor sinus pauses (pauses in the heart's pacemaker).
REM's phasic component refers to cholinergic activity in some centers of the brain stem, which activate the muscles of the eyes and brain centers related to visual imagery (dreams). There are sudden movements of the face and extremities. You can see twitches and micro awakenings. Here, we can have sympathetic bursts which favor these micro-awakenings. Parasympathetic activity is inhibited. People predisposed to arrhythmias can have ventricular extrasystoles.
During REM, there is increasing sympathetic activity and reduction of parasympathetic activity. Some call it autonomic ("neurovegetative") storms. There's variability and there's cardiorespiratory instability. There's intermittent low oxygen which can favor increased blood pressure, which can become permanent in people with obstructive sleep disorders such as sleep apnea.
Brain activity variations during sleep have an important role in heart function, specifically on heart rhythm, blood pressure and coronary blood flow. Brutal fluctuations during REM are well tolerated in healthy people, but those with heart disease are at risk of arrhythmias, ischemia and heart attacks. Notice how people with COVID-19 vax-induced-myocarditis die during their sleep...
Deep sleep stages take place more during the first half of sleep, and REM more during the second half of sleep.
When you monitor sleep disorders, you have at your disposal a nocturnal ventilatory polygraphy which keeps track of your thoracic and abdominal movements, oxygen, heart rate, whether there is air flow in your nose or struggle of air flow in your throat. It also keeps track of your bed position while you sleep. It gives enough information to let you know if there's struggle while you sleep because there's too much snoring, because you stop breathing at night or because air flow is just reduced as the tongue collapses your throat due to reduced muscle tonicity as in this picture:
You can also use a polysomnography which adds a lot more parameters including electrical activity in the brain, then you know in which exact sleep phase the apnea is taking place.
When reading the heart monitor parameters during sleep and knowing which sleep phase the person is going through as you do with a polysomnography, if you stumble upon this you can assume the person is in heart health trouble:
It's higher heart rate variability of more than 20 beats per minute at night. The person was eventually diagnosed with sleep apnea. And the heart rate variability coincides with stress due to lack of oxygenation during an obstructive flow event. They called it sleep apnea dysautonomia, where the increased heart rate variability alerts the specialist to look for trouble. You go from a parasympathetic predominance with low heart rate while you sleep, to a sympathetic storm due to a micro-awakening while the person struggles to breathe and the heart just starts beating much faster. Definition of pathology: higher heart rate variability of more than 20 beats per minute at night.
As the thorax is trying to pump air inside and is fighting against the obstruction at the level of the throat, the heart gets compressed which stimulates a heart hormone (brain natriuretic peptide) and people with these problems get up at night to pee often since the hormone stimulates urination.
You can see sleep apnea in obese people, whenever the ear-throat-nose area is chronically inflamed, when there are anatomical anomalies where the amygdalas of the throat or the tongue are bigger than normal. You can also see it in people who had chronic upper airway problems when they were children, which made them chronic mouth breathers. That leads to developmental abnormalities of their facial features, which favors sleep apnea within the context of resistance of the upper airway. There's actually a syndrome that reveals their sleeping problems and manifest thus:
It's similar to a POTS (postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome), but mechanical in its origin. You can see a picture of someone who had her anatomical issues corrected by a surgeon:
Sometimes physiotherapy is enough, but sleep disorders and its causes goes a bit beyond the subject of this thread.
In summary, heart rate variability is not necessarily always a sign of good health. It depends on which parameters they used for monitoring and what is the context. As it is, sleep disorder centers are the most advanced for monitoring. Companies like Oura and others have to go to them to test their technology and see if it compares to the scientific standard. One could argue that heart rate variability as a healthy marker of the smart vagus was never meant to indicate pathology as monitored above (which is a super zoomed version of monitoring). Nevertheless, the lack of consensus among scientists of what they're seeing, and the various interpretations, can give rise to confusion.
The devil is in the details, though, and one could say that it's a matter of interpretation and physiological reading parameters. Nevertheless, I thought that I would clarify because I already encountered someone whose Oura ring was giving the highest heart rate variability ever recorded in what was one of her worst nights ever due to an asthma attack. We thought the ring was bogus, but maybe it was just faithfully reporting what it was reading...
First, I'll clarify what happens while we sleep.
There are 4 stages during a sleep cycle. In the first stage, there's still some vigilance, and this is when snoring people can hear themselves. Muscle tone decreases.
During the second stage, muscle tone goes down even further. However, there can be sympathetic activity with blood pressure variations during what are called "K complexes" that appear during an EEG (electroencephalogram) which come from activity in excitatory cortical neurons. Despite the fluctuations, the important thing to remember, is that there's parasympathetic dominance with a decreased sympathetic activity.
In the third stage, there's very little muscle tonicity. It's the typical deep sleep when it's extremely difficult to wake up. There's dominant parasympathetic activity with reduced sympathetic activity, decreased heart rate, decreased blood pressure, slower respiratory rate, there's a moderate drop in cardiac output. There's even further decreased muscle tone.
When we transition from stage 1 and 2 towards stage 3, there are parasympathetic outbursts and that can translate in certain bradycardias and atrioventricular blockages (when the electrical activity of the heart goes very slowly or is blocked altogether).
The last stage is REM (rapid eye movement) which has two activities: the tonic component and the phasic component. The tonic component is always in the background, and it refers to the fact that we are actually "atonic", that is, we have no muscle tonicity. There's complete atony of all the striated muscles, except for the diaphragm (we're still breathing). There's a very strong cholinergic vagal tonus, with decreased heart rate and blood pressure. There are parasympathetic bursts which can favor sinus pauses (pauses in the heart's pacemaker).
REM's phasic component refers to cholinergic activity in some centers of the brain stem, which activate the muscles of the eyes and brain centers related to visual imagery (dreams). There are sudden movements of the face and extremities. You can see twitches and micro awakenings. Here, we can have sympathetic bursts which favor these micro-awakenings. Parasympathetic activity is inhibited. People predisposed to arrhythmias can have ventricular extrasystoles.
During REM, there is increasing sympathetic activity and reduction of parasympathetic activity. Some call it autonomic ("neurovegetative") storms. There's variability and there's cardiorespiratory instability. There's intermittent low oxygen which can favor increased blood pressure, which can become permanent in people with obstructive sleep disorders such as sleep apnea.
Brain activity variations during sleep have an important role in heart function, specifically on heart rhythm, blood pressure and coronary blood flow. Brutal fluctuations during REM are well tolerated in healthy people, but those with heart disease are at risk of arrhythmias, ischemia and heart attacks. Notice how people with COVID-19 vax-induced-myocarditis die during their sleep...
Deep sleep stages take place more during the first half of sleep, and REM more during the second half of sleep.
When you monitor sleep disorders, you have at your disposal a nocturnal ventilatory polygraphy which keeps track of your thoracic and abdominal movements, oxygen, heart rate, whether there is air flow in your nose or struggle of air flow in your throat. It also keeps track of your bed position while you sleep. It gives enough information to let you know if there's struggle while you sleep because there's too much snoring, because you stop breathing at night or because air flow is just reduced as the tongue collapses your throat due to reduced muscle tonicity as in this picture:
You can also use a polysomnography which adds a lot more parameters including electrical activity in the brain, then you know in which exact sleep phase the apnea is taking place.
When reading the heart monitor parameters during sleep and knowing which sleep phase the person is going through as you do with a polysomnography, if you stumble upon this you can assume the person is in heart health trouble:
It's higher heart rate variability of more than 20 beats per minute at night. The person was eventually diagnosed with sleep apnea. And the heart rate variability coincides with stress due to lack of oxygenation during an obstructive flow event. They called it sleep apnea dysautonomia, where the increased heart rate variability alerts the specialist to look for trouble. You go from a parasympathetic predominance with low heart rate while you sleep, to a sympathetic storm due to a micro-awakening while the person struggles to breathe and the heart just starts beating much faster. Definition of pathology: higher heart rate variability of more than 20 beats per minute at night.
As the thorax is trying to pump air inside and is fighting against the obstruction at the level of the throat, the heart gets compressed which stimulates a heart hormone (brain natriuretic peptide) and people with these problems get up at night to pee often since the hormone stimulates urination.
You can see sleep apnea in obese people, whenever the ear-throat-nose area is chronically inflamed, when there are anatomical anomalies where the amygdalas of the throat or the tongue are bigger than normal. You can also see it in people who had chronic upper airway problems when they were children, which made them chronic mouth breathers. That leads to developmental abnormalities of their facial features, which favors sleep apnea within the context of resistance of the upper airway. There's actually a syndrome that reveals their sleeping problems and manifest thus:
It's similar to a POTS (postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome), but mechanical in its origin. You can see a picture of someone who had her anatomical issues corrected by a surgeon:
Sometimes physiotherapy is enough, but sleep disorders and its causes goes a bit beyond the subject of this thread.
In summary, heart rate variability is not necessarily always a sign of good health. It depends on which parameters they used for monitoring and what is the context. As it is, sleep disorder centers are the most advanced for monitoring. Companies like Oura and others have to go to them to test their technology and see if it compares to the scientific standard. One could argue that heart rate variability as a healthy marker of the smart vagus was never meant to indicate pathology as monitored above (which is a super zoomed version of monitoring). Nevertheless, the lack of consensus among scientists of what they're seeing, and the various interpretations, can give rise to confusion.
Last edited:
Breo
The Living Force
Thank you for this very interesting article :) in which you lay out the complexity of HRV, connecting it to sleep research.
I often wondered in what context to put the results of HRV tests. Lately I had the opportunity to participate in a 24h HRV monitoring, to get to know a specific system. It was to be in a general context, to monitor overall stress levels, day and night. The numbers were analyzed by the program, the interpretations also done by the program with additional comments from the tester. It left me confused, as it did not represent my own health situation.
Now I understand that using HRV to only search for pathologies is limiting, that it's much more complex, needs specified clarification of context and knowledge.
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