If you've ever been told that your anxiety is 'just in your head', you probably already know that doesn't feel quite right. The racing heart, the tight chest, the sense of dread that arrives before you've even had a conscious thought — these aren't imaginary. They're physical. They're happening in your body, not just your mind.
Polyvagal theory offers a way to understand why. It explains the biological machinery behind anxiety, why certain situations trigger responses that feel completely out of proportion, and — crucially — why telling yourself to 'calm down' so often doesn't work.
As a polyvagal-informed therapist, I use this framework as a foundation for the work I do with clients. In this post I want to explain what polyvagal theory actually is, in plain language, and what understanding it can change.
The old model — and why it's incomplete
Most of us learned a simple version of the nervous system at school: the 'fight-or-flight' response. When danger is perceived, your body floods with adrenaline, your heart rate climbs, your muscles tense. You're ready to act.
This is real, and it's important. But it's only part of the picture.
The fight-or-flight model tells us there are two states: activated (stressed) and calm. What it doesn't explain is why some people freeze completely under pressure. Why some people dissociate — feeling absent from their own body, disconnected, flat. Why anxiety can feel like high-alert panic one moment and crushing numbness the next. And why, for many people, the 'calm' state never quite arrives even when the threat has passed.
This is where polyvagal theory comes in.
What polyvagal theory actually says
Polyvagal theory was developed by neuroscientist Dr Stephen Porges in the 1990s. The name refers to the vagus nerve — the longest nerve in the body, running from the brainstem down through the heart, lungs, and gut. 'Poly' refers to the fact that this nerve has multiple branches, each associated with a different state of the nervous system.
Porges identified three distinct states, arranged in a hierarchy. Think of them as three gears your nervous system can shift between, depending on what it perceives about your safety.
| The three states of the nervous system
1. Ventral vagal — safe and connected This is the optimal state. You feel calm, present, and able to engage with the world around you. You can think clearly, listen well, and connect with other people. Your face is animated, your voice has warmth and range. This is the state therapy aims to help you access more of the time.
2. Sympathetic — fight or flight Mobilisation. Your nervous system has detected a threat — real or perceived — and is preparing you to act. Heart rate rises, breathing quickens, muscles tense. Anxiety lives here. So does anger, urgency, and the sense that something is wrong even when you can't name it. The problem is that this state can be triggered by things that aren't actually dangerous — a difficult email, a crowded room, a memory.
3. Dorsal vagal — shutdown and freeze When the threat feels overwhelming and there's no way to fight or flee, the nervous system shifts into a conserve-energy mode. This is the freeze response. It can feel like numbness, disconnection, exhaustion, or a sense of being absent from your own life. Depression often has a strong dorsal vagal quality. People sometimes describe it as 'going through the motions' — present physically, but not really there. |
The critical insight from polyvagal theory is this: your nervous system is constantly scanning for cues of safety or threat — not consciously, but automatically.
Porges calls this process neuroception — a below-conscious detection system that is making judgments about your environment faster than your thinking brain can process. This is why you can feel anxious without knowing why. Your nervous system has already decided something is unsafe before your conscious mind has caught up.
Why this matters for anxiety
Understanding polyvagal theory changes the way you relate to anxiety — and that shift matters.
Anxiety is usually experienced as a problem with thoughts. You think too much, worry too much, catastrophise. The common response — from well-meaning friends and from older therapeutic models — is to try to change the thinking. Challenge the thought. Ask yourself if it's rational. Tell yourself you're safe.
The problem is that by the time your nervous system has already shifted into a threat state, your thinking brain is working in service of the alarm, not against it. Telling yourself 'I'm fine' while your body is running a full threat response is a bit like trying to read quietly in a burning building. The information is there, but your body isn't listening.
Polyvagal theory suggests a different approach: work with the body first.
If the nervous system can be helped to detect safety — through breath, through movement, through the presence of a calm other person, through sound — the threat response begins to downregulate. The thinking brain becomes accessible again. The thoughts change not because you forced them to, but because the physiological state shifted underneath them.
This is why, in sessions, we don't just talk about anxiety. We work with what's happening in the body. We notice sensations, work with breathing patterns, and pay attention to what helps you feel safer — not as a cognitive exercise, but as a bodily one.
What keeps people stuck in anxiety
One of the most important ideas in polyvagal theory is that the nervous system learns. Repeated experiences of threat, especially in childhood or in relationships, can train the neuroception system to detect danger everywhere — even in situations that are objectively safe.
This is why some people find it hard to relax even on holiday, or feel on edge in a meeting even though nothing is wrong, or become anxious in close relationships where they are genuinely loved and safe. The nervous system has been calibrated to high alert. That calibration is protective — it made sense once. But it can outlive its usefulness and become the source of suffering rather than safety.
Polyvagal-informed therapy works to gradually recalibrate this. Not through insight alone — though insight matters — but through repeated experiences of safety, within the therapeutic relationship and beyond it.
What this looks like in practice
You don't need to understand polyvagal theory to benefit from it. But for many clients, having a framework that makes sense of their experience — that explains why they respond the way they do, without blaming them for it — is itself a significant part of getting better.
Common ways polyvagal-informed work shows up in sessions:
- Noticing which state you're in, and what shifts you between them
- Learning to recognise your personal 'cues' — the things that signal safety or threat to your nervous system
- Working with breath, movement, and the body as primary tools, not afterthoughts
- Understanding why connection with another person is itself regulating — and why isolation amplifies anxiety
- For some clients, exploring the Safe and Sound Protocol (SSP), an evidence-based audio programme that directly targets the nervous system's threat-detection pathways
The goal isn't to eliminate the nervous system's protective responses — they exist for good reason. The goal is to widen the window of tolerance: the range of experience within which you can function, engage, and connect, without tipping into threat mode.
A note on the science
Polyvagal theory has been both influential and debated in academic circles. Some aspects of Porges' original neuroanatomical claims have been challenged and refined. As with many frameworks in psychology and neuroscience, the science continues to develop.
What I can say, from my work with clients, is that the model is practically useful. It gives clients a language for experiences that often feel nameless and overwhelming. It shifts the story from 'there's something wrong with me' to 'my nervous system learned to respond this way for a reason' — and that shift in itself tends to reduce shame and increase the possibility of change.
If this resonates with you
If you recognise something of yourself in what you've read here — the chronic sense of threat, the inability to switch off, the moments of shutdown or disconnection — please know that these experiences are workable. They're not character flaws or signs of weakness. They're responses that made sense once, and that can change with the right support.
I offer a free initial consultation for anyone considering therapy. It's a 20-minute, no-obligation conversation about what's going on for you and whether working together makes sense.
You can reach me at [email protected] or on 07368 155826.
Martin Truscott | Dip CST & Prof.DipPsy.C | NCPS Accredited | Polyvagal-Informed Practitioner
Three Oaks Therapy | Broughton Gate, Milton Keynes | threeoakstherapy.co.uk
The header image for this post was created using an AI image tool. I liked it because it captures something of the English countryside calm that polyvagal theory points toward — that sense of safety that lets the nervous system settle.