Your Nervous System is Running the Show. Here’s What That Means for You.

Before you think your next thought, before you make your next decision, before you walk into a room and decide whether you feel comfortable or not, your nervous system has already voted.

This is not metaphor. This is biology. And understanding it might be one of the most useful things you do for your mental health, your relationships, and the way you move through the world.

What is Polyvagal Theory?

Polyvagal Theory (PVT) was developed by neuroscientist Dr Stephen Porges in the early 1990s. At its core, it is a framework for understanding how your autonomic nervous system (ANS) regulates your physiological responses, your emotional states, and your social behaviour, particularly in relation to safety, connection, and stress.

The ANS operates largely outside of conscious awareness. Its primary job is simple: keep you alive. It is constantly scanning your internal and external environment for signals of safety or threat, and responding accordingly. What Porges discovered is that this scanning process happens via the vagus nerve, a long, winding nerve that connects the brain to the heart, lungs, and gut and that the responses it generates follow a very specific hierarchy.

The Three States

PVT describes three distinct states the nervous system moves between, each associated with a different level of perceived safety.

The first and most evolved is the ventral vagal state. This is where you feel safe, connected, and regulated. You can think clearly, engage warmly with others, access humour, creativity, and curiosity. This is the state where healing happens and relationships deepen.

The second is the sympathetic state. The familiar fight or flight response. When the nervous system detects threat, it mobilises. Heart rate increases, muscles activate, attention narrows. This state is designed for survival, not connection. In modern life, it shows up as anxiety, reactivity, irritability, and the sense of being constantly on edge.

The third and most primitive is the dorsal vagal state: freeze or shutdown. When threat feels overwhelming and inescapable, the nervous system conserves energy by shutting down. This can look like numbness, disconnection, depression, or a sense of going through the motions without really being present.

None of these states is a character flaw. They are adaptive responses, shaped by your history and your nervous system’s best attempt to keep you safe.

Neuroception: the body votes before the mind knows

Porges coined the term “neuroception” to describe the process by which the nervous system detects safety and threat without conscious input. It is happening constantly, below the level of awareness, reading cues from faces, voices, posture, tone, and the environment.

This is why you can walk into a room and feel uneasy without being able to explain why. It is why certain relationships feel safe and others feel draining before a word has been spoken. Your nervous system is not waiting for your brain to catch up, it is already responding.

In a therapy context, this matters enormously. A therapist saying “this is a safe space” does not make a client feel safe. Safety is not a cognitive decision. It is a physiological experience, built slowly through consistency, predictability, and genuine attunement. This is why the therapeutic relationship itself is not incidental to the work, it is the work.

Co-regulation: why connection is not optional

PVT makes a powerful case that humans are wired for connection, not as a preference, but as a biological necessity. The concept of co-regulation describes how one person’s regulated nervous system can help another person’s system settle. It is why a calm presence genuinely changes how someone feels. Why a well-timed tone of voice can shift a heated moment. Why sitting with someone who is steady when you are not can be profoundly regulating in itself.

Co-regulation begins at birth. The way a caregiver responds to an infant, through facial expressions, voice, touch, and eye contact, shapes how that child’s nervous system learns to recognise safety and engage socially. These early experiences create templates that continue to influence how we connect, how we respond to conflict, and how safe we feel in relationships throughout our lives.

This is not about blame. It is about understanding. And understanding creates the possibility of change.

What this looks like in the therapy room

Polyvagal-informed therapy works with the nervous system directly, not just the mind. Rather than asking a client to think differently about their experience, it starts by helping them become aware of their physiological state, where they are on the autonomic ladder at any given moment and building the capacity to move between states with more flexibility and choice.

This might look like breathwork to activate the ventral vagal response and shift out of fight or flight. It might look like tracking bodily sensations during a session to notice when the nervous system begins to brace. It might look like using the therapeutic relationship itself as a vehicle for co-regulation, a lived experience of safety that gradually expands a client’s capacity to tolerate, process, and connect.

Psychoeducation is also a central tool. When clients understand why they shut down, why they react, why certain situations or people send their system into overdrive, the shame lifts. The behaviour is no longer a sign of weakness or dysfunction. It is a nervous system doing exactly what it learned to do. And from that place of understanding, something shifts.

Research supports what clinicians are observing. Studies show that integrating somatic and non-verbal awareness into therapy can accelerate positive outcomes beyond talk therapy alone (Giroux et al., 2023). Mindfulness-based approaches that activate the ventral vagal pathway promote mental, social, and physical wellbeing (Poli et al., 2021). And understanding the ANS gives therapists a framework to work within a client’s window of tolerance, knowing when to press forward and when to return to stabilisation (Bailey et al., 2020).

Why this matters beyond the therapy room

You do not need to be in therapy to benefit from understanding your nervous system. Knowing that your body responds before your brain catches up and that those responses are adaptive, not broken, changes how you relate to yourself. It builds self-compassion. It creates space between stimulus and reaction. And it opens up the possibility of doing things differently, not by forcing change through willpower, but by working with your biology rather than against it.

The nervous system is not fixed. It is responsive. With the right conditions, safety, consistency, attunement, and practice, it can learn new ways of being. New ways of connecting. New ways of coming back to yourself.

That is what this work is about.

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Jodi Frizzel is a psychotherapist and coach working with individuals ready to make real shifts in how they live, learn and relate. To explore working together, visit innerworkings.au

References

Bailey, R., Dana, D., Bailey, E., & Davis, F. (2020). The application of the Polyvagal theory to high conflict co-parenting cases. Family Court Review, 58(2), 525–543.

Dana, D. (2023). Polyvagal practices: Anchoring the self in safety. W. W. Norton & Company.

Flores, P. J., & Porges, S. W. (2017). Group psychotherapy as a neural exercise: Bridging Polyvagal Theory and attachment theory. International Journal of Group Psychotherapy, 67(2), 202–222.

Giroux, C., Ahlers, D., & Miawotoe, A. (2023). Polyvagal approaches: Scientifically questionable but useful in practice. Journal of Psychiatry Reform, 10(11).

Mair, H. (2021). Attachment safety in psychotherapy. Counselling and Psychotherapy Research, 21(3), 710–718.

Music, G. (2014). Attachment, our brains, nervous systems, and hormones. In P. Holmes & S. Farnfield (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of attachment: Theory (pp. 127–147). Taylor and Francis.

Poli, A., Gemignani, A., Soldani, F., & Miccoli, M. (2021). A systematic review of a polyvagal perspective on embodied contemplative practices as promoters of cardiorespiratory coupling and traumatic stress recovery for PTSD and OCD. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 18(22), 11778.

Porges, S. W. (2022). Polyvagal Theory: A science of safety. Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience, 16, 871227.

Porges, S. W. (2021). Polyvagal Theory: A biobehavioral journey to sociality. Comprehensive Psychoneuroendocrinology, 7, 100069.

Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. W.W. Norton.

Ryland, S., Johnson, L. N., & Bernards, J. C. (2022). Honoring protective responses: Reframing resistance in therapy using Polyvagal Theory. Contemporary Family Therapy, 44(3), 267–275.