What is Polyvagal Theory?

Polyvagal theory is based on what we understand about one of the big nerves that come out of the brain, the vagus nerve.

The vagus nerve is called the wandering nerve because of how long it is and its far reaches throughout the body. The vagus nerve is responsible for a state of being termed rest and digest and the social engagement system. A lot of people have heard of the flight, fight or freeze mechanism but not so many rest and digest and even less the social engagement system but this is what the poly vagal theory is in reference to.

Fight, flight or freeze

Back in the day when our biggest threat was surviving predators an unconscious system was hard wired in to our body to respond unconsciously, in a way without thinking to run, fight or freeze to give us the best chance of survival. So image the tiger coming to get us. All functions not required to escape the tiger are moved down in priority. So digestion, sleeping are down regulated, the digestive juices turned off and blood flow redirected to muscles, heart and lungs for running or fighting.

Relaxation cue in progress

We either escape the tiger or get eaten.

Rest and digest

We escaped the tiger, we found a cave or tree and we live to fight another day. Our body relaxes. We are safe to eat, safe to sleep. We can recharge and be ready for the next time we have to fight the tiger.

So why is this important in training?

1.      Our horses are prey animals and primed for flight. They unconsciously react to their environment, the snap of a twig, the rustle of the leaves like it could be hiding a tiger.

2.      We don’t want them to think WE are the tiger!

What often ends up happening in training is that trainers toggle from relaxation up to flight and back down to relaxation. We don’t want our horses so relaxed they are asleep but we don’t want them spooking at every noise, every rustle and bolting with blind flight.

So trainers use tools to spook reactivity and then calm the horse and then spook reactivity and then calm the horse. Think flags and join up.

Or they pick the fight and then win the fight and then pick the fight and then win the fight. Think submission based training, push them through it, make sure they know you are boss.

Or they flood the horses nervous system so that they go in to freeze, shut down or dissociative state. Think desensitisation, sacking the horse out or bucking them out.

But there is another option. And that option is our social engagement system. Poly vagal theory is mostly about the social engagement system.

What is the social engagement system?

It is a branch of the nervous system that lights up our facial expression. It is also responsible for self expression and reception of verbal communication, guiding the rhythm and tone of your speech. It enhances your ability to listen to other allowing you to pick up on emotional nuances within communication. The vagus nerve also links the heart to the muscles of your face increasing your empathic engagement in responses.

So think about going out to dinner with friends. You’re relaxed but you’re not asleep. You have energy, self expression and engage in conversation with your friends. It feels good, you connect. We are upregulating the nervous energy with social engagement. Being around people we enjoy.

We can bring this to the training environment. We don’t have to upregulate our horses nervous energy through fear we can unregulate their nervous energy by doing things they and enjoy and being someone they enjoy being around.

And this is what we do in our Holistic Horse Handling Program.

We learn how to watch and read our horses body language to be able to tell what part of the horses nervous system is unconsciously triggered or activated in response to our lesson plan and we work to first get them downregulated in to a deep state of relaxation and then upregulate with games and focus in to work with an immense sense of task achievement (aka dopamine hits).

I find that engaging our horse in training this way is the best way to get true willingness and get a horse that enjoys learning, knows how to look after their human and asks to be ridden.

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