#11 - Wandering around Vagus - December 2023

Identifying Signals of Survival Dorsal aka Shutdown/ Collapse

Welcome to Month 11 of Wandering Around Vagus, a paid monthly subscription series exploring the Vagus Nerve + Polyvagal Theory.

I’m Tina Foster of Foster & Flourish, the creator and guide of Wandering Around Vagus.

A few quick notes to help you orient within our pages:

• If you’re new, or need a review, here’s the link to the START page.

• You can find last month’s post (our tenth) on visualizing and inhabiting the regulated sympathetic landscape here.

• Monthly & Supplementary Posts + Recordings can be accessed by topic from the navigation bar atop the Wandering Around Vagus Homepage.

• All past posts live on the archive page.​

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What we’ll do this month

This month, we're back to exploring the dorsal state, the most withdrawn and quiet state in the vagus nerve's autonomic hierarchy. This hierarchy is designed to move us through three basic states in response to our environment and the situations we’re in from moment to moment.

In our previous spotlight on dorsal, we covered both sides of the dorsal vagal spectrum: regulated dorsal (the calm and cozy "rest and digest" state) and survival dorsal (the more extreme state of shutdown/ collapse). Our practice last time focused on the regulated, rest and digest end, so this month we're delving into the survival dorsal or shutdown/collapse side that we enter as a respite from overwhelming degrees of fight-or-flight.

We’ll also have the chance to understand how our individual nervous system signals that it’s transitioning into survival dorsal to protect itself from the stress of fight-or-flight.

(NOTE: From here on, we'll refer to shutdown, collapse, and all responses at the overwhelm and "emergency" end of the dorsal vagal spectrum as "survival dorsal" for simplicity.)

By the end of this 11 minute audio you’ll have a better sense of:

• what survival dorsal does, the role it plays in life

• how it feels to be in survival dorsal

• how the survival dorsal state signals that it’s being activated

• what hypoarousal is + its relationship to survival dorsal

• which people, events, environments and experiences in our own lives tend to take us into survival dorsal

• patterns that emerge in survival dorsal, how we might react to them (and maybe even shift them) so we avoid collapsing at less appropriate times

First, we’ll review the basics of survival dorsal and how it takes us out of stressful situations in order to preserve our nervous system and energy.

In practice, we'll examine how survival dorsal operates within our own life and body—identifying when it occurs and the associated sensations. Understanding our personal signals and patterns related to survival dorsal gives us insight into how our nervous system manages fight-or-flight overwhelm, disengages from stressful situations and transitions into survival dorsal.