There is a story we inherit about stress and the body. It goes something like this: when things get hard, your body has two modes. Fight or flight. And if you do not learn to calm down, you end up living in fight-or-flight, and that is what anxiety is.
That story is not wrong, exactly. It is just much too small.
Three states, not two
The modern polyvagal picture (Porges, 2022) describes at least three distinct autonomic states, each with its own purpose and its own inner texture. The underlying neurophysiology was worked out across several decades by Porges (2011) and has since been translated for clinicians by Dana (2018, 2021).
The first state is social engagement. When you feel it, your breath is easy, your face is expressive, your voice has pitch variation, and other people seem interesting rather than threatening. You can think about more than one thing at a time. You can rest without feeling unsafe. The part of the nervous system that supports this state is often called "ventral vagal" in the literature -- a particular branch of the vagus nerve that wires up to your face, voice and heart in a coordinated way (Porges, 2022).
The second state is mobilisation. This is the classic fight-or-flight picture. Your heart rate climbs, your muscles tighten, your attention narrows, your gut slows down (Kolacz et al., 2019). From the inside, it often feels like pressure, urgency, anger, or the need to go faster, harder, or louder. This state is not a malfunction; it is your body trying to handle something that feels too big to simply think about.
The third state is immobilisation. This one is often missed. In the old two-state picture, it has no home. But most people who live with trauma, chronic stress, or complex depression know this state intimately (van der Kolk, 2014; Levine, 2010). It is the flat, empty, heavy, disconnected feeling. The sense that the volume on life has been turned down. Many people notice it most in the aftermath of something overwhelming.
Your body is trying to keep you safe
One way to understand each of these states is as a different strategy your body uses when it scans the room (or the phone call, or the email, or the childhood memory) and decides what it needs.
From a depth-psychology perspective, none of these states are character flaws. They are very old, very honest responses to what your system perceives as safe, dangerous, or impossible (Porges & Dana, 2018).
This perception happens largely below the level of deliberate thought. Porges calls it neuroception -- the nervous system's ongoing background scan of whether this room, this tone of voice, this posture, this silence, is safe enough to stay soft in. Neuroception does not ask your opinion. It just changes your state.
That is why you can know a meeting is fine and still feel your shoulders climb. Your cortex read the calendar. Your nervous system is reading something else.
What this looks like in ordinary life
Research suggests that most days contain more state changes than we notice (Dana, 2021). A typical sequence for many adults might go:
- Waking up with a small hum of mobilisation (there are things to do).
- Easing into social engagement over coffee or conversation.
- Climbing back into mobilisation during a hard meeting or a tense email.
- Dipping into immobilisation mid-afternoon when a blood-sugar dip or a disappointing piece of news lands.
- Finding social engagement again over dinner -- or not, depending.
The goal is not to live exclusively in social engagement. That is a brittle aspiration, and it is not how a living nervous system works. The goal is flexibility -- the capacity to move between states in a way that fits what is actually happening, rather than being stuck in one. Thayer and Lane (2009) and Kok and Fredrickson (2010) both describe this flexibility, measured as vagal tone, as a structural resource that widens or narrows over time.
The window of tolerance
Clinicians often use a simple image for this flexibility: the window of tolerance (Siegel, 2020; Ogden et al., 2006). Your window is the range of activation inside which you can still think, feel, and respond. Outside the window, above it, you are in mobilisation you cannot step out of; below it, you are in immobilisation that does not lift.
For most people, the window is wider on some days than others. Sleep, hunger, connection, physical movement, and the felt presence of safe others all widen it. Accumulated stress and isolation narrow it (McEwen, 2017).
Many people notice that their "default" window is not symmetrical. Some find it easier to fall out the top into mobilisation; others are more likely to fall out the bottom into immobilisation. Neither is better. Both are information (Kain & Terrell, 2018).
What this changes
When you know the three states, a number of things stop making sense as problems and start making sense as signals.
The afternoon crash is not laziness. It is a state change.
The hair-trigger temper in traffic is not who you are. It is your nervous system firing higher than the situation needs because your window is narrower than usual this week.
The flat numbness after a hard phone call is not "I do not care." It is your system dropping into immobilisation while it processes.
You do not have to agree with any of this cognitively for it to be useful. You only have to notice it. Naming the state you are in -- silently, to yourself -- is already a small move back into social engagement, because it requires the part of you that can observe.
A gentle place to begin
If this way of looking at things is new, you might consider spending a week just noticing. Not fixing, not analysing, not changing. Noticing.
Three times a day, pause for ten seconds and ask: What state am I in right now? Social engagement, mobilisation, or immobilisation. You do not have to get it right. The noticing is the practice.
Some people find it useful to write down one moment per day where a state change was particularly clear -- what happened in the minute before, and what happened in the minute after. Over a week, a pattern often shows up. The pattern is information about where your window is narrow, and about what widens it for you in particular.
None of this is a replacement for individualised clinical care, and for some people, these states are not just passing visitors but old residents that have been there a long time. If what you are noticing feels too heavy to sit with on your own, that is useful information too.
This is educational writing, not a substitute for individualised clinical care in a therapeutic relationship. If the reflection here raises material you would like to sit with in more depth, please seek professional support.