What happens in Vagus

 Calm down, why don’t you take a deep breath? 

Arguably these are amongst the least effective words in the English language. Why is this the go to line for the helpful/unhelpful advice giver? As with many cliches, it holds a world of truth, and if we get on top of breathing and the scientific literature of how it affects our bodies, and therefore our thoughts , we can use it as an effective tool to become better Agile coaches and professionals (and humans???).

Think about walking down a dark quiet street. You’re minding your own business, mind maybe lost in thought and suddenly you hear a dog sprint up to the other side of the nearest fence and bark at you. If you’re anything like me you jump out your skin, you figuratively (or literally sometimes), shit yourself. Go into that memory. What physically happened at that moment? You’ll perhaps remember increased heart rate and breathing, maybe sweating, a general tingling in your fingers. Probably by just thinking about the experience you might be having some of these physical sensations. 

Why does the body do these things when we know that our chance of being eaten alive by a dog on a suburban street are vanishingly small? Or why do horror films make us so afraid, even though we are sitting comfortably in a cinema with our grandma (who loves horror films)? 

These are all examples of the body’s arousal systems being triggered. The ‘fight or flight’ response has been explained in many places and I won’t pretend to shed new light on it here but I’ll try to summarise the useful bits. Fight or flight describes the set of systems that the body uses to either run away from something, or fight it. It’s characterised by increased adrenaline, which enhances muscle function for that punch or that sprint. Increased breathing supplies more oxygen to those muscles, and an elevated heart rate gets the oxygen to the muscles faster and disposes of waste products.

These effects are controlled by a distinct subset of the nervous system, and in general the systems at play when the body experiences fight or flight are called the Sympathetic Nervous System. It’s about increasing autonomic arousal, preparing the body to survive in the threatening situation that it finds itself in.

Think of the opposite situation - digesting your Christmas meal with your family happily slumped on the sofa. It’s the physiological opposite of the scary dog. Breathing is slow, you feel relaxed, the only sweat is from too much pudding, rather than fear. The set of reactions associated with this ‘Rest and Digest’ state is called the Parasympathetic Nervous System. So Sympathetic - fight or flight, Parasympathetic - Rest and Digest.

The nerve that makes all the difference in turning the ‘oh shit something bad is happening’ visual realisation into a ‘my oxygen and blood filled muscles are now punching this guy in the face’ body response is the vagus nerve. The same is true for the ‘slow down, slump in front the TV and feel relaxed and sleepy’ response. The vagus nerve connects the brain to various parts of the body involved in these autonomic functions. It’s a big deal and influences lots of our biology.

The vagus nerve acts as a brake on many elements of our physiology. It tells the heart rate to slow down and the breathing to be deeper and slower. When the Vagus Nerve is firing, it’s saying ‘relax, everything is ok. Heartate down please, breathing can relax, stomach can digest, everything is ok’. 

So much of our body has a role in either the fight or flight, or rest and digest responses that the vagus nerve needs to be incredibly complicated, and attaches to many different organs - for example the heart, lungs, spleen and liver. When the body senses something that it thinks requires a fight or flight response, one of the things that happens is the inhibition of the vagus nerve. It’s time for action, the body says, no time for this peacenik hippy, rest and digest nonsense.  

A beautiful and incredibly powerful feature of neurobiology is how systems in the body that are designed to work in generic situations help us adapt to specific problems. There’s nothing fundamental in the body that we are born with that knows that a gun is dangerous, and that if someone pulls one out on a train that a good response would be to get off the train sooner rather than later. Instead we learn what a gun looks like, and what it can do. Our bodies then learn to activate a fight or flight response accordingly. We layer on top of that knowledge that in certain contexts a gun-shaped thing is not likely to cause harm (think arcade game or laser quest), and in some contexts it is (most of the others).

If someone pulls a gun on a train, our generic shape detection machinery in the visual cortex of the brain passes information to generic fear-responding amygdala. That passes a cue to the body-regulating hypothalamus to increase the generically oxygen-absorbing and carbon dioxide-disposing lungs to provide resources to the mindlessly contracting and relaxing muscles. In other words our ability to respond appropriately to different stimuli in nature has for a long time been determined by we can process complex data in the ‘higher’, cleverer regions of our brain about what is physically happening in the outside world, and interpret it into an appropriate response in the ‘lower’ parts of our body - our physiological response and the way that our muscles move. This latter response is also called autonomic arousal. The autonomic nervous system is the unconscious nuts and bolts for basic survival including breathing, temperature, heart rate, digestive system. 

For millions of years of our evolution, the world was a dangerous place. Under-react to a potentially dangerous stimulus, and you could get eaten by a lion. Or a mastodon. Or speared by a neighbouring tribe. Reacting more severely to danger was more likely to lead to survival, so we evolved to sense and respond to danger and threat easily. Nowadays in an office environment your chance of being mauled to death is thankfully at its lowest in human history, yet our biological machinery for responding to perceived threat is the same. My assertion here is that when our bodies experience an autonomic arousal inappropriately, we can get ourselves in trouble different ways that make us worse at our jobs. Our body has a fear response to something that is not really dangerous, and that leads us to act in defensive ways inappropriately for example. Therefore learning how to manage this better can make us more effective professionally. 

In an Agile context this often comes up - for me at least - as an urge to control in situations where allowing something to happen is the wise move. When I think about the times I step in as a facilitator and share an opinion where it’s not necessary, it’s often accompanied by a feeling of increased autonomic arousal, probably stemming from a sense that everything isn’t going to be ok as it is. Similarly for the times we struggle to coach someone whom we find difficult, or when we force our agenda on the team at the wrong time. 

Having awareness and control over autonomic arousal is important for any professional, but I’m going to focus on us agilists. Whether we succeed or not is often based on whether we can let go of control, allow something to happen as it is, leave space, have ourselves contradicted. If we succeed it can help our teams to flourish; to express themselves fully; to try things, fail and learn; to try things, succeed and learn. So how can we start on this journey of noticing and harnessing autonomic arousal? 

The answer is simple yet powerful, and that is the breath. 

Breath is a physiological phenomenon which sits at the boundary between conscious and unconscious control. Your vagus nerve tells your lungs how fast to breathe and they do so without you being aware of it, however you also can control your breath on purpose when you turn your attention to it. 

If you doubt the power of breath, try forcing yourself to hyperventilate (if safe for you to do so). By over breathing you can excite yourself, pump full of adrenaline, even hallucinate. The opposite is true also. Long slow out-breaths slow down your nervous system and tell it that everything is ok. This is the main tool that I want you to take away from this article - when we are feeling that autonomic arousal at the wrong time, harness the power of long slow out breaths. 

How does this work? 

 

The key is in the vagus nerve. What makes the vagus nerve so central here is that only 20% of its fibres are giving out instructions from the brain. The other 80% are passing information about the world to different parts of the brain. So if we can tell the vagus nerve that everything is actually ok, we can mediate our body’s response. This is included in the literature of Polyvagal Theory.

When we breathe out, the pressure in the chest increases, which in turn puts physical pressure on the heart and increases pressure in the blood vessels. The heart can sense this and in order to keep the amount of blood flowing healthily, it reduces the heart rate. The vagus nerve then senses that the heart and breathing rate have reduced and takes this as a cue to dial down the sympathetic, fight or flight response. 

It’s really as simple as that - try it now. Take an in-breath for 4 seconds, hold for 7 seconds, breathe out for 8 seconds, and do that five times. Check in with yourself, how do you feel? 

Now try this on your next work day - if you’re finding yourself in a difficult situation where you are getting annoyed, or you feel compelled to do something, pay brief attention to your body. How’s your heart rate? How’s your chest feeling? Any other sensations? Then take a breath, or do a couple of rounds of the 4-7-8 method and see if you still feel compelled to take the same course of action. It’s free, nobody needs to know you’re doing it, and it’s pretty side-effect free. 

We often think that our thoughts originate in our brains, and then go out and make our bodies do things. What if it’s the other way around sometimes? What if our bodies sense things happening below our conscious control and have a physiological response, which then influences which kind of thoughts we have? Our work is knowledge work, which means that how good we are is largely limited to the thoughts we have at work. Learning how emotions and then thoughts arise gives us another set of tools to have a richer and more grounded approach.  

To be more specific, if we can consciously control the vagus nerve - which controls these autonomic responses - we can have more control over the kinds of thoughts and temperaments we take into our work. 

This article is about how this autonomic nervous system relates to agile so a couple of thought experiments to finish off a rather technical and science-mechanism-heavy post.

You’re facilitating a retrospective. You know that your job is to shut up and leave space for the team to talk after asking some probing questions. The conversation is flowing, but someone suggests moving away from Scrum or not finishing the sprint with a finished increment or whatever you think isn’t a good idea for the team. You suddenly feel the impulse to give them the ‘agile’ answer. Otherwise what are you even here for right? If the team becomes ‘less agile’ you’ll look silly or you’ll feel like you’ve failed them. Upon noticing that you want to jump in you take a moment to observe what’s going on in your body. Maybe your pulse is raised, your breathing is shorter. You take a deep inhale, and a deep exhale and let the moment sit. You choose whether it is the right idea to intervene or not. Is your response the same? 

You’re coaching someone one on one. They are complaining about their line manager and saying how stuck they feel and how they can’t get their work done and you just know that you have the right answer that will definitely solve all their problems. If only they knew! Why don’t I tell them what to do?! Aha but you remember that a good coach will help the client explore with questions and observations, and not really with advice. So you take a moment - what’s happening in your body when you want to jump in with advice? You’re probably getting some small fight/flight response. Breathe in for 4, hold for 7, out for 8. Can you now think of a better coaching question to help your partner client now?

 You’re running some Agile training. You’ve run a banging scrum simulation with tennis balls and marshmallows and your slides are on point and you’ve delivered it with calm slow articulate precision. Good job. Now some joker from some other side of the organisation smugly says ‘well that’s all very well for software but our work doesn’t flow like that and scrum couldn’t work for my team’. So you feel the blood rising and you want to throw your tennis balls at them - ‘don’t undermine me!’ you want to yell, but you know that’s probably not right. So you notice what’s going on in your body. Are you possibly having a defensive response? Is the adrenaline up and your body coming to the defence of the Scrum Guide? If so, take that deep breath, exhale slowly, and see if a better response comes to mind when you can calm your body’s reaction to fight. ‘That’s interesting - tell me about how your team works and we can see what of this makes sense for your context’. 

That’s all for now. I’m really keen to hear what this brings up for you and what you think I got right and what I didn’t. Happy breathing!

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