"One of my favorite things about our respective tenth cranial nerves (the vagus nerve, which wanders from your brainstem up into your face and down through your throat, into your chest cavity, around your vital organs, all the way to your rectum) is that you can so vividly picture the vagus-to-vagus contact of a parent or caregiver and their baby. You're holding that baby to your chest, where they can feel your heartbeat,"
"and your arms and your heart and your eye gaze are connecting all along your baby's vagal trajectory. You are neurobiologically tuning yourselves to each other. Which has got to be magical (and possibly also sometimes very fatiguing if or when one or both of you are sleepy, hungry, cranky, or having pain you can't describe). So when your child is out there on the field of play, and their face shows distress or their vocal tone indicates frustration, fatigue, or hurt, your nervous system is going to alert you in any number of ways."
Human beings possess social nervous systems and feel one another's physiological activation. The vagus nerve creates vagus-to-vagus contact between caregiver and infant, enabling neurobiological tuning through heartbeat, touch, and eye gaze. That tuning can be restorative and also fatiguing when caregivers are tired, hungry, or in pain. When a child shows distress during play, a caregiver's nervous system will register that and may shift into fight-or-flight or other activation patterns. Caregivers can access somatic reset strategies similar to those used by athletes to restore regulation, and a regulated caregiver state can help induce regulation in others.
Read at Psychology Today
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