Vagus nerve and the three defensive states

Why do so many high achievers secretly struggle with anxiety, burnout, and overwhelm? Dr. Elizabeth Stanley, Army veteran, Georgetown professor, and author of Widen the Window, joins Michael Hyatt to explain the hidden science behind stress and resilience. Drawing on her personal story of trauma, her background in the military, and her training in somatic therapy, Elizabeth reveals why talk therapy alone often falls short—and how body-based practices can change everything. This conversation is honest, practical, and deeply hopeful for anyone who feels stuck in patterns of stress.

Memorable Quotes

1. “We're all in it together and we're all experiencing the particular lawful ways that this human mind and body works in this particular poly-crisis world. Of course, people are struggling. It's kind of why it's my passion to help people understand ‘You're not alone in this.’”
2. “We are wired organically to be able to mobilize the energy to manage a crisis or a stressful situation, and then recover. Our ancestors that shared the same wiring that we have did not have 24/7 constant activation and constant demands the way that we do in modern life today.”
3. “The science term there is allostatic load, and the more our stress load grows, the less capacity we have in our mind and body to meet the next challenge, so that it becomes a bit of a vicious cycle, and we know that we're on the edge of our window or outside of our window of tolerance.”
4. “We are built so that we learn the downregulation through the soothing we receive from our parents and other early caregivers. And that presumes that our early caregivers and parents were regulated enough to do that for us.”
5. “If we're redirecting it somewhere that the survival brain perceives as safe, that actually starts conditioning. A process that makes the system move back in the way that we're organically built, which is to go through stress and recover naturally.”
6. “When we don't perceive agency, when we feel powerless or helpless, that actually leads to higher levels of arousal and it really resolidifies the prior conditioning. So being able to access that choice point is really critical in beginning to shift it.”
7. “If our parents had narrowed windows, if they were coping with a lot of stress and trauma, or if they were absent, if they had mental illness or they were incarcerated, they aren't able to help us wire those things. It's one of the ways that narrowed windows get transmitted intergenerationally and why trauma can become intergenerational.”

Key Takeaways

1. You’re Not Broken. Chronic anxiety and overwhelm are signs of dysregulation, not defects. They’re the evidence of what you’ve walked through—but don’t determine what’s ahead.
2. Your Body Knows the Way. Healing starts by listening to the signals of your nervous system. The key is not to minimize our reactions, but to listen and practice strategies that help us return to baseline.
3. Talk Therapy Isn’t Enough. True healing requires engaging the body and nervous system. Trauma-informed, body-based therapy can lead to breakthroughs when just thinking and talking isn’t enough.
4. Agency Is Key. Learning to notice choice points rewires the brain toward safety. The quickest way out of powerlessness is regaining a sense of agency.
5. Resilience Can Be Trained. Simple, repeated practices expand your “window of tolerance.” It takes time and intention, but you can widen your window.

Resources

• Widen the Window by Elizabeth Stanley
• Elizabeth Stanley’s Mindfulness-Based Mind Fitness Training (MMFT)

Watch on Youtube at:  https://youtu.be/Z607BPgbxi4

This episode was produced by Sarah Vorhees Wendel of VW Sound