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What Polyvagal Theory Taught Me about My Own Voice
It started with other people noticing before I did.
Several of them, on separate occasions, had to interject me mid-conversation—speak lower, calm down, why are you shouting?
So I sat down, determined to map every such instance I could recall and find some pattern.
Turned out, it happened more often when I was in conversations with people I have always been comfortable with. This included of course the people closest to me: my family, my best friends, my office colleagues, and sometimes the neighbours. The demographics were clear now. My next step was to look for a common thread across these conversations.
Strangely enough, it happened most frequently when I was conversing on subjects I carried a firm opinion on, but not much credence.
These were precisely the topics the old me would usually stay quiet about either out of lack of confidence, or because I worried my opinion was too strong, too blunt, or might come across as contrarian. I’m talking topics like the “right” age to marry, love, personal choices, judging people’s character, or even world and political affairs.
I began tracking my physical tells too. My posture would shift—hovering, eyes wide, voice rising with an accusatory edge. I desperately wanted to overpower the other person, to project an aura of absolute infallibility. But when I looked at my companions, I watched the illusion shatter. Shock gave way to confusion in their eyes as they searched for the calm person they knew—the real me.
Seeing myself so completely lost to them, I felt deeply abashed.
I grew up being a shy, introverted girl, who had opinions at the back of the throat but never the confidence to say them out aloud. I remember having unspoken convictions about subjects, both trivial and substantial, wishing someone could hear my mind speak what I couldn’t out aloud. Matters so trivial such as saying it wasn’t my fault the vase broke, or the instance when I wanted to defend myself against the allegations my teacher made against me.
Just as neurons bridge together to make sense of our thoughts, I tried to connect these past events with the present, mapping the differences between then and now.
The realization hit me: I am being loud in front of the exact same people or archetypes around whom I used to be submissive and guarded.
The people haven’t changed.
But I have.
And somewhere in that gap lives years of opinions I swallowed, finally finding their way out—loudly, imperfectly, all at once. The science that comes closest to explaining the sudden outbursts sits within American psychologist Stephen Porges’ Polyvagal Theory—and more specifically, a concept called Faulty Neuroception.
Understanding the Polyvagal theory helped me know how my responses work. The vagus nerve acts as a quiet bridge between what we think and how our body responds. And woven into this network is the process of neuroception—a word Porges coined for the subconscious mechanism through which the nervous system continuously scans internal and external environments for cues of safety, danger, or life-threat. When the nervous system picks up one of these cues, the vagus nerve carries it forward.
When it senses danger—real or imagined—the sympathetic nervous system is nudged to kick in. Heart rate goes up. Muscles tense. There’s the familiar fog of anxiety, and the urge to defend. When it senses safety, the vagus nerve does the opposite: it quiets the body down, softens the edges, lets you breathe.
And the vagus nerve doesn’t stop there.
It also runs through a network that controls the muscles of your throat, larynx, and vocal cords. The same system that’s quietly deciding whether you’re safe or threatened is also, in that same moment, shaping how you sound and stand—your tone, your pitch, the tension in your voice and your posture. And it does all of this before you’ve had a single conscious thought about it.
This explains why we suddenly go loud or defensive when communicating our opinions or wants.
But my case has another layer.
What seems to be happening is Faulty Neuroception—where the nervous system misreads the cues. It encounters safety, but processes it as a threat. A neutral expression reads as critical judgement. A soft tone sounds like sarcasm. The room feels charged even when it isn’t. And the response that follows isn’t a conscious action; it’s a reflex. A survival mechanism running on old programming, shaped by past events and memories.
Most of us were never taught that the body keeps a register. That years of silence don’t disappear—they find another way out. That the nervous system doesn’t forget what it learned to fear, even when the fear no longer applies. And that sometimes, what looks like aggression is just a very old wish, finally loud enough to be heard.
Ever since I understood that my volume isn’t a character flaw but a nervous system doing what it was trained to do, I’ve started meeting it differently. I still get loud sometimes. But now, instead of embarrassment, I try to offer myself a breath—and the reminder that the room is safe, even when my body insists otherwise.
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