I understand the appeal. When you’re watching a child shut down over homework, or an adult freeze in front of a task they know how to do, you want an explanation that makes sense of what you’re seeing. Polyvagal theory offers one. It also offers language that feels kinder than “lazy,” “oppositional,” or “not trying.” That shift matters.

But I’ve become increasingly uncomfortable with how often the language is presented as established physiology. I’m a developmental researcher and an executive function specialist. In my work, I see what stress can do to planning, initiation, working memory, and flexibility. I don’t need convincing that a person’s state affects what they can do. What I do need is a good reason to accept a particular account of why that happens.

The part I can’t get past

Polyvagal theory is often taught as though the nervous system moves among distinct “ventral vagal,” sympathetic, and “dorsal vagal” states, each with its own behavioral meaning. It’s a compelling story. The problem is that important parts of that story are disputed by researchers who study the relevant anatomy and physiology.

This isn’t a new disagreement. Grossman and Taylor (2007) questioned key claims about respiratory sinus arrhythmia and vagal tone years ago. More recently, a group of 39 researchers published an extensive critique arguing that the theory’s central physiological claims are not supported (Grossman et al., 2026). Porges (2026) has responded that critics have mischaracterized his theory. Readers should know that response exists.

Three issues stand out to me. First, respiratory sinus arrhythmia—the way heart rate changes with breathing—is not a straightforward gauge of “vagal tone” in the way it is sometimes described. A 2025 expert recommendation even proposed clearer terminology to avoid that inference (Menuet et al., 2025). Second, the evolutionary narrative is difficult to square with comparative evidence of similar cardiorespiratory patterns in other vertebrates (Taylor et al., 2022). Third, the vagal anatomy doesn’t neatly divide into the two behavioral systems often shown in diagrams (Neuhuber & Berthoud, 2022).

None of this means that people aren’t experiencing real changes in arousal, attention, or behavior. It means the tidy map may not be an accurate map of the underlying biology. And that distinction matters when we explain an intervention to a family.

Why the ideas still resonate

One thing polyvagal language has done well is give people a way to look at difficult behavior without immediately assigning blame. A child who melts down during a transition may be overwhelmed, not deliberately difficult. Someone who can’t start a task may need support, not another lecture about motivation.

I want to keep that shift. I just don’t think it belongs exclusively to polyvagal theory. Developmental science has long emphasized responsive caregiving, co-regulation, stress, and the importance of context. Those ideas stand on their own; they don’t become more credible because we attach a specific vagal explanation to them (Grossman et al., 2026).

What this looks like in executive function coaching

A familiar situation in my work: someone talks through a plan with me and understands it completely. They know what the assignment requires. They can name the first three steps. Then the deadline gets close, anxiety rises, and they can’t begin.

I don’t find it helpful to tell that person their nervous system has entered a particular vagal state. I’m more interested in what has changed about the demands on their attention and working memory. We have substantial evidence that acute stress can disrupt prefrontal functions involved in planning, working memory, and flexible thinking (Arnsten, 2009). That explanation gives me something concrete to work with.

Maybe we open the document together and write one imperfect sentence. Maybe I take the sequence of steps out of their head and put it on paper. Maybe we remove decisions, build a predictable routine, take a short movement break, or sit alongside them while they get started. I’m not claiming every strategy works for everyone. I want to see whether it actually helps this person do the thing they’re trying to do.

That’s one reason I’m cautious about explanations that sound complete before we’ve even observed what works. The language can make us feel like we understand a problem when we’ve only renamed it.

What I ask about programs built around the theory

Families sometimes ask me about interventions marketed using polyvagal concepts, including the Safe and Sound Protocol. I don’t dismiss a family’s report that something helped. If a child is less distressed by sound or finds an experience calming, that’s worth taking seriously.

At the same time, a positive experience is not the same as strong evidence for the intervention—or for the theory used to market it. A controlled study of an earlier listening protocol reported preliminary improvements in auditory sensitivity among autistic children (Porges et al., 2014). A later review discussed promising applications but also called for larger controlled trials (Gitler et al., 2025). That’s a reason for measured curiosity, not certainty.

Clinical treatment decisions belong with the family’s qualified providers. My role is to help families think clearly about the claims they’re hearing. I usually want to know: What evidence is there for this particular intervention? What specific change are we hoping to see, and over what period? How will we know if it’s helping? And what are the costs—not only financial, but in time and energy that could go toward something else?

Those questions aren’t hostile. They’re the same questions I’d ask about any intervention, whether or not I liked the theory behind it.

Where I’ve landed

I don’t think we need to throw away every useful practice that has been associated with polyvagal theory. I also don’t think we should keep repeating a physiological explanation simply because it gives people a reassuring story.

For me, the standard is straightforward: be compassionate about what people experience, careful about what the science actually establishes, and willing to change course when the evidence changes. If connection, predictability, reduced demands, or practical scaffolding help someone function better, that’s worth knowing. We can keep what works without pretending we know more about the vagus nerve than we do.

References

Arnsten, A. F. T. (2009). Stress signalling pathways that impair prefrontal cortex structure and function. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10(6), 410–422. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn2648

Gitler, A., Bar Yosef, Y., Kotzer, U., & Levine, A. D. (2025). Harnessing non-invasive vagal neuromodulation: HRV biofeedback and SSP for cardiovascular and autonomic regulation (Review). Medicine International, 5(4), 37. https://doi.org/10.3892/mi.2025.236

Grossman, P., Ackland, G. L., Allen, A. M., Berntson, G. G., Booth, L. C., Burghardt, G. M., Buron, J., Dinets, V., Doody, J. S., Dutschmann, M., Farmer, D. G. S., Fisher, J. P., Gourine, A. V., Joyner, M. J., Karemaker, J. M., Khalsa, S. S., Lakatta, E. G., Leite, C. A. C., Macefield, V. G., ... Zucker, I. H. (2026). Why the polyvagal theory is untenable: An international expert evaluation of the polyvagal theory and commentary upon Porges, S. W. (2025). Polyvagal theory: Current status, clinical applications, and future directions. Clinical Neuropsychiatry, 23(1), 100–112. https://doi.org/10.36131/cnfioritieditore20260110

Grossman, P., & Taylor, E. W. (2007). Toward understanding respiratory sinus arrhythmia: Relations to cardiac vagal tone, evolution and biobehavioral functions. Biological Psychology, 74(2), 263–285. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsycho.2005.11.014

Menuet, C., Ben-Tal, A., Linossier, A., Allen, A. M., Machado, B. H., Moraes, D. J. A., Farmer, D. G. S., Paterson, D. J., Mendelowitz, D., Lakatta, E. G., Taylor, E. W., Ackland, G. L., Zucker, I. H., Fisher, J. P., Schwaber, J. S., Shanks, J., Paton, J. F. R., Buron, J., Spyer, K. M., ... Gourine, A. V. (2025). Redefining respiratory sinus arrhythmia as respiratory heart rate variability: An international Expert Recommendation for terminological clarity. Nature Reviews Cardiology, 22(12), 978–984. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41569-025-01160-z

Neuhuber, W. L., & Berthoud, H.-R. (2022). Functional anatomy of the vagus system: How does the polyvagal theory comply? Biological Psychology, 174, 108425. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsycho.2022.108425

Porges, S. W. (2026). When a critique becomes untenable: A scholarly response to Grossman et al.’s evaluation of polyvagal theory. Clinical Neuropsychiatry, 23(1). https://doi.org/10.36131/cnfioritieditore20260111

Porges, S. W., Bazhenova, O. V., Bal, E., Carlson, N., Sorokin, Y., Heilman, K. J., Cook, E. H., & Lewis, G. F. (2014). Reducing auditory hypersensitivities in autistic spectrum disorder: Preliminary findings evaluating the listening project protocol. Frontiers in Pediatrics, 2, 80. https://doi.org/10.3389/fped.2014.00080

Taylor, E. W., Wang, T., & Leite, C. A. C. (2022). An overview of the phylogeny of cardiorespiratory control in vertebrates with some reflections on the “Polyvagal Theory.” Biological Psychology, 172, 108382. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsycho.2022.108382

For me, it has always been text messages and emails. When they pile up, I feel overwhelmed and I avoid them. As days pass, the avoidance turns into anxiety, guilt, and shame, because the people I care about aren’t hearing back from me in a reasonable amount of time. Then the shame fuels more avoidance. It is a loop I know intimately, and one I suspect many of you know too.

That gap between knowing and doing is where I live and work. This newsletter is about that gap: what is happening in the brain, why so many of the systems around us make it wider, and how to build a life that helps close it.

Who I am

I’m Jennifer Lauren, a developmental researcher and executive function specialist. I have always recognized executive dysfunction in others, and it is what drew me to graduate school. I kept noticing how closely executive dysfunction tracked with other mental health struggles, and three questions followed me: What are the neurobiological underpinnings of executive function (EF) development? What biological and contextual factors impact EF development across the lifespan? And what can we do about executive dysfunction?

I didn’t study this from the outside. Large projects were always hard for me to start. They felt enormous, I wasn’t sure where to begin, and so I avoided them until a hard deadline forced my stress response into gear. Over time, I became reliant on adrenaline to focus and get work done. I later learned that in brains like mine, the reward and motivation system works differently, which helped explain why the usual motivation never seemed to show up for me. (Full disclosure: I still get the most done on adrenaline rather than the dopamine-friendly strategies I teach. But it is enormously better than it used to be.)

For decades, no one saw any of this, including me. I was skilled at perception management, so from the outside my life didn’t look painful. On the inside, I carried a persistent sense of otherness and inferiority. I believed that if people truly got to know me, they would stop seeing me as smart and capable. I was certain I was fooling everyone. The stories I told myself were familiar ones: I was lazy, I didn’t try hard enough, maybe I was even fake.

None of those stories were true. I’m a late-identified neurodivergent woman, and finally getting answers was profoundly cathartic. I understood, for the first time, why life had felt so hard. My struggles were never character failings. I was a neurodivergent little girl navigating her world the best she could. That realization changed my life, and how I show up in my work and in my relationships.

The funny part? When I shared this with the people who know me best, not one of them was surprised. Their collective response was some version of, “Yeah. No kidding. We know.” That was its own kind of validation.

A word about masking

I am very good at masking, and it has come at a significant cognitive cost. Masking requires constant hypervigilance, and I have spent years unlearning that vigilance so I can set it down in places where it isn’t needed.

Still, I don’t think masking is inherently bad. Plenty of people mask, not just those of us who are neurospicy. Masking gets a bad reputation because it can look disingenuous. The mask I wear at work is something different: it is the deliberate effort to slow down, stay present, notice, listen, and truly hear the person in front of me. None of that comes naturally to me. It also keeps the focus where it belongs, on my clients, so there is room for them to show up honestly. What matters is choosing when, where, and with whom the mask comes off, and building relationships and spaces where it isn’t needed at all. Those spaces give back an enormous amount of bandwidth.

Why “The Surrogate Frontal Lobe”

Long before I understood my own brain, one of my coping strategies was overfunctioning. I built systems and collected every tip, trick, and workaround I could find so I could get through graduate school, be a good partner and parent, run a household, and run several businesses.

Over years of working with people across the lifespan, I started using the phrase “surrogate frontal lobe” with parents of children with executive dysfunction. It always landed, because that is exactly what those parents feel like. It helped them feel seen (and it usually got a laugh).

Much of my work with parents involves helping them step back and stop functioning as their child’s surrogate frontal lobe, so their child, whether in early childhood, adolescence, or adulthood, has room to build those skills. But I have learned that you can’t simply remove the scaffolding without replacing it with something. So when a parent or partner steps back, I step in. I build scaffolding only where a person’s functioning is weaker. Then I help them identify their strengths and use those strengths to navigate the harder areas.

That strengths-based approach helps people rebuild their identity, not around brokenness, otherness, or pathology, but around their strengths, gifts, and talents. It is also where my slogan came from: Borrow mine while I help you build yours.

What you’ll find here

• Read the Research With Me. I walk through studies in plain language, including what they don’t show. Much of the popular advice about the brain rests on weak or outdated evidence, and you deserve to know the difference.

• The Executive Function of Institutions. Universities, healthcare systems, and workplaces quietly hand their organizational work to individuals: the portals, deadlines, forms, and follow-up calls. For people with the least executive function to spare, that hidden load is often the real barrier.

• Be Your Own Scientist. Practical ways to test what works for your brain. Research tells us what works on average; careful self-tracking tells you what works for you.

This isn’t therapy or medical advice. I’m an executive function specialist, not a clinician, and nothing here replaces care from your own clinical team. When I make a claim about the research, I will cite it, and when the evidence is thin or contested, I will say so.

Why I’m writing this for you

If you’ve found your way here, I want you to feel seen first. Then I want to gently challenge the story you’ve built about yourself. When you understand the neuroscience behind your struggles, you can let go of the belief that they reflect a moral or character failing. They reflect how your brain is wired.

And then I want you to feel empowered, because once you understand your brain, you can learn to operate it. Together, we’ll identify your strengths and how to put them to work in the parts of life that feel harder.

You are not broken. Let’s write the user manual for your brain.

If something here resonates, I hope you’ll subscribe, and you’re always welcome to reply with what you’d like me to explore next.