The Safe and Sound Protocol, or SSP, is a non-invasive application of Polyvagal Theory, based on decades of research and developed by Dr. Stephen Porges.
The SSP’s effectiveness has been proven in a wide range of studies, most notably in two clinical trials involving children with Autism Spectrum Disorder. Trial participants demonstrated statistically significant improvements in:
Emotional control
Behavioral organization
Hearing sensitivity and listening
The SSP pathways are designed to help the nervous system to better receive, process and respond to the cues and signals from the world around us. This helps us learn how to more easily and consistently feel better regulated in the face of life’s challenges.
Listening is connected with the vagus nerve, the body’s internal control center for processing and responding to cues and signals from the world around us. The SSP uses specially-filtered music to train the neural network associated with listening to focus on the frequency range of the human voice. What you hear, and how you hear it, influences how your body responds.
It’s not what you say – it’s how you say it. We look, speak and listen with the same system. When the voice changes, the body responds. Think of how a baby or a pet responds to your voice. As we learn to focus on the sound frequencies of human speech through the SSP program, the vagus nerve becomes stimulated and the state of feeling more safe and calm becomes accessible.
The proof is in the playlists. Specially treated music playlists are part of the SSP program and all help ‘prime’ the nervous system by exposing it to different sound frequencies. Listening to these playlists through over the ear headphones helps the nervous system to more readily achieve balance, or “homeostasis.”
The Safe and Sound Protocol is a 5 hour program given through circum-aural headphones, it is delivered over a period of between 10 sessions or more, depending on how your nervous system responds to the music.