How To Regulate Your Nervous System For Stress, Anxiety, And Trauma | Peter Levine

This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello, my fellow suffering beings, how are we doing? In the circles in which I run, which include a lot of therapists and Meditation teachers, plus also, of course, lots of regular people who are patients and clients have said therapists and teachers.

In these circles, I have for years heard about a kind of therapy called somatic experiencing. And to be honest, I usually nodded my head politely when I heard about this, half pretending to know what people were referring to, but now I actually know what they're talking about because I had a chance to interview the dude who created somatic experiencing, or SE. He describes it better than I can, but it's a kind of therapy where you learn how to regulate your nervous system as a way to reduce your stress and anxiety and depression and chronic pain and trauma. And there's been some research into somatic experiencing and the initial results are quite promising, although of course more research needs to be done. So the guy who invented this is Peter Levine.

He's my guest today, Peter A. Levine, PhD. To be formal about it, he spent the last 50 years developing SE. He holds a doctorate in biophysics from UC Berkeley and a doctorate in psychology from International University. His work has been taught to over 30,000 therapists in over 42 countries, and his most recent book is called An Autobiography of Trauma, and it was published in 2024.

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