In previous blogs, we’ve talked about how important Psychological Safety is to Team Transcendence. (If you have issues with the term Psychological Safety, just insert the words “respect and belonging” whenever that phrase comes up.) We’ve shown how Team Transcendence requires Psychological Safety for all of the team members, or at least the vast majority of them.

Physical Indicators of Psychological Safety

So how do you know Psychological Safety has been reached? While there’s not a clear answer to this question yet, perhaps the simplest way to tell whether or not you’re experiencing Psychological Safety is to observe how you feel when you’re with your team. In previous blogs, we’ve suggested some questions that can help, like “do you self-censor during a meeting” and “is there nervous laughter?” 

Heart Rate Variability

We’re working on some ideas for how to measure it and there are already ways to measure some physiological aspects of Psychological Safety in individuals., There are a few things that happen very quickly within your body that can help you determine if you’re experiencing Psychological Safety. One of the fastest ones is heart rate variability (HRV). This is where your heart rate slows just a little bit as you exhale and then speeds back up as you inhale. This minor arrhythmia is normal and, in fact, indicates your nervous and circulatory systems are in good health and working well together. More HRV, or more heart rate slowing, also indicates you’re relaxed and probably feeling psychologically safe.

This arrhythmia happens because as you exhale, your parasympathetic nervous system is directing your heart rate to slow. When you inhale the sympathetic nervous system kicks back in and brings your heart rate up again. The fact that your body can switch back and forth this quickly is a good indicator that your sympathetic nervous system (which triggers your fight, flight, or freeze response) is in good balance with your parasympathetic nervous system (which triggers your calm response often called “calm and connect” or “rest and digest”).

To understand how quickly this switching happens, think about how long it takes you to go through an inhale/exhale cycle. You might even time it, although as soon as you start monitoring your breath you’ll almost certainly alter what you’re measuring. Nonetheless, the fastest people can breath is in cycles of perhaps 2 seconds, and while the slowest cycles vary quite a bit, depending on an individual’s health and fitness, a realistic slowest cycle is about 25 seconds. So we’re talking about the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems passing control back and forth every few seconds.

This dance between the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems is something you can feel. It may take some practice, but anyone can learn to do it. Try it 

1. Rest comfortably and feel your heartbeat in your chest
2. Once you’ve settled into this state, inhale normally and fairly deeply and exhale slowly by relaxing the muscles in your chest
3. Don’t exhale forcefully or try to expel all the air in your chest, simply relax your torso so you slowly breath out
4. Feel what happens to your heart rate

How much your heart rate slows down, or not, is called vagal tone. Good vagal tone is indicated by a lot of slowing, or large HRV. You want your heart rate to slow as you exhale – it’s a sign of good mental and physical health.

Not everyone is going to feel a difference, though, because switching between these two nervous systems requires your sympathetic nervous system to give up control quickly. For many years, I had poor vagal tone and little HRV which I attributed to age and stress. When I was in my teens and twenties I noticed lots of variability, and as I aged and progressed through my career I lost that ability and thought it was because of age or poor fitness. Neither of those things could have been true. After I retired, it was only a matter of months before my vagal tone improved and I started noticing some HRV again. Now, after about a year of retirement my vagal tone seems about what it was when I was in my twenties, (although I didn’t measure it then so I’ll never really know for sure).

This breath exercise is something you can do discretely in a meeting and it can help you determine if you’re experiencing psychological safety. It’s unlikely anyone else will notice because this “measurement” only takes a couple of breaths. Plus, using this breathing technique for a few minutes gradually slows your heart rate down, too, putting you into a calmer, more relaxed state.

Circulation

So our nervous system, along with our heart rate is something that varies quickly. Something else that varies rapidly, but not as quickly, is our circulatory system. When your parasympathetic nervous system is running the show, and you’re in the calm and connect state, your arteries dilate and your extremities receive more blood flow. In contrast, the fight, flight, or freeze state constricts your arteries to limit blood flow to your internal organs and your large muscles so you can fight effectively and/or flee quickly. An added bonus is that your body is also prepared to survive injuries more easily with your blood supply restricted this way.

So when you’re in the calm and connect state (and your parasympathetic nervous system is in charge) your hands and feet get more blood flow. More blood flow means your hands and feet are warmer. Unlike your heart rate, this change doesn’t happen in seconds and you probably won’t feel it. You might be able to tell that your hands aren’t as warm or as cool as they were before, but this isn’t as definite as feeling the “thumping” of your heart in your chest. 

An old biofeedback technique that’s fallen out of favor can be useful here. You can hold a temperature gauge between your fingertips to measure the change in temperature in your extremities. A friend suggested this technique and I tried it. When I get freaked out and my sympathetic nervous system kicks in, the temperature in my fingertips can go down by over 10F. When I’m relaxed and my parasympathetic nervous system takes over, the temperature I measure can go up by over 10F. Please note, these measurements were made by holding a bare thermocouple between my fingers and the gauge was pretty inexpensive and not calibrated, so the specific numbers may not be reliable. The trends are undeniable, though, and the timeframe to measure these temperature changes is on the order of 10 minutes.(And be careful about cell phone apps that claim to measure body temperature, they all look like scams.)

So now we have physiological measurement techniques that can let us see what’s going on with our nervous systems over a timescale of seconds and our circulatory systems over a timescale of minutes. These measurements can relate directly back to whether we’re feeling Psychological Safety or not. These timescales are appropriate for not only taking measurements during meetings but perhaps even reacting and adjusting the meeting flow to better facilitate and maintain Team Transcendence.

The Future of Psychological Safety Measurements

There are much longer timescale effects that will also affect whether a particular individual is likely to experience Psychological Safety, and we’ll talk about them, too. So we’ll eventually have things we can use that span from seconds to at least months, if not years. But let’s start with these. What are your ideas for how these types of measurements can help create Team Transcendence? Are there other measurements to try? And how can this information be collected and used to improve the team dynamics? Should the results only be available to the individual they came from, should the results be anonymously aggregated, shared freely, and should each individual decide how they’re used?

Join the conversation and help us figure out how to reliably bring Team Transcendence to your team.