What stress does to your body and brain!

Okay, I think I am here. Let me see here. It looks like there's 33 people. Sorry, we're getting started just a little bit late. It's having mild issues connecting, but I am here. Okay, so the first question is, can you hear me? Sometimes there's issues with sound, sometimes not. Yay. Okay, people are hearing me. Okay. Well, welcome, welcome to the Webinar what Stress does to youo Body and brain. I am Dr. Jennifer Sweetin and I'm a licensed clinical psychologist. I'm located in the greater Kansas City area in the U.S. i know those of you who are joining right now could be from all over the world, especially at this time in the morning where people in Europe are still awake. So what I want to do in this next hour or so, it might be more like 50 minutes, is I want to say a little bit about how stress impacts us as people, really focusing on what it does to our body and what it does to our brain. And then of course, taking it a step further, talking a little bit about what we can do about it. So it's only helpful if we can use this information to feel better. Okay. Okay. So something piece of information about me. So I'm a psychologist. I do treatment. I do a lot of individual therapy. I do therapy in my practice here. I also do therapy online via a telemedicine platform with people all over the world. And I mostly focus on trauma and anxiety. And we can think of trauma and anxiety as kind of revved up versions of stress. It's kind of one way to see it. I love this topic because I love neuroscience and I was actually trained as a neuroscientist before I became a clinician. So a lot of the stuff that I present to people oftentimes has to do with the brain and educating people on how the brain impacts how we feel and the symptoms that we experience and how we can change our brain in the direction of health. So to start this, excuse me, I'm still recovering from a cold here. I'm going to go to the second slide to begin. And I want to start off by talking about stress in the body. And in a few minutes I'm going to actually ask you all if you would want to share things that you feel in the body when you feel stressed, or if maybe you just have a question about a certain physical sensation and you want to know if it's linked to stress. The reason why I'm starting with the body here is because it turns out that the body and the brain are literally physically connected. To one another. And what that means is that we can work through the body to change the brain. If we're thinking about the goal of therapy, the goal of recovery is always being brain change, Then it's helpful to know that we can actually work through our bodies, do things with our body, do exercises with our body to change our brain. So we're gonna start off by talking about the body. So on the second slide at the top, it says autonomic nervous system. So what this is, is. Is it's a nervous system in the body. So you have the central nervous system, and what that is is your brain and spinal cord, and that's your central nervous system. And the brain is of interest to a lot of people. But then you also have nervous systems in your body. You got two of them. One of them is called the somatic nervous system, and one of them is called the autonomic nervous system. We're going to focus on the autonomic nervous system. So I don't want to get too technical here. I don't want to spend too much time on the technical aspects, but what I just want you to know is that you have this nervous system in your body, and the purpose of it is to cope with stress. This is the point of the autonomic nervous system. So the autonomic nervous system essentially has, like, two switches to it. One is the stress response, and one is the relaxation response. And the autonomic nervous system is there to help us deal with threats that present themselves to us. So, for instance, if you're being chased by a tiger, what happens is your body, your autonomic nervous system, is going to send you into the stress response. And the whole goal here is for the body to mobilize its resources so that you can be faster and stronger in a moment of stress, with the idea that then maybe you can either fight or get the heck away from whatever is threatening you, such as the tiger. Okay, so we have these two settings of the nervous system. The first one, and you see over here on the left, this blue box, is your stress response. So this is what the nervous system goes into when you're faced with a threat or a danger or just something that you're not really sure if you're equipped to handle. So this could just be that your boss gives you extra work at the end of the day that you're not sure you can get done, and you feel stressed about it. It's. So it's not always as intense as a tiger chasing you, but it can be over here on this right side, you have this pink box, which I'm circling. This is your parasympathetic nervous system or your relaxation response. This pink box over here on the right is the box that we're supposed to be in as human beings most of the time. So as human beings, we're wired to be in our homeostasis or relaxation response most of the time. And it's characterized by the exact opposite of the stress response. So it's characterized by slow heart rate, long, slow, deep breathing, lowered blood pressure, that kind of thing. And we should be over here more than 90% of the time. The blue box, the sympathetic nervous system, is your stress response. During this response, that's when the body mobilizes itself, getting ready to deal with the threat at hand. I put up here on the slide that during the stress response, you have about 1400 biochemical changes in the body that happen. So when you get stressed, your body's working overtime to try to keep you protected and safe. Which means that being stressed is actually exhausting, super tiring and exhausting to be stressed. And we don't want to be stressed too much. Ideally, we're relaxed most of the time. And we have rare spikes where we get stressed and then they go back down. Here's where the problem could come in. So where the problem is, that is. I just made the screen a little brighter. There is that Modern day human stressors get us stuck over here in the stress response way too much of the time. And that results in us feeling hyper vigilant, not being able to sleep, just feeling revved up and using way too much of our resources, being stressed. And I think a lot of this is really just the nature of our stressors today, which are a little bit more chronic than they were way back in the day. So primitive stressors, for instance, getting chased by a tiger. Either way, it's over in like, you know, a minute or 45 seconds, which, whether you live or you die. But today's stressors are more chronic, which means we go into this response for much longer periods of time. When this happens, a lot of things happen. Chemically. 1400 biochemical and psychophysiological changes happen in the nervous system in a split second. This includes things like adrenaline or things like cortisol. But that's probably not the level that you notice stress. You probably don't sit there and say to yourself, well, gosh, you know, I just noticed my cortisol tripled when I was thinking about that stress. Stressful events or a stressful event. And that's true. We don't feel it at the chemical level, but we do feel it in the body because not only do chemical reactions happen when we get stressed, but we have these physical correlates or things in the body that happen that tell us that we're getting stressed. Okay. So some of those things might be rapid heart rate. It could also be that your breathing gets very fast and shallow. I'm going to also open up to you guys. There's a lot of other things, too. What are some of the things that you notice when you get stress? And as people are typing, I'm just going to respond to a comment. Somebody is talking about that there's a. This person is saying that there's a third response causing the freeze response and complex trauma. Yeah. And they mentioned the vagus nerve. So the vagus nerve is actually involved in all parasympathetic arousal. But yes, we have a fight response, a flight response, two types of freeze responses. You got a tendon befriend response, and you got a fawn response. So you got a lot of different survival responses. We're not going to be going over all those today. Right now, I just want you to understand stress versus relaxation. Okay. Somebody saying inflammation. Yeah. So chronic stress increases inflammation. It also decreases. Sorry, Increases inflammation and also increases immune suppression. So decreases immune functioning. Somebody saying, can't breathe. Think that you're dying from the pain. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Can have some panic symptoms, breathing changes, rigid muscles, tight muscles, headaches. Absolutely. Somebody's saying anger. Yeah, anger. Think about anger as the interpretation of the physical sensation. So anger itself doesn't have its own physical profile, but when we feel the physical sensations of stress, it can be angry. We can interpret that as anger, choking, feeling. Yeah. So sometimes people have a tightness in the chest or the neck. Hyperventilation. Yeah. Chest pain, chest tension, neck tension. It can also be neck, shoulders, back tension. Okay. Yeah. So you all are capturing a lot of this, and I like to emphasize this and ask you what you experience when you get stressed. Because I want people, especially when I'm working with clients and we're trying to tackle something like anxiety or trauma, I want them to begin to notice what's happening in the body, because then if we notice that, we can begin to intervene in those symptoms. Chronic fatigue. Absolutely. So the reason why you're having chronic fatigue is because, again, it's exhausting to be in sympathetic nervous system arousal when we're stressed. It's tiring, so your body wears out. It actually breaks down your body and Your brain. Somebody's saying a tingly feeling, that's very common too. Low energy levels, muscle pain, joint pain, irritability, neck, back, chest pain, headache, fatigue. Yeah, you all got it? Yeah. All of these are physical indicators, stress. And when taken to an extreme, it can be panic. Right. You can have a full on panic attack, especially if those sensations happen and they're very, very intense and then you start having interpretations of those sensations such as I'm going crazy or I'm dying or I can't breathe, things like that. Yeah, somebody's saying it makes them feel exhausted. Yeah, it's going to. Because remember, as human beings were wired to be and parasympathetic arousal or relaxation, we're wired to be relaxed most of the time. And so when we spend time in the stress response that requires so many resources, if we sustain that too long, we get exhausted and it starts to actually hurt our medical and mental health. So we start to develop things like ibs, develop heart issues, ulcers, chronic muscle tension, that kind of thing. So all of these things that you all are describing, all these physical correlates of stress are actually really adaptive when a stressor is short term. So when you're not chronically stressed, but let's say you're driving on the highway and somebody swerves in front of you and cuts you off and slams on their brake and you have to go into that stress response and slam on your brake really fast. It's adaptive, that context, to have that muscle tension and your heart to speed up so that you can move faster. So the stress response is not all bad. We want a stress response and we think it's responsible for us still being here as a species. We're still here. I think it's in large part because we figured out how to protect ourselves and respond to threat. So it's fantastic that we have this. Where the problem comes in is if we stay in the stress response too much, too long, so that rapid heart rate that we need, if somebody just cut us off in traffic to save our own lives, if we sustain that for hours, days, weeks, years, then what happens is your heart is going to start to wear out over time. When I worked with Vietnam veterans, what I started to notice in the VA system is that if I was seeing a Vietnam veteran and he had a trauma related disorder or an anxiety disorder, always had a heart related condition. Because 45, 50 years of being stressed is going to buy you a heart condition. It'll also buy you some gastrointestinal issues. It could be ulcers, it could be ibs, it could be acid reflux. So all these types of issues can be linked to chronic stress. So stress is. Okay. It's chronic stress that starts to cause problems in the body and in the brain. Also with the immune suppression, there's been research showing that it increases your vulnerability to a common cold. If you're undergoing a lot of stress, there's immune suppression, there's increased inflammation, which has been linked to a whole bunch of stuff, whole bunch of not great stuff, including cancers. So what we want to do, we don't want to eliminate stress completely. And thankfully for us, we really can't. We can't just carve out the area of our brain that's signaling to go into the stress response. But we do want to manage it. We don't want unmanaged stress running amok in our lives. Okay, I'm just pausing to look at some of the comments. Okay. People are talking about what things work for them. Yeah. Feel free to. To read what everybody's saying about what happens or what. What's working for them. Okay. Yeah, Great, great, great. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Even if I don't have time to say it all out loud, Share. If you're finding things that are helpful for stress, it's always helpful to hear from other people. But we're going to be talking about some stuff today, too. Okay. So this is stress in the body. We have all these physical sensations. We have these chemical reactions happening. Something that I want to drive home, though. A big point of this webinar is that your body does not become stressed unless your brain tells it to. So your body doesn't just do this on its own. It's not operating without a master control system. And that master control system is your brain. And specifically, when we're talking about stress, I want to talk about one little area of the brain. We won't get too much depth about this, but I think this is important to know, especially if you suffer from an anxiety disorder or ptsd, because this is a key brain area involved. And I'm going to the third slide here. Third slide, you'll see it is a picture of a little area of the brain called the amygdala. Okay, so here's your amygdala. Here's your brain on stress. Sometimes it's called your fear center or your stress center. Some people also call it the smoke detector of your brain because its main job is to detect whether or not something is a stress, whether it's a threat or a danger. So it's looking out for you. This is a big survival area of the brain and its main job is to keep things from killing you. So what it's doing is it's scanning for threat. It's a very low area of the brain and it's actually not within your conscious awareness or conscious control. So it's something that can actually be pretty hard to control or manage because it's not within conscious control. Although we'll talk about a couple of techniques that can get it under control. It's always scanning for threat. But if you have something like an anxiety disorder or ptsd, what happens is that this amygdala fires too much too often, and when it doesn't need to. So you can think of it kind of like as a dimmer switch that gets cranked up. In these disorders with chronic stress, it becomes hyperactivated where now it can't turn off. This is why stress can become habit. Also, somebody, I think, was saying that positive events can cause stress. Yeah, positive events can cause stress as well. Absolutely. They don't tend to be as toxic for us as the negative events, but yeah, absolutely, they can become stressful. And somebody was asking, can you be happy when you're stressed? Oh, depends on your definition of happy. You can be, absolutely. But I would say you don't want mismanaged stress in your life for too long. We do want to intervene and have methods to begin to manage the amygdala. Thing about the amygdala, why it is so important is that it is this little area of the brain, the survival area of the brain, this fear brain, that signals to the body to go into the stress response when it thinks a danger is present. Okay, so let's say your cat walks across your living room floor. If your amygdala misinterprets that cat as a tiger or a lion and thinks that it is dangerous, then the amygdala is going to fire. And what it's going to do is it's going to send that signal of threat up to these top areas of the brain. And at the same time, it's going to send that threat signal down to the body. And it's the amygdala that's responsible. I'm going back to slide two here. It's the amygdala that's responsible for throwing your body into this blue box, this stress response. So when you hear the word stress, think of the word amygdala and somebody is mentioning about it being stuck. It absolutely can be stuck on it's. Like a dimmer switch that gets cranked up and then it just stays. So if your amygdala is cranked up, you're gonna know it because you're not sleeping, you're not focusing, you're not thinking clearly. You might be walking around with your shoulders up, you're tense all the time, you're hypervigilant, you're looking around, any little noise, you're kind of jumpy, you have the sensitive startle response, and you start to see danger or threat all around. When this happens, it's throwing your body into that stress response constantly. And it's going to lead to things like anxiety disorders, or it could lead to ptsd, chronic distress, and then all of those medical things that we talked about, all those medical implications of stress, your body starts to experience those as well. So stress can be really, really harmful to us. But the good news is that we know what stress looks like in the brain and that this is a key piece of it. That this amygdala, that hyperactivation of the amygdala. Good news is that there are techniques that we know. If we do them correctly and we do them consistently, that's a key repetition. Consistently, we can actually reduce activation of this area of the brain, which is awesome. Okay. Somebody saying meditation helped their brain? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Research would support that. Absolutely. Meditation can bring down amygdala activation. Okay. Okay. Oh. One person says that feeling calm. I assume you mean after you've been stressed for a long time, feeling calm feels. Feeling calm becomes foreign and terrifying. If you. If that sounds like you. If feeling calm is not just kind of unusual for you, but if it actually feels scary to be calm, this is kind of a different phenomenon. This is a specific thing. If you feel scared or unsafe when you calm down, it's a big indication that there's a history of trauma. And it means that you probably need to get some trauma focused therapy, Get a really, really good trauma specialist, trauma therapist, trauma psychologist. That's what you're gonna need. Yeah. Because that can be a real thing where feeling calm is terrifying. And if that's you, then these techniques that I'm gonna tell you about, they might be helpful to an extent. But if every time you feel calm, you feel unsafe or traumatized, you need to get. There needs to be therapy around that before you can even really benefit from these exercises that crank down the amygdala. So you absolutely can get help for that. It's not hopeless by any means, but there's gonna need to be A focus on that piece. Okay. Neurofeedback. Somebody saying they've done neurofeedback. Yep. Neurofeedback's awesome. Yeah. Somebody saying if you're in the middle of a panic attack, then it's gonna be hard to meditate. Yeah, yeah. See, that's the thing. So the exercises that we're gonna go over are great for the amygdala in general, but know that if you're in the middle of a panic attack, you're not gonna be able to reason with yourself very well. And it could be hard to do some of these techniques if you're in the middle of a panic attack. Let me just say one thing about that. If you're in a full on panic attack and it's gotten to the point to where. Oops, I don't know what that is. It's gotten to the point where you can't think and you can't function. And your amygdala is that activated? It might actually be too activated to do some of the techniques that your therapist might tell you to do if you're in the middle of a panic attack. Really the goal is to get out of panic. Couple of recommendations. Really quick physical movement. Okay. So not like running, that's not going to help you, probably. But walking. Okay. Kind of brisk walking physical movement because it brings you back to the present moment where panic sometimes will cause a dissociative experience. And don't try to breathe deeply, just count the exhales. So just pay attention to the breath and notice when you exhale, and that's 1. And when you exhale again, it's 2. And try to get to 10. And then start over. So what you're really doing with panic is movement and distraction. And that's it. What you want to do is during panic, distance yourself from the thoughts that are probably revving the panic up. Such as, I'm dying, I'm going crazy, I'm losing control, I can't breathe. All those interpretations are going to make panic worse. So panic is a little bit of a different phenomenon than just stress. Yeah. Somebody saying gentle linking movement with breath. Yep. That can be fine. Somebody is asking, why does exercise help so well with dealing with stress? Well, one of the things exercise does is it actually decreases amygdala activation. So I won't go into all the mechanisms behind that. It's kind of a long story. But exercise decreases amygdala activation. Yeah. So big recommendation. And it doesn't have to be exercise. That's like you Know, running marathons or anything. 20 to 30 minutes a day, maybe three times a week. Especially if you can incorporate novel movement. So something like yoga movements or dance or something. For some reason, the brain really likes novelty and the brain likes novel movements. So if you're going to go on a walk, if you can go on a walk outside, at least you're looking at things that are novel. The brain's going to like that. If all you have is a treadmill facing a blank wall, that's not ideal, but that's still better than nothing. But try to incorporate novel scenery or novel movement with it. Okay? All right. Somebody saying when they feel a panic attack coming on, they start to slowly jog. Okay. It's good to know that that helps. I've heard of that helping with people. Okay, so you have this amygdala, you have this stress center, and when it goes off, it sends that threat message down to your body. And your body goes into that stress response and you feel tense and your heart races and your breathing gets really shallow, and you have all of those sensations that we discussed. Okay, so what do we do? The amygdala, this main stress center. The idea is to intervene here in this area of the brain. In reality, a lot of other brain areas are involved in stress and anxiety and trauma as well. So I'm telling you the truth, but I'm not telling you the whole truth. We just don't have time for the whole truth. We need months, really, to go over all of it. But this is a main area of the brain that I think therapy is aiming to intervene with. So when your therapist tells you things like take a deep breath, and I know it's almost maddening when you hear that, because you've heard that so many times and it's such a cliche, and you're like, yeah, I'm already breathing, and it's just frustrating. But just know that some of these recommendations, even when they sound totally common sense like that there's actually something behind them, because these techniques can reduce amygdala activation. Let me go to the next slide. Let me go to slide four. Let me start linking this to treatment. So you got stress in the body, you got stress in the brain. What we want to do, the goal of techniques and interventions, and a big goal of therapy if you're in therapy, is to begin to deactivate this feed fear and stress center of the brain. Right here. I have a picture here on slide 4 where you see a little person, a guy, and then a picture of a brain. And I have an arrow pointing to his body. The message that I'm trying to relay here is that we can work through the body to change the brain. Specifically, we can work through the body to calm the amygdala, the fear center of the brain. Another approach to this that's a little bit different would be if we're not working through our body, but instead we're working through our mind to change the brain. So this would be like if you're working with thoughts. So you can do two things, two big options you have. You can work through your body to manage stress, or you can work through your mind to reduce stress. Working through your body to reduce stress, that might look like something like exercise. Working through your mind to manage stress. That's more like if you try to reason with yourself and calm yourself down. So maybe you feel stressed and you say to yourself, it's okay, calm down. Everything's going to be okay. Nothing's wrong, you're safe. And you go through that mental dialogue where you're trying to get yourself calm. That would be using your mind to calm the amygdala. And that is not impossible to do. And that's a skill that therapy will teach you how to get good at. But what I want to emphasize today is using the body to calm the amygdala as opposed to just using the mind to calm it. And the reason is because it can be actually really hard to calm the amygdala with your thoughts. It's actually kind of a difficult thing to do. The reason why it's difficult is because the connections going from these logical areas down to the amygdala are actually kind of weak. So you may notice that sometimes when you try to tell yourself just to get over it or to calm down, it's hard to do. It's hard to actually feel different, even if you know that there's no reason to be upset. Okay. So actually, research has shown that it's much more effective and efficient to calm down this fear center of the brain through working through the body. Okay, I'm going to pause and just read. I think I've missed some, like, comments and questions, and I apologize. I apologize if I miss things. It's hard to keep up with it. Okay, let me see somebody saying they felt triggered and they did a quick seated forward fold, like head between the knees. Yes, this would be okay. Yep. Actually, I just. My book comes out next month through Pessy Media and Publishing, Publishing a media whatever. And it's a workbook with all Sorts of brain based brain changing trauma techniques and actually one of them is a pose where you do just that, Sit in a chair and you fold over. Yes, yes, yes. This works very well. Yep. The forward fold. Somebody saying closing your eyes, taking three deep, slow breaths and holding them. Exhale slowly. Yep. The technique I'm about to tell you about is a variant of that. Somebody's mentioning a yoga technique. Yep. Yoga is awesome. Yoga reduces amygdala activation. Somebody's mentioning spasms. I'm not sure what your condition is and after this if you want to email me, you can too. So I, yeah, I don't know what the condition is so I can't give any recommendations right away for that. Somebody saying, yeah, find what works for you. Absolutely. I'm gonna present just a. We don't have much time so I'm just going to present a couple of options. Two options for techniques that can reduce amygdala activation. Which one you use, what you do. It depends on what you resonate with, what you like to do, what you're willing to do. Not everything is going to work for everyone. Not everybody's going to like the same thing. Some people hate running, Some people love running. I hate it. I wish I loved it. I've got to do other types of exercise. So it's okay. You do what works for you. Okay. Somebody saying if you have a brain injury, it may be impossible to change your brain without neurofeedback. So don't be too hard on yourself. So it totally depends on the type of neurofeedback. So neurofeedback is great, but neurofeedback is a type of intentional brain change. And what we're talking about today, it's all intentional brain change. What you're going to see with neurofeedback. And it can be hard sometimes, depending on where you're located to find those practitioners, but you're going to see faster results and more stronger results, better results overall. So I would agree that if you have a tbi, if you have a traumatic brain injury, neurofeedback can be great. It's gonna be something that you do. It's not gonna probably be the only thing that you do. But I agree it can make you, can allow you to enjoy more gains faster. Yeah. So definitely, definitely do neurofeedback. Biofeedback, you might wanna add to it also. And if you have concurrent ptsd, which a lot of people with brain injuries do, you'll want PTSD specific treatment as well. Yeah, yeah. So I know this stuff gets complex in an hour long or a 50 minute webinar. You know, we're just skimming the surface, but yeah, okay, awesome. Yeah. Okay, so then what we gonna do? Okay, so we want to work through the body to change the brain again. Therapy will also have you working through the mind to calm down that fear area. Quick technique. Quick technique. Something called the four count breath. All you're doing, there's nothing magical about this. You're inhaling for four, holding for four, and then exhaling for four with the breath. I don't even like these counts, to be honest with you. I prefer to extend the exhale. So I might do inhale four, hold four, exhale eight or something like that. Don't get caught up in the specifics. So don't get caught up in do I inhale for four, do I inhale for three? As a general rule, what you want to do is focus on the numbers. Counting inhales, holding the breath and exhales. Let me tell you why, though. Let me tell you why, because I know this is like the same advice you get a million times and it never really makes any sense. So let me link this to the amygdala. Oh, somebody's saying, can antidepressants help the chronic stress and overactivation of the amygdala? Yes and no. So what research has shown about that is SSRIs, selective serotonin reup TEC inhibitors can reduce the reactivity of the amygdala. It's not going to shut it off for you. It's not going to crank the dimmer switch down and turn it off. But what it will do is it will help you become, over time, less reactive to stress and trauma triggers. So it allows you to slow the amygdala down a little bit so it's not so knee jerky. That makes sense. So you're not going to be overreactive and as impulsive. So. And that's a good thing. So I'd say, yeah, medications can be great. It's going to be a piece of the solution for some people. Okay. All right. So quick and easy exercise. Let me get to the why though of this. Why would we do something like this? Why would we do breathing? Why would we do diaphragmatic breathing? Look at this Next slide. Slide 6. Look at this picture. You see this yellow thing and at the top it says vagus nerve. This yellow thing that you see, this is called the vagus nerve, which is awesome. The vagus nerve. So, you know, we Talked about the stress response in the body. Well, the vagus nerve is also in the body and it's attached to the brain, but it is for relaxation. Majority of it's for relaxation. So what this long yellow thing is, it's your 10th cranial nerve. It's the longest cranial nerve you have. It wraps around all of your internal organs. It branches off at the heart. It actually branches off behind your eyes, believe it or not. And then the picture kind of fades out. But if you take the picture up, you pretend like above, where the picture fades out at your brain, where the vagus nerve connects to. It actually connects to three places in the brain. You don't need to memorize this, but it's the medulla oblongata. It's a piece of something called the central nucleus. And then it's the amygdala that it connects to. The vagus nerve connects to the amygdala. The significance of the vagus nerve is that when you activate this thing, and you activate it by pressing on it, when you activate the vagus nerve, you send the signal of relaxation to the amygdala. And it actually turns down the dimmer switch a little bit. It decreases activation of the amygdala. Remember, it connects to. It has a few different connections, but it connects to it and it's in the body. So what does this have to do with breathing? Okay, so if you're engaged in shallow chest breathing, like hyperventilation, your chest is kind of going up and down. You're not going to activate the vagus nerve, and you're not going to calm down. That's not going to happen. In fact, shallow, free, fast chest breathing that's associated with panic and hyperventilation and anxiety, right? So what we want to do, we want to do the opposite of that. We want to engage in long, slow, deep breaths. We want to breathe through the diaphragm, because that is what actually activates this yellow thing, this vagus nerve. The reason why, when you're not shallow chest breathing, but the breath is going deep into the lungs and filling the lungs with air, you take a long, deep inhale and you feel your lungs fill with air. The lungs expand. And then what actually happens is as the lungs expand, it pushes the diaphragmatic wall down. Pushes the diaphragmatic wall down. And what happens is to make space for all that air, it starts to squish your inner organs. And this vagus nerve, I'm going to circle them here, is wrapped around all of your internal organs. So when you take a deep diaphragmatic breath, you actually indirectly start to squish your internal organs and wrapped around all those organs is the vagus nerve. So what you end up doing is pressing on the vagus nerve in all these places. When you take a deep breath, when you press on the vagus nerve, it takes about 45 seconds for it to activate. And when I mean pressing on it, what I mean is like literally physically pressing on it. So the way you literally physically press on it with breathing is you take a very big full, deep inhale, push your organs down and wrapped around as these organs and it, it actually compresses this nerve. And that's how you activate it is the nerve compression. That's it. I mean, that's the physical phenomenon that's happening here, which is really, really, really cool. So when you press on the vagus nerve, it activates it and it sends a signal up to the brain to start to reduce the activation of the amygdala. And it doesn't happen immediately that it just switches it off. It's not an on off switch, it's a dimmer switch. So it starts to slowly crank it down. Okay. Anything that presses on the vagus nerve is going to have this impact. And breathing is one of the fastest ways to do it because you always have to breathe anyway. It's with you all the time. It's free. If you can go and get biofeedback done, you go to some biofeedback sessions, do that, because you're going to do breathing like this. You're going to press on the vagus nerve, but it's going to train you to do it even faster and you're going to get even better at it right away. So if you have the resources to get biofeedback done, do that. Okay, I'm gonna pause because I see some, some people chatting. Here, let me see. Let me just see here. Let me see. Somebody saying, stay away from drugs if possible. It totally depends on the drug. I'll just clarify. It depends on the drug. SSRIs. I wouldn't worry about if, if you're using benzodiazepines, you need a new doctor, I'll tell you that. Yes, it totally depends on the medication. They do wildly different things. Altering nutritional intake. Oh, my gosh. Yes. Let me just throw out some unsolicited advice about nutrition. Things that can help change your brain for health and help with mood. Tryptophan, if you can, have a diet, unless for some reason you can't have tryptophan in your eye if you can increase tryptophan. Tryptophan is a precursor to the production of serotonin, 80% of which stays in your gut. Yeah, diet can be really important. Tryptophan, omega 3s, niacin. Those are the three. I won't say any more about it, just in the interest of time, but let me see. Okay, somebody's saying that they lie on the back, lay on their back, hand on belly, breathing into the hand. Yep. Great. Yep. Awesome. Head is in line with the heart. Very effective, as long as you're not panic. Perfect. Yep, yep, yep. The whole mechanism here, the reason why you do this, is activation of the vagus nerve. That's what we want. Where people go wrong with the breathing is they think they're breathing deep through the vagus nerve, like activating vagus nerve, and they're not. Because if you've been anxious for like 20 years, you think you're breathing through the diaphragm and you're not, because you're so used to shallow breathing, you actually forget, like, you don't know how to do it any other way. So I have a slide here. Oh, somebody's talking about. Okay. Some other stuff. Okay. Yeah, Some people are giving some awesome advice. Okay, great. Okay, so let me show you slide seven. Let's go to slide seven here. Mindful breathing poses. So I think the biggest issue with breathing, it's not that it doesn't work. It works. And we know why it works. It's that people give this advice to breathe, and then they don't say anything about how to actually do it to where it's helpful as opposed to harmful. Okay, somebody, real quick, let me just pause. Somebody's talking about benzodiazepines, how sometimes they're bad and sometimes they're a lifesaver. That's the whole key, is sometimes. And sometimes as a major intervention for ptsd, no bueno. But benzodiazepines can be fantastic for some things. This is why I'd say get a very good, highly specialized psychiatrist. Not pcp, not general practitioner, not psychiatric nurse, doctoral psychiatrist, and preferably a psychiatrist that works specifically with the conditions that you're suffering with. So this is not a one size fits all approach. Yes, psychiatrists are trained as generalists, but if you suffer from ptsd, you want a PTSD psychiatrist because. Yeah, these medications, they are lifesavers in some contexts and they are life ruiners in others. So you definitely want to find the right. Right one. Okay. Yeah. So, poses. So to make sure we're breathing correctly in a way that will actually activate this thing, the vagus nerve, and then calm the amygdala down. Few poses. First is the Wonder Woman pose. It shows her with her hands on her hips. I know you can't really see me below the shoulder as much, but this picture shows her with her hands on her hips. It's not really that. It's actually hands on rib cage, if you can kind of see me. So I'm going to put the little. I'm going to draw a little yellow lines on the slide here where you should really have your hands maybe a little above even that. Hands on rib cage, shoulders down and back. You're going to feel your rib cage pulled out. Long, slow, deep breaths. If you're sustaining this pose as you do the technique, whatever breathing count you choose, then you are probably activating the vagus nerve. Second option is the La Z Boy pose. You can do this sitting up, laying down, reclining back in your La Z Boy chair. Hands behind the head. That's all it is. So hands behind the head, you're going to feel your ribcage pulled out. Long, slow, deep breathing. And last but not least, arguably the most effective strategy, and the one that I really don't like at all because I just don't like the way it feels, is sitting on your hands. So you sit with your back straight. You put one hand under each thigh. I know you can't see me. So your palms are under your thighs. Long, slow, deep breaths. And what you'll notice is that you feel sort of trapped, like you can't move your chest and all the air goes lower down and then poofs your stomach out. An occupational therapist taught me this strategy, and it's very, very effective. So it makes you breathe deeper. That's the whole idea. Any of these techniques, any of these poses work? I would just say that if you've been stressed for years and years and years, don't just sit there and focus on your breathing and think that you're breathing deep for several weeks. Assume one of these poses as you're doing your breathing. I'd really recommend that. The other thing, the other thing that makes this not work so well. So I'm trying to think of, like, ways to inoculate you against, like, you know, having some failure experience with this. So one would be if you're not actually activating the vagus nerve because you're not actually breathing through the diaphragm. The other way that people go wrong with this is that they'll do it once in a moment of extreme stress, and then they're like, oh, it doesn't work, I'm not going to do it. Let me tell you up front, if you don't have a daily practice with something like this and you just do it when you're stressed, it will not work for you. Let me save you the time, energy and effort. It's going to fail. If you want this to actually work for you, this has to be a brain training exercise. The way you retrain your brain and the way you're retraining the amygdala here is through repetition and as much as possible, consistency. But even repetition is more important than consistency. So what I usually recommend when I'm teaching people this is start off with just a five minute chunk a day, maybe set an alarm on your phone and you do it for five minutes. So five minutes every single day you're doing, maybe it's the four count breath or four, four, six, or whatever counts you want. Assuming that pose, if you want to produce brain changes that you could see on a brain scan, if you went and you got, you got some FMRI done, you're gonna need to practice probably about a total of 15 to 20 minutes a day. But it doesn't have to be in one sitting. You can break it up three times a day, five, five, five, five and five. But you're gonna want about 15, 20 minutes a day for about 15 weeks. And I'm just being totally honest with you. I'm basically saying don't expect a miracle until you've been doing this for about 15 weeks. The good piece of this, I know that's not the best news, but the good piece of news with this is that you're gonna feel better, you're gonna feel symptom relief long before you would see change on a brain scan. So it's about 15 weeks for change on a brain scan. But really you're gonna start to feel different pretty fast if you do this. Okay? So just know and know this, this is going to be true with any type of therapy. Anytime you're wanting to make a change, you've got to create new habits. The brain loves repetition. And that's how you're going to change the amygdala over time to where slowly it starts to crank itself down and it's a slow process, but all of a sudden you notice that you're sleeping a little better, that you're a little less hypervigilant, that you're A little less snippy, maybe a little less impatient. So the changes kind of come slowly, but you will start to notice some changes. Okay. Somebody saying also weighted blanket. Yep. Awesome. Yeah. Okay, let me, while I'm talking, because I want to give you a link here. So let me actually go find this link. I meant to have it before I started this webinar. Let me see here. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna paste this link in the little chat box. Don't. When I post this in the, when I copy or paste this in the chat box, don't go to this link right away because it's gonna take you out of this webinar. Okay. It'll like. I'm told that it likes, kicks you out of the room. People tell me that this is a link for you for after this, after this webinar. So it's my website, jennifersweetin.com backslash stress webinar as one word. If you want the slides, if you want these slides that I'm showing you and you want scripts and instructions for the breathing technique and then the next technique that I'm about to talk to you about, since we don't have time to do them together, but if you want instructions for that, this is the link where you can find that information. You get access through that link. So, so that way you can have these slides and you can have instructions for the four count breath. And the other technique, I just want to mention real quick, which is a different kind of amygdala deactivation exercise. It's called progressive muscle relaxation. So for those of you who've been in therapy maybe for a long time, especially for something like anxiety, you may already kind of know what this thing is. This is a different technique than breathing. It's going to accomplish some similar things in the brain. Actually, it's going to help the amygdala. It's going to help you calm down. It's going to help you get back into the body. In some ways, it's kind of like a meditation. If you like meditations, you might gravitate toward this, but the experience of it is a little different. So I always like to give people a couple of options because I know some people just hate focusing on breathing and some people can't stand progressive muscle relaxation. So I want to give you a couple of options for how to reduce amygdala activation. Progressive muscle relaxation. What it is, is you're going to, in the technique, you'll see in the instructions, you start at the bottom of the body. I usually start with the feet and you feel into or you notice sensations occurring in different areas of the body as you work your way up. And what you're doing is you're tensing and releasing different major muscle groups. Just systematically tensing and releasing. Okay, yeah, think somebody said that. I'm assuming you're talking about progressive muscle relaxation, unless I've missed some context here, but that this technique is so boring, but worth it. I have totally been bored doing PMR progressive muscle relaxation before. I actually prefer breathing myself. And then I like this other technique called autogenic training, which we're not doing today, but I'm a big fan of that, so. So yeah, to each their own. But what you're doing is you're systematically tensing and releasing different major muscle groups moving up the body. What it's training you to do is to tense and notice what tension feels like. So that when you become tense, when you're stressed, you can recognize that you're becoming tense. So you're not walking around like this saying, no, I'm fine, I'm not stressed. But you can actually feel that tension and say, ah, I think I'm tense, I must be stressed. So you can learn how to take cues better from your body. So you learn how to notice the feeling of tension. And what you're training your body to do in this exercise is to also intentionally relax muscles. So you're training yourself to relax on command. And this too, this takes a lot of training. This is not something where you're going to see a huge, like some huge progress in, you know, one or two sessions of it. You're going to have to do this. But you can train your body to relax on command to reduce that stress response, basically on command, which is really, really, really cool. So consider checking out the instructions for this technique too. If you just want a different way to reduce amygdala activation other ways. Yeah, the exercise, yeah, the yoga can be great. If you have ptsd. Getting a lot of focus on the trauma really can help too. I'm just getting some of that trauma integrated. You never really get over trauma, but as it can become integr processed and consolidated better in your brain, that too can help with the amygdala deactivation. So there's a lot of things that can be of help. I hope that this is helpful. I know there's only so much we can do in a one hour webinar, but I have here on the last slide, sorry, the blue came out kind of weird and bright Here, that's just my website, which is just my name. You got the link through the link I put in the chat box, my email. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions in my Facebook. So I'm all around. There's plenty of ways to get a hold of me. I'm doing these. I stopped doing them for a while, but I'm doing more of them in January. I'm trying to do them weekly. So I will be offering it again if you're interested. Somebody says, best webinar I've attended yet. Thank you so much. Hopefully it'll be helpful to you. I'm gonna just stay on for another minute or two if anybody else has questions and then I'll let you all go. Yeah, somebody saying, even just drawing a picture, stopping to do something else distracting can be helpful. Absolutely. So each week when it's this topic. So it's how stress impacts the body and the brain, it is exactly this exact same thing every week. Yes. So the content is going to be the same as much as I can make it the same. Yeah. So if you want to listen to this basically again, you know, join me again next week. But yeah, if you don't want to hear the same thing, don't. Useful website. Yeah. Hopefully you can find some helpful things on my website too. I'm trying to do better, getting more videos up and things like that and information. So. Okay, you said. Okay, somebody says, you said something about if calm is stressful and fearful, what are you supposed to do? Okay, so specifically, if you find calming down is scary or unsafe, that strongly indicates a trauma history. And I would say you need to get trauma focused, trauma informed therapy for that. Thing about being really afraid of relaxation is that you're not going to do these techniques that we've talked about that I just talked about. You're not going to do them if they make you feel unsafe. There are ways to manage that though. There are ways to feel safer in the body so that you can learn to calm down again. And you need some trauma focused therapy. Yeah. Okay. Okay. So there's no exercise that I gave for that piece in this. That would be a different type of topic. But if you want more exercises, I think you can find some information through my website. But also just email me if you're looking for something in particular to help with something and I can tell you these are the exercises that tend to help with these conditions or phenomena. Okay, well, thank you all. I'll go ahead and log off just in case. I never know in this program. Somebody's going to come right after me and need me out of here on time. Somebody's asking if there's a way to listen to this webinar again. So I am actually recording it, and I am going to try to find a way to get it to my website. So I just say look at my website, maybe email me and ask me me about it, because I have been recording this today. Okay. All right. Thank you all, and maybe I will see you all again soon. Have a great weekend. Bye.