Ep. 22 On the comfort zone, stretch zone, panic zone and play zone

Mary Wandlis, welcoming you to podcast number 22, where we continue to talk about fear and anxiety. In working with this, I really love the idea of each rider having their comfort zone, their stretch zone and their panic zone. So your comfort zone is you doing what comes easily. Whether that's about the patterns you've learned, the coordinations in your body, or or about your bravery in your stretch zone. You're working to choose new reactions over old and that could just be to do with new learnt skills and it could be with reminding yourself to breathe, bear down, stay short, stay strong, stay still. In your panic zone, you've crossed an edge of where you're really being run by your hind brain reactions. You've got no access to higher brain centres and really you're a victim in that situation. And for me, as a coach, my job is to make sure the rider doesn't get into her panic zone or if she does, to get her back as quickly as I can. What we want over time is that what was your stretch zone becomes your comfort zone, what was your panic zone becomes your stretch zone. As your skills and your confidence grow, it's also nice to add the idea of your play zone, which is pretty much a hybrid between your comfort zone and your stretch zone, where you're not so much struggling with new coordinations, but playing with what you know, putting different things together, playing around, experimenting. Now, of course, people aren't really allowed to experiment in dressage arenas, but good riders do, in an ethical, mindful way, and they grow their noticing skills by doing that. But if you're one of these people for whom dressage is stressage and you're really involved in the passionate pursuit of perfection by being obsessively imperfect. Play may be a rather alien concept, but it's one you want to develop. If you grew up in the era of instructors basically saying, what's wrong with you, girl? What do you mean you're frightened? Get on and ride that horse. That experience can really mess with your sense of what is safe and how to make a situation safe. Sensible people might think this is too dangerous to get on at this point. I need to maybe lead the horse around the arena a couple of times before I get on, do a little bit of groundwork, maybe lunge the horse. They are making a sensible risk assessment. But if you're there thinking, I really shouldn't be frightened, I ought to be able to do this, I have to get over my fear, I need to get on, then you may jump over a barrier that you really shouldn't jump over. There have been many times when I've been teaching a lesson and a rider has arrived for the next lesson and I'm meeting them for the first time and then their horse are in my environment for the first time and I'm looking at them out of the corner of my eye and I've maybe said, are you sure that this is safe to get on? Do you want to spend a bit more time? It's fine with me if you do. You can do whatever you want to make this situation more safe. And they've gone, no, no, no, I'm fine, I'm going to get on. And maybe they made the archetypal mistake of thinking they were riding the horse they have at home. Whereas of course you all know if you've been to a competition that the horse in the warm up arena or any new arena may not be the same horse. And all of those riders got on but didn't stay on for very long. And I learnt that for me, as an observer, my perceptions, my ability to read that rider and horse to assess danger or safety were probably much more accurate than many riders. It can work both ways. Riders sense that something is safe when it isn't and that sense that something is unsafe when it is. I've met riders who their horse pricks its ears and they have a panic attack and get into a major control freak mode of getting his head down and getting his ears sideways. And that poor horse is living with an awful lot of constraints and control in a way that won't do it a lot of good. Over many years I've worked with many people with their fear, both written and in workshops. I also refer people a lot to Jo Cooper and her website, equestrian confidence.com but it's interesting, over the many years of many anxious riders, I've only met one rider who said to me, I need help, I need to stop falling off. My doctors have told me I'll be in a wheelchair if I have another bad fall, but I just can't stop myself getting on the crazy ones. I love riding the crazy ones. Now this was a young rider, probably the late stage at a pony club. She I suspect wasn't much more than 18 and I rather think she had an identity performance mishmash. Her claim to fame was her ability on these crazy horses that nobody else wanted to ride and she didn't want to give up that kudos, even though she obviously had had falls and was potentially in danger. She's the only person who's ever said to me I really need to reassess this, but I have known many riders whose confidence was too big for their competence and who paid a price on that. And the other end of the scale is the riders whose competence merits more confidence. Let's change tack for a minute here to talk about horses. If a herd of horses are grazing in a field and one of them sees or hears something that might be dangerous, its head goes up, its ears prick, it looks in the direction of the possible threat. Some of the writers are on issues around fear and anxiety and post traumatic stress have called this state arrest. It's a state of just going, what's happening here? Do we do fight or flight? Are we safe? Do we just graze? What do we do? And once one horse has done this, the chances are that rest of the herd are going to join in because more eyes and more ears may have more useful perceptions. And either the herd decide to flee or they go back to grazing. And horses are flight animals. Fleeing is their default. So we can get the situation where we have a hypervigilant horse who's ridden by a hypervigilant rider. Now, horses and all other prey animals will do arrest. They will run, assuming they outrun the predator, they will go back to grazing and they will often do a whole body shake. And that shake is a kind of reset for the nervous system and they're back and they're okay. If you have a hyper vigilant horse, it has somehow not gone through that cycle. So the spooky hyper horse is somewhere stuck in that arrest kind of state and hasn't taken that cycle through to its ending. Which prey animals do much more easily than humans because their threats, as ours were back in the days of early man, are visible and obvious. And they have a beginning and they have an end. Whereas human stresses in this day and age that could be around family and work and financial worries can be very ongoing and have a different quality to them. But anyway, let's say we have a stuck in that process hyper vigilant horse being ridden by a hypervigilant rider. The hypervigilant horse has had its attention go narrow and external. And I think we've used before the idea of who's got the channel changer? The horse is going, Channel 5. Scary movie, Channel 5. Scary movie,. Channel 5. And if the rider goes, what? What's over there? What's the scary movie? Channel 5. What? What are seeing? Then the horse has got the channel changer. The rider has to be able to go, no, no, no, horse. It's not that. Channel one, forward, calm and straight. Keep your attention with me. Channel one. Keep your attention with me. Channel one attention with me. And when she's got the channel changer, then she can begin to defuse the situation and get both of them from that narrow external focus to a more internal focus. I've known riders, as I said, where the horse pricks one ear and they go into hyper panic control mode, but it is true that up there, sometimes it's really important to keep the horse's attention. I can remember years ago I had to ride my boss's horse who was coming back into work in the outdoor arena, while the indoor arena that was being built had guys on the roof moving around and banging things. And this horse was very fresh and he was a bit of a joker and it was really important I had his attention on me. But that's different if you do it by bearing down, keeping your centre, keeping your breathing being more compelling to the horse than the outside world, rather than getting wiggly and jiggly and uncoordinated and pully and fiddly. So sometimes as a rider, you really have to be strong in your boots and well organised. But here's a question for when you are anxious. Do you get stiff and a bit rigid and uncoordinated and feel like your body goes to blocks of wood or do you go to jelly? Have that question in the back of your mind while we go through the rest of this presentation. I'm sure you've all heard about the two branches of the autonomic nervous system. The sympathetic branch is powered by the hormones of adrenaline and cortisol and it leads us and all animals into fight or flight. The parasympathetic system brings us back into rest and digest, or as I've heard it said, feed and breed. And that's powered by oxytocin. So our modern day human threats do not pass as easily as the threats of our animal and early human ancestors. So we can end up in an aroused state for a long time. This wears the body down. People tend to end up with high blood pressure, high heart rate. Those people often have an overly strong handshake. You can imagine how that translates. For a rider, these two systems can be thought of a bit as if they interact like the heating and cooling system in a house that has both heating and air conditioning. So if the thermostat recognizes it's cold, it puts the heating on and when it warms up too much, the heating turns off and the air conditioning comes on. This is A great idea, but unfortunately it's not actually true. There was a researcher in ancient Rome who used to try and cobble gladiators together after fights. And if he couldn't save them, he dissected them and he found the vagus nerve. And it's only very recently, actually in 1994, that a researcher, Dr. Stephen Porges, discovered that he made a mistake and that there are two branches to the vagus nerve and what we thought of as two systems and is actually three. Let's start with the parasympathetic system, which does rest and digest and feed and breed. The vagus nerve, with its two branches, has an older branch and a newer branch. The vagus nerve, like the word vagrant, means the wandering nerve. It's newer branch is found in mammals. It goes mostly to the heart and lungs and a little bit to the organs below the diaphragm when the vagus nerve is working well. Another name for this rest and digest is the social connection system. We are feeling safe, and it's safety that enables this branch of the vagus nerve to run the show and keep us in that state. Mammals develop this because we cooperate to raise our young to live in social groups. And this branch of the vagus nerve is also pretty well associated with facial expression and the voice, the way we recognize friend and foe and know whether or not we're safe within our group or perhaps if our group meets other groups. So somebody in the social activation system, or rather the social engagement system, is in her body. She's present, she can see and feel and understand. That person will be a good learner. Now, when we get stressed and adrenaline and cortisol kick in, that fires up the sympathetic system, which is also known as the spinal activation system. So the vagus nerve is a cranial nerve that comes from the brainstem. The nerves that get our muscles fired up come from the spinal cord exiting between our various vertebrae, and they're going to send heart rate up. We lose fine motor control. We get scared. Blood goes from the organs to the muscles. As we prepare to fight or flight, that person is likely to lose fine motor control. And that's the origin of the term scared stiff. The animal, as we said, runs for it, lives to tell the tale, shakes it off. That acts as a reset for the nervous system, going back to the social connection system and back to grazing. But we can get so stuck in fight or flight when we're doing that. Our system is doing mobility with fear. The social engagement system is doing mobility without fear. The state of Arrest is immobility with fear. And the other circuit, the newly discovered dorsal vagal circuit, the older circuit does immobility with fear. So this circuit goes back evolutionarily to reptiles. Reptiles don't need to cooperate. They don't need to give each other different cues and read each other cues. They also don't really run for it. One of their best things to do in a tricky situation is just freeze, be immobile, stay on that rock. And that older branch of the vagus nerve inhibits breathing. It has some connections to the lungs and the heart. It goes mostly to the organs below the diaphragm. It feeds back to the brain. A lot of information about the internal state of the body. How is, how is it, Is it perceiving threat, Is it healthy, how's it doing? This circuit runs freeze and fold. So to fight or flight, we add fight, flight, freeze and fold. So the reptile would freeze on the rock. If a mouse realizes it's being observed by a hawk in the sky, it will stop breathing. Because a lot of what that hawk is seeing is the movement of its ribcage with the breath. The vagus nerve inhibits breathing. The mouse can be scared to death. And apparently 10% of mice really do die of fright in that situation. So the animal freezes like a hedgehog. A hedgehog or a porcupine folding up. This is just the same kind of response. Not fight or flight, but just retreat, shut down. The ultimate of this circuit is hibernation, really slowing blood flow, heart rate, breathing, preserving the body's resources for as long as possible. When there is no escape, freeze becomes foal. So what happens? Let's suppose the predator catches the prey animal. The prey animal is in the jaws of the hungry tiger. It will then go limp. When it goes limp, if the cat bites down, the muscles don't feel like they should. They should have a firmer response, but there's this sogginess that it bites into and it feels wrong. And sometimes the predator will put the prey down and lose interest. So this is an evolutionary, potentially life saving response. Now if you search YouTube, searching duck makes a fool out of dog. You will find a little video that shows this. And a Labrador has a duck in its mouth and it holds it for a while and it then puts the duck down and it walks off. And the duck, which looks so dead, gets up and runs away. One of the versions of this video has some really crass laughter attached to it, which I find quite offensive actually, because it's not funny. It's not so much clever. It's a duck scared for its life, doing what its nervous system has programmed it to do. So fold is a give up of when you think deaf death is imminent and there's no escape. Now, what happens in the body is known as tonic immobility. And if this has happened to you a lot of times in your life that you've been stressed in a situation where you can't fight, you can't flee, there is no escape, there is no way out. Your body may have chosen this response. It means your tone will be really low. It also means that the notion that fear could be interpreted, or rather the symptoms of anxiety, the butterflies could be interpreted as either fear or excitement will feel like a sick joke because you've been in a state of repeatedly experiencing dread. Now if this is your history, it means that you will go to jelly or as you'd say in the U.S. jello. When you're really stressed. And for you, riding becomes a big challenge because if you freeze, you slow down, you go into yourself, you have a low tone body, you're not going to find riding easy, your reactions will be slow, you lack authority, you have poor boundaries, you're going to tend to nag your horse rather than being really effective. A horse could be in this state too. It will be low tone disengaged, not really present. The horse and rider in that state have learned helplessness and getting yourself out of this would be a big challenge. Your aim is to find your way from here back to the social connection system and that's a quest. But there's no one better to help you with that quest than the right horse and a really empathetic but together coach who can just keep you in your stretch zone and help you find that boundary and the learning place. In our next podcast we'll look at more strategies to help you if you're stuck here. So there'll be some of you where I've explained you to yourself, some coaches where I've explained some of your pupils to you and and you probably know someone struggling from a dorsal vagal background whose tendency is to shut down and freeze and fold. Meanwhile, remember, you can get help from the website equestrian confidence.com and I'll be back with you next time with some more practical strategies for dealing with anxiety and nerves.

These podcasts are linked to two other Internet sites. One is Dressagetraining tv, which hosts a whole variety of webinars taught by myself, Mary Wanlis and my colleague Ali Wakelin.

Where we're working live with a variety.

Of horses and riders, showing them the basics of biomechanics and helping them build their skill and train their horses and explaining to the audience as we do this. There's also a groundwork certification course on that site based on the work of Dr. Andrew MacLean and Equine Learning Theory and this too gives you a step by step guide to building your skills. We'd also love you to take a look@justgiving.com and then to search Overdale to find the Justgiving page for Overdale Equestrian Centre which is my UK home base here in this time of lockdown in 2020 we have 10 school horses eating of course and pooping and doing all the things that horses do and no income to support those horses and whilst they're having a wonderful time for us this is something of a stress and if you've enjoyed these webinars or enjoyed these podcasts and benefited from them and you're willing to give any small or large amount to our Just Giving page.

We would be so grateful. Many thanks to you.