For a very long time the field of
psychology was dominated by psychologists who insisted that the way to change how you
feel is to change how you think, and honestly that is true, it's at least partially true; when
you change how you think, you can change how you feel, but there's something deeper than thoughts.
The older more instinctual part of your brain actually has superiority over your cortex and
modern research into trauma and anxiety work is showing that your nervous system really
runs the show. For many people, you can't just think your way out of emotions, but when you calm
your nervous system, you can then think clearly as well. In this video you're going to learn
about the two states of your nervous system, how emotions can get stuck in the body or nervous
system, and how to train your nervous system to be calmer so that you can process through
emotions, feel happier, and make better choices. This video is sponsored by Better Help. Better Help
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a try. If you use the link in the description you can get 10% off your first month. In the last video
we learned about the fight-flight-freeze response. This is an automatic reaction in the
nervous system to respond to threats, but your beautiful brilliant brain isn't just
going to leave you hanging, there are two automatic responses in your nervous system. This natural
alerting response, the fight-flight-freeze response, and a natural calming response. Now quick review,
when we feel unsafe our nervous system has a way to get activated in order to respond to threats;
this is the sympathetic nervous system response. This is what leads to the physiological changes
in the body with the fight-flight-freeze response. Your nervous system also has a response to calm
down. This is called the parasympathetic response. I remember this by thinking para as in parachute. It
slows things down and it helps the nervous system and your body to return to a calm state. The
parasympathetic response slows your heart rate, lowers your blood pressure, it turns back on
digestion, your muscles loosen, and your eyes soften. This state is also known as rest and digest
or feed and breed, this is a healing state. Your immune system gets back to work and
your sense of peace and safety is restored. Both of these responses are helpful, it's important
to be able to respond to threats, but it's also important to rest and heal. These two states are
kind of like muscles, the part of our nervous system that we use the most becomes the strongest.
A healthy nervous system alternates between these two states easily. It can go through these cycles
of activation which are like- waking up, performing a task, getting motivated, dealing with problems, and
then it can switch to relaxation- taking a break, sleeping, rejuvenating, refreshing, right? A healthy
nervous system tends to spend more time in the calm state than it does in the activated state.
Our nervous system is designed to go through a natural cycle of being at rest and then being
alert, possibly performing in the fight-flight- freeze response or in some level of performance,
and then shake it off, and then return to safety, to to rest and digest. Peter Levine, who is the creator
of somatic experiencing therapy, he explains this process so well, and he uses this example of a
polar bear to demonstrate the nervous system cycle. So this polar bear was peacefully doing its
thing when suddenly a group of researchers chase him down with a helicopter and shoot him with a
tranquilizer dart right? This is really stressful, and the bear is helpless to stop these researchers
who are examining it and tagging it right? The bear has experienced a traumatic event, but
after the researchers leave, he begins to shake violently and this is his body's natural
response to burn off the excess adrenaline that surged through his body when he was trapped.
So after shaking for a while, the bear walks off with no residual effects from the experience. He
returns to a calm state of hunting and eating. The cycle is the essence of emotion processing
in our body. We start with a resting state, we go on alert, then fight-flight-freeze, then
afterwards we shake it off, and in humans this looks like laughing or physically shaking
or crying, and then we return to feeling safe and back to this rest and digest state. Now, let's
take a minute and look at the shake it off stage. Have you ever seen someone who had a near miss
right, like a car nearly hits them or something? Their immediate reaction is this strange laugh or
think about someone who has been in a car crash, but they're unharmed they often go into this shaky
stage afterwards, this is your body trying to burn off that adrenaline and process through those
stress chemicals that you just got flooded with. Your body is naturally trying to return to calm
by going through emotions in a physical way, but we humans are different than other animals,
we have this huge cortex, this thinking brain that helps us plan things out and think things
through and have self-control, but it often gets in the way of that response. 'Don't cry' it says,
'this is too embarrassing, act like you're fine'. It says, 'try not to get shaky at your
presentation, just don't think about it' it says, and so our brilliant, thinking mind, and our
attempts at avoiding these raw, visceral emotions, it interferes with our natural ability to resolve
that stress response and so emotions get trapped in the body, they get trapped in muscle tension,
and stress chemicals, and hormones like cortisol, and we carry them around with us. Maybe we try not
to think about them or we cope with stress, but our body holds the deep wisdom of how to let them
go. Here's an interesting story from Nicholas Sieben, a self-proclaimed acupuncturist and healer.
A patient, a successful male artist, came to me for "general wellness." He thought I could do something
to help him yet it was unclear what he had in mind. He appeared withdrawn, scattered, and shy.
He wouldn't make eye contact with me. He spoke of sexual problems with his wife, and a lack of
enthusiasm about his seemingly abundant life. Within the first three sessions (of acupuncture
treatment) a deep grief began to emerge. The patient would begin crying on the table and
felt a tremendous amount of shame and fear which he couldn't explain... I encouraged him
to allow the emotion to be expressed without trying to understand or classify it. ... For several
sessions he experienced expressions like this. He kept coming back because of the growing sense
of lightness he was beginning to feel. He was once again feeling joy. His sexual function was also
returning after a duration of about three months, this patient began to seem like a new person, very
different from the man I'd met months before. His posture and demeanor changed dramatically, he
seemed to glow and radiate with enthusiasm and energy, his relationship improved, as did his sexual
expression. He began to radiate sex appeal, and he gained the attention of many people, which also
seemed to help his creative work and self-esteem. Once the expression of grief, fear and
shame ceased to occur during his treatments, we decided the therapy had concluded. Now I am not
saying that acupuncture is a cure for trauma or you know, repressed emotions, but there are lots
of anecdotal reports of huge physical releases of these emotions or of trauma when doing physical
treatments. So if you talk to massage therapists or acupuncturists or chiropractors, you'll hear
stories of people who suddenly start shaking or crying during a session and and they
feel like something has been released. Can we say in a very specific way, an empirical
way, that your trauma is stored in your shoulders or your uterus or that acupuncture releases your
chi to flow? Well no, because we simply don't have the tools to measure that, but we can say with
certainty that physical activity is powerful at resetting the nervous system and healing
anxiety and trauma. So if you're struggling with ptsd or anxiety or stress, I encourage you to
work with a therapist who specializes in trauma, and one thing you could look for is someone who is
certified in emdr or somatic experiencing. So I'm a believer in evidence-based treatments, that means
treatments that show through rigorous research to be effective consistently and not harmful
in treating these certain disorders. So I am not necessarily a proponent of energy healing for
example. There's a lot of alternative treatments for trauma and body work that's happening that
I think might be selling a little bit more than the research can back up, but on the other hand
the anecdotal evidence the stories people tell is that they experience something really different,
and they experience healing doing these body-based modalities, and the research is starting to catch
up with these physical treatments as an effective way to heal trauma and anxiety. So for example, yoga
has been shown to be an effective treatment for ptsd, and according to Bessel Van Der Kolk, it's
more effective than most medication treatments. Physical treatments like acupressure,
massage, dancing, or deep belly breathing, are all things that people say help them with
stress and what these things are likely doing is rebalancing the nervous system. Same thing with
exercise, it's been shown to be more effective than medication at treating mild to moderate
depression and anxiety and this has got to be because it's helping the nervous system go through
these natural cycles of activation and relaxation. So unresolved trauma or chronic stress can leave
us trapped in the sympathetic response. It's like the thermostat gets turned up, and that fight-
flight-freeze response becomes very sensitive; it gets turned on easily and it stays on for a long
time, and in this way trauma or stress gets stuck in the body even when we may not be consciously
thinking about the actual trauma. An unhealthy nervous system gets stuck in elevated levels
of stress, rarely going through cycles of calm. The sympathetic nervous system takes over
and you feel constantly anxious, you may see danger in the slightest signal, and find it very
difficult to relax. This often leads to periodic exhaustion and crashing. We're often unaware
of why we're going into the high alert mode and this leads to us being stuck in it even longer.
It's not healthy to be stuck in high alert all day long and then collapse at home or to simply
rely on relaxation to recharge. We need to learn how to regulate our nervous system throughout the
day. I recently worked with a trainer who trains emergency room doctors, emts, police, the military to
regulate their nervous system throughout the day. Now many of these people have very stressful
jobs and if they're clenched right, if they're stuck in fight-flight-freeze at work, then they
often end up exhausted, traumatized, and burnt out. This trainer, he trains them to build a
healthy nervous system through the skill of relaxed vigilance, and this is essential for
ptsd and anxiety and stress, so you know, mental health in general. In the next section I'm going to
teach you all about it, but the basic skill is just learning to trigger that parasympathetic response,
that calming response in your nervous system, in small moments, frequently throughout the day, and
you do this through simple body based exercises, like taking deep breaths, or tensing and then
softening muscle groups. You can still be a high performer, in a high stress job, and have a
parasympathetically dominant nervous system. You can train yourself to be calmer. Our nervous system,
including our brain, has an amazing ability to change and grow depending on how we use it. There's
good research out there showing that we can change the physical structure, the chemical balance, and
the electrical activity in our brain depending on how we use it. We can even influence our genes and
how they're activated and passed on. We can learn to have quite a bit of influence on our nervous
system, training it to activate when we need to wake up, perform tasks, or respond to problems, and
teaching it to calm down when it's time to relax, recoup, to process, or to repair and we do this through
physical, emotional, and psychological exercises. The many skills you're learning in this course are
geared toward this process. When we're calm, we can make more intentional and powerful choices with
our lives. We create calm by resolving the needs of survival and attachment and training our brain
to feel safe. We're going to keep developing these skills as we move through this course. For now,
here is one exercise that can help you feel safe. Dr. James Gordon travels the world to
train people on how to overcome trauma and he uses research-backed, mind-body techniques.
He's used these skills to help refugees and rape victims, earthquake survivors, and veterans
of wars. Now here's a story about him from the website mindbodygreen.com. About a year after
the massive earthquake that rocked Haiti in 2010, Gordon traveled to the island to lead a
workshop for survivors. "I was leading a workshop for about 100 nursing students. They'd
lost about 90 of their fellow nursing students- many of them very young women, in their late
teens- in this earthquake. So at the end of one afternoon, I got them all up shaking, and within two
minutes half of them were weeping. We paused for a bit became aware of our breath, and then I put on
some Bob Marley, and they started dancing. Some were still crying, others started laughing, and afterward
they said, 'this feels so good!' Many of the women told Gordon it was the first time that they'd
been able to laugh or cry since the earthquake- and that they thought they had to be strong,
or that they shouldn't be enjoying themselves." Dr. Gordon says- "When you shut down one emotion and
you go into that frozen state, it's not just that emotion you're protecting yourself against that gets
shut down; your whole emotional life gets limited." Okay, so here's how to do it. So first go
ahead and turn on some of your favorite music or if you can't think of something upbeat, turn
on some Taylor Swift. I would play it for you, but I can't because of copyright reasons. So okay
and then go ahead and just stand up put your feet shoulder width apart and just start shaking
your feet a little bit right? Start shaking down there at your legs and then let that move up
through your whole body and just shake it out, and I want you to shake it out to music, act like
an idiot, let your hands go floppy, shake your head, and dance for like 45 minutes okay? Not 45, 4
to 5 minutes. Okay, do that for a few minutes and then when you're done, take a few slow,
deep belly breaths, and then come back here. By doing this you're essentially sending a
message to the fear centers in your brain that you are safe and this turns on that parasympathetic
response. In upcoming lessons we're going to teach you how to train your mind and body to respond
differently to threats, to resolve anxiety, and to teach the body to return to calm quickly. You're
going to learn how to strengthen the calming part of your nervous system through self-regulation.
Thank you for watching, and take care. This video is one skill from my 30 skill course-
How To Process Your Emotions, where I teach 30 of the most essential skills for resolving
depression, anxiety, and improving mental health. Emotion processing is an essential skill for
working through intense emotions, but most people have never been taught how to do it. I'm putting
every single main video lesson on youtube for the world to access for free. You watching these
videos, sharing them, contributing to my Patreon, and my sponsors make this possible. If you would
like to access the entire course in one place, ad free, with its workbook, exercises, downloads,
extra videos, live Q & A's, additional short readings, and links to extended resources, the link to
buy the course is in the description below.
