Understanding PTSD's Effects on Brain, Body, and Emotions | Janet Seahorn | TEDxCSU

I'm having that identical twin sister and my background in neuroscience is probably giving my husband more stress than he ever thought he knew when he married me he thought he was getting one person he received two they asked us earlier this morning how we felt going into the TED talks and one of my very creative other presenters said feel like Katniss going into the Hunger Games that's kind of what I feel like and my subject is post-traumatic stress disorder which I think I have today so I'll start out with our poem Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall Humpty Dumpty had a great fall all the king's horses and all the king's men putting good foot Humpty together again one moment he's on the wall eating a hamburger drinking a beer talking about the Friday Night Football game and the next minute he's a scrambled egg his mind his body and his emotions are very different so this is our active learning I want you to look at the person to your right and to your left and I want you to think can you tell that this person has gone through some really traumatic event now I'm not going to ask you to raise your hands but the answer is probably no because we call it the hidden wound I like to refer to it as the silent screen because it's very much in that person but most of us can't see it can't hear it and can't feel it but they can and they're not going to talk about it now I have been married to my husband for over 40 years he's a Vietnam vet I didn't know him before he went over which is probably a good thing on the other hand I didn't know what normal looked like for him so he arrived in country three weeks after his 21st birthday he was one of the older ones he was a second lieutenant and on his first week there he was sleeping in a tent with two other second lieutenants when a rocket exploded over their tent one person was killed one person lost an arm a leg and he was injured but not bad enough to be sent back home it's like welcome to Vietnam and after a few weeks when he was healed enough they sent him on his first mission and that was out in the jungles of Vietnam where he stayed and lived day in and day out experiencing tremendous high doses of traumatic events that in dealt with life and death experiences now we had no idea where some of his for the first 25 years where some of his strange over-the-top behaviors were coming from like if he opened the refrigerator door and there was a certain smell that he didn't like he had a very abnormal event to that having toys or materials on the floor that shouldn't be there not a good thing in his eyes now our military and our first responders are highly trained to be an abnormal events so that they have normal for them responses to be able to survive battle and even with all that training they cannot be inoculated against post-traumatic stress by definition post-traumatic stress is an anxiety disorder that develops in reaction to a physical injury or a severe mental or emotional distress now I'm not going to name all the ways you can get post-traumatic stress all you have to do is look on your cell phone open up a a paper turn on the news and there's millions of different types of ways you can get post-traumatic stress but here's a fairly new one and it's happening to our young people it's called cyber bullying and cyber bullying for a young mind puts them into that mental and emotional distress in Larimer County we're not all that big we had 81 suicides last year two of them were 11 years old one was 12 if it takes a village to raise a child it will take a village to help support and heal the wounded all of the wounded at any age in our society and I'm going to take issue to the word disorder we're changing the language because post-traumatic stress by a neurological standpoint is not a disorder it's a reordering of your neural networks and pathways and your sensory pathways so that you can survive in a really dangerous situation I tell my students here at CSU that the one reason you get a brain is not to pick out your girlfriend for a Saturday night date it's much more primal than that although that might be pretty primal but you get it to survive the brain is organized so you when you get in difficult situations may live through that difficult situation it helps you through that and I also tell my students experience gulps the brain good experiences bad experiences the brain doesn't care all it's doing is taking information from the environment through our senses sight sound touch taste smell that lets us know we're green light everything's okay we're yellow light that's tolerable stress it's actually supposed to help us our immune system I get that driving down the freeway and at 80 miles an hour I see somebody texting okay and I'm no longer in tolerable stress I may go into that red zone the toxic zone this is the one is what's happening with the brain is that our prefrontal cortex that may not all be all that developed anyway is now starting to shut down I can't get information to it fast enough the hippocampus is getting shorter that's where we have short term memory example I got in the shower today turned off the water and said if I wash my hair I am Katniss in The Hunger Games and the amygdala and the amygdala is what I call the traffic cop it is where it starts getting the information for all the senses and the miracle does this Oh goodness we're in the red zone I'm rallying the troops I'm telling them to call into the hippocampus or the hypothalamus the pituitary the adrenal glands release those stress hormones get me ready to fight and flight so I release one noradrenaline epinephrine cortisone glucose and it's not going up here for me to think it's going into my limbs so I can fight the heck out of my way out or better yet I'm going to run faster than any of the rest of you and be safe now eventually our sensory systems become a little overwhelmed you think they become sensitized to what's happening so they're easily triggered we hear things that may not be there we don't hear things that are there my husband blames me on not hearing what I've told him vision we see things that aren't there and we don't see things that are there and driving down the highway that's not that's not a good thing to have so in that brain change the sensory system when it's overloaded looks like this you become hyper-vigilant and hyper aroused so we like to go on ski trips we started our kids when they were toddlers and we had to be out of the house at 6:00 in the morning now for any of you have had toddlers and you're trying to get them awake fed and dressed by 6:00 in the morning you better have a miracle on hand at one minute after 6:00 my husband's pacing at two minutes after 6:00 he's getting a little anxious at three minutes after 6:00 now he's irritable and at four minutes after 6:00 he's found language and it sounds like this hurry up you're going too slow what's the matter with you we planned on this last night we were going to be in the car driving down the road at six o'clock in the morning well we eventually get there although I didn't want to be a nap car with him and nor did my son's and going down the road whoa all of a sudden he's thinking he's happy we're a mess but now he's in control no worries we made it past the danger no this is what we didn't understand we didn't understand that in combat if you're late people died but subconsciously he knew that and that he carried with him nightmares night sweats panic attacks insomnia which really messes up the brain for short-term memory and also your immune system you kind of need sleep flashbacks another story we like to go to allegis a big amusement park in Denver and my boys and myself we would juice with neighbors and friends except for this one Saturday and my husband decided to go with us and we had a favorite ride it was called the dragon it looked like a dragon and it went up some of you may know this came down down fast pulling those G's who went up came down that we're lovin this we had hardly wait to get him on that ride so we board and it goes up and it comes down and it goes up and it comes down and I'm look at my husband and he should be laughing but he's turned white to Nash and colored and he's starting to say in a very anxious voice I've got to get off at this right you have to make it stop I have got to get off of this ride and you can't it has ten more fun cycles as soon as he got off he ran to a bathroom threw up came back he's this ashen color still and he says we have to go home I'm really sick and we just thought it was that hot doggy ate for lunch make sense blaming everything on hot dogs but this is what was really happening that ride triggered a flashback from when he was in Vietnam and on one occasion he was flying right wing in helicopters and they had gone into a hot combat zone to remove some wounded military they were all loaded on the helicopter they were starting to take off 20 30 feet off the ground he being right-wing hadn't quite buckled his seatbelt when the helicopter took a direct hit he was blown out and when he landed he looked at himself and he was covered in the oil the gas and the blood of everyone in that helicopter that was his flashbacks that's what that fun ride did to him it was anything but fun those overwhelming waves of emotion that you would do anything to get rid of just keep flowing the personality changes where you're more anxious you're more irritable you may become angry you may have feelings of detachment and you want to just isolate because you no longer fit into that normal world you used to but you don't now and trying to be with all of you when I'm not normal hey guys you're my triggers there are days I don't want to be around people and nor does he eventually that may make us feel different about who we are how we lived how we proceed in our environment and if you don't get a handle on it this is what happens is that your brain and your body start to wear out high incidence of hypertension you have chronic incidence of strokes and different types of heart attacks we know we have obesity we have diabetes we have ulcers we have chronic fatigue symptoms there's so many issues to our body when it starts to wear out but this is what we can do this is the good news we can start healing but it's by doing something that helps us heal things like we know that cognitive therapy and feedback biofeedback work we know that doing things like exercise helps us we know and we're getting smarter because if information is coming from our body why not start working on our body first like massage yoga tai chi meditation because what those are doing it's resetting our breathing back to normal we take a lot of that fly-fishing because the motion of that fly and forth mimics that good heartbeat and that healthy breathing we have our dog he's a service dog Bailey just stroking him house so there's all kinds of positive things that we can do to heal and we've been practicing now for years in the end it is not in the hoping that we might heal it is in the doing that will help us move forward and I can tell you at this time in our lives Maya Angelou says when we know better we do better we know better and we practice hard we're going to win that Hunger Games we're going to be those survivors and in spite of those traumatic experiences we have become stronger we become more compassionate not more doubtful we definitely become more grateful for every single thing we have in our lives in our days versus angry at things we don't have or may have lost and we've become wiser Marshall Probst says in wisdom you do not receive wisdom you discover it within yourselves after a journey that no one can take for you or with you and in our silence we say the serenity prayer which calms us down and we are learning to finally begin to bear what it once felt so unbearable to us and to heal what once felt so shattered thank you you you

Channel: undefined

Views: 1,174,490

Rating: 4.8818874 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United States, Health, Brain, War

Id: BEHDQeIRTgs

Length: 15min 59sec (959 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 14 2016