 to Happiness Isn't Brain Surgery with Doc Snipes. Each week we record the podcast during a Facebook Live broadcast in which Doc Snipes presents information and tools to help you start living happier. Our website, docsknipes.com, has even more resources, videos, handouts and workbooks to help you apply what we talk about. After each podcast, the accompanying video, text and worksheets will be published from members on docsknipes.com. Additionally, each week we have a members-only educational group, followed by a question and answer session with Doc Snipes, to help you apply the tools to yourself and start living happier faster. The Doc Snipes podcast will be providing listeners and members the same tools and information Dr. Snipes gives her clients. Go to docsknipes.com to learn more. Welcome everybody to Happiness Isn't Brain Surgery with Doc Snipes, practical tools to improve your mood and quality of life. Today we're going to be talking about identifying and preventing vulnerabilities. This is one of my favorite topics because it provides a lot of easy initial solutions. I'm not saying it's going to fix everything, but it's going to take the edge off or give you some ideas about ways you might go in order to start reducing stress and working towards being happy. We're going to define the vulnerabilities. We'll talk about some of the most common vulnerabilities, their effects and ways to prevent them. Again, I want you to focus on the fact that this is a broad overview. Each vulnerability that we talk about is going to have its own presentation, its own podcast. Today what we're doing is just taking a survey, if you will. Why do you care? That's the beginning question that people want answered when they have to listen to a lecture or read a book or do something. Vulnerabilities are situations that make it more difficult to deal with life on life's terms, leading to depression, anxiety or stress. It makes it easier for you to overreact or get stuck. When I talk about vulnerabilities, I want you to think about a day that you woke up and you just woke up on the wrong side of the bed and you were in a God-awful mood. What was your day like for the rest of the day? How did you react with people? How did people interact with you? Did you tend to be more irritable than you may normally be? That's what we're talking about with vulnerabilities. They're things that predispose us to kind of be cranky pants. When you experience stressors or threats, you respond with the fight or flight reaction, which is basically anger or fear. If you're seeing the world through a negative lens, if you're seeing a lot of threats or stresses or if your body is perceiving a lot of threats or stresses, you're probably going to be a little bit more irritable because you're protecting yourself in a way. You've got that fight or flight thing going on. We want to try to reduce that. Chronic stress is basically the situation where you've got fight or flight going pretty much all the time. Everywhere you look, there's some sort of obstacle or some sort of threat to your personal integrity of some sort. Depression can occur if you feel hopeless or hopeless for long enough, so you're stressed. You're trying to fight the stress. You're trying to fix it. You're trying to fix it and nothing works. And you're just like, you know what, screw it. At a certain point, your brain kind of says the same thing. And this is what we call depression. At a certain point, your brain goes, you know what? There is no point continuing to throw energy at whatever this stressor is because we're not going to win. So we're going to conserve energy. We're going to conserve all those excitatory neurochemicals that help us get motivated and happy or motivated and get ready to do something fight or flee. But those neurochemicals are the ones that we need to feel feel happy to. So if it's holding on to those preparing so it's got enough excitatory neurochemicals to fight if another threat comes along, then we're going to not feel happy. So we're going to feel depressed. Addictive and escape behaviors increase when you feel a need to escape because of stress, anxiety, depression or pain. So this threat, this stressor keeps going on and you're just like, I cannot take one more second. I don't have the skills to deal with this right now. I just can't tolerate it, which people turn a lot of times to some sort of addictive behavior. Now it's not always an addiction. It couldn't be an escape behavior that you just use occasionally. And that's OK. Sometimes we just have to distract so we don't react impulsively. But you want to look at if you start developing addictive behaviors, what are you using it to escape from? What's the threat? What are the unpleasant emotions? What's going on? Any type of stress can activate the threat response system. And we do a whole video on the HPA axis and the threat response system. But I'm just going to kind of hit the highlights here. When you're stressed, when there's a threat, your body releases a hormone called cortisol. It's your stress hormone aptly named. This causes a decrease in sex hormones. Your body goes, you know what? There's enough else going on right here. Sex is the least in my worries. Unfortunately, your sex hormones also make things like GABA and serotonin, your common chemicals available. So when your sex hormones go down, your anxiety and or anger can go up. And that's, you know, kind of by design. It means you're not calming down because there's a threat going on. So your body doesn't want you to calm down. But if this goes on long enough, then it starts impacting multiple areas of life. Now you have this release of cortisol, decrease in sex hormones, decrease in libido, increase in anxiety. You're like, oh, lovely. On top of that, you'll have an increase in thyroid hormones initially. This is your initial fight or flight. But if your body decides that, you know what, I can't win this battle, then you're actually going to have a drop in thyroid hormones. But while those thyroid hormones are high, again, it increases anxiety, anger, agitation, whatever you want to call it. You're also releasing norepinephrine, which is your motivation and your get up and go chemical, which makes you get up and go and makes you agitated and may increase anxiety or anger. It prepares you to respond to the threat. The whole point of this HPA axis is to protect you from danger. Unfortunately, when all this is going on, it causes impairments in sleep, which has a whole other cascade of effects we'll talk about later. So when you try to sleep, when you try to rest, you can't, you can't actually get good sleep because your body's on alert. It's looking for the threat is trying to defend itself. And sometimes, especially if you're not aware of what those threats are, you know, the body's just kind of scanning going, I don't know what I'm stressed out about, but I'm going to stay on high alert. So I'm not getting good rest. Think about a day that you or, you know, if you've been a new parent, you know how it feels. If you've gone for a couple of weeks or months without having a good night's sleep, life seems a lot harder. It's a vulnerability. We'll look at some of the reasons why that's true. But as sleep gets impaired, then your appetite starts to get impaired. The body can't regulate the hormones that tell you when you're hungry or when you're satiated. So you start to see a whole bunch of other effects in your, in your body, in your hunger, in your attitude. And most of them are negative. So the takeaway from this slide is the fact that you really want to look at things that are causing you chronic stress because chronic stress is bad. It's just, it's not a good thing. So individual vulnerabilities, physical, lack of sufficient quality sleep. When we sleep, our body rests, restores and rebalances. When we don't get enough quality sleep, the body starts to become imbalanced, which means it perceives a threat, you know, kind of goes back to that primitive, you're the weakest animal in the herd. So you're more vulnerable to attack. Many people, when they're not getting good quality sleep, say, you know what, I'm just going to take a sleep aid and go to sleep. Well, unfortunately, most of the sleep aids out there actually, they help you sleep, but it's not quality sleep. It's restless sleep. So you know, what do we do? When you're not getting enough sleep, you're going to be foggy, you're going to have difficulty concentrating. Again, think back to being a new parent or maybe when you were in college and you stayed up way too late, too many nights in a row. Been there, done that. You tend to be irritable or more anxious, because again, that threat response system is up, your body's like, Okay, I'm not on my A game, so I need to be more alert to danger. Your appetite changes, and you're fatigued. You haven't gotten enough sleep. Of course, you're fatigued. And I don't know about you, but when I'm tired, I'm not a nice person to be around. So it impacts every area of life. What do we do about it? Oh, there's a lot of things. But in this particular video, what we're going to talk about is a couple. Develop a sleep routine. So about an hour and a half before bed, if you can, start doing about the same three things. You know, when we were little, or when we had children, they would come home from school, they would play, they would eat, they would bathe, they would get a story, and they'd go to bed. That sequence of events that we did pretty much every night cued their brain into, Hey, it's about time to go to sleep. So it would start producing melatonin, which helped them get to sleep. Try to develop some sort of a sleep routine. In addition, caffeine stays in your body for 12 hours. So cut back on caffeine, at least six hours, but preferably 12 hours before bed. And I know some people are going, Oh, no way. You may not want to do it. Cold turkey, you may want to gradually wean down, but become aware of how much caffeine you actually ingest after noon. Because you know, I know for me, it wouldn't be unheard of for me to be drinking caffeinated soda or coffee or something else till three or four in the afternoon. Well, that means it's not actually out of my system until three or four the next morning. And I get up at 4am. So the entire time I was sleeping, I had a stimulant in my system. And easier said than done, reduce chronic stress. So developing tools to figure out what's stressing you out, and starting to take steps to address it, it's baby steps, you know, you're not suddenly going to be like, Okay, I'm going to create a sleep routine. And next week, everything's going to be grand. There are going to be small steps in the process. But as you start trying to deal with these things, you'll see some improvements. If you have poor sleep habits right now, just improving your sleep routine may start improving your mood. Even if you haven't really eliminated a lot of those chronic stressors yet. So look at your sleep. That's one of those things that most people are not averse to changing. And think about cutting back on your caffeine. Those are two initial steps that you can think about taking right away. Poor nutrition, your body needs building blocks. Your body uses vitamins, minerals, carbohydrates, fats for energy and to create the chemical reactions that produce the neurotransmitters. Proteins are used to produce those neurotransmitters and other hormones in your body. So you need to have decent nutrition. It helps you recover from injury, you know, because food is building blocks, basically, it helps you keep from getting sick, it keeps your immune system strong. And it helps you make hormones and neurotransmitters. So I say, you know, decent nutrition, I'm not thinking that you're going to just become the guru on good nutrition overnight, nor would you probably want to, because that's not something you're going to maintain. Look at making some small changes. If you don't have enough water, if you're dehydrated, you're going to feel foggy, sluggish, irritable. And it can also reduce your metabolism. So that's another bonus. If you start drinking enough water. Now it doesn't have to be pure water, ideally it is. But if you can get in some decaffeinated tea, something like that, anything to start improving your hydration will go a long way at helping you feel a little less sluggish. Have three colors on your plate at each meal and condiments and candy don't count. So M&M, Skittles, ketchup, no, that's not what we're talking about. Nice try. Fruits at breakfast, some kind of protein at breakfast and some kind of grain at breakfast, you know, same thing at lunch. A lot of people have a hard time getting vegetables in and, you know, slow baby steps. Try to get vegetables at lunch and dinner, but, you know, at least dinner. Eat smaller meals every few hours and again reduce caffeine and other stimulants. Caffeine keeps that threat response system activated. It's a stimulant. It's saying there's something to be stressed about. There's something to be amped up about. Well, if you're telling your body there's something to be amped up about, then you're never going to be able to relax. You're basically countering any calming chemicals that it wants to secrete. Think about a hot bath. You know, you're constantly adding more hot water. If you're drinking caffeine and no matter how much cold water it puts in, you're increasing the hot water exponentially. So you're never going to get the bath that's the right temperature. And pain and illness. We don't sleep well when we're sick or when we're in pain, partly because pain keeps us awake and, you know, I have a bad shoulder, so I know what that's like to wake up and just be in agony. And so it wakes you up itself, but also your body perceives pain as one of those threats making you the weak link in the herd. So it keeps you a little bit more alert, makes it more difficult for you to get good sleep. When we're in pain or when we're sick, it's hard to concentrate. Again, your body's like we need to stay alert for things going on, but we just it's intolerable. It's painful or we just don't feel well and it's hard to get motivated and to focus. Your body is trying to help you get better. So it's not devoting those neurochemicals to concentrating on typing the report you've got to do, which can make you cranky in and of itself. Irritable mood, you know, most people are not in the best mood when they're in pain or sick. And remembering that medications, depressants can worsen sleep problems, concentration and mood. And those are your opiates generally and anything that slows you way down. Sometimes antihistamines, decongestants or stimulants, kind of like caffeine. It's going to amp you up, maybe only a little bit. Some people don't have as much of a reactivity to it, but it does have an effect. Antihistamines, like I said earlier, impair quality sleep. So if you're sick and you're taking antihistamines right before bed, you know, totally get it. You want to be able to breathe. However, understand that you're probably not going to get good quality sleep while that's in your system. And if you're in pain and the doctor gives you steroids, steroids tend to amp you up and can increase anxiety. So be aware that pain and illness have a big effect on just kind of your mood and your outlook and your stress level, your ability to sleep and get quality rest and rebalanced. And it's all intertwined and the more stressors you have, the less sleep you get, the more unrested you are, the more irritable you're likely to be. So for any of these, talk with your doctor about interventions. What can what can I do about this pain so I can sleep? What can I do about this illness? And I mean, sometimes it's a virus and you just got to ride it out for the 10 days or whatever. Explore non-pharmacological interventions. So can you go into a steamy room? Can you use hot and cold compresses? What can you do physical therapy, massage? What is it that you can do to manage your pain and illness other than drugs? And finally, just be compassionate with yourself. If you're in a lot of pain, you're in a lot of pain and there may be nothing you can do about it at the moment. If you're sick, like I said, sometimes it's a virus and you just got to kind of live with it. So cut yourself some slack and realize you're not going to be on your A game because getting upset about the fact that you're not on your A game just stresses you out more and makes really no sense at all. But we do it. And finally, brain changes. This can be caused by heredity. You may not produce enough of certain neurochemicals. It can be caused from an accident that damaged the brain. It can be caused by trauma. Trauma actually causes changes in the brain and hippocampal volume and all kinds of other stuff that you really don't care about. But recognize that trauma, whether it's chronic, mild or moderate trauma or one severe trauma, can cause significant brain changes. Doesn't mean we can't learn to work with it, but you need to be aware of it. And you can also have brain changes as a result of addicted behaviors. Because again, when you're using, you're altering the level of those brain chemicals. And when you stop using, your brain has to adjust and go, okay, we got to rebalance to this new level now. Changes in the structure of the brain have all kinds of effects, including memory, concentration, mood, and how reactive you are to stress. People who were stressed out at one point, people who had a trauma experienced a significant trauma or had a traumatic or neglectful childhood may have brain changes that cause them. It's called hypercortisolism, if you care, but may have brain changes that cause them to react more strongly when they're stressed out. So they go from zero to 250 instead of zero to 20 when something causes them a threat. And then they have a harder time calming back down. So it's important to understand that there may be some organic changes that happened that cause you to be more reactive. Does that mean you're destined to be that way the rest of your life? Maybe, maybe not, but you can learn to work with it so you can prevent going from zero to 250 and you can learn how to deal with it if you do have an event that makes you get really upset so you can tolerate the distress and regulate your emotions, calm yourself down before it causes negative effects. What can you do about these? Well, good nutrition. If the brain needs the tools, it needs the building blocks to make the neurotransmitter, so eat well. You know, regardless of what state the brain is in, if you give it the building blocks, it typically wants to rebalance itself to what it knows to be normal. Get adequate quality rest. Allow your brain to use those tools. Give it time where it can rebuild and rebalance. Take medication if needed. You know, if you have brain trauma for one reason or another, you may need a long course or a short course of medication to help stabilize those neurotransmitters. And that's obviously a discussion you need to have with your physician or psychiatrist. Emotion regulation. This teaches you to become aware of your emotions and, you know, it's part of it is being aware of your vulnerabilities, but being aware of your emotions so you don't put yourself in a situation where you're more vulnerable to reacting with a 10 to something that's probably only a two. And distress tolerance skills. These are the skills that help you when you go from zero to 250 to tolerate that distress without having to act impulsively and help yourself calm back down until you can get to a place where you can think a little bit more clearly and make decisions that are in your best interest. So whenever your brain receives a threat, it activates the threat response system. This system impairs sleep, alters sex and stress hormone levels. So your libido goes down and all your calming neurotransmitters kind of go down, your amped up neurotransmitters go up, you start feeling more anxious. These are good if you're actually defending from a threat, but if these go on for too long, it can be exhausting and it can cause chronic anxiety and acting out and cause problems in other areas of your life. Physical vulnerabilities include lack of quality sleep, poor nutrition, pain and illness, and brain damage. Interventions for these are aimed at preventing the vulnerabilities when possible. So you know, eliminate as much chronic stress, get good nutrition, get good quality sleep. But if there are things that you can't completely eliminate, then you need to learn how to live with them, mitigate their negative impact, as we say. So figure out, okay, you got this going on. How can you be happy and live the life you want anyway? So this is the end of part one of this podcast. If you would like to subscribe to the podcast, you can. We are on iTunes, Google Play. You can also join our Facebook group. And henceforth and forevermore, these presentations will be broadcast through our Facebook group, which is docsnipes.com slash Facebook. You can subscribe to our YouTube channel at YouTube slash all CEU's education. And you can also join our community and access additional resources at docsnipes.com. I will return with part two in about five minutes in the happiness isn't brain surgery group. Thanks for tuning into happiness isn't brain surgery with docsnipes. Our mission is to make practical tools for living the happiest life of the day. Thanks for tuning into happiness isn't brain surgery with docsnipes. Our mission is to make practical tools for living the happiest life, affordable and accessible to everyone. We record the podcast during a Facebook live broadcast each week. Join us free at docsnipes.com slash Facebook. Remember our website docsnipes.com has even more resources, members only videos, hand outs and workbooks to help you apply what we talk about. New resources are added weekly. 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