 This episode was prerecorded as part of a live continuing education webinar. On-demand CEUs are still available for this presentation through all CEUs. Register at allceus.com slash counselor toolbox. And today we're going to be discussing when things go wrong, breaking the cycle. Really, what we're going to be focusing on is addressing those vulnerabilities that we talk about. So over the next 45 minutes to an hour, we're going to learn about the brain, body, and how you feel are impacted by your nutrition, sleep, stress, pain, and sickness, and vice versa. So we're really going to look at how it says self-perpetuating cycle, either upwards or downwards. So you've already learned that the brain receives information from the senses. The brain gets information about whether there's a threat, whether you're hot, whether you're cold, what it needs to do in order to protect the body. The brain interprets this information based on prior experiences and current data. So it takes in information and goes, okay, what can I compare this to? And what is the next logical step for me to take? Is this something we need to get stressed about? Can we relax? Can we go to sleep? What needs to happen? The brain takes that information and sends signals to the rest of the body using neurotransmitters, telling the body to react, fight, flee, or forget about it. You know, to forget about it is really those things like we talked about on Tuesday. If a car backfires outside and your brain says that was just a car backfiring, no big deal. That's the forget about it. There's no sense maintaining that heightened stress response. The side effects of excess or continued stress are sleep problems. Think about the last time that you had a big project due or you were getting ready to meet your new boss or your in-laws or something, anything that was really stressful. If it's a really stressful event, it can cause sleep problems. Or if it's ongoing kind of moderate stress, it can also start to cause sleep problems. Some of us before we travel, I know I have a hard time sleeping before I travel partly because I'm excited, but partly because I'm stressed about traveling and going through Atlanta and all those sorts of things. When we talk about stress, we're talking about anything that's excitatory. That can be good stuff like getting excited about going to Disney World or bad stuff. You can list a lot of those things. But if we're ramped up, if we're under that excitatory sort of situation, the body is not going to ramp down or relax enough to sleep as well. Long-term stress can cause a depletion of cortisol which may affect blood sugar issues. So it's important for people, especially people with diabetes, to be aware that excessive stress could also make their blood sugar become more erratic. It can contribute to overall fatigue. Now, this isn't just being sleepy. This is overall muscle fatigue. When we're stressed, we're ramped up, we're prepared for fight or flee, but that also means that we have muscle tension going on and our heart rate's beating faster. We're probably breathing a little bit faster. So our body itself is going to start to get tired. And muscle aches and tension can kind of creep in there. Even after you start calming down a little bit, your muscles may still stay knotted. A lot of us, you know, at the end of the day, we're like, oh my goodness, I'm stressed. Or I'm tired. And a lot of us say tired at the end of the day because our muscles are all tensed up and it's been a stressful day. And all of this can lead to reduced immunity because the body is trying to do what it can to keep everything in homeostasis. So dealing with the little bug-a-buggers is the least of its worries. I've mentioned before when I was in college, before pretty much every finals exam week, I would get sick. And a lot of times I wouldn't get sick until after final exams, but it was like I'd be walking out of that last final and I'd start to feel awful. It was my body was going, okay, we're done. Now we're going to crash. Because I would stay up and study and drink just ridiculous amounts of coffee to try to get ready for my exams that I didn't prepare for as well as I should have. So anytime you've got something going on that's causing you stress. And remember, I said it could be good stress like a new baby. If you have a new baby in the house and you're not sleeping a lot. And you know, the little bug-a-buggers are adorable. But when they cry, when they get colicky, when, you know, you just want to get some sleep and they don't, it can be frustrating. And that's, you know, you love the kids and you don't want to get angry. You don't want to get frustrated with them. But there's some level of stress that goes along with having a new baby in the house. I know with my son, he used to have pacifiers. And he would have one in each hand, one strapped to his shirt and one popped in his mouth. And that, that was his little zen zone. He would just like lay back and go to sleep at that point. But if he didn't have his pacifiers and it had to be the right pacifier. It wasn't just any old binky. He had to have the correct binky or he was going to scream. So it was always a little bit stressful getting ready to go places until his father came up with a great idea about packing a go bag. So we had an entire go bag in the back of the car the entire time that had extra diapers, extra bottles, extra binkies, the correct ones and anything that we might need. So we're going to talk as we go through here about ways that we can minimize stress, good stress or bad stress. I mean, we want to have fun, but we also need to be able to sleep and, you know, get some reasonable nutrition and things like that. The feedback loop. So let's talk about how these different things might affect everything else. When we have sleep problems, whether it's because you've got a stomach ache because you've got allergies and you're coughing. The dog keeps getting up and down. Your significant other has sleep apnea, whatever the case may be. If you're not getting good quality sleep, you may have feel kind of fatigued, foggy headed, have difficulty getting things done. For most of us, if we have difficulty getting things done, we don't go, ah, you know, whatever, we'll try again tomorrow. There's a certain amount of stress that goes with us because we feel like we should be able to get things done. We feel like we should be able to function because we're not paying attention to the fact that, you know, we haven't slept well for three months. Or, you know, in the case of something like having a spouse with sleep apnea, you know, maybe three, four, five years. Paying attention to this is important because then you can start taking steps to figure out how to deal with it. Difficulty concentrating. If you're a new parent, if you're not getting enough sleep, anytime we're sleep deprived, I think all of us have been there at one time or another. It's harder to think. It's harder to remember things, which again can be very frustrating, especially to those of us who are a little bit type A, which can add stress. And sleep problems can reduce immunity. If you're not getting enough sleep, they've shown that people who don't get enough sleep, one of the first things to go is their immunity, leading to illness, which leads to frustration, because now you're sick. And now not only are you sick, not only couldn't you sleep well, you're sick and you can't sleep well, which means you're not going to be able to concentrate. You're going to be tired and you're going to be doped up on meds, which can be irritating. So these all kind of lead back to what we're generally calling stress. Another thing I didn't put on here is sleep, sleep work, shift work. Shift work is awful if people are trying to flip flop their sleep schedule on a day to day or even weekly basis. The body needs time to adapt. It takes about 30 days for a person to completely flip their schedule from working day shift to night shift. So if you have someone in your family who does shift work, and maybe they work 7pm to 7am on their work days, and then they get off, they take a little nap, and then they get up at noon, and on their off days they try to sleep when the rest of the family sleeps, their body's never going to adjust. Their circadian rhythms are going to be out of whack, which for a lot of people kind of leads to this green pallor and fatigue and this kind of foggy headedness almost all the time. Think persistent jet lag. And I'm not talking just one time zone. I'm talking flying from New York to California and how you feel the very next day. Take that and multiply it by 365 days. You can see how it would be frustrating. Blood sugar issues. Now whether it's because you've got diabetes or you're not eating well, you forget to eat. I know a lot of us do. It can cause problems. As your blood sugar goes down, you can start getting shaky. You can start getting kind of foggy headed. You can have difficulty concentrating, which makes it difficult to get things done, which again leads to stress. You see where there's a pattern here. Unfortunately, a lot of us are guilty of saying, oh, you know, my blood sugar is getting low. Let me go get some M&Ms, or that's my go to. But a lot of times we choose poorly. We choose a really sugary food, which causes a spike in blood sugar, so we feel really good really quickly. But when that blood sugar crashes, it crashes even lower and harder than before. So you're on this perpetual up and down and it's not a gentle rolling hill. You know, it's Pike's Peak, which causes more foggy headedness, more shakiness and changes in appetite. You start craving caffeine and sugar just to try to stabilize and get through the day. If you're having caffeine late at night or even, you know, six hours before bed, it's still going to be in your system. So remembering that chocolate has some caffeine, but a lot of us who drink diet sodas, regular sodas, coffee, anything, any caffeine you drink, it takes 12 hours to get out of your system. It takes six hours to get halfway out of your system. So if you're drinking coffee at six, seven o'clock at night, then it's not even out of your system until you're getting up the next morning. So think about how that might impact your sleep. My suggestion to people is to try to cut down the caffeinated beverages, switch over to decaf after about three. Not right away, because a lot of people experience major headaches, frustration, it just compounds everything, but weaning it down. Overall fatigue, you know, we already talked about blood sugar issues, which tend to cause people to get kind of sleepy, shaky, not feeling so good, difficulty concentrating. We talked about not getting enough sleep. But then when you're just everything feels like you're carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders is overall fatigue, your body feels like it weighs twice as much or 10 times as much as it really does. You can have difficulties concentrating. You're just you're exhausted. You don't want to do anything. You may not be sleepy, but you're exhausted, which can lead to negative self talk. I really should be getting up and doing this. Everybody else is fill in the blank. Muscle aches and tension as our stress increases. So do our muscle aches and muscle tension, which cause problems with sleeping. Have you ever tried to sleep if you're all knotted up? It's not not real effective. And if you're in pain because of it, it's going to be even less effective. It can also cause fatigue. You're using a whole lot of energy to keep those muscles spasming, whether you know it or not, whether you intend to or not, you're keeping those muscles spasming. And it caused pain and pain is frustrating. I don't care who you are. I don't think anybody really likes being in pain. Some of us can say, Oh, you know, we have this transient pain that comes and goes and whatever. But if you've got pain that's disrupting your sleep that you're feeling a lot of the time. It gets really frustrating, which can lead to feelings of helplessness, hopelessness, aggravation. As we ramp up that aggravation and irritation, even if it's at our own selves, again, we're kicking off that fight or flight reaction. So we're ramping up those stress chemicals again. And reduced immunity, which means increased allergies or increased illnesses will start there because your body is not focusing on the random bug a bug a prevention. But as cortisol gets depleted, cortisol actually counteracts the histamines. You know, when you have allergies, you take antihistamines. Well, cortisol, one of its functions is to be basically a natural antihistamine. So if you're running on like zero, if you've been stressed for a long, long time, if you're not producing as much cortisol anymore, if your body is adjusted, and remember, we talked about turning turning up the thermostat so it wasn't as sensitive to stress anymore, your body's not going to secrete cortisol at the same times. So you may start feeling more allergies. And anybody who has seasonal allergies knows it becomes difficult to sleep if you're sneezing, coughing, waking up in the middle of the night, because of those. It's also hard to focus and function for a lot of us if we're on antihistamines or decongestants. So how do we break the cycle? We've identified how all of these things can feedback in on on each other and everything makes everything else worse. The awesome thing is everything makes everything else better. So if we improve our nutrition, we're providing the building blocks for your body to make neurotransmitters, rebuild and repair tissues, and keep your immune system fully charged. Think about presidents. When they go into office and when they come out of office, how much they look like they've aged. You know, their body isn't having time to rest and recoup. They've got high levels of cortisol. They're under a lot of stress. I mean, they're the leader of the free world. Don't blame them. But what I'm saying is that highlights how stress really takes its toll on our body as well as our mental focus and things like that. Poor nutrition and dehydration contribute to fatigue, poor concentration, irritability, depression and anxiety, and increased pain perception. Fatigue. If you don't have the gasoline in the tank, you can't go. When we eat, we're giving our body calories, which is what we use for energy. So if you're not eating good calories or if you're eating sugar that spikes and crashes, you're going to feel more tired. Poor concentration, irritability, depression, anxiety, all of these kind of go along with your main neurotransmitters, your norepinephrine, dopamine, serotonin. If you're not getting the right balance of neurochemicals, you're going to start experiencing some negative symptoms. Pain perception. Some people don't realize, but if you come to these classes you probably already do, that serotonin is implicated in our pain perception. So people who are feeling more pain may have, and I emphasize may because there's a lot of things that go into pain perception, may have reduced levels of serotonin. Our endogenous opioids are also responsible for pain perception, but those are all things that our body is making. And if it's making it, it has to have the supplies to make what it needs. So good nutrition. Making changes in eating habits should be undertaken slowly, like one change a week. I know too many people who get on the bandwagon and they're like, okay, on Monday I'm going to start eating healthfully and they get rid of all the processed food. They get rid of all the food they like. They get rid of all the sodas, all the everything. And it's just this extreme change and shock to the body. For some people that works. For the majority of people, it's too harsh. It's too much of a change. It's like going from being all warm inside of a fur coat to jumping into the Arctic Ocean naked. You know, it's just not something that most people want to do. It's a shock to the system and it's a little painful. One change per week is doable and not talking huge ones like drink more water, you know, start drinking eight glasses of water a day. Most people can work that in over the course of a week. Be moderate. In most cases, unless there's a physiological reason why you should eliminate something from your diet, obviously, you know, we don't have to have alcohol. Some people, there are foods that they're allergic to. They need to eliminate those. But if there's no medical reason to eliminate something, consider moderation. Now, at the beginning when you're making these changes, sometimes moderation means not having it like freely available at your house. So if you like sweets, if you love sweets, maybe moderating it. So that's a reward when you go out on the weekends that you can order a dessert or having things in if you get the little travel packs. That's a smaller amount than getting the one or two pound bag of M&Ms. You know, if you eat from that, you may eat the whole thing. If you eat the travel pack, you're pretty much guaranteed to eat the whole thing, but it's not as big of a deal as far as messing up your blood sugar or anything else and you still feel the reward. So don't eliminate anything. It sets you up for cravings. Focus on progress, not perfection. You know, I said start drinking eight glasses of water a day. If somebody tries to do that and the first day they get in four, that's still probably three more than they had the day before. So awesome. It doesn't have to go from zero to 100 overnight. Try to do it. See progress. You know, if it's harder to do than you expected, maybe do that change the next week. So you're giving yourself two weeks to get it under your belt before you start making another change. And modify any changes so you're motivated to maintain the change. I personally, if I said I was never going to eat chocolate ever again, I wouldn't be real motivated to do that because I just be thinking, I like chocolate. I want chocolate. Do things so that you're motivated to keep doing them. If you only have chocolate at the end of the week, at the end of the week on a Friday, you know, maybe when you go out to dinner, like I said, that's a treat. That's doable. You want to make sure that everything that you undertake is doable and that you're motivated to do it. If you're not motivated to lose weight, if you're not motivated to cut out or cut down on saturated fats, you're probably not going to do it. So encourage people to make positive changes in their nutrition that they're willing and motivated to do. And then everything else, if it falls into place, it will, but at least we're making some changes. And any changes positive are going to have positive effects. Easy changes, replace sugary sodas with 80% diet soda. Obviously, if you're not allergic to it or have, you know, ethical issues with diet soda. A lot of times just adding that 20% of the actual sugary soda with high fructose corn syrup changes the flavor enough that most people are quite satisfied. Find fruits you love to eat instead of candy. There are fun fruits out there, kiwis, bananas that are very, very sweet. Add a little cheese to your veggies. One of the complaints I hear a lot from people is, I just really don't like green vegetables. So look for ways to dress them up. Put them in meatloaf. That's what my mother used to do when I was growing up because my father wouldn't eat vegetables. She would always put them in meatloaf. I make meatloaf. I make quiche. If I make like a straight up green vegetable, I'll either put some sort of a sauce on it. That's a low fat sauce or I'll put a little bit of cheese on it just to kind of take the edge off. Switch over your coffee and replace 50% of your instant coffee with an equal amount of unsweetened cocoa powder. It tastes like really rich coffee or chocolate flavored coffee, whatever you want to call it. But there's a lot less caffeine in it and bonus chocolate. Drink water. Add a little lemon or citric acid to make it more palatable. It's not always convenient to carry around a lemon in your purse or in your reef case. Citric acid, they sell in little containers. It's basically the savory part that comes from the lemon. And you just add a little sprinkle, like a 16th of a teaspoon to a glass and that's plenty. But if you can keep that in a little packet that you can access. It takes the edge off some of the water that tastes, for lack of a better word, stale. Use a salad plate instead of a dinner plate. Your brain gets tricked into thinking that you're eating a lot more if you're using a smaller plate. Now it's not, it catches on if you start trying to use a teacup saucer instead of a salad plate. So don't take it to extremes. But your brain is kind of goofy that way. Also, three colors on the plate. The more colors that are on the plate, the more your brain thinks it's eating. Because it sees all that color and it's kind of overwhelmed. Take what you want and put half back. The majority of us, our eyes, are a whole lot bigger than our stomach. So if I take what I want, I put half back. Then if I want to go back and get seconds, you know, that's fine. But most of the time people find that they're satisfied with half of what they originally thought they would eat. Start weaning off sugary drinks. Try to eat something, not necessarily a meal. But try to eat a little bit of something every three to four hours to keep your blood sugar stable. Use a food diary app to track which nutrients you may not be getting enough of. There's a bunch of them that are free on the iPhone and the Android. Really easy to use. And try to reduce caffeine. So once you've looked at nutrition and some people are going to go, you know, I really don't want to mess with my nutrition right now. That's fine. Let's look at sleep. Sleep is when your body repairs, rebuilds and recharges. But quality is just as important as quantity. You can stay in bed for 10 hours and not get good rest. Your body breaks down serotonin to make melatonin to help you get sleepy. So if you're deficient in serotonin, i.e. depression, then you're probably not going to sleep well. So we want to make sure that your body has the building blocks to make serotonin. But we also want to make sure that it has the building blocks it needs so it can break down serotonin to create the melatonin to help you get sleepy. Your body also relies on circadian rhythms, the light and dark cycles that naturally happen to regulate your sleep wake cycles. As humans, we're supposed to be awake when it's daytime and asleep when it's nighttime. We are not nighttime predators. So when it's time to go to sleep, you want to start winding down, turn down the lights, turn down the tempo, turn down the sound on stuff so you're not getting, you know, 150 beats a minute of whatever your teenager's favorite song is. Naps are okay as long as they don't exceed 40 minutes. They have found in research that once you exceed 40 minutes, you start getting into a deep sleep, and then your body starts getting confused about, wait a minute, wait a minute, am I supposed to be asleep for sleeping or is this a nap and it doesn't really get the difference, which messes up your nighttime sleep. I know some of you are going, oh, but I really like daytime naps. There are exceptions to this. If you have new babies in the house, if you're recovering from illness, there are a lot of times where, you know, you can afford to mess up your circadian rhythms a little bit, but in general, this is what we want to shoot for. Easy changes, create a sleep routine to cue your body to wind down, just like we do with kids, you know, they come home, they eat dinner, they read a book, they take a bath, they go to bed, maybe not in that order. Their body says, oh, dinner time, that means we're going to start winding down, so I need to start making melatonin. Keep your room as dark as possible. If that means putting on a sleep mask, so be it. Not all of us have blackout curtains. Eliminate blue-based lights after 6 p.m., including on your iPhone, iPad, laptop, whatever you may be looking at. We have apps for that that will switch it to a nighttime color scheme. Dim the lights an hour before bed and don't go into a bright room. So if you need to go to the bathroom, try to have either a nightlight or something in there that's bright enough that you can see and you can wash your hands and do all that kind of stuff, but you're not walking into 240 watts of good morning because that jolts your body out of getting ready for sleep. This is one that I don't know if I want to say surprised me, but I learned recently. Your body needs to be cool to sleep. I always knew that people slept best around 72 degrees, but it didn't really occur to me why. I thought it was just comfortable. In reality, your body needs to cool down in order to go to sleep. So if you take a hot shower right before bed, you're doing yourself a disservice. But a hot shower first thing in the morning actually will help you wake up. Who knew? I guess a lot of researchers did, but now you do. So you want to cool down. So don't do intense exercise right before bed. If you're going to do anything, maybe some easy stretches. Keep a notepad and a pen with a red light by your bed to jot down anything you have to remember. I mean they look corny. Corny is all get out, but they do have those little headlamps if you have one for going up in the attic or something. Most of them have a white light setting, a blue light setting, and a red light setting. Use the red light setting because again, that does not mess up your night vision as much and it doesn't mess up your circadian rhythms as much. But jot things down. If you're laying there going, I got to remember to get milked tomorrow. I got to remember to get milked tomorrow. You're not going to go to sleep. You're not going to sleep as well. If you have things that you need to remember for work, might as well just turn on the little nightlight and jot it down. That way you can relax and let your brain kind of go, okay, I can forget everything. I don't need to remember anything right now. Which takes us to stressful cognitions. Stressful thoughts creates physical stress. If we tell ourselves there's a problem. If we tell ourselves there's a threat. If we tell ourselves that something scary or anxiety provoking is coming up, your brain is going to be all on board and go, okay, let's get ready. Let's fight or flee. If you're doing that at 9 o'clock at night, it's not going to be good if you're dreading a meeting the next day. So figuring out a way to quiet those stressful thoughts, preferably deal with them before you go to sleep. But also during the day, so many times we get kind of all wrapped up and stuff. We have no control over my son, you know, bless his heart. He's 16 and this is the first election that he's really been super cognizant of what's going on. Lucky him. But when we talk about what's going on in politics and world news and stuff at dinner, he will get all fired up. And it's not just for a second. He will go off on a diatribe and he does this a lot. He'll take something and he'll wind himself up tighter than something that's wound really tight, which creates physical stress for him. And he'll actually get to the point where he's getting up and pacing around the dining room table while he talks. And I'm like, dude, sit down. It's important to recognize how our thought patterns affect our body. Reducing mental stress reduces physical stress. Think again of the president. You know, if he didn't have so much mental stress of running the free world, he probably wouldn't age as quickly. He probably would have more energy. You know, I don't know what it's like to be the president, but I imagine it's exhausting. How can we do this? Practice mindfulness at each meal. Now, why each meal? Because most of us eat at least three times a day. So in order to practice mindfulness, and I'm not necessarily talking meditation, I just want you to do a body scan. How am I feeling emotionally? Where are my thoughts right now? Am I like all over the place or am I pretty centered? How am I feeling physically? Am I tired? Do I have pain anywhere? What's going on? That's it. It takes all of about 30 seconds to do, but it encourages people to check in that way. They can identify things that are not worth their energy. If they identify that they're mentally stressed over something, then they can deal with it instead of having that low grade mental stress going on behind their head for the rest of the day or week or whatever it is. So practicing mindfulness at each meal, that's one of your anchor points, and you can address some of the stressors so they don't hang on and drain on. Practice positive self-talk. Oh my gosh, what a new concept. But it is for a lot of people. A lot of people get stuck on focusing on what they didn't do or what they should have done instead of going, you know, I did a really good thing today. Even focusing on the small random acts of kindness that they do. Silence the hecklers. Those tapes in your head, the hecklers in your gallery that tell you that you're not good enough. When we do our mindfulness and we notice that we're not feeling well or we're feeling anxious or we're feeling stressed about something, we need to figure out if it's real or if it's the hecklers in our gallery telling you, you're gonna fail, you always fail. We can shut them up and we don't have to do anything necessarily that's all that involved. I'm gonna say shut up, obviously quietly because if you do it out loud people look at you kind of strange. But we can take charge of our own thoughts and say, you know, that's not true. I've got this so you need to just kind of take a back seat. Ask yourself if this, whatever this is, and you know there were so many things I couldn't list them all, is this worth your energy and helping you get closer to your goals? Is whatever is stressing you out worth all this energy that you're using for it? Sometimes you're gonna say yes because it's getting you closer to your goals. Defending my dissertation. Oh my gosh, I cannot tell you how much stress I was undergoing into that. Not, you know, it was just this whole performance anxiety thing. My committee was great but going into it and going well this is for the whole shebang, it was a little overwhelming. So I had to ask myself, is this, is getting all upset over this worth it? And then realistically going, how likely is it that they're gonna flunk me? They've already read my entire dissertation and it doesn't look really good if they don't pass me at this point. So whether that's true or not, that was what I used to kind of get my head on straight before I went in. Encourage clients, encourage yourself, encourage your children to use some of these tools just to stay focused so they don't go on autopilot and get stressed out and kind of crash and burn without knowing where it came from. And while we're on autopilot, so often people talk about relapses, whether it's depression, anxiety, panic attacks, bipolar addiction, relapses come from out of the blue. Things were going okay and then just like out of the blue, I didn't want to get out of bed anymore. Let's take a look at that. What led up to this point? Because that's a pretty big crisis point if you don't have the energy to get out of bed. A lot of times I find clients, once they get out of residential treatment, quit doing, they may do it for two or three months, but quit doing whatever skills they learned, whatever habits they learned in treatment and then a relapse sneaks up on them, because they're not being mindful. What's a stressful environment differs for people? For me, I'm sensitive to noise and interruptions, so key features to consider in people's environment, if they're already stressed out, if they're already fatigued, if they're already kind of edgy, do you want to add to that by being in an environment that is stressful? Sometimes you can't fix it, but you can put in interventions like headphones, earplugs, noise level and type. Sometimes a random noise level, like the cars going by on the interstate, you may habituate to that so it doesn't bother you, but a crash is going to wake you up. A frequency of unexpected noises. If you've got a moderate level anyway and there's a crash, you may jump a little bit. Think about in a restaurant when somebody drops a tray of dishes. You'll probably jump, or at least look. If you're in a library and someone makes an equally loud, sudden noise, it's likely you're going to jump a lot higher. So pay attention to what kind of environments you're in and if there are a lot of unexpected noises, if there are a lot of things that even the person finds annoying, like maybe they work somewhere where the phones are ringing constantly. If that bothers them, is there a way they can work around it? Clutter level. It depends on the person how much clutter is tolerable versus how much more calm they feel if everything has a home. You know, I have piles. Every pile has stuff in it, but I know what goes in which pile and they're neatly organized piles that drive some people crazy. Understanding what your preferences are. That way when you go to work, you're not fighting the stress of going, oh my gosh, it looks like a hurricane hit. If that bothers you. Eliminate these vulnerabilities. Anything you can do to relieve unnecessary stress is going to make it easier for you to calm down and feel relaxed and happy. Temperature. I get cold really easy, but I also get hot really easy. So making sure, for me, making sure I have a jacket with me wherever I go is important. Some other people, not so much. Lights. Especially flickery lights and flickery, the fluorescent lights that flicker actually can kick off a seizure in people with seizure disorders. So that's yet another reason to get those replaced. But fluorescent lights are just naturally harsh and kind of tiring. Daylight lights are good for helping mood and helping keep you awake, but it may be too stressful for some people. Too little light. I had a friend of mine. You'd walk into her office and it was very cozy, but it was at a light level that I reserved for an hour before I go to bed. If I stayed in there for too long, I'd be ready to take a nap. Helping people understand what works for them and what doesn't. Safety and relaxation. All of taking those courses about being safe when we're in the room with clients, being safe when we're around other people, always having an exit, that sort of thing. But when you look at things like Feng Shui, it will talk about always being able to see the entrance and exit so people can't sneak up on you. There have been some research studies that have determined that even if you're not one of those people who typically is a little jumpier or high strung or whatever you want to say, if there is a likelihood or a chance that somebody could come up behind you while you're cooking at the stove, while you're working on the computer, while you're doing something, your body is going to stay on higher alert than if you have your back to the wall and you can see the entrances and exits. Feng Shui encourages you to use small mirrors like on your computer screen so you can see people come up behind you if somebody's going to. Don't put your back to the door. Simple things like that. If there's a window in your office and you're going to be working on the computer and you're not going to be able to pay attention to it, you may want to draw the curtains. Those are suggestions they have. You can obviously check out books from the library. Color. Color means different things to different people. I love yellows. I love pale muted warm colors. But I also love blues and purples. Those are cheerful to me. There are certain colors of kind of a bluish gray and kind of a pea soup green that remind me of very stressful places I've been in the past. And I think institutional. I feel cold, institutional, you know, kind of dark, unpleasant feelings. If I'm in an entire room that's painted in those colors, I encourage people if they can't paint to get accessories in colors that they like in order to cheer up the room if it's not painted in a color that they particularly care for, which takes us to personalization. How much nicer is a room when you walk into it and you see pictures on the wall, even if they're not pictures of people, they're just paintings or whatever, as opposed to blank walls everywhere and nothing on the desk, very sterile. Personalization lets people feel more comfortable. It reminds them of the good things in their life. It gives them something to look at and smile. Like I said, it may not be pictures of your family. It may be, you know, I have a tapestry of chickens hanging in my living room. I love my chickens. My chickens are awesome. Their eggs are better. But I love my chickens. That makes me smile. That makes me happy. So whatever it is that makes that person, makes you content is going to lower your stress in that environment. If your stress is lower most of the day, it's going to free up energy. It's going to allow you to wind down easier at the end of the day. And if your stress is down during the day, then it's likely that any challenges that come your way, you're going to have more energy to deal with. But if you're in pain, it makes it difficult. Pain makes it hard to concentrate, keeps your body on high threat alert. If you're in pain, it's kind of, you know, think about the primitive origins of kind of where our brain comes from, not our higher order thinking. But animals that are injured are probably likely going to be, you know, the first one's gone. So your brain stays a little bit on high alert. We know that when people are in pain, and I got to participate in a doctoral study on it so I am very familiar, when you are in pain, your heart rate goes up. So if you put your hand in a bucket of ice water for 10 minutes, your heart rate's going to go up as the pain increases. Pain keeps your body on kind of an excited state, which can lead to frustration and which may intensify the pain. If you're frustrated and your muscles get tight and you already have a pulled muscle, it could cause you to feel worse. And opiate medications used for pain can actually decrease your pain tolerance in the short term. If you start taking oral opioids over a long period, I'm not talking three days, but over a period of time, your body may say, oh, well, if you're going to take it, I don't need to produce it. So it quits or at least ramps, greatly ramps down the production of the natural pain killers that you have. So when the opiate, the oral medication wears off, you feel a lot more pain than you naturally would because your body is not producing those endogenous opioids anymore. Nice thing is your body will kick back in. It just takes a few days for it to register the fact that you're not taking the synthetic medication anymore. Easy-ish interventions. And sometimes when you've got pain, nothing is easy. Massage. Sometimes people can get a massage. Sometimes it's covered under insurance. Any kind of general massage will help reduce some muscle tension for most people. Some people just hate being touched. Milofacial release. And I gave you the link here so you can go read about it because we don't have time to cover it here. But it talks about basically releasing some of those knots that people have that can help the rest of their body relax. Your body wants to stay balanced. So if your right side is all knotted up, your left side is fighting against it, which creates even more problem, even more stress. TENS units. Transcutaneous electronic nerve stimulation. You can buy these over the counter now. They're wonderful. Basically they bombard the nerves so the nerves can't pick up the pain sensations and it helps the muscles relax. Alternate focus is focusing on something other than the pain. If you sit there and focus on how much your back hurts, it's going to continue to hurt. If you switch your focus and start focusing on how cold your toes are and really pay attention to that, you're not focusing as much on the pain in your back and you actually, probably most of the time, get some relief. Guided imagery. Talk yourself into your happy place. I had one of my colleagues suggested one time she used a lot of guided imagery. And I have back problems naturally. And she said, imagine the angels rubbing the knots out of your back. I said, okay, you know, I'm willing to try anything at this point. And if you can actually get into the image without having the hecklers in the background going, this isn't going to work. It works. Progressive muscular relaxation. So you can notice the difference between tense and relaxed. Having a positive focus. When we're negative, we intensify our pain. We intensify our stress chemicals. So if you can focus on positive things and recognize the fact that nobody's pain free all the time, it helps a lot. And heat or ice. Some people like heat because it's relaxing. I tend to like ice because it just numbs it all out. Depends on your preferences and obviously, you know, what the doctor says. Being sick can put anyone in a bad mood. Being sick when you already have too much to do can feel overwhelming. So when you're, when you are excessively stressed, your body is less able to fight off infections. Chronic sinus infections or bad allergies can make it almost impossible to focus or be in a good mood. Even if you're not taking medication, if you're constantly blowing your nose and you feel all stopped up, I'll take a chest cold over a head cold any day. But not everybody feels that way. What's important is to understand that when you're sick, your body needs to divert energy to get better. So you need to figure out ways to reduce your stress. Your body has already lost one battle. So you're going to have to make some concessions here. Prevention is the easiest fix. Wash your hands. Go figure. Wipe down grocery carts. Don't bite your fingernails. And I'm guilty of this. I hate to say it, but I am. But your fingernails have like billions of bacteria underneath them. They're kind of gross. One thing we don't think about very often is wiping down our cell phones and purses. Obviously guys generally don't have purses, but your cell phones and your cell phone cases, they're just as dirty, if not dirtier. And same thing with our purses as a lot of public toilet seats. They actually somebody did a study. Wipe them down at least once a day with, you know, something antibacterial disinfectant. Drink plenty of fluids and get plenty of rest. Let your body do what it needs to do to get better. Recuperation. Figure out the minimum and do that. And that's hard for a lot of us to go, okay, the minimum I need to do today is breathe. I jest. But a lot of times there's not a lot of stuff you have to do. You know, if you have small children at home, they may get to eat cereal for dinner one or two nights. It won't kill them. And they'll actually think of it as kind of a bonus probably. But you don't have to get up and make a five course meal. You can't change it. Once you're sick, you're sick. Getting irritable is only going to prolong it because it raises the stress chemicals and knocks down your immunity. So other bacteria and stuff have a chance to take hold. Eat healthfully. Garlic, honey and ginger are known to have antibacterial properties. So why not? Medication. Opiates, muscle relaxants, anti-anxiety medication are all depressants. Depressants make you feel tired, slow your breathing and heart rate. Some people are more sensitive than others. And alcohol is also a depressant. So please don't mix alcohol with these. But understand if you're already depressed and you take depressants, you know, you can figure out where you're going to go from there. Be aware if you're taking depressants, you may feel tired. So going back to all of the side effects of feeling tired and sluggish and getting frustrated and not being able to concentrate. That happens to a lot of people if they take muscle relaxants, opiates, or benzodiazepines. If you have to take them, you have to take them, but you need to be aware of the side effects and figure out how to work around them. Anti-depressants increase the availability of neurotransmitters, usually norepinephrine and serotonin. Remembering that serotonin is your calming, happy chemical with GABA. And norepinephrine and glutamate are your excitatory chemicals. As one goes up, the other one goes down. You want to keep this balance like the warm bath. Norepinephrine, which is also called adrenaline, gives you energy and helps you focus. Too much can cause an anxiety and eventually depression. So some people take medications that increase their level of norepinephrine in an attempt to address depression when in actuality they've already got too much and their body has started to desensitize to stress. Too little norepinephrine can cause apathy and difficulty concentrating. If you don't have the energy to get up off the sofa, you just don't care. We've all been there once or twice. It's important to understand that that may mean that norepinephrine is lacking. It could mean other neurotransmitters are out of whack too, so I don't want to just assume. But be aware. Serotonin helps you feel happy and relaxed, mitigates pain. Too little keeps you from being able to relax, which eventually will lead to depression. Remember on Tuesday we talked about the dog and the learned helplessness experiments. At a certain point, your body just gives up and goes, white flag, I can't make the stress go away, I give up. Too much serotonin can make you feel confused or apathetic. Either too much or too little serotonin can also affect libido. Changes in libido also have huge effects on the way people feel about themselves, their self-esteem, and all kinds of other stuff. Just be aware. There are a lot of different avenues we can look at to see what may be exacerbating people's stress, depression, or anxiety. And finally, hormones. Estrogen, testosterone, and cortisol all affect the availability of serotonin and GAVA, which are your calming chemicals. Too much to go into right now, but do recognize that it's not just your neurotransmitters that affect one another. There are a lot of other chemicals that have to remain in balance in your body. Proper hormone balance requires that we eat well, exercise, get some sunlight, manage stress, and in some cases, talk to your doctor. You know, when you go through menopause, if you're perimenopause, if you're a man and you don't think you're producing enough or you're producing too much testosterone, those are all things that need to be considered when thinking about your mood. So stress can cause you to sleep poorly, eat comfort foods instead of a well-rounded diet, feel achy, have muscle tension, and be fatigued. All of these can lead to increased stress. The cool thing is, if you just pick one thing, you can start breaking the cycle. Any positive change is going to have positive effects throughout the system. If you enjoy this podcast, please like and subscribe, either in your podcast player or on YouTube. You can attend and participate in our live webinars with Dr. Snipes by subscribing at allceuse.com slash counselor toolbox. This episode has been brought to you in part by allceuse.com, providing 24-7 multimedia continuing education and pre-certification training to counselors, therapists, and nurses since 2006. Use coupon code, counselor toolbox, to get a 20% discount off your order this month.