 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. So for those of you who are here, we're not actually starting class yet. We've got about four minutes. The next few presentations we're going to do, and there's also going to be some intermittent ones, but I'll get to that in a minute, are going to be based on happinesses and brain surgery, which is a book that will be coming out in January of 2017. So y'all are going to get a little preview of what may be coming out or what will be coming out. Now, I said there's going to be some intermittent ones. We have our normal Tuesday, Thursday every week, and we will continue to have those. But for those of you who have the unlimited access membership with the either unlimited access for a month or as part of your year package, I will be doing some additional presentations throughout the week that aren't going to be, quote, scheduled ahead of time. I'll send out a message. If I'm going to do one, if you can attend, great. If you can't, that's fine too. They will be at approximately the same time right about noon CST, 1 p.m. EST. So if this happens to be when you normally take your lunch break and you want to even just click and log in just to see if, you know, hey, are we doing a class today? You know, you are more than welcome to do that and then you can go from there. But that way, people who have the unlimited access can do that. People who don't have that unlimited access, those courses will be available on demand within a week of when I put them, when I do them live. So I see my little microphone moving. I'm assuming everybody can hear me. As usual, if you have any questions, please feel free to shoot me a little text message during the class. And I am more than happy to answer it after class. I'll hang around if you have any questions. One thing that I do want to emphasize is you need to take the course or the course exam, which is like four questions during the time period. So I've tried to condense some of these presentations. So they're about 45, 50 minutes. That way you have plenty of time to take the quiz before you see your next client or whatever you have coming up afterwards. The certificate will reflect the day that you took the course exam. So for those people whose boards require them to be taking live interactive, you really want to have today's date on your exam. So right after the class, login to allceuse.com, take your quiz. Like I said, it's like four questions and then some other stuff that NBCC makes us put in there and we'll be good to go. I'm glad to see everybody back. I've been, as most of you know, I've been away for about 10 days trying to get caught up a little bit on that book. So I'm glad to be back and glad to be presenting in about 30 seconds. We'll start. I try not to start until the very last minute just in case somebody had a client right before this. So welcome to today's presentation. Happiness isn't brain surgery. Understanding the mind-body connection. What we're going to do is learn about your central control center, which is the brain and what role it plays in emotions, thoughts, physical reactions and sensations. And you're like, well, we're clinicians. Why do we need to know that? A lot of times, at least in the programs that I went into and that it may not be indicative of all graduate programs, we really didn't focus a lot on the mind-body connection or neurobiology. And it's so important to helping clients understand why we're trying to get them to change their thoughts in order to feel better. They're like, well, if I change my thinking, how is that going to give me more energy? We're going to talk about that. So we want them to understand the role that the brain is playing and understand really the fact that the brain is kind of dumb. It's like a computer CPU. It does exactly what you tell it. And if it gets bad information or outdated information or a virus, it may not interpret the situation correctly and do exactly what you want. And we don't want a blue screen. Anyhow, so then we'll talk about generally how things can go wrong and how to fix those things. Your brain is the central control center. It takes in information. It gets information from your peripheral nervous system, which, you know, think about periphery, the outside, your fingers, your toes, your eyes, what you hear, all of your senses. It takes in this information and compares it to what it already knows or thinks it knows from prior experiences and makes a decision about what to do. So let's think about this for a second. If you hear a really loud bang and some people will say that was a gunshot, some people will say that's a car backfiring. Some people have dived under their desk and they are just hoping that they're going to be safe. So based on your past experiences, your brain will interpret how much of a threat there is if there is any. If there's a threat, then it kicks off that fight or flight reaction. It says, okay, all hands on deck, secretes all of those excitatory hormones nor adrenaline and people start getting that stress reaction. If your brain decides that, nah, you know, that was just a car backfiring that happens all the time here, you probably won't react and you will keep doing whatever it is. So you won't have a surge of adrenaline and stuff. So based on the decision that your brain makes about whether there's a threat available, it activates action centers which excrete the neurotransmitters in order to produce the reaction. The first, like I said, would be there's a threat we need to fight or flee. The alternative is there's no threat, calm yourself down. Your initial reaction probably was a startle reaction, which is the fight or flee. But your body can say, you know what, not a big deal, chill out. And you can ramp that down really fast or you can get all upset and really wind it up. And we want to help our clients see how they see certain things, they hear certain things, they have certain thoughts and they can get that fight or flight reaction to just spiral out of control or they can just identify it as a thought and let it go. The neurotransmitters take orders to and from the brain and the big six that we've talked about before are your excitatory neurotransmitters and dopamine kind of goes in there because it's your pleasure chemical. It says we need to do this again, we need to remember this, norepinephrine and glutamate. Glutamate is, well we'll talk about that in a minute, your inhibitory neurotransmitters pretty much are GABA and serotonin. They're the ones that help you relax and feel calm and happy. And then there's acetylcholine, which is a neuromodulator. It helps the other guys do their job. These are the ones we really want to focus on. There are an abundance of neurotransmitters and hormones and other things that affect how people react and how people are feeling. But ultimately it comes down to the availability for the most part of these six. Neurotransmitters help people feel happy, sad, angry or fearful. So let's think about that happiness. That's your dopamine. Dopamine is going, I want to do that again. That was good. Sadness, when people feel sad, they tend to feel hopeless and helpless. They tend to feel a loss. So there's going to be some stress involved with that and a sense of helplessness. Anger and fear, fight or flight, you know, those are your excitatory neurotransmitters going, we got to get out of here, we got to get out of here. Mentally, your neurotransmitters also help you concentrate, learn and make decisions. So norepinephrine can help you concentrate, which is great. So when that's, you know, flowing and flowing well, you're concentrating, which is one of the reasons and not that I'm advocating for drinking a lot of coffee. But caffeine does tend to help some people and that means those people that don't have a pre-existing anxiety condition may help some people focus a little bit more. Because caffeine causes the excretion of norepinephrine or adrenaline, whatever you want to call it, which helps people concentrate a little bit. When we do things and there's a positive result or the result that we wanted, whatever it is, the brain secretes dopamine, which helps us remember, okay, that worked. That was good. I want to do it again. And it also helps with decision making. It helps you concentrate, think more clearly and make decisions. Physically, neurotransmitters are involved in sleep behavior, your circadian rhythms, your eating behavior, telling you when you're hungry, when you're not hungry, libido, gastrointestinal functioning and motility and pain perception. These are all big things. And when we talk about diagnosing, if you will, think about how many of these things are in your DSM diagnosis for depression or anxiety. Libido, eating, sleeping, not so much pain perception and gastrointestinal, but we know that people who are depressed tend to feel more sluggish, tend to have more fatigue and tend to be more constipated. So now that all that's out. Mentally, when we talk about diagnosis, we talk about how well are you able to concentrate and are you having difficulty making decisions? Well, haha, neurotransmitters. And emotionally, obviously, people present for their emotional symptom of sadness, anger or anxiety. And imbalance in these neurotransmitters can cause emotional, mental or physical distress. So we need to remember, and you know, I preach on this a lot, that our neurotransmitters is not just about increasing one. Because if you increase one, then those other ones have to balance out. They're supposed to be in sort of synchrony, like making a good marinara sauce. You know, when we're talking about two neurotransmitters, you might talk about norepinephrine, adrenaline and serotonin. As one goes up, the other goes down roughly. And it's like making a warm bath. But when you're talking about all of the neurotransmitters, it's this nice soup and it needs to maintain a balance. So don't just assume that you need to increase something. It may be decreasing something. So what causes these imbalances? And this is what our clients really need to focus on. Too much stress for too long. Yeah. When you're stressed for too long, your body says, all right, I need to ramp it down a little bit. I need to dial up or dial down. I always get that confused. Dial up the sensitivity of my stress radar because I can't be stressed like this all the time. Or I'm going to run out of cortisol and I'm going to burn out. So things that used to cause you stress and things that used to get you excited happy don't do it anymore. So you start to see more apathy. There's an imbalance going on. The body is adjusted because the brain is actually trying to protect you. It's going, well, I've got way too much going out for too long. We need to have an ebb and flow and all I've got is an ebb. So it protects itself. It starts to shut down some of those receptors. Poor nutrition. If you don't have the building blocks, you can't make the neurotransmitters. Insufficient sleep. Sleep is when your body recharges, recovers. I know there was some stuff out there. I think it was back in the 80s where they tried to prove that humans didn't need to sleep. Or they only needed to sleep 20 minutes a couple of times a day. There have been a lot of studies since that have shown that if you start to deprive people of good quality sleep, their immune system shuts down and worst case scenario, they are dead. Obviously the dead part they did with mice, poor little mousies. But sleep is important. Sleep is vital. Sleep is when you kind of reset the whole system. One of the jokes that I've heard is take two aspirin and call me in the morning as a doctor's version of try turning it off and turning it back on again and see if that works. So insufficient sleep is really a problem. And when we talk about insufficient, we're not just talking about time. You can be in bed for 10 hours and not sleep well. My dog Brewster last night ate something that didn't agree with him and he was up and down all night long. Now I didn't get up with him. He was just sort of restless and he didn't feel well. I was in bed for a reasonable number of hours, but the quality of sleep I got was not really good. So we want to look at what is it that the person's getting. And new mothers who are waking up every two or three hours to feed their babies may have insufficient sleep. They may be sleeping when the baby sleeps, but they may never be getting down into that deep sleep. As a new parent, at least for me, I slept a lot more lightly. I could tell you I woke up every time my son turned over in his bassinet. So it's important to look at some of those factors because those are relatively easy things to address with patients to help them start feeling a little bit better, feeling a little less foggy, a little more energetic. And then addictive behaviors. Addictions are their own kind of ballgame because when people engage in addictive behaviors, either to escape from pain by numbing it out with drugs or alcohol or something, or to get a rush, to get a euphoria because nothing else in their life. They're depressed and nothing is making them happy and they don't want to go on feeling like that anymore. Either way, we're talking about a flood of happy chemicals, a flood of dopamine, most of the time, sometimes opioids, but when this happens, just like when there's too much stress for too long, believe it or not, you can be too happy for too long. When you have that much dopamine getting dumped all the time, the body's going to adjust and shut down some of those receptors that says, you can't be this happy all the time. When that happens, then normal things don't make the person as happy anymore. So you've got another imbalance that's created. The brain's trying to maintain the balance, but what does the person with the addiction do? Instead of going, okay, maybe I need to chill out for a while, the person with the addiction goes, let me try doubling up. I bet that'll make me feel happy. So these are all things that we see. When we talk about addictive behaviors, I don't want to gloss over behavioral addictions, especially gambling and sex addiction, and to a certain extent, some of your eating disorders. They can have very, very powerful potent effects on people's neurochemicals and very, very powerful effects on the balance of those neurochemicals. Your peripheral nervous system. The nervous system continues to feed the brain information about whether the threat is continuing or subsiding. So we need to make sure that we're paying attention. Sometimes something happens like that car backfiring, and a threat is there, a threat is gone, butter bang, we dealt with it. But if you're hearing multiple crashes or multiple bangs, then your peripheral nervous system is going to say, maybe we need to do something different. The peripheral nervous system also incorporates what we see and what we hear. People who grew up in environments where there was a lot of domestic violence may see people who talk with their hands as being stressful, may hear people who talk loudly as being stressful. And in that particular situation, you need to address or assess whether or not that there's really a threat there or the person is just very animated and kind of loud. So it's important that the peripheral nervous system take in the information and then the brain checks it out to go, really, right now, is there a threat? When I've experienced this in the past, yes, there was. Is this the same exact situation or do I need to make some adjustments? So how does this happen? How does the brain let us know what is threatening? When we were born, there were very few things that were meaningful. If you want to go back to that tabula rasa, however you want to think about it, think about any infant that you've ever known, whether it's an infant human or an infant puppy, they don't get it very much. They startle. They react when they're cold. They react when they're hungry. So our basic needs, the being reacts to. But there's not a whole lot meaningful. If they see a stop sign, even if they can focus on it, it doesn't mean anything to them. They haven't assigned meaning to it yet. If they see a dog, they haven't assigned meaning to doggie yet. If the dog comes up and startles them, then from that point on until it's readdressed, doggie may be scary. So it may startle the child and cause the child to cry. So we've assigned meaning to things through observation and experience. When children are little, especially before they're mobile, they see and they hear a lot. And they look and they see how parents react when something happens. And they see what happens when you turn on the television and then Elmo comes on. They learn that the television is where Elmo is most of the time. So children learn and assign meaning through that. Now, if they are in a situation where that interpretation gets a little messed up, then it could be a problem. Brewster, and another Brewster example. My son is in Taekwondo and his friend was over the other day and they were out in the backyard practicing. I mean, they weren't fighting. They weren't angry with each other. They were practicing Taekwondo, but they were practicing, you know, contact sparring. Brewster saw this and lost his mind because in Brewster's mind, that boy was trying to hurt his boy. So in order to help him understand that, you know, we've had to work on desensitizing. But it's important for people to understand that whatever conceptualization they came to, or when things scare them, when things are threatening, at some point in their life, they observe something to make that so. And now we've got to look at it in terms of their current skills, abilities, and survival mechanisms. Is this still true? I don't want to invalidate it and go, well, that's stupid to feel that way. When you were six, it may have been very valid. Now that you're 26, do you still need to fear it? Until about age seven, children's interpretation of behavior is centric based on one thing at a time. So like Brewster, because we know that dogs are like very, very small children. He saw the two boys fighting. He didn't pay attention to the fact that neither one was making angry noises. There was no screaming going on. There was nothing. He just saw the action. Children are kind of the same way. They see one thing. They see mommy and daddy fighting. They see lightning strike and the power goes out. They're not focusing on the thunderstorm. They see the lightning. The power went out. So every time lightning happens, the power is going to go out. Based on one thing at a time, it's concrete. I consider alternate explanations when children are that young. It's all or nothing. So this either happens all the time or never. You love me or you hate me. There's no, you know, you love me, but sometimes you make bad choices. And it's egocentric. My perception is the right perception. The way I perceive it is real. That's the way it happened. And a lot of things happen because of me. So if you look at some of the things that are bothering your patients, that are bothering your clients in terms of centric, concrete, all or nothing, and egocentric, you can see where these interpretations, where these schemas that were likely formed when they were young have become dysfunctional now or unhelpful. So then we can start addressing those things. Interpretations are only as good as the information coming in and your prior knowledge. So if that prior knowledge, even if it was accurate, but it was centric, all or nothing, you know, it didn't look at all the possible reasons why a parent may have abandoned the family. So the person has a skewed interpretation of maybe what happened or an incorrect interpretation. Now new information comes in and the person has to make a decision about is the parent going to leave again or is this thing going to repeat. Things that are learned in early childhood need to be reexamined as we grow because we have to go back and address that centric. We have to ask people, okay, let's think about this situation. I hear what you're telling me, what you saw, what you felt. What else was going on? Tell me about the big picture. We have to help them address the concrete. What are some alternate explanations for what may have happened? Did Sally, your neighbor down the street, see the same exact thing? All or nothing, look for exceptions. Yes, this happens. Yes, this happens sometimes, but does it happen all the time? Or yes, you love this person, but does that mean you have to love all of their behaviors? Ego centric, is it really about you? Did you have a hand in this? Maybe, maybe not. Going back to the summarizing everything else we've talked about right up until that, your interpretation is one interpretation, but is it necessarily 100% right? Is it 100% accurate? These are things they can challenge, and if they say yes, then okay, let's deal with it. But I want people to really look at the bigger picture and not just focus on one thing, not just focus on feeling instead of logic, or logic instead of feeling. I want them to look at the big picture. So again, look at the big picture, consider alternatives, look for exceptions, and then reevaluate your interpretation to see if your initial interpretation was what you want to stay with. Once you're in middle school, you can be taught to start considering multiple aspects. It doesn't, I mean, for some people, they just, especially in school, teachers will kind of nudge you along the way. But especially in social interactions, this doesn't always happen. People don't always start considering multiple aspects of relationships and multiple aspects of social interactions, or using abstract reasoning for looking for other interpretations, why Johnny was late to the party, why so-and-so wrecked their car, why whatever happened. Sometimes people do, but a lot of times people need to be encouraged, either through their parents or their teachers or whatever, to start making that cognitive leap. And again, we're going to find that a lot of the distress that plagues a lot of our clients is because of schemas that are based on that early, less mature, less informed reasoning. So for an example, a child brings home a report card. The child hears negative messages from their parent. Why did you get a C? I know you're not that stupid. Ouch! Or why can't you do anything right? These are statements that I know parents say. These are statements that I know parents have said to children that I've worked with. So we want to say, alright, so what is the child hear and interpret? All or nothing, I can't do anything to make my parent proud. So this is one of those messages that may stay with them through adulthood. Ego-centric. I'm not lovable. Another one of those messages that may plague the child growing up because they didn't look at specific behaviors. We're getting there. So what does this mean for future behaviors of the person as an adult? They may desperately seek approval. They may fear abandonment because they don't feel like they were ever good enough. The alternative is that the child brings home the report card and the child hears a neutral or positive message from the parent. Because remember, at certain stages, the child is not able to really think all that abstractly. So we need to think carefully about how we interact with them. Why did you get a C in math? It seems like you might need a little help in that subject. Now that's a very different statement than, I know you're not that stupid. The other one is you're a really smart and a good student. So you got the positive there. What's causing you this difficulty in math? The child's interpretation. Again, all or nothing, it needs to be refocused with the specifics. And the parent is trying to use specifics in this. You might need some help in math. Ego-centric and single-focused is broadened to you're really smart and a good student in general. So what's causing you difficulty in this specific area? Future behaviors, the child starts learning to examine specific behaviors and say, I'm good at this, but I have some weaknesses. And the child is able to identify strengths and weaknesses. Example number two, if the parent abandons the family, the child may interpret, my parent has to love me. My parent left. My parent must hate me then. So I'm unlovable because again, the child is thinking very egocentrically. As a result, the person may end up feeling inadequate, fearing abandonment, seeking external validation that wasn't received from the parent. So we really want to look at the messages clients are telling themselves and extrapolate it and go, okay, where might this have come from? And look for those cues, for those cognitive errors. Is it all or nothing? Is it centric? Is it what the other one was? I'll get to it in a minute. We want to help people really broaden their ability to look and the psychological flexibility. So the child in this situation may be helped to interpret, my parent has to love me. My parent is still in my life, and my parent will always be there for me. Now, of course, in this situation, we're assuming that the non custodial parent shows up when they're supposed to, does what they're supposed to, and it's all happy and swell. As a result, the adult may end up feeling adequate and able to provide internal validation. You know, starting to understand, you know, they may not be able to understand at that age that it wasn't about them. There was, you know, other stuff going on. But as they get older, they can be coached into examining that if it's an issue. And the adult feeling secure in relationships, even if someone goes away, they'll be back. And obviously this means, you know, family, those sorts of things. Or temporary separations because of jobs or whatever the case may be, not that every time you break up with someone, they will come back, because that's obviously not the case. But we want to help adults to feel secure in relationships, understand that sometimes things happen, and things, relationships end, and it's not because of you. It's because of them. Another example, if a child witnesses domestic violence, what the child sees is mom gets hurt and makes daddy drink and makes daddy hit her because she makes him mad. This is what the child's hearing, this is what the child's seeing. So this is what the child's kind of putting together. The child isn't able to go, well, you know, maybe that alcohol is really messing with dad's ability to control his temper. That's not how children think. The child hears the father criticizing the mother and telling her how useless she is. So the child interprets, well, if that's true for her, if I don't do absolutely everything right, then maybe I'm going to be unlovable and useless too. So then we end up with an adult who's perfectionistic, who fears abandonment, who's always afraid of disappointing others, who looks for external validation. Future behaviors of someone who witnesses domestic violence are often shrouded in fear of failure, which caused the person to either refuse to try or become a perfectionist. And I've seen both. I've seen people who are just like, you know what, no matter what I do, I'm going to screw up, so I might as well not even be in relationships. And I see that a lot, or I saw that a lot in people with severe addictions. At a certain point, they just start numbing out the loneliness and the isolation. And then there's the other side where people may try to be a perfectionist. They end up being like the type A personality. Either way, both people fear abandonment. The person who just doesn't even try cuts it off so they don't have to hurt. They just numb that up, box that up. The person who's the perfectionist, most likely and often, if someone leaves, takes it very personally. They take it as I made them leave or I wasn't good enough for them to stay. That need for external validation is there for both of them. Because they learned that if you don't make other people happy, then everybody abandons you. Instead of learning that if you make yourself happy, you know, positive things will attract positive things. And the child learns that he or she is responsible for others' feelings and behaviors, which creates all kinds of codependency. Because people are saying, well, you know, when I was little, it was my job. It was my responsibility to make sure daddy was happy, to make sure mommy was happy. It's my job to make sure you're happy. If you're not happy, then it's my fault and I am inferior. Most of you are probably sitting there going, yeah, that sounds like something that one of my clients has said. And, you know, it's true. So we need to look at what happened in the past that's affecting how they interpret today's environment, today's situations, today's relationships, so they can make healthier choices about what they're doing. So what's the point? Much of people's anxiety and distress comes from faulty interpretations of prior experiences, creating faulty interpretations of present experiences. Now, when I say faulty in the prior, it was very spot on for the child with premature or primitive cognitive abilities. It was centric, it was all or nothing, and they couldn't do any better. They did what they could with the tools they had at that point in time. Unfortunately, it hasn't been challenged yet. So they're still holding onto those old ways of believing and ways of thinking and ways of interacting and ways of perceiving. Now that they are stronger, more independent, able to consider abstractions, able to consider alternate possibilities, able to look at the big picture, and able to consider whether or not their prior interpretations are serving them well today. And the brain may use outdated experiences. You know, what happened in the past may have really sucked, and that's true. However, does that mean we have to assume that every relationship from here on out is going to be abusive and yucky? Does it mean that whatever happened in the past is destined to repeat in the future? Whenever a person has a negative message, a negative schema, something that requires them to seek external validation, something that tells them they're not good enough, something that tells them they have no control, it creates a threat or a stress reaction, or a threat that produces a stress reaction. Those stress reactions manifest differently for different people. If people feel, and I don't want to say empowered because that's not exactly the word I'm looking for, but if they feel like they can take on the threat, or if their go-to has always been anger, they may react with anger. Anger pushes people away. Anger pushes away the threat. Anger gets power over the threat. Either way, you're pushing it down or pushing it away, but it's protecting the person. Fear runs away from the threat or tries to figure out how to fix it to make it go away. Either way, the person is having this fight-or-flight reaction. At a certain point, like I said, the body will adjust because it can't stay on edge. It can't stay on high alert 24-7, 365 for years on end. It just is not capable of doing it. So it ramps down the sensitivity of the stress meter or the reactivity meter, I guess I should say, because it means that those excitatory neurotransmitters, whether it's good excitement or bad excitement, it takes a lot more to get them flowing than it did six months ago. When you constantly bombard yourself with negative messages, your body constantly perceives a threat. So if you're constantly telling yourself, I'm not good enough, then the follow-ons are, I'm going to be rejected, nobody's going to like me, I'm never going to succeed. I'm getting depressed just saying those things. It wears on a person's sense of confidence. It wears on a person's sense of self-esteem. But it also causes the stress reaction, which is exhausting. Think about when you get stressed, when you have a stress reaction, when you have a stressful day, when you go through a stressful experience, whatever the case may be. You don't just go, wow, that was stressful. Glad it's done. A lot of times after a really stressful day, most of us will come home, plop down on the couch, and be like, oh, I'm so exhausted. Imagine feeling like that every day, day in and day out. You'd want some relief. Then you go to bed. You're exhausted, and you go to bed, and you can't sleep. Because everything from the day keeps running through your head about should as could as would as all the things that you're not good at, all of the negative self-talk so you don't sleep well. And you get up the next morning, and you feel like you got hit by a train. And you do it all over again. So it gets exhausting. And if you can't make it stop, at a certain point, you feel hopeless and helpless. And I think I've made reference to the experiment before, and I don't remember who did it, because I hate it so much, but the experiment where they had a dog, and they would electrify one side of the, one side of the fence, and the dog would jump over to the other side where there was no shock. And he'd be like, okay, fine, I'm safe. And then they would electrify that side, and he'd jump back over. Well, after a while, they kept both sides electrified, and he would jump over, get shocked, jump back, still get shocked. Eventually, he just laid down and said, I give up. I quit. Learned helplessness. People become helpless and hopeless when they don't have the tools or skills or know which direction to turn. Maybe they have them in their toolbox, but they can't even see the forest for the trees to figure out how to get out of this situation. And the hopelessness and helplessness sits in. And just like the dog in that experiment, they just lay down and they're like, I give up, white flag, I can't do it anymore. Many of our clients come to us at this stage. They're done. They've tried everything they know how to stop the shocks, to stop the pain. And it hasn't worked. And now they're just, they're out of options, except for us. So what we want to do is help them start identifying what's causing these shocks, if you will, help them identify what right now is causing this threat. What things, and sometimes it may mean keeping a log of what stresses you out during the day. To identify where you can start making small changes in their lifestyle, in addition to obviously the work that you're going to do in counseling, addressing the cognitive distortions, thinking errors, emotionless use, traumas, whatever your theoretical approach is. They also want to help them understand that they need sleep. They need good nutrition. And heaven forbid, they need to relax. Stephen Covey talked about sharpening the saw. And what he said was, you know, think about trying to saw a log. Now you can try to saw it with a dull saw, but it's going to take a whole lot longer. And it's probably not going to be done right because you're going to go off a little wonky since you're working so hard to try to saw through the log. Or you can take the time to go sharpen the saw first. Yeah, it takes a little bit to go sharpen the saw. But in the end, are you spending more time using a dull saw and maybe not even getting it right or sharpening the saw and doing it right the first time? So we want to help clients see that, you know, sometimes relaxation is important. We need to have our brain, give our bodies and our brain time to feel happy chemicals or just to decompress. It doesn't have to be anything, you know, totally extraordinary. But we can't just go on autopilot all the time of wake up, eat, go to work, come home, eat, go to bed, repeat. That's not how we're meant to do it. Mindfulness is really helpful here because people can start identifying where they might have some vulnerabilities, where they might have some things that are making it harder for their brain to produce the positive neurochemicals and harder for them to not be on edge all the time. The brain is your central control center. It can be your friend and it can be your worst enemy. The good thing is it learns. It's trainable. So if you have a lot of negative self-talk or hecklers in the gallery or negative tapes that play, whatever you want to call them, you can teach your brain to turn those off. It's not that hard to do. It just takes a little bit of time. The brain can be trained to do whatever you need it to do. It can be rewired, whatever you want to call it. Through observation and experience, it learns what's okay and what's threatening. So what was threatening back then may be perceived as threatening now, but if the person goes through it and experiences nothing bad or better yet, something positive, then that schema has to be adjusted to figure out why. You know, it's a different situation. I'm older now. Whatever the rationale is, the brain can relearn what's scary and what's not. Think about when you were little, you know, knee-high to a grasshopper. The dark was scary. I used to hate walking around in the house when the blinds were open because it was just freaky. And a lot of children are afraid of the dark. Now that you're older, you know, most of us aren't afraid of the dark. You may still not want to walk around with the windows open, but most of us have learned that the dark really isn't anything to be afraid of. There aren't boogeymen hiding underneath the bed. We have relearned and adjusted that schema. Things that were threatening or misinterpreted in the past may now need to be reexamined. So when we're thinking about traumas and negative experiences from a person's prior, you know, years, we want to figure out and ask them, how does that impact you today? You know, how is it affecting your relationships today? By addressing those old, unhelpful thoughts and interpretations, you can reduce physical and mental stress and anxiety. So if we stop putting the body and the brain on high alert all the time, then you have all that energy that can be reallocated for laughter, for happiness, for, you know, doing yard chores if that's what you like to do or whatever it is. But all that energy that is normally dedicated to keeping your heart beating faster, preparing you to fight or flee, keeping your muscles tense. Oh, that's freed up. Hey, maybe you can even go to the gym. There are a lot of things that will happen as patients start to turn down their stress meter. 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 allceus.com slash counselor toolbox. This episode has been brought to you in part by allceus.com providing 24 seven multimedia continuing education and pre-certification training to counselors, therapists and nurses since 2006. 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