How to Turn off the Fight/Flight/Freeze Response: Anxiety Skills #4

Transcript

I'd like to do a quick introduction into
grounding activities Being grounded means that you are in
your body, you're feeling your emotions and you're aware of your present moment
experience. It also means that you're feeling responsible for your safety and
well-being. Grounding is an important therapeutic approach for managing
anxiety, flashbacks, symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder and for
improving your mental health. Grounding strengthens your
parasympathetic response this is your body's natural ability to return to calm.
This parasympathetic response counteracts the fight, flight or freeze
response. PTSD and other anxiety disorders are disordered in their
essence because you're feeling like you're in danger when you're actually
safe. So your body's having this danger response this fight flight freeze
response when you're present moment experience is actually safe and that's
one reason why they are disordered. Anxiety is often about worries about the future-
what might happen. And depression is often about discouragement about the
past. And both of these can be counteracted with an increase in our
ability to be here in the present moment. Most of the time our present moment is a
safe and secure environment if it's not we need to leave so we need to create a
safe and secure environment in our present moment. But grounding activities
help us activate that safe feeling in our brain by reminding ourselves that
here in the present moment we are safe. When we're grounded and calm were able
to work through emotions and memories in a healthy way. Our body has a natural
ability to resolve trauma or to work through emotions, but when we're panicked
or in our fight flight freeze danger response our brain shuts down those
abilities because it thinks that our survival is at stake. We can train
ourselves to trigger this calming response by practicing grounding
activities. It's important to practice these exercises over and over again so
that they become habitual and we can draw on them in moments of stress or
anxiety. Many of the grounding activities that
I'm going to teach you use your body as a way to create that sense of calm so
these are physiological grounding skills. This is called a bottom-up approach
bottom-up meaning we go from the body to the brain instead of from the brain
to itself and this makes sense because most of us aren't able to think
ourselves calm. Like if you're stressed out and you say "Don't be anxious! Don't
be anxious!" that like never works we can never actually tell ourselves to calm
down by just forcing it from the top down. That's partly because our brain,
when it feels threatened, it reacts at a very animalistic level it's using this
deep part of our brain in the limbic system and the brainstem to react
impulsively or instinctively to danger. So this makes a lot of sense this is a really functional reaction. So if a tiger jumps out at you you're not going to be
using your thinking part of your brain to be like "Hmm I wonder what I should do
with this?" your body's gonna naturally and instinctively gonna run away. So it's
gonna have this physiological reaction this fight flight freeze response. It
turns up your heart rate and it turns up your breathing rate. Since we can't
access those deeper survival parts of our brain with our thoughts the best way
to access that calm is through our body. So this is called a bottom-up approach
to grounding. Our five senses anchor us to our body and our surroundings. Using
this bottom-up approach is a much more effective way to treat anxiety and
stress than trying to simply change how we think. And by creating that
physiological calm we're able to lay the foundation for future cognitive work.
Many of these activities focus on our breathing and that's because our
breathing is something that happens both automatically and we have some degree of
control over so that can help trigger that change in the limbic system that we
need to create that physiological calm. Grounding exercises help connect us to
our body and help us reassert that sense of self control and they reorient us to
the safe context that we're actually in in the present moment.
One of the ways that we gain confidence in our ability to use these grounding
exercises is by doing a check-in before and after the exercise and one way to do
that is to do a quick scale. So before you do a grounding exercise scale your
anxiety on a scale from zero to ten and then do your grounding activity and then
just check in with yourself again afterwards and put yourself again on the
scale from zero to ten. Now it's not necessary for you to decrease your
anxiety every time. Sometimes a grounding activity is just about increasing your
awareness and your contact with the present moment. But if you do these
consistently you will notice a gradual pattern of decreasing your anxiety
little by little. We need to be able to notice these small victories because
they can add up to large gains over time. Another way you can look at the effects
of these grounding activities is to ask yourself these questions before and
after: What are you noticing in your body? What are you noticing with your breath?
What's happening with your feelings? What's happening with your heart? and
What's happening with your thoughts? During these grounding activities if at
any point you need to take a break that's okay you can just pause the
activity and then come back to it later. When you're initially learning these
grounding exercises the best way to practice is when you're in a place
that's quiet peaceful and calm. Don't wait until you're stressed out or in a
chaotic environment to try them. And again it's important to practice these
activities every day for a few weeks before trying to practice them in a
stressful environment. The more you practice them the more habitual and
instinctual they'll become and you can actually train yourself to calm your
body down with just a thought or a word. As you get better and better at
grounding you'll increase your confidence and ability to create that
physiological calm even when you're in a stressful situation and you can
gradually use your skills in more and more difficult situations to maintain
that sense of calm that we all need to feel safe and happy. Over the next couple
of months I'm making a bunch of grounding videos I hope they're helpful
for you. Take time to practice them and please like, comment and . Thanks for watching and take care!