How to Release Emotions Trapped in Your Body 10/30 How to Process Emotions Like Trauma and Anxiety

For a very long time, the field of psychology was dominated by psychologists who insisted that the way to change how you feel is to change how you think. And honestly, that is true. It's at least partially true. When you change how you think, you can change how you feel. But there's something deeper than thoughts. The older, more instinctual part of the brain actually has superiority over your cortex. And modern research into trauma and anxiety work is showing that your nervous system really runs the show. For many people, you can't just think your way out of emotions. But when you calm your nervous system, you can then think clearly as well. In this video, you're going to learn about the two states of your nervous system, how emotions can get stuck in the body or nervous system, and how to train your nervous system to be calmer so that you can process through emotions, feel happier, and make better choices. This video is sponsored by BetterHelp. BetterHelp provides professional online counseling to help you with depression, anxiety, trauma, grief, relationships, and more. At BetterHelp, you just answer a few questions and they match you with a licensed therapist in your area. You can also use their service to message your therapist anytime from anywhere. And you can have live sessions without needing to leave your home. Check it out if you're on the fence about starting therapy. This is one of the easiest ways to give it a try. If you use the link in the description, you can get 10% off your first month. In the last video, we learned about the fight-flight-freeze response. This is an automatic reaction in the nervous system to respond to threats. But your beautiful, brilliant brain isn't just going to leave you hanging. There are two automatic responses in your nervous system. This natural alerting response, the fight-flight-freeze response, and a natural calming response. Now, quick review. When we feel unsafe, our nervous system has a way to get activated in order to respond to threats. This is the sympathetic nervous system response. This is what leads to the physiological changes in the body with the fight-flight-freeze response. Your nervous system also has a response to calm down. This is called the parasympathetic response. Remember this by thinking para as in parachute. It slows things down and it helps the nervous system and your body to return to a calm state. The parasympathetic response slows your heart rate, lowers your blood pressure, it turns back on digestion, your muscles loosen, and your eyes soften. This state is also known as rest and digest or feed and breathe. This is a healing state. Your immune system gets back to work and your sense of peace and safety is restored. Both of these responses are helpful. It's important to be able to respond to threats, but it's also important to rest and heal. These two states are kind of like muscles. The part of our nervous system that we use the most becomes the strongest. A healthy nervous system alternates between these two states easily. You can go through these cycles of activation, which are like waking up, performing a task, getting motivated, dealing with problems, and then it can switch to relaxation, taking a break, sleeping, rejuvenating, refreshing, right? A healthy nervous system tends to spend more time in the calm state than it does in the activated state. Our nervous system is designed to go through a natural cycle of being at rest and then being alert, possibly performing in the fight-flight-freeze response or in some level of performance, and then shake it off and then return to safety to rest and digest. Peter Levine, who is the creator of somatic experiencing therapy, he explains this process so well and he uses this example of a polar bear to demonstrate the nervous system cycle. So this polar bear was peacefully doing his thing when suddenly a group of researchers chase him down with a helicopter and shoot him with a tranquilizer dart, right? This is really stressful and the bear is helpless to stop these researchers who are examining it and tagging it, right? The bear has experienced a traumatic event, but after the researchers leave, he begins to shake violently and this is his body's natural response to burn off the excess adrenaline that surged through his body when he was trapped. So after shaking for a while, the bear walks off with no residual effects from the experience. He returns to a calm state of The cycle is the essence of emotion processing in our body. We start with a resting state, we go on alert, then fight-flight-freeze, then afterwards we shake it off, and in humans this looks like laughing or physically shaking or crying, and then we return to feeling safe and back to this rest and digest state. Now let's take a minute and look at the shake it off stage. Have you ever seen someone who had a near miss, right? Like a car nearly hits them or something. Their immediate reaction is this strange laugh. Or think about someone who has been in a car crash, but they're unharmed. They often go into this shaky stage afterwards. This is your body trying to burn off that adrenaline and process through those stress chemicals that you just got flooded with. Your body is naturally trying to return to calm by going through emotions in a physical way. But we humans are different than other animals. We have this huge cortex, this thinking brain that helps us plan things out and thinks things through and have self-control, but it often gets in the way of that response. Don't cry, it says. This is too embarrassing. Act like you're fine, it says. Try not to get shaky at your presentation. Just don't think about it, it says. And so our brilliant thinking mind and our attempts at avoiding these raw visceral emotions, it interferes with our natural ability to resolve that stress response. And so emotions get trapped in the body. They get trapped in muscle tension and stress chemicals and hormones like cortisol, and we carry them around with us. Maybe we try not to think about them or we cope with stress, but our body holds the deep wisdom of how to let them go. Here's an interesting story from Nicholas Seban, a self-proclaimed acupuncturist and healer. A patient, a successful male artist, came to me for general wellness. He thought I could do something to help him, yet it was unclear what he had in mind. He appeared withdrawn, scattered, and shy. He wouldn't make eye contact with me. He spoke of sexual problems with his wife and a lack of enthusiasm about his seemingly abundant life. Within the first three sessions of acupuncture treatment, a deep grief began to emerge. The patient would begin crying on the table and felt a tremendous amount of shame and fear, which he couldn't explain. I encouraged him to allow the emotion to be expressed without trying to understand or classify it. For several sessions, he experienced expressions like this. He kept coming back because of the growing sense of lightness he was beginning to feel. He was once again feeling joy. His sexual function was also returning. After a duration of about three months, this patient began to seem like a new person, very different from the man I'd met months before. His posture and demeanor changed dramatically. He seemed to glow and radiate with enthusiasm and energy. His relationship improved, as did his sexual expression. He began to radiate sex appeal, and he gained the attention of many people, which also seemed to help his creative work and self-esteem. Once the expression of grief, fear, and shame ceased to occur during his treatment, we decided the therapy had concluded. Now, I am not saying that acupuncture is a cure for trauma or, you know, repressed emotions, but there are lots of anecdotal reports of huge physical releases of these emotions or of trauma when doing physical treatments. So if you talk to massage therapists or acupuncturists or chiropractors, you'll hear stories of people who suddenly start shaking or crying during a session, and they feel like something has been released. Can we say in a very specific way, an empirical way, that your trauma is stored in your shoulders or your uterus or that acupuncture releases your qi to flow? Well, no, because we simply don't have the tools to measure that. But we can say with certainty that physical activity is powerful at resetting the nervous system and healing anxiety and trauma. So if you're struggling with PTSD or anxiety or stress, I encourage you to work with a therapist who specializes in trauma. And one thing you could look for is someone who is certified in EMDR or somatic experiencing. So I'm a believer in evidence-based treatments. That means treatments that show through rigorous research to be effective consistently and not harmful in treating these certain disorders. So I am not necessarily a proponent of energy healing, for example. There's a lot of alternative treatments for trauma and body work that's happening that I think might be selling a little bit more than the research can back up. But on the other hand, the anecdotal evidence, the stories people tell, is that they experience something really different. They experience healing doing these body-based modalities, and the research is starting to catch up with these physical treatments as an effective way to heal trauma and anxiety. So for example, yoga has been shown to be an effective treatment for PTSD. And according to Bessel van der Kolk, it's more effective than most medication treatments. Physical treatments like acupressure, massage, dancing, or deep belly breathing are all things that people say help them with stress. And what these things are likely doing is rebalancing the nervous system. Same thing with exercise. It's been shown to be more effective than medication at treating mild to moderate depression and anxiety. And this has got to be because it's helping the nervous system go through these natural cycles of activation and relaxation. So unresolved trauma or chronic stress can leave us trapped in the sympathetic response. It's like the thermostat gets turned up, and that fight, flight, freeze response becomes very sensitive. It gets turned on easily, and it stays on for a long time. And in this way, trauma or stress gets stuck in the body, even when we may not be consciously thinking about the actual trauma. An unhealthy nervous system gets stuck in elevated levels of stress, rarely going through cycles of calm. The sympathetic nervous system takes over, and you feel constantly anxious. You may see danger in the slightest signal and find it very difficult to relax. This often leads to periodic exhaustion and crashing. We're often unaware of why we are going into the high alert mode, and this leads to us being stuck in it even longer. It's not healthy to be stuck in high alert all day long, and then collapse at home, or to simply rely on relaxation to recharge. We need to learn how to regulate our nervous system throughout the day. I recently worked with a trainer who trains emergency room doctors, EMTs, police, military, to regulate their nervous system throughout the day. Now many of these people have very stressful jobs, and if they're clenched, right, if they're stuck in fight, flight, freeze at work, then they often end up exhausted, traumatized, and burnt out. This trainer, he trains them to build a healthy nervous system through the skill of relaxed vigilance. And this is essential for PTSD, and anxiety, and stress. So you know, mental health in general. In the next section, I'm going to teach you all about it, but the basic skill is just learning to trigger that parasympathetic response, that calming response in your nervous system, in small moments, frequently, throughout the day. And you do this through simple body-based exercises, like taking deep breaths, or tensing, and then softening muscle groups. You can still be a high performer in a high-stress job, and have a parasympathetically dominant nervous system. You can train yourself to be calmer. Our nervous system, including our brain, has an amazing ability to change and grow depending on how we use it. There's good research out there showing that we can change the physical structure, the chemical balance, and the electrical activity in our brain, depending on how we use it. We can even influence our genes, and how they're activated and passed on. We can learn to have quite a bit of influence on our nervous system, training it to activate when we need to wake up, perform tasks, or respond to problems, and teaching it to calm down when it's time to relax, recoup, to process, or to repair. We do this through physical, emotional, and psychological exercises. The many skills you're learning in this course are geared toward this process. When we're calm, we can make more intentional and powerful choices with our lives. We create calm by resolving the needs of survival and attachment, and training our brain to feel safe. We're going to keep developing these skills as we move through this course. For now, here is one exercise that can help you feel safe. Dr. James Gordon travels the world to train people on how to overcome trauma, and he uses research-backed mind-body techniques. He's used these skills to help refugees and rape victims, earthquake survivors, and veterans of wars. Now here's a story about him from the website mindbodygreen.com. About a year after the massive earthquake that rocked Haiti in 2010, Gordon traveled to the island to lead a workshop for survivors. I was leading a workshop for about 100 nursing students. They'd lost about 90 of their fellow nursing students, many of them very young women in their late teens, to this earthquake. So at the end of one afternoon, I got them all up, shaking, and within two minutes, half of them were weeping. We paused for a bit, became aware of our breath, and then I put on some Bob Marley, and they started dancing. Some were still crying, others started laughing, and afterward they all said, this feels so good. Many of the women told Gordon it was the first time they'd been able to laugh or cry since the earthquake, and that they thought they had to be strong, or that they shouldn't be enjoying themselves. Dr. Gordon says, when you shut down one emotion, and you go into that frozen state, it's not just that emotion you're protecting yourself against that gets shut down, your whole emotional life gets limited. Okay, so here's how to do it. So first, go ahead and turn on some of your favorite music, or if you can't think of something upbeat, turn on some Taylor Swift. I would play it for you, but I can't because of copyright reasons. So okay, and then go ahead and just stand up, put your feet shoulder width apart, and just start shaking your feet a little bit, right? Start shaking down there at your legs, and then let that move up through your whole body, and just shake it out. And I want you to shake it out to music, act like an idiot, let your hands go floppy, shake your head, and dance for like 45 minutes, okay? Not 45, 4 to 5 minutes, okay? Do that for a few minutes, and then when you're done, take a few slow, deep belly breaths, and then come back here. By doing this, you're essentially sending a message to the fear centers in your brain that you are safe, and this turns on that parasympathetic response. In upcoming lessons, we're going to teach you how to train your mind and body to respond differently to threats, to resolve anxiety, and to teach the body to return to calm quickly. You're going to learn how to strengthen the calming part of your nervous system through self-regulation. Thank you for watching, and take care. This video is one skill from my 30 skill course, How to Process Your Emotions, where I teach 30 of the most essential skills for resolving depression, anxiety, and improving mental health. Emotion processing is an essential skill for working through intense emotions, but most people have never been taught how to do it. I'm putting every single main video lesson on YouTube for the world to access for free. You watching these videos, sharing them, contributing to my Patreon, and my sponsors make this possible. If you would like to access the entire course in one place, ad free with its workbook, exercises, downloads, extra videos, live Q&A's, additional short readings, and links to extended resources, the link to buy the course is in the description below.