My gosh, I'm so stressed out. Are you stressed? I'm Dr. Paul, I should know how
to handle stress. Oh, wait a minute. Yeah, I got some ideas about that. Let's talk
about that today. As we get into this stress discussion, I think we first make
a distinction between brain and mind. Brain and mind are not the same thing.
Your brain is an organ in your head, part of your body. When I talk about mind, I'm
referring to the agent inside of the machine. The thinker, the soul, the spirit
the you, that's inside of that body. And you have a body which includes a
brain, but you're not your body or your brain. When we're dealing with stress, we
look at a brain component and we look at a mind component. So, give me a moment
here while I draw the brain for you. Isn't it awesome that my video editors
can make that happen so fast. This is your brain.
For those of you who are around in the 80's, you know what's next right? This is
your brain on drugs. No, that's not where we're going today.
But that might be relevant to think about as well.Your brain has different
parts that do different things. So did you know, which part of your brain
controls eyesight, vision? Some of you got it right.
And most people guessed incorrectly on this. They think it's up here by the eye
somewhere. But the visual cortex of your brain is clear back here in the back.
That's the part that handles all the visual input from your eyes. It's in the
occipital lobe right here on the back of your head. I don't know why but that's
how we're designed. There's a little part up here. It's about the size of your
thumb, it's called the motor cortex and you've got one on the right side, one on
the left side. This controls all of the muscles and movement in your body and
the right side, controls the left side of your body and vice versa.
I know why it's designed that way. That's
how we are. Up here in the front, the prefrontal part right behind your
forehead, that's in charge of a lot of different things. But let's shorten it to
this, thinking. Thinking, logic problem-solving, those kinds of things
are happening up here in the frontal or prefrontal part of your brain. Now,
there's another part located down here kind of near the brainstem. Let's label
that the limbic system. The limbic system is actually a family of structures
within your brain that all have a similar responsibility and the short
version is survival. Your limbic system takes care of keeping you alive. So it's
always on the outlook for threat. Something that's going to pose a danger
to you. So that, it can react in a way that keeps you safe. The reaction that
the limbic system kicks into collectively we call the fight-or-flight
response. You've heard of this, right? Which makes total sense because if
you're in danger what should you do? Well, put up your dukes or get the heck out of
there, right? Because you're in danger. Thing about the limbic system is, it
doesn't discern and quite frankly, it doesn't care about the difference
between a threat that is real and a threat that is perceived. It doesn't know
the difference. This is why when you go to a movie for example, you ever been in
one of those really intense movies and as the intensity increases in the movie
you find yourself gripping those hand rests and your heart starts to beat
right and your breathing can get shallow. My wife laughs at me because I'm dodging
stuff in there and it's not even 3d. What gives? Well,
your limbic system is reacting to a perceived threat. It's just light on a
screen and sound from the dolby. But your limbic system doesn't know that. So it's
kicking your body into that fight-or-flight response. Now
took the time to explain some of the Neurophysiology to you because stress
has to do with your brain responding to threat.
What are you stressed about? "Oh, the bills are coming due." That looks like a threat
and your body is reacting, your brain is reacting, sending chemicals into your
body that cause you to be keyed up to be in that fight-or-flight response.
This isn't necessarily helpful because the other thing that happens,
we've got brain scan studies that show this. When that limbic system is active,
when it's really fired up, there's actually a decrease in blood flow to the
prefrontal part of your brain. What are you not doing? Right. What are you going to
need to handle the problems that you're trying to solve? Do you need a fight
response? Do you need to run away a response or do you need a thinking
response? So part of dealing with stress is understanding how our brain is
reacting to those perceived threats. I'm going to give you a two brain hacks to handle
the brain side of managing stress. The first one is breathing. Breathing. Now,
I know you do this every day. Your breathing in and out all day long. I know.
I'm talking about a special, conscious, intentional form of breathing that helps
to condition your limbic system to chill out so that you can send the blood flow
back up front, where you're going to need it, to solve the problems that you're
dealing with. This is the first thing that I teach in marriage counseling.
People come in and they're fighting. What's up with that, right? Well, they're
feeling threatened. So we got to calm down that fight-or-flight response and
reactivate the prefrontal part. Quick little breathing exercise for you. In
through the nose, over inflate the lungs a little bit, just hold it for a few
seconds and then out through the mouth nice and slow. Restrict the flow here so
that it slows it down because you want to
about twice as long in the exhale as you did on the inhale. Practice that. I would
recommend that you do 3 to 5 reps, reps meaning, in through the nose hold
out through the mouth. 3 to 5 reps, 3 times a day for 5 days. If you
will do this, you will start to condition your limbic system to respond to you. To
the mind part of you, to the conscious part of you. So that we can calm down
that limbic system fight-or-flight response and get the prefrontal lobe
engaged again in doing the thinking and the problem-solving. Here's the second
brain hack. For the brain. Regular exercise. Oh my gosh you guys, when you
look at the clinical literature on this, exercise is so important to our brain
health. I know you probably already knew this and hopefully most of you are
already doing this. If you're not already, this is one of the best things you can
do for your brain health that will help you to manage stress. And I can't give
you a specific workout routine or an exercise routine. You go look at some
other videos for that. I'm not a physiologist, I'm a psychologist but I
know that you need to have at least 3 days a week, where
you're doing at least 30 minutes of a good cardiovascular exercise. Get your
body moving. The research also shows that even if it's not intense, if you're
walking, in fact walking is one of the best ones you can do. It triggers things
in your brain and subsequently in the rest of your body that allow you to
metabolize differently and it's like sending a signal to your body to go into
a different mode and that different mode helps us to handle and manage stress
appropriately. Now, let's shift from brain over to mind for a moment. The
thinker, the you inside of the body. There's a conscious portion of your mind,
there's a subconscious portion of your mind. I think of it as the upstairs and
the downstairs. If you were to collapse those two.
You've got two halves and the upstairs part is in the light. Conscious means
aware. Awareness, so you know what's going on in your conscious mind. Subconscious,
"sub" means below. Like subway, submarine. Subconscious is below your awareness.
You're not as aware of what's going on down there. We've got a bunch of other
videos on on working through our thinking. Using metacognition, staying in
a positive mode, All of those are going to be helpful to you. Here's the part
that I want to emphasize from the subconscious part of your mind, are a lot
of questions. Those questions trigger stress. For example, "what if, what if" Yeah,
the what if question. Probably the most stressful question that's hanging out in
the basement of your own mind because your subconscious can't just let that
alone. When your subconscious asks the question, "what if this happens, what
if that happens?" It also comes up with an answer and the
default answer from your subconscious mind is, "you can't handle that". But folks,
it's not true that you can't handle it. But if your subconscious tells you, "you
can't handle it", what did we just trigger in the limbic system? Huge threat.
Chemical party starts because the limbic system sends a signal to the glands in
your body to respond to that threat, through the fight-or-flight response. Do
you see how the mind and the body or specifically the brain, interact to cause
that stress response. So, from a mind perspective, here's what we get to do.
Answer the what-ifs. Answer them. And I'm talking, bring them upstairs, into the
conscious part of your mind where you get to answer them truthfully and
according to principle. And here's the true answer. I'm saying this with all of
the clinical experience and life experience that I have. You can handle it.
In fact, I'm going to be as bold as to say there is no earthly experience that
you can't handle. And I know that sounds bold but I've talked to so many people
who have experienced things far more difficult than whatever it is you're
handling and I say that with an acknowledgement that what you're
handling is hard. Yeah, I get that. But I've talked to people who have been
abducted, who have been tortured, who have experienced some of the most difficult
things you could ever imagine in life and guess what? They handled it and I
don't think you're a special case. As special as you are, I know but you're not
a special case. What that means is all the laws, the natural laws, the principles
apply to you too. And this is one of those. You can handle it. What if you
believed that? What if you believed from a mind perspective that you could handle
absolutely anything. Anything that happens to you. What would happen to your
fear? What would happen to your stress? Okay, so go use those things to handle
your stress. Share them with somebody else. I'm going to be back tomorrow. I'll see you
then.