this episode was pre-recorded
as part of a live continuing education webinar on demand CEUs are
still available for this presentation through all CEUs register at all
CEUs comm slash counselor toolbox so I'd like to welcome everybody to today's
presentation on the mind-body connection today we're going to talk about how neurotransmitters
interact to help us have moods if you will we're going to learn about the central control
center of the brain what it does in relation to producing emotions what thoughts have to do
with everything and how the brain actually causes physical reactions and sensations we'll
talk about how things can go wrong which lead to feelings of depression anxiety anger insomnia all
kinds of other stuff and some ways to fix those things obviously in an hour we can't talk about
all the ways to fix those things but I always like to leave people with some tips tools and
tricks that they can start doing or looking at doing today in order to start feeling better it
keeps the momentum going if people are interested in topic or they're thinking that well this might
help me keeping them going giving them something to look at and start learning about so we're
going to start out with the brain your central control center and if you are a cartoon junkie
like I am you will recognize our little buddy over here but anyhow I digress your brain takes in
information compares it to what it already knows or thinks it knows from prior experiences and
makes a decision about what to do so we use this model of a computer CPU generally when we're
talking about the brain and it's not exactly accurate but it gives you an understanding on a
more global perspective of what's going on in the brain there's been a lot of research lately
that says you know your brain doesn't store memories per se well but we know that there are
certain actions and reactions that are happening so we're going to proceed with this metaphor
throughout this training and just understand its neuro chemically not exactly a hundred percent
correct so based on the decision that your brain makes it activates action centers which excrete
neurotransmitters in order to produce the desired reaction so you put your hand on a hot stove and
your peripheral nervous system registers that's hot that hurt your brain says that's painful pull
your hand away because we don't want to burn our skin up so you pull your hand away and that's
kind of what we're talking about with a lot of our other decisions that result in emotional
pain not just physical pain chemical messengers are our neurotransmitters take orders to and
from the brain through the nervous system so it's this give and take feedback loop going on
and the things we're going to talk about today are really what I call the big five and there
are all kinds of hormones and neurotransmitters and stuff that we're not covering today but the
big ones I really want you to understand are your excitatory and your inhibitory neurotransmitters
so the ones that get you revved up and motivated and want to get off the couch and the ones that
say you know what let's binge on Netflix for the weekend so you're excitatory neurotransmitters
dopamine dopamine is your reward it's kind of like your cookie at the end of doing something good it
says let's do that again I want to remember that that was really awesome along with dopamine you
have norepinephrine and glutamate these are your get-up-and-go neurotransmitters now depending on
what other neurotransmitters they're paired with their buddies with they can say get up and go
yay rahu let's go on the roller coaster again or it can be get the heck out of here this is
a really dangerous situation but it's get up and go it's telling you you need to do something
it's stimulating and when we think excitement we tend to think happy but excitement in terms of
neurotransmitters just means it stimulates your body it revs everything up it makes your heart
rate increase it makes your breathing increase sometimes if you're really excited that might
make your speech increase no just kidding but things are getting really revved and that prepares
you for the fight-or-flight reaction or you know just some rush of endorphins from pleasure as
in the case of the roller coaster which I never understood and then you have your inhibitory
neurons and they're the ones that come in when the stress or the threat is gone and they say
let's relax let's chill out it's all okay you know everybody can stand down there's no threat
anymore and then serotonin doesn't really relax you but it's your calming and contentment
neurochemical if you want to kind of pare it down to two words it does so much stuff but in
terms of excitation or inhibition it's more of an inhibitory calming chemical now there's always
a balance it's like making a hot bath you turn on the water and you try to get it right but
you feel it and it might be a little too hot so then you put in some cold and you feel it a
little while longer and you're like ah too much cold and you've got a monkey with it a little
bit this is kind of what's happening when you have a extreme stress response you dump a whole
lot of hot into the system and then in order to balance it out you need to kind of take pull back
the hot sum and add a little bit of cold and the cold in this particular metaphor would be your
inhibitory neurotransmitters but there's always a balance you don't ever have one without the other
and that's what's really important to understand with neurotransmitters is that if you had too
much of something it can also cause depression and anxiety just as if you didn't have enough of
it well look look at that a little bit more in the next few slides so what a neurotransmitters
do it's a big word but what does it do emotional your neurotransmitters are responsible for the
physiological reactions that we've come to label as happiness sadness anger and fear when a baby's
born you know they don't have these words to use they have physiological reactions and as they
grow up we you know a child gets startled we say you know you don't need to be scared and
we help them learn how to calm down and they associate that physiological reaction with fear
when they have a temper tantrum we associate a you know you're angry right now and we help them
associate that physiological that feeling whatever it is for them as anger and then sadness and
Happiness are obviously pretty self-explanatory so these emotions we have are really words
that we placed on physiological states you know is your heart rate calm is it racing is your
breathing slow and deliberate or is it rapid and shallow mentally neurotransmitters also help us
with concentration learning and decision-making so you'll see kind of where I'm going with this
in a minute physically neurotransmitters help with sleep behavior you're going to learn two
presentations from now when we talk about sleep how serotonin is essential in order to produce
melatonin so if you don't have enough serotonin then your melatonin is is going to be deficient it
regulates eating behavior libido gastrointestinal functioning and motility and pain perception and
you're like okay so why do I hear let's think about the symptoms for depression depression is a
general lack of pleasure in most things most days for at least two weeks okay fine so you have this
feeling of sadness that some but you've learned to label as sadness or apathy concentration a
lot of times people who are depressed have a hard time with concentration and decision-making
they have problems with sleeping they're either sleeping too much or they can't sleep at all
they're having problems with eating they may be eating to self food they may be eating because
they can't tell if they're hungry or not there's a lot of different reasons they may be eating but
there's often eating disturbances libido tends to go down gastrointestinal functioning and motility
when people get upset their bellies get upset and pain perception they found that when serotonin
goes down that we have greater pain perception but when you're thinking about the symptoms of
depression and anxiety you can see where they're really represented in actions that are tied to
neurotransmitters so this is why neurotransmitters are so important even if you only focus on you
know the five or six big ones it's important to and that imbalances in this system can
cause some of or exacerbate some of the unhappiness and dysphoria that our patients
are experiencing so think about it what is your body's response you know not generally what
is it but when you are afraid what happens to your body your respiration rate do you start to
sweat does your heart start to race do you have ringing in your ears tunnel vision what's going
on how do you wait what is it that you label as fear the same thing is true think about what is
it what are you feeling when you label things and say I'm angry what physiological cues did
you have to go yeah this something's not right and then depressed and depressed is again like
any of these others it's going to be a little bit different for everybody but if you wake up
and you say it on really depressed today how are you feeling busier physiologically what have you
associated this label with so mood disorders are an imbalance in neurotransmitters that cause
emotional mental and/or physical distress but what causes the imbalances that's kind of
what we're talking about this mind-body thing going on because too often we say well cognitive
behavioral therapy is the key to fixing depression well it probably will help a lot but there may
be other things going on likewise we can't just necessarily treat everything with a pill so what
is it that causes these mood disorders or and and neurotransmitter imbalances and basically we
have two things either a reduced flow of something there's the body has slowed down the excitatory
neurotransmitters as we can't we can't run this hot right now or there's an insufficiency because
so much is run for so long but there's not enough left now generally the insufficiencies we see in
people who've abuse drugs and/or people who have some sort of biological or fizzy logical brain
damage that causes problems producing certain neurotransmitters most of the time it's reduced
flow the awesome thing is reduced flow as you'll see in a minute can be fixed it can go backwards
or it can rebalance itself too much stress for too long think about and most of us have gone
through periods where we've been really stressed for a really long time and then we've gotten
gotten it in check even if it you know think about some finals week when you're in graduate
school or maybe you were studying for your comps exams and that's even bigger than finals week you
started studying three months ahead of time and some people they were great with it you know it's
just they were confident they were going to pass and we're not talking about them we're talking
about us um persistent worrywarts that wonder if we know everything and we need to know everything
that's going to be on the exam so we stress about it for a long period of time eventually your
your brain goes yeah I need a break I can't do this all hands on deck 24/7 365 for an extended
period so we need to pull back some of those excitatory neurotransmitters addictive behaviors
like I said tend to flood the body with dopamine and excitatory neurotransmitters medications
opiates and in some other medications that may be prescribed and they may be taken as prescribed
may affect the balance of neurotransmitters for example SSRIs typically mainly increase the
amount of serotonin but what does that do to the amount of norepinephrine that in the body and
norepinephrine remembers your motivation chemical so if you're feeling good but you don't have
any motivation there's still this sense kind of depression so understanding the balance
between them it's not just increasing one or decreasing one it's helping the brain find balance
and insufficient sleep sleep is the time that your brain rest and kind of gets rebalanced and all
that kind of stuff and they found that one of the first things to go during sleep deprivation
is cognitive functioning we lose the ability to concentrate make decisions and our ability to
learn in our short-term memory is significantly impaired so let's think about the analogy of Black
Friday and addiction so on a normal day and we can say addiction or extreme extended stress and
some people have this you know for days not just days but months years on end they are wigged
out stressed to just the brink and and so we want them to understand kind of what's going on but
in this particular scenario we'll talk more about addiction because it's more immediate so think
about on a normal day a place like Target has a capacity of say 750 people you know that's what
the fire marshal says they can handle the store needs a constant 500 people going through during
the day to stay open okay so that's fine so they have eight doors in order to allow for people to
enter an easily and staff enter and exit easily without getting bunched so when you go to Target
you know there's always like a bunch of doors and you're like well what what are all these doors
needed for there's only like four of us but it's in order to allow for easy flow of people in and
out and it works well and this is how things are when you're nervous neurotransmitter system is
working well when you get stressed you have an influx of people and then you know they leave and
you have the balance out with it with the calming chemicals but there's never a flood there's never
an overabundance except for on Black Friday Black Friday everybody's waiting they've camped out
and 1,500 people push through the door as soon as it opens and what happens I thankfully I've
never been to a Black Friday because I really hate shopping but you know I've seen pictures
on TV and people are stomping on each other and they're pushing through the doors the shelves
are just ripped bare with stuff people are all over each other the store is basically destroyed I
mean not forever but stuff is just everywhere the staff is exhausted they're looking at you kind
of shell-shocked and it's going to be a little while before the store can restock itself
so what do they do do they keep the doors open so more people can keep flowing in and keep
overwhelming the store no theoretically if it were legal management would close all but two of the
doors and they would put security guards there and go okay five people can go in and then they wait
for five people to go out and they'd normalize it until staff had time to restock the shelves and
get everything back under control again that's kind of what your brain does your brain serves
as management and goes whoa that was way too much happy or that was way too much stress I need
a break so I can restock all the shelves and get ready for the next round of whatever it is if you
understand if you look at it that way you realize that even if people have been using cocaine or
methamphetamine for years you know that's been a long Black Friday but when they stop and allow
their brain to rest and rebalance it usually is able to do that almost back to normal they found
with but it takes time you know if you have been using methamphetamine for 15 years 15 days is not
going to get you rebalanced it takes time for your brain to repair itself because it's been injured
but it does so where does all this information that we keep talking about come from your brains
making decisions based on information and you know it's not just from these anonymous sources
it's from your peripheral nervous system but it's not very smart either these are your nerves say
something hot something dangerous or your eyes that say I've seen this before and it triggers a
memory that says yeah this is really bad mojo here we need to get out but your eyes your sense
of smell what you touch it's all providing information to your brain that's saying it's all
clear or there might be a threat all hands on deck when the all hands on deck comes out what
is your brain do it excretes norepinephrine with noradrenaline and your body goes you know
Red Alert red alert red alert fight-or-flight reaction because in order to survive I either
need to fight this threat or get away from it and then when it calms down you know it does not just
that that disappears although that noradrenaline disappears but then GABA and and serotonin tend
to come in and go all right threats past you made it congratulations good job but how does
the brain know what's threatening because okay something's hot what does that mean how do we
know that's threatening one of our cats who's not the brightest kitty in the world jumped up
on the counter one time and walked put his paw right on a hot griddle he didn't remove it until
he smelled this be well maybe it's eventually he felt it but he didn't remove it until he had
done a fair amount of damage blistering his poor little paw and so his response system
didn't really kick in right away and go oh that's that's something that's probably hot but
not touch it he remembers that now poor little guy when you were born there were very few things
that were meaningful I mean we're thinking infant everything is new to an infant they're just like
haha you've assigned meaning to things through observation and experience over time you know
when you're a little kid you learned that one of the favorite games of a lot of toddlers is they
learn that if they throw their fork on the ground mommy will pick it up put forth back on toddler
throws it on the ground again you go oh and of course you pick it up again and they've learned
through this experience that if something falls on the ground well initially mommy will pick it up
but eventually it becomes incumbent upon them to pick it up so when something happens you compare
it to prior experiences and decide what to do so think about dogs and dogs get a bad rap I love
dogs don't get me wrong but if the dog comes rushing down a fence line barking and charging
and bearing allah's peace and i'm not talking about a chihuahua I'm talking about a Rottweiler
just charging at you depending on your prior experiences you're either going to look at and
go oh isn't the doggie all excited sweet little doggie or you're going to about wet yourself and
try to get as far away from that dog as you can depending on what your prior experiences are and
you know I'm something akin to Elmira so I usually walk up to it and start talking baby talk and
telling it it doesn't need to worry which the dog continues to bark so I haven't learned from that
but this is how we understand why different people react differently to different situations because
it's based on a schema if you think back to Piaget who said that schema are basically shortcuts
they're basically brief descriptions of prior similar experiences and we say okay when we go to
a restaurant this is how we're supposed to behave because this is restaurant behavior and we have a
restaurant schema we have a school schema we have a scary dog schema and we compare things so when
scent our senses say you know they see something or smell something that reminds us of something
from the past that schema is activated and it either says yeah that was a bad bad situation
or that was nokay situation and then your brain either sends out the all-hands-on-deck signal
or the don't worry about it signal unfortunately until about age seven children's interpretation
of behavior is centric which means is based on one thing at a time so if somebody comes in and
they start yelling they're going to be focused on one thing and usually it's the yelling person
who appears to be very scary probably so they may start thinking that that person is scary
it's concrete there's no hypothesizing about I wonder what could have made this person so angry
that they came in and they start yelling it's you came in and started yelling that was scary so
you are scary it's all or nothing it's either terrifying or it's not there's no middle ground
there's no middle of the road explanation if you sing dialectical behavior therapy there's no
middle path here children are very all-or-nothing and it's egocentric what I perceive must be the
truth so if I perceive it to be scary then it's terrifying and if it's terrifying to me then it's
terrifying to everybody which for a little kid can be really threatening because they're relying
on adult people to protect them and if they think they're scared so everybody's scared then yeah
who's going to save them so anyway so kids get these schemas and we start building schemas from
the time we're knee-high to a grasshopper and that's just the way we do it but those schemas are
not 100% accurate they're based on the experiences the child's have had up to that point and a
four-year-old hasn't had many experiences so they may not be a hundred percent accurate one thing
we need to do as counselors or even as people if we find that we have a lot of stress is look at
some of our schemas and say are these accurate in present day am i considering the whole totality of
the situation or am I only looking at one piece am I looking at all the possibilities or just what
I can see right here am i considering it all or nothing or am I willing to look at you know yes
that person came in and was screaming and that was scary but there could be a lot of a lot of other
reasons for it and it may not have been me so you know it was scary for a minute looking at sort of
a middle accepting what is and then it may not be all about us the other thing we need to look at
is even if it was accurate you know even if we formed a very thorough schema when whenever we
formed that idea and think about older children 16 17 18 they're forming really act you're at
schemas at this point they still don't have the same knowledge that a 47 year old does but they
have a lot more and they have much more formalized ways of thinking and abstract ways of thinking so
they're probably a lot more accurate but something that was threatening or troublesome to a 16 year
old in high school may not be threatening or troublesome when they're 26 or 36 or 46 because
they've grown up they develop stronger coping skills they've developed other needs and
they've also their priorities have changed what was devastating to a 16 year old you know
maybe not being liked or not being included in the in-group or you know one of those issues that
a lot of high schoolers deal with when you get to be older yeah you still like to be included don't
get me wrong however you've also learned through experience but not everybody's going to like you
and hopefully you've learned how to be okay with that so it's no longer applicable to say that this
is a huge threat if somebody doesn't like me and I could also argue that not that's not applicable in
high school but ups the self-esteem presentation so we're going to go with it interpretations are
only as good as the information coming in so if you have faulty information then you may make
a faulty interpretation so if you think you see something that you didn't really see you might
not make the right interpretation somebody comes in and they've got a bump in the back of their
in the back of their pants under their jackets now you think that means to have a gun what if it
means they have a TENS unit on which is something else or they have their cell phone back there or
they took their shirt in weird there could be some other explanation for it but the information
you have is person bump in the back of their jacket prior experience may say danger so prior
experience may say time for that anxiety stress reaction to kick in and prior knowledge you know
maybe you've experienced situations like this in the past you've realized that they're usually
not a big deal so prior knowledge can take that information though you know what there have been
bad situations before but this is probably not one of them think about if you have a boss
who usually only calls you into his office when you're in trouble for something it's bad
news so when he calls you into your office or when he calls you into his office what's your
first reaction oh crap something bad is going to happen no news is good news don't want to be
here so the prior knowledge combined with the information coming in prior experience is combined
with that information provides and interpretation now it may not be the right one we don't know yet
until we get the actual information and we hear what our boss has to say things that are learned
at early childhood need to be re-examined as we grow to see if it's still accurate I've worked
in co-occurring disorders for many many years and dealing with families a lot of times there are
children who are growing up in addicted families who learned that it's not safe to talk to trust
or to feel those are the family rules of the addicted family and they grow up into adults who
are afraid to assert their opinions or ideas to trust anyone or to feel anything because if they
do they might get hurt and we end up seeing a lot of those people in counseling the challenge
here is when you feel something or when people feel something that make them feel upset to look
back and go why am I feeling this way and is this accurate in present day yet when you were six and
you were living in that family it may have been very accurate that was the safe thing to do now
that you are 36 and not living in that household is that the safest and most productive thing for
you to do once you were in middle school you could be taught to start considering multiple aspects
for the situation and using abstract reasoning so you'll find that schemas that were formed in
middle school in high school tend to be more accurate than those that were formed when you
were you know four or five four five and six so that's good and as teachers as clinicians
as parents we can help children look at the what they need to do and look at the alternatives
and the question comes in it do hormones affect the ability to be taught and having two teenagers
at home my gut reaction is to say yes however we know that hormones greatly affect people's
ability to get quality sleep and lack of estrogen or insufficient estrogen can contribute to poor
quality sleep low testosterone can also contribute to poor quality sleep as can high testosterone
so if we go with follow the theory that when we don't get good quality sleep it's difficult for
people to learn and to concentrate and to focus on the bigger picture then I would say yes hormones
have an indirect effect on the ability to learn in the environment because we're just kind of not as
with it when hormones are out of whack and there's always a balance between estrogen progesterone
and testosterone but so that's yes a good question there are a lot of things that affect how we
learn we know that when hormones are high that people tend to be more reactive testosterone
and estrogen people tend to be more reactive and more emotional which could translate possibly
to labeling something as an unpleasant experience when it was more of a neutral experience so
we want to look at all of the vulnerabilities that contributed to the ultimate decision or the
ultimate upset not just necessarily what someone said or what the situation was but what personal
factors did you bring to the interpretation of the situation so in 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 or why can't you do anything right wait I know parents say the
child interprets in their all-or-nothing mindset I can't do anything to make my parent proud
and because of this I'm not lovable because it's about me and I don't feel lovable right
now because I can't do anything right future behaviors could potentially be desperately
seeking external validation and approval and fears of abandonment because they never felt
like they could do anything right to earn somebody else's love so you know it's got conditions
of worse and all kinds of stuff going on here alternate example because kids get bad grades
child brings home a report card and here's neutral or positive messages from the parent we're still
talking about a fee why did you get a C in math it seems like you might need some help in that
subject and I know we're not supposed to ask Y questions but we do you're really smart and a
good student I'm wondering what's causing you difficulty in math so it's specific it's not
global it's not you're stupid is you seem to be struggling in math and there's some positive
stuff in there that says you know you got the tools to do this what's causing the problem the
child in this case generally would interpret all or nothing needs to be refocused to specifics
they'll learn that it's not I'm bad at school I'm a bad student they learn and not so good at math
but they focus on the things they're good at and they fear that this their egocentric and single
focused interpretation needs to be broadened to the big picture I am a good student more global
what am i and you know what is this situation future behaviors eventually as an adult this
person will learn to examine specific behaviors instead of globalizing everything and they'll be
able to identify their strengths and weaknesses and say you know what I'm really smart I'm a
really good student but I'm not so good at this or I'm a really good you know clinician but I'm
not so good at psychoeducation groups or whatever you know you our strengths and weaknesses because
we all have them but it's okay and that's what we want our children to hear or at least learn to
hear example number two the parent of a parent abandons the family the child interprets you
all or nothing my parent has to love me what child grows up thinking and my parent doesn't
have to love me kid thinks you know my parent has to love me and they left so they must hate
me which means I'm unlovable you know this is a pretty elementary level progression of thought
future behaviors if this is left unchecked the person feels inadequate my parent didn't
even love me enough to stay around fears of abandonment my parents abandoned me and if
anybody was supposed to stick around it was my parents and seeking external validation that
was not received from the parent so trying to basically redo that relationship to resolve
their mommy or daddy issues whoever it was who left what parents separate canvassed ever be
resolved hopefully well one example if the parents separate but they're both actively involved
in the child's life then the parent the child still believes well my parent has to love me but
the child sees my parent is doing whatever is in their power to stay in my life and will always
be there for me so there's a different reaction when the parent is still there because children
cognitively can't understand when parents just disappear that's mind boggling to them so as a
result the adult it feels adequate and able to provide internal validation I'm good enough you
know people are going to love me and they learn that in relationships people may go away they
may move away they may break up but it doesn't mean that they won't be back or that it's about
you it means it may mean it's more about them example three a child witnesses domestic violence
the child sees mom get hurt and make daddy drink and make daddy hit her because she makes mad
and yes I'm using quotes very deliberately here because we know that we don't make anybody do
anything but the child that's forming this schema this is what they're remembering so when they grow
up what are they going to remember the child hears the father criticizing the mother and telling
her how useless she is so the child interprets if I don't do absolutely everything right I will be
unlovable and useless this is the takeaway message that the child gets from witnessing this emotional
and/or physical violence for the future behaviors this child may grow up and have behaviors that
are shrouded in fear of failure causing them to either refuse to try it's like why try I know
I can't do anything right so screw it or to be a perfectionist and just hold on with for dear
life to control of everything in order to try to be worthy of someone else's love they will fear
abandonment a lot of times and again this is not true across the board for every DV situation this
is just an example I'm kind of pulling out from my clinical experiences there's a need for external
validation because you know they saw that mom was never good enough for Dad and brought on all
this bad stuff and nobody could ever seem to make daddy happy and child couldn't make that
happy and so now they're trying to figure out well if I am going to be lovable I've got to make
people happy and I don't know how to do that so I need you to tell me I'm okay the child learns
that he or she is responsible for other people's feelings and behaviors and that's what gets filed
back away we call it negative internal voice crit internal critic the the heckling gallery whatever
you want to call it these are the schemas and the negative cognitions that a lot of times we end up
addressing in counseling because they haven't been questioned yet and they haven't been re-evaluated
from an adult or a third party point of view so what's the look if your anxiety and distress
may come from faulty interpretations of prior experiences creating faulty interpretations
of present experiences so thinking back to situations in your past when you thought maybe
somebody was they walk down the hall and they had a horrible expression on their face and you're
like ah you know what did I do to make this person mad or you know whatever your interpretation
was and then every time you see that person and they have a scowl on their face you assume it's
something you did that made them mad may not be the case so there's faulty interpretations
go back to the guy that walks in and has a bulge in the back of there in the back of their
jacket or the brain may use outdated experiences what was threatening and overwhelming to a four
or a six-year-old who couldn't feed themselves cook food go to a grocery store that kind of stuff
who couldn't fend for themselves versus a 26 year old who is very capable of fending for themselves
there's very different threats for those people so the four or six year olds if mom or dad is all but
incapacitated on drugs or alcohol or depression or whatever it is and they can't function that's very
threatening to a child because they're scared that they're their caregiver won't be there for them
once you're an adult yes it would be traumatic if your caregiver wasn't there for you you know prior
caregiver parent whatever you want to call them wasn't there but as a 26 year old you can take
care of yourself you can pay your bills you can feed yourself you can go to the store so it's not
as literally life-threatening and you know four and six year olds aren't going well I could go
into foster care and somebody else will take care of me that's just not how a four-year-old thinks
that's way too abstract so negative messages equal threat there's there some sort of threat I need
to fight or flee which produces a stress reaction your brain dumps norepinephrine and glutamate
it says we need to get the heck out of here or we need to fight this off in order to survive
so we're dumping in the hot into the bath and you know that's great in the short term because
it helps us survive but when you do that for too long eventually the water heater runs out of hot
water or you've got to reel it back a little bit in order to balance out the temperature of the
bath when you constantly bombard yourself with negative messages your body constantly perceives
a threat you're on high alert all the time so you're not even sleeping well you've got cortisol
coursing through your system there's low levels of norepinephrine even when you're trying to sleep so
you're not getting good restful sleep which means you wake up you're groggy you have difficulty
concentrating and you start experiencing those symptoms that we have come to label as depression
and when you feel this way day after day after day at a certain point you may start feeling
a little hopeless and hopeless as like I am so tired of feeling this way what happens you know
we talked about the store earlier and shutting down all but two of the doors in your brain your
brain is basically turning down the sensitivity of the threat response system it's saying yeah
there's a lot of threats out there but we've got a conserve energy right now so we're only going
to get excited or energized about a very narrow range of really threatening things you know fire
tornado those sorts of things the average day to day stuff we don't have enough get up and go left
in us to worry about it but that also means not only are you not going to get stressed about some
things you're also not going to feel happy about some things so that apathy it's like whatever
kind of pervades everything and there's the sense of lack of pleasure and motivation but
that's not at all I feel like a one of those commercials on TV but that's not all just order
now no simply reducing your stress won't fix it changing your cognition it's a good start you know
we need to start countering some of those memories and sorting through those schemas and going that
one's and accurate that one's accurate that one's not so much so we don't feel like the world is
a scary uncontrollable place all the time that will help you know take down our stress level
some but we also need good sleep we need good nutrition and we need to get rid of any pain
when you're stressed and think asking you to think about yourself when you get stressed do you
have physical aches and pains I know I do I carry my stress in my neck and in my upper back and
I can tell when I've had a really stressful day because I kind of walk like this it's hard for
me to even you know touch my head to my knees when I'm sitting down so it's more difficult
and there's more tension which uses energy in and of itself to keep those muscles knotted up
but pain keeps you from sleeping pain keeps you from enjoying life when you're in chronic pain
if my son just had his wisdom teeth out he is a grump and a half right now and when we're in pain
we tend to not be our jolly little self so all of this contributes to how we perceive things how we
remember things and generally how we're feeling so to rebalance itself the body needs to have
times when it's not on high alert times when you're relaxing sometimes people have to learn
to schedule in those times I can be very type A and I can get to the point where I'm scheduling a
lot of things back to back to back to back where there's no downtime and I know that when I do that
eventually I'm going to hit the wall and run out of gas and it's not pretty so remembering that
when you're working towards health and work-life balance and all that stuff that we encourage
people to do we need to remember to schedule in rest and relaxation time you know coming home
from work doesn't mean it's time to necessarily start working on a home improvement project maybe
it's time to sit on the couch and watch something besides the news we need sufficient quality sleep
and hours in bed does not connote to quality sleep there is their sleep phases there are four of them
five depending on which model you use and you need a certain amount of deep sleep every night and
alcohol nicotine caffeine and just some of our habits prevent us from getting quality sleep and
we need decent nutrition to fuel the system those neurotransmitters got to come from somewhere
they're made from the building blocks that we take in and I say decent nutrition whenever
I do these presentations because I know that most people aren't going to all of a sudden start
eating this miraculously healthy diet they're not feeling very happy right now so starting to eat
a whole bunch of rabbit food probably is not high on their list and rabbit food is good don't get
me wrong but that may not be where people's mind is at that point in time and as clinicians unless
you happen to be a registered dietician we can't make nutritional prescriptions we need to refer
to their doctor or a dietician but as clinicians we can't educate them about the importance of good
nutrition in in recovery and one of the tips that a nutritionist friend told me was trying to have
three colors on every on your plate at every meal and breakfast is a little dicey sometimes but
lunch and dinner it's really easy to get three different colors on your plate so that's not
counting calories carbs macros micros any of that it's counting to three and most people can
handle that as their first step towards better nutrition and they'll find that they start feeling
a lot better when they're giving their body but a variety of nutrients that it needs to build the
neurotransmitters so the brain is your control center neurotransmitters are sent out dumped
excreted whatever words you want to use to produce a reaction to help you either survive a threat
or remind you to repeat a reward so it's either fight flee or oh yeah let's do that again through
observation and experience your brain learns what is okay and what is threatening so when you do
things and there's a positive experience you're going to remember that you're going to have a
memory about it you're going to okay and when the good memories outweigh the bad memories then that
becomes more of a positive experience things that were threatening or misinterpreted in the past may
now need to be re-examined if well there's a whole bunch of cognitive stuff but we want to look at
in the present is this a threat to us and what are our automatic beliefs if you want to go CBT here
that are telling us that this is a threatening situation and can we dispute those at all too much
stress or excitement for too long means the brain is sending out far too many excitatory transmitter
transmitter which changes the balance that's like turning that hot water all the way up and you've
only got a trickle of cold water so the bath is going to be too hot it's gonna hurt to get in
after a hard day a lot of us want to just relax and veg for a few minutes I need quiet time I
don't know what anybody else calls it this is your brain generally sending out the all-clear message
and inhibitory or common chemicals coming in to balance out the stress of the day as the okay
everybody can relax now but we need that period of time we don't want to ignore it and go no I
can't relax I need to fill in the blank there's always going to be need to do however if we want
to be able to do them we need to give ourselves time to relax and rebalance when the brain does
not get the all-clear it recognizes that it needs to conserve the excitatory chemicals for a true
emergency so it turns down the sensitivity of the threat response system basically it's saying
if you won't conserve your energy I'll force you to which is you know depression basically
your body is conserving that last little bit of noradrenaline norepinephrine that it has for when
there's a true honest-to-goodness emergency and nothing else is really going to get you all that
excited by addressing old unhelpful thoughts and interpretations you can reduce physical and
mental stress and anxiety remember I said we have mental stress we cognitively stressed but a
lot of times we carry that in our in our muscles and you know I have TMJ and I grind my teeth
so I care I know I carry it in my jaw as well so when I reduce my mental stress I also reduce
my physical stress which helps me sleep better so I can concentrate more and everybody's happy
recovery involves not only helping your mind and thoughts become healthy but also your body because
if you don't have the building blocks to make the neurotransmitters or if the neurotransmitters
you're dumping at the wrong rate you're not going to feel that physiological state that you
label as contentment or happiness or relaxation final note in March on March 1st we're going to
be starting to do happiness isn't brain surgery podcast which is going to be designed to target
just kind of the general population people who are struggling with depression or anxiety issues
or who just want to learn how to be happier and healthier so stay tuned for that March 1st
of 2017 so those like what six weeks from now there's obviously since its targeted at
the general population it's not going to be a CEU thing but it will be a information for you
thing yes so to speak so anyhow are there any questions on today's presentation anything that
wasn't clear anything you want to add let's see okay now I can hear you if you want to
unmute yourself I can still see what you're typing but if you want to unmute
yourself so you don't have to type I can actually hear you and so can everybody
else and if you have any questions if not have an amazing day and let's see
it is Thursday at this time on Tuesday I kept saying have a great weekend and yeah so
Orion oriented to time in place and not always okay it doesn't look like anybody has any
pressing questions or anything they want to add I have learned a lot doing the presentation
on sleep it's not next its next Thursday but it will also be released in the counselors
toolbox podcast if you don't need any more CEUs or you've got something else going on
it will be on our youtube channel and in the counselor toolbox podcast at the beginning of
March 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 doctor Snipes by subscribing
at all CEUs comm slash counselor toolbox this episode has been brought to you in part by all
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