The Marble Jar Channel

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll discuss some of the body-based techniques that you can use to quickly calm your nervous system.  If you've watching some of the earlier videos in this series, you already know that I talk with my clients a lot about neurobiology and specifically about the brain-body connection.  For a long time, psychologists have ascerted that in order to feel better,  we have to change the way we think.  And that can certainly be true.  However, we now know that calming the body also calms the brain -- and this process is far faster and more efficient than the reverse.  In fact, for every 1 signal that your brain sends to your body, your body is sending 4 signals to your brain.  So, although you can TRY to get your body to calm down by changing the thoughts from your brain, it's far more efficient and effective to work on your body to calm your brain down.   I think of cognitive work as a one la

Hi, everyone.  Recently I was asked to write an article about the psychology of suffering for a friend's triathlon training newsletter.  This is a different audience, but I thought I'd share it with you all nonetheless! I have to confess -- I don't really understand endurance athletes.  Now don't get me wrong -- I am properly impressed.  I'm awed by the effort, tenacity, and grit that is required to train for and ultimately finish something like an IronMan race.  But I have to say, I don't really get it.  Your body takes a beating, the training requires a huge amount of time from your life, and in the end -- all you get is the satisfaction of knowing that you completed an outrageous physical feat.  So, I guess maybe I can see doing that once?  But committed endurance athletes do not just do it once. They do it over and over and over again.  There is an almost addictive quality to it.  My friend Ali is such an athlete.  When Covid shut everything down two years a

Hi, everyone! This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel, and in today's video I will demonstrate the simple steps that I follow to do EFT tapping on my own. I call it PETS# Tapping. I'm a big fan of body-based calming techniques and my favorite by far is EFT tapping.  I did a 2-part video series that included a demonstration and explanation of how it works to discharge emotion and calm the nervous system.  If you don't know anything about basic tapping, go back and watch the first video in that series before watching this one.  So, I think highly enough of this technique that I use it almost daily to manage my nervous system and investigate feelings that I'm having.  I tried to meditate 10 minutes a day for something like 5 years -- with pretty dismal results.  I'm just a little too ADHD to meditate successfully.  I think this technique has a lot of similar benefits, but is more active and engaged, which I MUCH prefer.  I've said this in previous videos,

Hi, everyone.  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar Channel and this is the seventh video in a series where I share information that I think EVERY therapy client should know.  In this video, I’ll talk about the two different kinds of change and the first step - breaking old behavior patterns. In the last couple of videos, I’ve discussed how to create emotional safety -- both external and internal.  Emotional safety is the WD-40 that greases the skids to allow behavior change to happen.  And unfortunately, it isn’t a one and done thing.  In order to challenge your old habits and create new ones, you will inevitably feel discomfort and anxiety.  And every time you feel this, you will need to re-stabilize yourself either by co-regulating with someone else or regulating your own emotions and create safety within. Let’s talk about the two different kinds of change: behavioral and developmental.   Behavioral change is just about acquiring a new habit.  For example, let’s say I decide th

Hi, everyone.  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar Channel and this is the sixth video in a series where I share information that I think EVERY therapy client should know.  In this video, I’ll talk about how to build internal emotional safety or self compassion that will help to widen your window of tolerance. In the last video, we talked about how widening your window of tolerance requires you to take small, anxiety-producing, growth-oriented steps and apply a lot of emotional safety like WD-40 to help ease the discomfort.  Of the two kinds of emotional safety, in the last video we covered external emotional safety -- or feeling safe and trusting someone else to help regulate your emotions.   So, let's say you have some people in your life who you trust and can usually help you to co-regulate your emotions.  But at the same time, you have this harsh, mean-spirited, critical inner voice that taunts you and makes you feel small, incapable, and unworthy. It might say -- “Why do

Hi, everyone.  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar Channel and this is the fifth video in a series where I share information that I think EVERY therapy client should know.  In this video, I’ll talk about how to find external emotional safety, otherwise known as trust or co-regulation, to help you widen your window of tolerance. External Emotional Safety - Co-regulation/trust As humans, we are built to connect.  It's the first tool we are programmed to try when our nervous system starts to ramp up -- connecting with another human being.  In this way, we can borrow some of that other person’s nervous system calm to counter OUR freaking out. This is called co-regulation -- regulating your emotions by connecting with someone else.  But we all know that not everyone makes us feel calmer. In fact, some people just push our buttons and make us feel worse.  I'm sure just saying this brings to mind some people in your life who fall into this category -- they quickly blame you, crit

Hi, everyone.  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar Channel and this is the fourth video in a series where I share information that I think EVERY therapy client should know.  In this video, I’ll talk about how to push open your window of tolerance (which I think is the whole point of therapy) and feel emotionally safe. In the last video, we talked about the window of tolerance and how I think widening the window is  the whole point of therapy.  So, how do you do this? I think that the way you widen your window of tolerance is to do small, growth-oriented things that make you uncomfortable, over and over again.  For example, if you were afraid of heights, in order to increase your window of tolerance, you would have to start small by climbing up a single step.  You might have to climb up that single step multiple times before you don’t feel like jumping out of your skin.  And then you would climb up the second step.  And just like that, literally one step at a time, you push open yo