Use Your Body to Quickly Calm Your Brain

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 watched 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 asserted 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-lane country road and body calming as a 4 lane highway -- one gets you to your destination a lot faster.  But how do we go about using our bodies to calm our brains?

Breathing - By far the most commonly used body-based calming method is breathing. Breathing in speeds your heart rate and stimulates the sympathetic nervous system which brings on fight or flight.  Breathing out calms your NS and brings on rest and digest.  I like to teach my clients 7-11 breathing which helps us calm down when we are amped up.   It's breathing in for 7 beats and out for 11.   Let's do this together right now: start with 7 beats in  -- breathe in 234567 and out 234567891011.  Do this style of breathing until your nervous system starts to calm down.  If you are depressed or unmotivated, you can reverse that to 11-7 breathing -- which helps to stimulate more energy.  If your nervous system is too amped up to even get to a count of 7, breath in fully, then take one more quick breath in, and then breathe out for as long as possible.

Body check in - Okay -- now we are going to do a quick body check-in.   Just close your eyes and take several deep breaths.  Breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth and in through your nose and out through your mouth.  And as you do this, think about how you are feeling right now and specifically, where you are feeling that emotion in your body. If you are anxious -- do your shoulders feel tense?  Do you feel a buzzing in your chest?  Is your jaw clenched?  If you are sad -- do you feel pressure in your stomach?  Or your chest?   If you are angry, do you feel it in your arms or in your throat?  With my clients, we try to locate the feelings and then put those feelings into words. And the more granular, the better. Instead of just angry -- we dig beyond that to frustrated, hopeless, or irritable.  As Dan Siegel says, for an emotion you have to "name it to tame it."

3 body-base calming methods - I teach my clients a variety of body-based calming methods.  If you are nervous for a test, worried about a friend, or amped up during a fight with your spouse -- how do you get to a point where you are thinking and feeling at the same time?  How do you use your body to quickly calm yourself down?  I give three options since everyone is different and has different preferences.  The first is the

• Heart hold - put one hand on top of the other, right in the middle of your chest and apply a little pressure.  This is the heart hold, but I like to call it a self hug.  This lights up the same part of your brain that lights up when you receive a hug.  The next is the
• Gamut point - on the outside of your hand between your ring finger and your pinky finger, just under the knuckles is a triangular-shaped depression called the gamut point. Rubbing this helps to calm your nervous system.  And finally, the
• Sore spot - below your collar bone and outside of your pectoral muscles is a spot that is a little sore when you press on it. Did you find it?  For women, it's kind of under the bra.  You can tap this sore spot to regulate your emotions.

So, those are just 3: heart hold, gamut point, and sore sport.  And the truth is -- you can hold, rub, or tap any of these points and still have it be effective.  Body-based calming is not particularly precise, but it is very personal.  You just have to figure out what works best for you.  If you are curious about why these work, each of these techniques stimulates the ventral part of the vagus nerve which turns on the parasympathetic part of your nervous system and brings you back into a state of rest and digest.  In addition, any body touch produces oxytocin which is also called the trust or cuddle hormone.  Simple put, these techniques turn off fight or flight.  I encourage you to use each of these over the next week when big feelings come up and see which one works best to bring YOU back to a state of calm. 

Mammalian diving reflex - If you experience severe anxiety or panic attacks, I like to recommend the mammalian diving reflex.  All vertebrates (not just mammals) respond to this.  If a vertebrate is entirely submerged in water, it will shut down its nervous system immediately.  Fight or flight mode takes A LOT of energy. Our bodies instinctively know that if we are drowning, we need to conserve our energy for survival, so it will turn off fight or flight.  So, to trick your brains into thinking you are drowning, fill up a bowl with cold water, and add some ice cubes. Then immerse your whole face in the water for a count of 15 to 30 seconds.  Usually, this works in one try, but you can use it as many times as you need to.  I have a client who used to wake up every morning in a full-blown panic attack.  She would need to do this 3 times just to get herself into her car to drive to work.  As an aside, she is no longer at that job -- her nervous system finally convinced her that she might want to do something else for a living.

Polar bear shake - there is a YouTube video of a polar bear that is shot with a tranquiler gun and then examined, poked, and prodded for testing purposes. It's an intensely traumatic experience for him.  Once the tranquiler starts to wear off, the polar bear's nervous system makes him shake violently.  Watching it is kind of awful, but really it's a super healthy way for him to discharge all of that adrenaline, energy, and trauma that he just experienced.  Once he stops shaking, he takes a couple of incredibly deep breaths, sleeps it off for a while, and then he is able to just walk away -- like nothing ever happened.  It makes you wonder, what if it were more socially acceptable for human beings to shake, cry, and run around like crazy people?  Would we have less bodily-held trauma?  I think so.  I encourage you all -- when possible -- to shake off your anxiety, anger, or fear -- just like a polar bear.  I've done this.  I had an incredibly escalated event with a family member about 2 months ago. I removed myself from the situation, literally shook myself like a polar bear and I kid you not, my prefrontal cortex came back online in 45 seconds.  It worked so quickly that I was honestly shocked. 

EFT Tapping - I have a ton more of these, so I will have to do another video, but I have to do a plug for my absolute favorite body-based calming method -- EFT Tapping.  Tapping is great because it's a technique that brings together feeling intense emotion with body-based calming and cognitive-emotional regulation.  You can use it just to calm down, but you can also use it to process emotions more efficiently, learn more about what is really bothering you, and reconsolidate traumatic memories.  It's amazing and I try to do it most days just to keep my nervous system tuned up and process my feelings.  I have a whole series on EFT Tapping, so check it out if you are interested.

Okay, so just to review all of the techniques we talked about 7-11 breathing calms you down, 11-7 breathing gives you energy.  Regularly checking in with your body helps you to locate your emotions and name them to tame them.  3 body-based calming areas to hold, tap, or rub are the heart hold, gamut point, and the sore spot.  Dunking your face in ice water and holding your breath is called the mammalian diving reflex and it works for panic attacks and anxiety.  And the polar bear shake discharges trauma and big emotion.  And finally EFT Tapping brings together intense emotion, body-based calming, and cognitive-emotional regulation to reprocess memories or quickly work through negative feelings. 

Let me know what you think!  Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching!