Hello everyone and welcome to therapy in a nutshell. I'm Emma McAdam, a licensed marriage and family therapist.

And this is the podcast where I condense mental health skills into bite-sized nuggets of health.

And if that wasn't bad enough, he would then throw up all over the back seat.

This happened every time they got into the car. Now, you can imagine the dog owner was about at her

wit's end. In desperation, she decided to take the dog to a trainer and ask for help.

The trainer taught the woman to teach the dog to be calm by having the

dog lay down in the car. She explained that when the dog's body is in a calm position, it sends

messages to the brain that he's safe and triggers him to relax. The woman started working with the dog

every day, putting him in the car, gently making him lay down,

and before long, he stopped throwing up in her car. Problem solved. In previous videos in this

course, we learned that our emotional reactions are much deeper than our thoughts. They show up in

the body and are powered by the fight-flight freeze response in our limbic system. Now we're going to

talk about how to

soothe anxiety in your nervous system through the skill of self-regulation. Basically, this means

calming down your nervous system and creating the physiological response of feeling safe when we are

actually safe. Is it possible to have an anxiety disorder or PTSD if your body is calm?

I've worked with many professional trauma educators who say that you cannot have PTSD or anxiety disorders in a relaxed body.

Anxiety and PTSD are the outward symptoms of having your nervous system stuck in high alert.

When your amygdala is sending

the message that you're in danger and it's triggering that fight-flight freeze response.

So this is why anxiety is something that you feel in your stomach, or PTSD locks you into

hypervigilance, you know, jumping at the slightest threat. This is because your nervous system

...