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.

In this video, you're going to learn to recognize the lie of perceived danger that can trigger the body's fear response when you're actually safe.

You're going to learn how to soothe your nervous system, and I'm going to show you some really practical activities that you can do to feel safe when you are safe, even when your mind lies and tells you that you're not.

In this section, the exercises are

really important. This section is experiential. It's about the experience of doing these exercises,

not just thinking about the concepts I tell you. So make sure not to skip the exercises.

I'm going to share a story directly from the worry solution, right?

Let me invite you to do a simple experiment to see how your imagination can influence the way you feel.

Make sure you're in a safe, comfortable place where you can close your eyes for a few minutes.

Focus on your body, as if your attention were a radar or sonar beam slowly scanning up and down.

Notice if you feel any stress, tension, or discomfort anywhere in your body.

Now let's rate it on a scale of 0 to 10, where 0 is no tension and 10 is all the tension you could stand. Where would you rate

the tension level in your body right now? Now, imagine that you are camping in the woods. In the

middle of the night, you need to go to the bathroom, so you throw some clothes on and you shuffle

off so that you won't disturb anyone else. It's completely dark with no moon,

and it takes you a while to find a level place,

but you're finally able to do what you need to do.

The need attended to, you notice how really dark it is,

and you start to carefully pick your way back to camp,

reaching out with your arms so that you don't bump into anything.

You trip over tree roots and rocks, you pick up a few scratches from unseen branches.

...