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. As we've learned in previous sections of this course, emotions are just as much in our body as in our minds.

Anxiety, fear, anger, shame, and other core emotions are rooted in a subconscious response deep in our brain,

the fight-flight freeze response. This response, also known as the sympathetic response,

triggers waves of physical changes in our body,

releasing stress hormones, adrenaline, speeding up our heart rate and breathing,

it turns off digestion and the immune system, it tenses our muscles,

and afterwards it leaves us feeling shaky and jittery.

We can't just turn off this response by thinking,

you know, calm down or relax,

because our thoughts don't directly control this part of our brain.

But the body has a natural counterbalancing response

called the parasympathetic response.

This is also known as rest and digest. This response

slows your breathing and heart rate, releases your muscle tension, helps you relax, and turns on that

rest and digest response. So since we can't access the survival-oriented parts of our brain

very easily with our thoughts, it's often more

effective to calm our brain using our body. So to clarify, if we use thinking to calm our body,

this is called a top-down approach, and if we're using physical skills to calm our brain,

this is called a bottom-up approach. And this is a really effective way to start

processing intense emotions and treating anxiety and trauma. This topic is the last video in this

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