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.

This may surprise some of you to hear, but when I teach in front of a large group, I get really nervous.

My hands start sweating and they go ice cold. I sometimes get shaky in my voice, or I often get

that like crazy, stinky armpit sweat. And even though I actually really enjoy presenting and teaching,

what's happening in my brain is that it sees all these people in the audience as a threat,

and it essentially turns off the thinking part of my brain. It pumps out a bunch of stress chemicals,

and it goes into this protective mode. This is our body's physical reaction to anxiety,

and it makes it hard to solve problems and to control our behaviors. In this video, you're going

to take that anxious feeling you already know, and you're going to explore it. You're going to

learn more concretely how it works, why it messes with your brain in the way it does, and then you're going to learn a few ways to calm it down so that you can turn on your thinking brain to make better choices instead of getting stuck in your limbic system. And if you don't know what a limbic system is, don't worry, I'll be covering that here too. So have you ever done something really dumb when you've been scared or stressed out or angry?

You're not alone. You know, have you ever wondered, why do my hands get all cold and sweaty when I'm anxious?

Or why does my stomach hurt when I'm worried?

Many people don't know that the way their body responds to stress or anxiety is really a reaction intended to keep us safe from danger. Your brain has many different

emotional responses, but in this video, we're mostly going to focus on the fear response,

because that's the one that often leads to the worst reactivity in our part. We freeze, we get

anxious, we feel hopeless, we get angry. All of this stems from the fear reaction in your brain.

So, understanding how your brain works can help you learn how to stop reacting to emotions and

stop doing stupid stuff that you regret later. And this can help you live a happier life where

your actions line up with who you want to be. Okay, so let's talk about how your

brilliant brain works. The brain is really complex. I am not a neuroscientist, but to simplify,

there are three main systems in your brain. The brain stem, the limbic system, and the cortex.

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