Welcome back again. I'm going to just take off where I left off from the previous video, which was here. Really highlighting this really important difference between the kinds of stresses our systems were evolved to deal with, and the kind of stress that we are all dealing with right now. Specifically that point that our sympathetic nervous system was really evolved to take on short-term acute threats. The prototypical being a predator popping out at us. We attack it, we deal with it, or we run away. Either way, within a short period of time, the incident may be over and then we can relax and get down from it. So that's the idea of the sympathetic nervous system. But again, in a situation like the COVID situation we're in now, heck, we don't even know how long this is going to go on, and it's a threat at multiple levels, very significant levels for a very long time. So it's a chronic threat of the most extreme and that is not what our system was meant to handle. In fact, things can break down when the anxiety response becomes chronic. I'm really doing this video just to let you know, you came to this course anyway, but I want to let you know why the rest of the stuff that will follow is so important when we start talking about managing the system, why it's so critical you manage the system. Part of the story is these, what we could call feedback loops with various other psychological things that can in fact make the whole experience worse and worse unless we get in there and short circuit some of these things from happening. So let me be more clear, let me talk about the first thing. When stress is chronic, our sleep is disturbed. We simply, you can understand why, sleep sounds like relaxation. But if you're geared up to fight or flee, if that's what your system is ready for, then yeah, you're going to have trouble sleeping or you might find you get to sleep all right, perhaps just because you're mentally exhausted from the day, but then you wake up in the night and you feel fully awake, again because your system gets engaged pretty quickly. So this chronic stress can mess with sleep, and that creates this nasty feedback cycle because if we don't get enough sleep, then we're more poorly equipped for dealing with challenges that then come at us. So the anxiety can cause a lack of sleep which makes it harder for us to handle the anxiety, which makes it harder for us to sleep and etc so it becomes a vicious cycle. In fact, virtually every psychological disorder we know of has some form of sleep disorder that's connected with it. We know sleep disorders are very pervasive. If we don't get enough sleep, we find life very challenging. So we have to learn how to control our anxiety so that we can sleep well and be best able to deal with the challenges. That's one of the things. Here's another one of the things, emotional control. Again, this system is telling you to fight or flee, and it's engaging this really strong emotion to do that. So now imagine while you're in that fight or flee mode, somebody criticizes you, or somebody in some way does something that maybe makes them a target. What I mean by that is where you're looking for something to fight, and if somebody says the wrong thing in front of you, you might lash out at them. You might also cry, you might break down. When we're anxious, our emotions are raw, they are at the surface. Especially that fight emotion is primed. So we can sometimes find that we have harder time interacting with others. Of course now we're in this do, we're all this way. We will all have our anxiety up there. So yeah, if we don't find a way to control this, if we don't find a way to manage our anxiety, and especially if this is going on within a household full of people, we should expect some quarrels, we should expect some issues to arise, we should expect some yelling and some crying, and obviously that just increases anxiety and stress levels more. So again, another one of these vicious circles. If we can short circuit the anxiety, if we can manage the anxiety, then we can get control of this as well. Now perhaps most important in the current situation is our health. By the way, a lot of this original work on health and anxiety and stress came from a guy named Hans Selye who did his work in Montreal, Canada. He was the first to really show that your mind can affect your body, and it was through these stress studies. Essentially what he showed is if somebody was exposed to a stress, that's depicted here in the graph. If you look at how well their immune system is functioning, a little bit of stress isn't bad. Having that stress there for a while seems to gear us up and our immune system responds. Maybe having an immune system with a little bit of exercise, a little bit of something to fight back against is good, it may actually strengthen it. But when that stressor is prolonged, when it's stretched out, then it becomes a problem, our immune system literally becomes suppressed. My goodness, we're fighting a virus. If all of us allows our anxiety to continue too long, we are going to become more susceptible to the virus. We don't want that, quite the opposite. So again, this is why we really have to take this seriously now. Before all of this, we might have been able to say, "I can handle a little bit of stress and anxiety," and we might have been right. But can we handle the chronic stress that we're now under especially if it starts impacting our sleep and our emotional relationships and our health? It becomes a really nasty stew of things but the good news is we can manage them. We can do something about this anxiety reaction. By doing that, we can improve all of these things, our sleep, our emotional interactions, and our health. So that's why it's so chronic to do it. I'm going to give you another reason at the end of the course why it's so critical. I've just used the word chronic, but why it's so critical for us to gain control but now is the time. The really good news is, when you learn these skills and learn these strategies, they will be with you for life. Assuming you practice them enough, which I'm going to have to hammer on you a little bit as we go through, but hopefully by now you're like, "Okay Jordans, I understand where my stress is coming from. I get the sense of these two systems and I understand I have to do something about it. What do I do?" All right, cool. I am going to, in my next video, explain to you the one thing that's really powerful, I think the best tool you can have in your pocket, something I'll call guided relaxation. I'll describe to you how it works, what it's doing, and then I'm going to give you a little resource that'll be made available here somewhere, just ask in the discussion forum if you don't see it but it'll be obvious. It's going to be a little auditory file that you can play to help you actually learn how to control your anxiety, your sympathetic nervous system really, how you can shut it down. You're never going to be able to keep it shut down, but you're going to shut it down for periods of time, and that's a very important thing to do. So hopefully I've got you teased enough to want to come back to that next video. I'll explain to you what guided relaxation is, how it works, and then I'll give you that resource, and then I'm going to ask you to start practicing. So let's get there in the next video.
