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Episode 2 - Thoughts, Behaviours and Emotions - Running From Tigers
Episode 2 - Thoughts, Behaviours and Emotions - Running From Tigers
Today we are going to have a discussion about your environment, thoughts, feelings
(emotions) and behaviour, and how they correlate.
Consider this example:
Akash, a 23 year old working professional, plans to sleep on time every night, at
11pm (behavior). Unfortunately, he has a work related call at 10pm thereby
disturbing his plan (environment). As a result, he feels angry and anxious about
missing his sleep cycle (emotions), believing that he is disappointing himself
(thought). He thinks, "I will have a bad day and feel tired tomorrow because I did not
sleep on time today." This belief raises his anxiety (emotion) as well as his frustration
about not sleeping on time. This makes it even harder for Akash to figure out how to
sleep and face the next day, resulting in him staying in bed (behavior), which in turn
only serves to raise his anxiety and strengthen his negative thoughts about his
inability to sleep.
In this case, the environment would be the work call. We have added something new
here called Physical health. No, we didn't get that wrong. You will be surprised that
anxiety affects your physical health. Humans are mammals, and mammals have a
dedicated part of the brain that is responsible for something called the fight or flight
response . Back in the days before we had air conditioning and microwaves, we used
to sleep on trees and be chased by all sorts of predatory animals. When you saw a
tiger around the corner (environment), and your body registers this thought because
it knows what a tiger looks like (thought), you feel anxious and threatened (emotions)
and you start running (behaviour). I n order to make you sprint faster than the
tiger, your body pumps out 2 hormones adrenaline in the short term, which
makes your muscles work harder and cortisol in the long term, to cool down
any inflammation and injury to worn out muscles. B oth of these chemicals make
it nearly impossible to sleep well or feel at ease.
A lot of the time, the only thing we can control to some degree is our environment
and our thoughts. The best way to avoid the adrenaline and cortisol response is to
remove yourself from the environment. If there was no predator, there would be no
thought, no fear emotion and no automatic running behaviour. In Akash's case, the
situation is very similar. Because of his work call (environment), he t hinks he cannot
sleep (thought) and f eels anxious (emotion) and hence s tays in bed the next day
(behaviour). This leads to more thoughts about sleep rather than the act of sleeping
itself (thought). The best way for Akash to not feel this way is to avoid the
environmental trigger in the first place (avoid or postpone the call).
In real life, this is rarely possible. Life is fast paced and it's impossible to keep
avoiding everything just to feel better. Instead we take a closer look at the CBT
model. We notice there are 4 places in the cycle we can intervene.
1. Environment We can avoid bad environments that would trigger stressful
thoughts. Eg: If you're scared of snakes you avoid places with snakes.
2. Thoughts We can rephrase our thoughts to avoid negative emotions (don't
think about sleep by distracting yourself or not taking the thought seriously
we're going to teach you some of these techniques)
3. Emotions Once your body releases adrenaline, it's going to be hard to stop.
Your body is designed such that there is no on/off switch for the stress
response. Once a stressful thought has released adrenaline the best thing we
can do is wait it out. It's harmless in fact it gives you strength. If you test
yourself, you can run faster when adrenaline is coursing through you. It
makes you sharper and more alert, so we're going to find cool ways to use
adrenaline once it's switched on.
4. Behaviour To prevent behaviour from creating more negative thoughts, we're
going to find a way to learn positive behaviours that help.
Second fear: This is a concept that we want to briefly touch upon here and delve
into deeper, at a later part of the course. Have you noticed that most people have a
normal stress response? People with anxiety disorders however, have something
new in this cycle; something they have learnt.
Second fear is a fear of the emotions arising out of the anxious event itself. It comes
with it's own cycle of thoughts, physical health, behaviours and emotions. So now,
we have 5 points on the cycle. Note that apart from emotions, every other point on
the cycle can be controlled to a certain extent. Once an emotions is triggered by
chemicals in your brain and body, you can only stop immediately it with medication.
You j ust h ave to let them pass.
Our job is to control those points and that by itself will reduce the emotion
component. Medications affect just the emotions part of the cycle, thus improving
behaviour, which further improves health and thoughts, and finally manifesting as
improved emotions. More correctly, medications numb the fear response, thereby
giving your body the chance to heal temporarily. It is vital to understand that
antidepressants and tranquilizers d o not make you happy, they merely numb the
emotional quality of the fear response.
Stress units is a metric that we are going to invent here. We are going to define it as
the available adrenaline and cortisol bucket and use the short form ‘SU’ for stress
unit. Suppose we have 15 units available per day, we are going to have to use them
wisely.
Here are the places we use our SU bucket charges for a typical day of a normal
person. Some events are minor stressors, some are major stressors. We’re going to
assign a minor stressor an SU value of 1 and a major stressor an SU value of 3.
Anything in between we’re going to assign a value of 2:
1. Had to pick clothes to wear for work today 1 SU
2. Couldn't find my keys 2 SU
3. Car ran out of petrol so had to refill 2 SU
4. Boss is in a foul mood and screamed at work 3 SU
Total = 8 SU
Now look at the same typical day of a person with an anxiety or a depression
disorder:
1. Had to pick clothes to wear for work today 1 SU
2. Don't know if the clothes I'm wearing are good enough 1 SU
3. Why don't I have enough confidence to carry off that clothing 2 SU
4. Why am I always thinking negative thoughts 2 SU
5. I'm useless I always think negative thoughts 2 SU
6. My chest is beating harder because I think I'm useless 2 SU
7. Couldn't find my keys 1 SU
8. It's because my mind was constantly thinking how useless I was 2 SU
9. Let's not go to work and use up a leave 1SU
10. I used up a leave I can't even go to work because of my thoughts 2 SU
11. My boss called me and screamed at me 2 SU
12. I can't even muster enough energy to go to work 2SU
13. I forgot to eat in all of this so my head is hurting 2SU
14. and so on...
Total = 22 SU and the day isn't even done yet.
Now, the body has no problems making more cortisol and adrenaline. The problem is
that when the body makes these 2 hormones constantly, it thinks that producing
more of these hormones will be beneficial to your survival. So the body adapts.
In the past this has been called the General Adaptation Syndrome to chronic stress.
Your body now makes more cortisol and adrenaline at the slightest of stressful
incidents, b ut at the cost of other helpful hormones, like DHEA (which helps in
muscle growth and general vitality) and even feel good hormones like
serotonin and dopamine.
As a result, a situation that used to cost you 1 SU now costs you 2 SU because your
body is producing more of these hormones and delivering them even faster.
Let's not forget that the purpose of these hormones is mainly for you to run away
from predators. If you're standing still while these hormones are in your body your
heart will beat faster, you will feel dizzy and breath shallower causing even more
stress and anxiety!
The point of this course is to determine how much your body has overcompensated
and reverse all of it. We want you to be able to spend few ‘SU’ units per day and give
you more mileage per unit of SU. If a task used to take you 2 units of stress
hormones, we are going to teach you how to do it in 0, in order for you to not spend
any of your precious fight or flight hormones on things that don't necessitate their
expenditure. In essence, finding your keys does not really require any adrenaline, so
let's train your body not to use it.
In this course, we are going to teach you how to recondition the stress response so
that you need very little of it. With drugs, you can do this in a few weeks. With CBT, it
will take you a little practice, but the end result will be the same, but the results stick
in the longer term.
Our goal and your goal: to switch off the stress response when it’s not needed.