Hey all right so you join the course, fantastic thank you, let's just jump right into it. The first thing I want to do with this course is to really make you understand where stress comes from you. I've got this crazy background going on here with up and down things, but I did that on purpose to kind of simulate or grab this feeling like within you there are these forces that are always kind of changing around. And I want you to understand what some of those forces are, because once you understand those forces, you become empowered to actually take some control over them. And so I'm going to start just by introducing you to part of your biology, you may not yet know very well. I'm going to use this so called 3D brain thing, and I've got a link to it here and it's actually hyperlinked if you download my power points as well. It's a fun tool to just play with in general, I'm going to skip to it, I believe it's right here, yes, it should be. Where is my brain though? Let me just do a refresh, give me my brain please, there is my brain excellent. So it's a fun little site you can use to kind of look at the brain and study it, it's a 3D brain, you can do all kinds of stuff. But what I really want to do with it today is introduce you to part of your brain, your limbic system and specifically, well let's do limbic system first. Inside the brain you see they're very deep in the brain, there are these structures and these are very primitive structures. Every brain of every animal has these, and I'm especially going to focus on these two little parts inside your brain here that are called your amygdala and you have left in a right version of them. They are as close as science comes to what we colloquially call the spider sense, at least if you're a Spiderman fan. The idea here is that information comes from the world, through all of our sensory channels, our eyes, our ears our whatever, but it all flows through these and their job is to sense danger. And specifically, if they sense danger or threat, and they mean that in a very general sense as you'll get, but especially if it's sort of existential danger. If your life is in danger, they send the message to the rest of the body, and change the way the body reacts to things. So specifically, I have so many things here I don't see what I want, I'm just going to go back here, cool. So specifically when that part of the brain gets active, it interacts with what we call your peripheral nervous system. So your brain is your central nervous system, that's where a lot of decisions and such are made, but then once the brain decides something, it has to obviously be able to control the body. And it has this whole nervous system, that's both literally nerves, but also a lot of chemical kind of influences hormones, especially, that the brain can release that can activate the body. And when it does so, it puts the body into one of two states. If the amygdala is not active, if no danger is present, then we are in what we call the parasympathetic mode. The nerves that control these things that take control, and what I want you to really think about this mode is, it's really the relaxation mode. You've come home, you've had a hard day, you're sitting on the couch, you're relaxing. Maybe you got some dinner first and and you're just sort of chilling out, and when you're in that mode your brain kind of tells your body you know what you gotta do now you gotta worry about our long-term survival. So I want you to do what we could think of is like maintenance to a house, except it's to the body, and what is that maintenance? It's largely digesting the food that you've eaten, getting the nutrients to the critical parts of your body that need the nutrients, separating out the waste from the food that you've gotten in, and disposing of it. And so what we see in this state, is your eyes actually constrict, it's like you're less attending to the outer world. We see all of the parts of the digestive process from saliva to that, your stomach itself, your pancreas, your intestines, your bladder, everything that's involved in processing food in eliminating waste that becomes active. Some of your other organs, your heart rate and your breathing rate actually slow down, and so there you are sitting in your couch, slow breathing, slow heart rate, digesting your food, but now imagine there's a gunshot outside, or a car crash or something. Now your amygdala hears that, and it says, we gotta stop Relaxing now an it turns on this mode. These are like two sides of a coin, which is a very important point as we go through this, you can't be both relaxed. And well, this is actually the stress anxiety system we're going to talk about here, and they can't both be engaged. It's sort of one or the other, and so when this system takes over this stress system, basically what it's saying is you know what? Forget about long term survival right now, it's about short-term survival. There's a danger of foot. And you must be ready to take on that challenge. And so what we see first of all is all of these things that were involved in digestion. They all what we call downregulate. They stop becoming so active. Suddenly the body doesn't care about delivering nutrients and separating waste. Instead, it cares about keeping you alive. And so what we see are things like the pupils dilate. And that's just one example of how your body is now orienting to the external world. Really looking for what's out there, so you would be also having heightened senses of hearing and other things like that. Things that allow you to see what is the danger, right? Where is the danger? Also your heart rate increases and your breathing increases. What this is about, is pumping oxygen rich blood to all of your muscles and that makes your muscles especially strong and powerful. You are almost in a superhero mode when this kicks in. And all of this is about preparing you to take on that challenge to either fight it directly or get the heck away from it. So we're going to call this the fight or flee system and you'll see this come through, okay? So, there's a critical other thing that happens when this system kicks in, and that's the blood flow in your frontal lobes, which is the newest part of our brain. It decreases, so it's kind of like the primitive parts of our brain. Say you know what, we got this short term. Survival is what we do. We've honed this system over centuries of evolution. We don't need thought right now and so literally that part of your brain that's involved in rational behavior and strategic thought becomes impaired, you have less blood. You can do these things less well and instead the blood flows to the more primitive parts of your brain. These parts that are related to emotion and survival, your body feels strong and ready and you are feel this imperative to do something. It's like your body is screaming out to you, do something. And typically, what that means is either go after that threat and take it down, so directly confront it, fight, or get yourself away from the threat, flee to safety. It's more complex than that, and especially more complex in your job is will talk about, but at a very sort of gross level. That's kind of what's going on. And so is if you kind of think about it, this is what stress and anxiety feels like. Because this is what stress and anxiety is. It is this system being keyed up, being sort of turned on, and that leaves us with that feeling of, when we talk about feeling anxious, it's an energetic feeling, right? Because it is all that oxygen rich blood going to our body. But it also is this sort of cognitive feeling like we have to do something, and that's especially difficult when we don't see what to do right off. And so that can lead to the negative affects of anxiety, so that's the basic system underlying what's going on. It's meant to be a good system. It has evolved because it's useful, when we hear stories of mothers or police officers being able to lift a car because somebody was trapped underneath. That is this system at work, and that's what it is meant to do. If there's some acute stress, there's something out there that needs to be dealt with, and suddenly you have the power and the strength to do it, okay? So a very cool system most of the time. But the problem is it's a very primitive system and it will take over if you let it. And what I'm going to suggest to you is you don't want to let it. Okay so, now that you have a sense of the system in the next video, I'm going to talk about this more in the context of police work. And the really crazy challenge that we expect of all of you guys to be able to manage the system so well. And so we'll talk about that, and then we'll eventually get into some very explicit things you can do to manage this system to gain some control. Now that strength there when you need it but not have it take over when it shouldn't, all right. I look forward to seeing you in the next video. Bye bye.
