CBTunlocked

Do you ever feel hopeless, shut down, or walled off? Or do you get triggered and feel anxious, angry, or agitated? There are essentially 3 states of your nervous system: Ventral Vagal (Safe and social) Sympathetic (Fight or Flight) and Dorsal Vagal (Shut Down). Most people aren’t able to identify which state they’re in, and then they feel helpless to change. This is especially difficult for people with trauma, which includes about ⅓ of the population. When you have trauma, your nervous system can get stuck in a hypervigilant state or a frozen, numb state. And when you can identify the states of your nervous system, you can learn skills to spend more time in the safe and social state of your nervous system. You can retrain your nervous system to be healthier. One approach to learning how to feel safe in your body is the Polyvagal approach. It’s known as the science of feeling safe. The researchers and clinicians who developed polyvagal therapy have developed a system to help people learn to turn on that safe feeling in your body, so that you can feel more calm, have better relationships, and make better choices. In this video you’re going to learn the three states that your nervous system can be in according to polyvagal theory. This will help you learn to identify what state you’re in and then use self-regulatory skills to shift your nervous system to a state of safety.

You can change your negative thoughts by learning the skill of reframing. In this video I’m going to teach you a technique that therapists use in almost every session but you probably didn’t know about. And when you learn how to do it yourself, you can change how you think and feel.

ometimes we feel like we're in danger even when we're actually safe. In this video you're going to learn four skills to turn off this fear response, aka the fight/flight/freeze response, and restore a sense of calm in your body and mind. When we believe we are in danger, our body and mind create the fear response, the same physical anxiety reaction as if we were in actual physical danger. This is the fear response, aka the fight/flight/freeze response. This keeps us stuck in FFF response (NS hyperarousal). How we think about things and how we interpret our situation creates a sense of either calm or fear.

Sleep hygiene is an essential mental health skill. When my clients come in for treatment for some of their challenges like depression, anxiety, or relational problems, one of the most common associated problems that they have is difficulty sleeping. This shows up as having a hard time falling asleep, staying asleep, or just feeling tired all the time. Getting enough quality sleep can make your brain function much better. You’ll be better at solving problems and feel more self-control. In this video we’re going to talk about how to train your brain to sleep well. This is called sleep hygiene Sleep is essential for good mental health. Lack of sleep can actually cause mental illness. Research is showing that one of the most effective ways to treat depression is by helping people improve the quality and quantity of their sleep. One study of people with depression found that after resolving their insomnia, 87 percent of them experienced major improvements in their depression, and their depression symptoms disappeared after eight weeks of good sleep. https://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/19/he... So how do we improve our ability to get sleep? We can train our brains to sleep better. Sleep hygiene means going through a routine that trains your body to know when to sleep. Like a muscle that strengthens with practice, sleeping well is a skill we can develop. Here are some essential skills to develop better sleep.

It can be hard to fall asleep when you're anxious, and insomnia can make anxiety worse. But you can train your brain to worry less and to sleep better when you're anxious by using the skill of deliberate worry.

Terminal insomnia, aka sleep maintenance insomnia, aka early morning waking, aka I wake up at 3 am and can’t get back to sleep and it’s driving me crazy! is a pretty common experience for many people. When you wake up in the middle of the night and can't fall back to sleep, it's aggravating. Maybe your mind starts racing, maybe you worry about everything you need to do, or not, but you just can’t fall back asleep. At least not until it’s almost time to get up, and then you’re tired, cranky, and don’t function as well as you’d like. But then the real problem with insomnia is the next night, when it starts happening over and over and over again, and you’re just soooo tired and then you start to get stressed out and angry about your inability to sleep and that makes things worse, because when you wake up and see that it’s 3am you get mad and that makes it even harder to sleep. As the researchers say...this is common but aggravating...Insomnia is the worst! If you’re here you’re probably desperate for sleep, you haven’t slept well for a long time, and you're cranky, irritable, depressed. I feel you. I’ve struggled with insomnia off and on, and I come by it honestly. My dad is almost always up from 2-4am and so is my baby...there’s a genetic aspect to this, and this early morning waking is also closely linked to depression- as a cause of depression or as a symptom of depression. But don’t worry your little head. There’s also a lot you can do about it. In this video we’ll talk about six non-medication strategies you can use to defeat insomnia and get better at sleeping through the night.

Your body has a built-in, natural ability to calm anxiety. Learn four simple, body-based ways you can calm anxiety by turning on the parasympathetic nervous system. Calming anxiety is something you can learn to do when you learn how the parasympathetic response works as an anti-anxiety reaction. Anxiety, PTSD, trauma, and other intense emotions are rooted in the nervous system, specifically the sympathetic response, but our body has a built-in natural ability to calm anxiety by turning on the parasympathetic nervous system.

Trauma, anxiety, and other emotions can get trapped in your body. In this video, you'll learn how to release trapped emotions and heal stress, anxiety, and trauma through the body. Trauma, anxiety, and other emotions can get trapped in your body. In this video, you'll learn how to release trapped emotions and heal stress, anxiety, and trauma through the body.

What’s the difference between an anxiety attack, a panic attack, and panic disorder? This is important because people sometimes use these terms interchangeably, they both have a lot of overlapping symptoms, but the treatment for each of them is different. So in this video we’ll talk about the difference, in the next video we’ll talk about good and bad advice for treating them and in the third video we’ll talk about how to stop panic attacks. Okay, so what’s the difference? First, definitions vary because the DSM-5, the diagnostic manual of mental health disorders, doesn’t define an anxiety attack. Anxiety is defined as a feeling of worry, physical discomfort, and fear. Anxiety attacks usually come in anticipation of some event. You might have work stress or a family event or financial trouble or all three, and the stress becomes overwhelming. Anxiety builds over time until it reaches a breaking point. While anxiety may build over hours or days, anxiety attacks usually last less than 30 minutes. Panic attacks are defined in the DSM-5. Around one in three people will have at least one panic attack in their lifetime. With panic attacks, a sense of overwhelming fear comes on suddenly. They are more like a balloon popping. There are two types of panic attacks: unexpected panic attacks which seem to come out of nowhere, and expected panic attacks which come in response to some kind of phobia. For example, if you’re afraid of snakes and suddenly come across one, that may trigger a panic attack. Both panic attacks and anxiety attacks include a sense of fear, discomfort, and the FFF response triggers physical symptoms like fast heartbeat, shortness of breath, tightness of throat, dizziness, nausea, sweating, dry mouth, shaking) etc.

Managing stress involves a lot of things, a healthy work life balance, good boundaries, sleep, exercise, but changing what you eat can also have a big impact on your stress levels, and that’s because what you eat impacts cortisol levels. Cortisol is known as the stress hormone, it is part of the activating energizing response in your body, and it triggers the fight or flight response. But it plays a lot of other important roles in your body too. Cortisol helps regulate everything from sleep cycles and inflammation, to blood pressure and blood sugar levels. Cortisol is released by the adrenal gland in response to a physical threat (like an injury) or a mental threat (like a deadline). Cortisol isn't inherently bad, it’s helpful in the short term, but being exposed to it for too long can lead to a chronic stress response which includes more anxiety, depression, fatigue, inflammation, weight gain, higher blood pressure, a decreased immune system, higher chance of diabetes and heart disease. So you can see how decreasing cortisol can have a big impact on physical and mental health. When researchers explored how diet impacts cortisol, they found that people on a traditional American diet (high fat, sugar, and carbs) had much higher cortisol levels than people who were eating more fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and polyunsaturated fats. An anti-inflammatory diet can counteract the impacts of cortisol. Inflammation is essentially a low level stress response in the body, your immune system sends out macrophages and cytokines to kill off pathogens, but the side effect is that it also damages healthy tissue and leads to chronic stress on the body. Inflammation also increases intestinal permeability, aka leaky gut, which allows bacteria into the bloodstream and triggers even more inflammation to counter it. When we eat foods that cause inflammation, we essentially trigger that stress response in the body, but you can choose foods that lower cortisol, inflammation and the stress response. As we go through this list of foods, you may recognize it as having a lot in common with the Mediterranean diet. The Mediterranean diet has been found to be quite effective at decreasing inflammation and it’s been shown to improve mental health.

You can rewire your brain to be less anxious through a simple, but not easy, process. Understanding the anxiety cycle and how avoidance causes anxiety to spiral out of control unlocks the key to learning how to tone down anxiety and rewire those neural pathways to feel safe and secure. In this video, I teach three essential things you need to understand about anxiety, three steps to face and overcome anxiety, and how the brain can actually change (rewire) its structure, function, and chemistry when you change how you think and act.

Do you ever find yourself overthinking a situation or battling intrusive thoughts? This video will teach you the skill of cognitive defusion, which will help you separate yourself from your thoughts so that you can look at them rather than through them. Intrusive thoughts can be scary, dark or painful. They can make you worry that you're losing your mind. they are associated with OCD but they can also just pop up out of nowhere. But Intrusive thoughts don't have to ruin your life. Overthinking is another problem that many people face, constantly dwelling on thoughts or rehashing them over and over. We swim through our thoughts like a fish swims through water. We don’t even notice that the way we think colors our view of the world. Or sometimes we do notice thoughts that we don’t like, and then we don’t know what to do with them. Sometimes you fight them or struggle against them, but that doesn’t feel any better. So sometimes you get stuck in an endless loop of overthinking, obsessively struggling against a thought. But that’s not any better, because struggle steals your attention and energy. In this video you’re going to learn how to get unstuck from your intrusive thoughts and break free from patterns of overthinking. You’re going to learn how to look at your thoughts instead of through them. This skill is called cognitive defusion.

Catastrophizing is a thinking error (aka cognitive distortion) that makes you anxious, depressed, and unmotivated. In this video, I explain what catastrophizing is, how to stop, and what to do instead.