That's Ron Huxley and I want to talk to you now about how to hack your nervous system, the head heart connection. So I'm first going to demonstrate this technique, and then we'll talk a lot about it a little more detailed terms of the science and how it works for you. So what I want you to do is to be able to put one hand on your head on your forehead, Mr. Palm, and then the other hand, I want you to put it on your heart, you can use your right hand up here, you can use your left hand up here, either one is fine, it all depends on what makes you feel most comfortable. And then as you put your hand in your head, one hand on your head and one hand on your heart, I want you to take three nice deep breaths, and we're going to do that with by counting from one to six.

One being the odd numbers are going to be the inhale and the even number there'd be that exhale, mile go a little faster than maybe you might do it just because I want to be able to get through the different steps. Okay, so let's do that one hand on your Palma went on your head and one on your heart. And then let's count together. One. Inhale to exhale, three, inhale, four, XL, five, inhale, six, exhale. Good.

Now I want to take, take the hand that you had on your head and put that on your abdomen or what will refer to as your guts and be a little more coarse, and there'll be a reason for that. We'll talk about it. And then I'll do the same one to six. Breathing, nice, slow breaths, and hell. One, XL, two, and health three, XL four, and how five, XL six. Good.

Now I want you to take both your hands again and put one On on your head with your palm on the forehead and one on the back of your head. Just support it nicely. Don't push our grab or twist or anything. And then I want to do the same in how I want to count. And how one. Exhale two and health three.

Exhale for inhale five. Exhale, six. Good. Now take both your hands I want to put them on your heart, you can just kind of put one hand or the other or if you want to do it more non butterfly approach to it, you can do it that way. And then at the same six count, here we go. And how one exhale to inhale, three.

Exhale for inhale, five. And finally exhale, six. Great. Now taking both hands again and putting them on to you. Your stomach however you're comfortable on your guts. And let's do the six count again.

Inhale one. Exhale to inhale three, exhale four and held five, Excel six. All right, good. Okay, so what we've done is we are working on how to hack your nervous system by connecting your head, to your heart, to your guts, and then we'll break it down in terms of each of those areas. They had the heart and the guts. So what we're doing by hacking the nervous system is that we are engaging the autonomic nervous system.

All the tools that we're using in this neuro resilience section is designed to help you build an anxiety proof nervous system by strengthening your parasympathetic system within your body. So as I mentioned before, you have A parasympathetic and sympathetic system within your overall autonomic nervous system, your parasympathetic system is your break, your sympathetic system is your gas. For many of us, depending on the type of anxiety that we've been dealing with, we'll have an overactive, parasympathetic or over after active, sympathetic system. So we want to bring some integration and balance to both of those things. Most of the time, we have too much sympathetic and not enough parasympathetic. And so the more you exercise that through the breath, and through the intentional focus, almost like a mindfulness or meditation sort of approach.

This will help increase the parasympathetic system and bring balance between the two. The breath is really the key piece to all of this. The other additions have to do with what we might consider a very rudimentary biofeedback machine. So many of the people that I work with who are dealing with anxiety will come in By having a disconnect between their head and their heart, I mean, they literally say, you know how to disconnect between my head and my heart. So what they mean is that I don't feel a sense of control over my life because although I know what I should be doing what's right or wrong, I know how I should be feeling I know the situation is not really terrifying. I know that the circumstances is not going to put me in danger.

I still feel as if it does. And so what's happened is the head and the heart are not operating. So what I want you to be able to do by starting off or are hacking the nervous system with the head of the heart is a sort of a biofeedback we're creating a loop between the two, that is register within our nervous system. Through our breath, we're creating a balance into our autonomic nervous system. And then we're going to add a third level to this and I'll go over that in a second. So what we want to do is we want to bring the integration between the head and the heart.

Some people will have Too much had IE cerebral logical sort of approach to situations and some people have too much of an emotional or overreaction within their heart. I refer to it as also and window of tolerance and talking more about how to create safety. Through that sort of slinky science, I'll be able to create a natural rhythm within your nervous system. So this is an exercise that you can do again, sort of like a meditation exercise. And you can add meditation you can add music to this piece, and I have some phrases that you can use that will help you as well are adding a cognitive piece to this in a second. So we want to add a connect the head in the heart and then what we're doing is we're connecting the heart to our guts now, I call it our guts, because when we talk about our emotions or anxiety, fear, panic.

What we're referring to is sort of our gut instincts as our visceral reaction to situations that don't logically pan out If we look at them into reality, and the cognitive approach is just one way if we can't get the body to be called and arrested state, what science would call homeostatic. So if we can't get it into a homeostatic or homeostasis, then we are not able to do any type of other interventions, it just won't stick. And if you've been trying to do cognitive behavioral approaches, and you haven't been very successful, and this is probably the reason why, because your body has not yet been able to receive it because it's not registering that sense of safety to overrule that fight or flight response is going on your body IE, creating a parasympathetic and sympathetic balance. So now we're wanting to connect our heart, to our guts, our to our body.

And what's important here to know is that our the nervous system that goes within the body is as important as the nervous system called the brain that's between our two ears. behind our eyeballs. And there are 41 different pairs of nerve endings that go throughout throughout your body predominantly around your internal organs, to your brainstem, and then to your brain. Your brain is using all this information to gauge how to protect you from danger. That's very important to remember. It's your brain is using the signals that are coming from your body from these different 41 nerves to third pair actually, to help you know how to keep you safe.

Yeah, that's very important for what we're doing here. Now one of the pairs that goes from your body goes from your internal organs, I mean your stomach, which is your guts, right your digestive system, the whole system, and register that's called Vegas nerve. This is actually 10th cranial nerve and this nerve goes from our guts to our heart. To our throat, to our face, and then finally into our brainstem and then into our brain. Now, this Vegas nerve is extremely important in understanding how to create neural resilience. Steven porges talked as this whole poly polyvagal theory, which I think I'll put some information on that in the specialized toolbox in at the end of this course, so you can get some more information on how that works.

You want to get more into the science of it. But what's really interesting about this cranial nerve, this Vegas nerve is that the brain looks at all the other pairs of nerves that go to the brain and interprets those nerves as signals from the organs right to register how you're doing what's going on taking sensory information. But the vagus nerve, the brain registers it as an emotion It doesn't determine whether or not this is coming from the organs from your stomach, your digestive system, or literally an emotion that center within the middle of your brain, the limbic system of your brain. That's really crucial to understanding how to deal with fear, anxiety, panic worry, because our brain is fooled by what's going on in our body. Now, the reason we are focused on our guts, our visceral reaction is because most of our feeling words that we have have to do with a very visceral sort of description, or an expression.

For example, I have butterflies in my stomach, right? When you get nervous, that'd be a front talk. You'll feel butterflies in your stomach. You don't literally have butterflies in your stomach. But you feel that fluttery because your your biggest nerve is registering that nervousness in your digestive system and a lot of people who have issues with anxiety Have a lot of digestive issues, irritable bowel syndrome, and are we have leaky gut, we have a lot of constipation. There's a lot of things are going on.

And there's a lot of allergies, celiac gluten intolerance. There's many things that are going on that originating from our guts. And the more and more we talk about nutrition, the more we're understanding that there's a brain body connection between all that so I'll have another handout on that. I think it's called healthy, healthy brain healthy gut. So you can look at that handout and that will give you more information on nutrition as it relates to anxiety to so what's happening is we feel these emotions. But so, so many of us, we in order to protect ourselves, we cut off that our, our electrical logical thoughts from our emotional thoughts so that we are not overwhelmed by all these feelings, and we don't want to register a panic attack right.

So we avoid situations that are going to create social anxiety. We stay away from phobic areas that are our particular phobias and fears. We try to do things that will distract us from feeling anxious, all the efforts not to experience these feelings because they're so overwhelming. And what the brain does over time begins to register those feelings as actually dangerous impulses. And it will create a disconnection sometimes in an extreme way, called a disassociation so that we literally have a disconnect between our head and our heart and our body or our guts. Now going on with the Vegas nerve, it takes that sensations out from our body, from our guts, Primark, primarily, then they go to our heart.

Now a lot of people have panic attacks often believe that they're having a heart attack. And many of the 911 calls for a heart attack or a cardiac arrest is really an anxiety attack or a panic attack. It's not actually a physical problem. It's psychological and emotional problems are not purely psychological. Obviously, we're talking about how it interacts with the body. So their bow, but the doctors are saying this is not something that's going to actually fitted with your heart.

But what happened is the biggest nerve is registering these sensations, and then the heart is reacting to it. And so often it will raise and feel like it's going to burst right out of your chest. Now, that Vegas nerve also goes to the throat. And that's really important too, because many of us, certainly we feel like social anxiety, for example, we feel like we don't have a voice or we can't talk or if you get scared, try to speak. It's very difficult to speak when you're scared. Or when you're having a panic attack.

Or when you're in front of a group of people or you feel like you're being publicly humiliated, or you imagine you're going to be publicly humiliated. It will literally kill off your voice and many people will use the words I have no voice to describe their anxious feelings, meaning I don't have any real control over my Like, I don't have an ability to stand up and express myself, I can't stand up for myself. So it's about confidence and anxiety is just a real competence killer. Then from there, that cranial nerve that vagus nerve goes to the face. Now the face is often referred to and again, this will be in their information by Steven porges polyvagal theory, but our face is really important. The whole Vegas nervous system is important, but the face is important in terms of our social engagement.

Steven porges calls us our social engagement system, the whole entire network. So, if you babies other very earliest are actually registering the facial expression they are programmed to look for faces and even in the womb, they've got some projection arm of a light into a mother's abdomen and babies will pay more attention to lights that Have a pattern of like two circles and a triangle underneath it, which has kind of an image of a fake face. So they are automatically looking for that where they're pre programmed. And all of the system that we're talking about with the body is pre programmed in. So when an infant is born, these things are already fully online, the brainstem is active. It's the rest of the system, the emotional system, the cognitive system that requires input.

And that input comes in face to face interaction. This is why in terms of attachment research, so many scientists will talk about the importance of that male female bond, I mean, the mother child bond, and they can happen with fathers too, of course, but they that bond between the parent and the child. So interaction, you don't talk to a child and attach to them from the other side of the room or facing away from them. You do it by looking, holding them close to feeling your heartbeat, your heartbeat back to their heartbeat. Your face to face calm. interaction going on your voice, all these things, your voice, all these things are very important to understanding the attachment system and how people attach.

So, the face is very important. And many times people who deal with anxiety and fears and worries actually cut off, as he said, between the head and the heart and they don't register facial expressions very well. So a lot of people will be and it's very true in attachment issues too. And that people will be saying, I'm not mad at you, and the child or the individual is simply thinking okay, but not mad at me. Because they can't register the emotion behind it. That's being communicated.

And they don't register in the face. And so they don't see the what's going on and recognize that their own face they don't see it in other people's face and it really has a disastrous effect on relationships. That's why anxiety and fear and rumination are Worry is so detrimental in our relationships and why so many people feel social anxiety, and have trouble maintaining relationships when they are anxious. So again, it's confidence killer. It's a real relationship destroyer. And so part of this is being able to get the whole system online in alignment and imbalance, one or the other.

So we're connecting the head to the heart to the guts. Now, after you've done this preliminary piece of heads, the heart guts and you're doing the breathing of one to six, that gets the system kind of settled down. And then you're adding a cognitive piece here. And what you're going to do is you're going to put one hand on the front of your forehead, one hand on the back of your forehead, I'm going to put two hands on your heart and two hands on your gut. And as you do that, you're going to say, to each of those systems, you're going to speak to your head, speak to your heart, speak to your guts, to your intuition to your body, and you're going to simply say thank you. Thank you Thank you head for protecting me.

Thank you. And thank you thoughts for keeping me safe. Thank you heart for protecting me. Thank you heart for keeping me safe. Thank you guts, thank you body for protecting me, thank you guts Thank you body for keeping me safe. You want to honor each and every part of our system.

So that it again, puts it in connection with one another allows you to feel the power of each of these things. We need all of them you don't want to cut off one to overdo the other. So it's important that we bring that integrative approach of head and heart and guts and that we respect what they're doing and a very primal primitive way. What our body is in our brain is doing is trying to keep us safe. Once we have communicated that we are in Safe, then we can go on and bring more cognitive approaches that we'll talk about in the rethink section, which allow you to create new perspectives on your situation. And now like for example, when you're, if you're practicing this every day, and you can do it every day, many times a day is not going to hurt you.

Actually, the more you do it, the stronger your nervous system is going to get the more neuro resilient you're going to be. And then when you move on to the cognitive section, when you say things to your, to your heart, like, I feel I've been having a panic attack right now. But I know even though this is very uncomfortable, it's not dangerous. That's a very important phrase. If you have panic attacks and say to yourself, even those is very uncomfortable. Even though I'm very uncomfortable and feel like my heart's racing right now.

This is not dangerous, I'm not going to die. And that cognitive thought will be believed, because your body has already been built up that resiliency, to handle that situation. When you're in front of an audience and you're having to talk to somebody you can say to your If you can coach yourself and say, even those is very uncomfortable, even though this is very unpleasant. I know that I'm safe. I know that I'm not in danger. I know that I will finish this.

Well, I'll finish it strong. And you can then coach yourself and use cognitive strategies that we'll be talking about to help you through the process. Thank you very much.