Hi, this is Ron Huxley. Do you believe that a hug can actually help you deal with your stress? I want to show you a simple technique called the butterfly hug that will help you build a strong neuro resilient system that is bulletproof to dealing with stress and trauma as a trauma that's come up from the past or even trauma that you're dealing with in the present. The butterfly hug is a modification of a tool called EMDR. Now EMDR stands for eye movement, desensitization and reprocessing. That's a real mouthful.

Eye Movement desensitization and reprocessing or EMDR. Is it developed by a psychologist by the name of Francine Shapiro and has become one of the most recognized techniques for dealing with posttraumatic stress disorder in America. P EMDR. utilizes bilateral stimulation often with eye movements. Hence the EM piece that helps someone who has been traumatized or is overwhelmed by stress to deal with or desensitize them to the event that has become so stressful for them and is creating a lot of malfunctioning in their life. They also have a cognitive piece to this which is the reprocessing.

So it allows the individual to reprocess the event and change their perception or meaning that they have put placed on this stressful event either in the past or the present. Now that just kind of a background, you don't really have to know that to understand how to use the butterfly hug. The butterfly hug was actually developed by industry. by the name of Luciana arteaga ortigas, and she did this work after Hurricane Pauline in Acapulco, Mexico. And what she did is she had children form a butterfly with their hands where you interlock the thumbs and then you have like wings on both sides. You didn't place it here on your collarbone.

And then you use instead of IPE moments, you use hand movements to create a bilateral stimulation of the brain and nervous system. I'll talk about that in a second. But basically you just tap right, left, right, left, right, left, right and that kind of motion, tapping right here on your collarbone collarbone level. I've seen some people actually do over here on their shoulders and I'll show you some other modifications for this. But for the most part, it's interlocking the thumbs and then doing a tapping motion on your collarbone while closing your eyes and imagining something that is peaceful and calm. This can be a real place like walking on the beach or say in a meadow, in a forest, or at home on your porch, or it can be someplace that is imagined.

I feel safe, peaceful and calm. And we do this for about five minutes a day, every day, building a very strong neural resilient system. The reason we want to do this is that a lot of us as a result of trauma and stress that have occurred in our life, have developed depression, anxiety, a lot of fears and phobias. We have become very emotionally reactive, we're very have anger, trigger anger where we are immediately fly off the handle when an event occurs, or people frustrate us or whenever we're told no, a lot of children who gone through a lot of victimization and abuse and neglect 10 To be very reactive, impulsive and or want to control everything around them. All of these things have events that occurred, our life stresses in the past or stressors in the present, affect our nervous system. And as a result, the constant pressures of stress on our lives, we will become very reflexive in that we will operate in a very way called primitive reflexes, we will bypass our thinking brain and our brainstem and our emotional centers of our brain, the middle of our brain, which are closely connected to our memory and learning centers of the brain, ironically, will bypass the thinking processes of cause and effect to react.

And the reason we have to do this is to keep ourselves safe, because when you're stepping out in front of a car, the last thing you want to do at that moment is to to process the logistics and the timing and problems that might occur and you don't want to think at that moment, you want to move you want to react. So you jump out of the way of the car. That's where your brain is designed to take a primitive reflex and immediately get you to stay safe. The problem in our society is that we tend to continue to react to stressors that are always on us. We're either over scheduled children we have over scheduled lives. We're constantly dealing with stressors in our environment.

We have social media coming at us from every which direction. There's so much information and pressure that is occurring in our life, that our brains are constantly firing off with this primitive reflex to protect us. Now the intentions are good. They're doing exactly what the brain is designed to do, which is to protect us from harm, but in essence lying to us. It's telling us that there are dangerous when there aren't any dangers is causing us to react in extreme emotionally reactive ways when it's unnecessary to do so. When you prolong this over time, what happens for an adult as you get several addictive behaviors to try to cope with this overwhelming sense of stress and emotional reactivity?

You'll see people both children and adults who become emotionally I mean, impulsive and distractible and will make poor decisions that include poor decision our relationships or decisions with money. And did you imagine you have a lot of cultural, legal financial kind of problems as a result, not using your thinking brain and operating from an emotional reactive or primitive reflex point of view, not a good plate way to live life. But a lot of us do this and either an extreme way or an A minor wage because we are dealing with so many stressors In our life, if this is you that are you something, you know, what I want you to do is to begin to use this butterfly hook. And do this for about five minutes every day, not when you're in a stressful situation. I mean you can but Iraq. Ideally you would do this when you are already in a complex or that you can begin to think of something calm and peaceful and you build into your nervous system, neuro resilience.

Now, this is my word, neuro resilience. I may be used somewhere else, but I'm going to claim it at this point. Because what I use when I'm working with clients to help them build a neuro resilience, trauma makes you over reactive primitive reflexes to stressful negative events. What happens is when we become oriented towards those negative events, and we tend to see the negative in every situation, which gives us negative mindsets and negative attitudes and negative interactions and we We'll brush off or ignore or avoid the positive events that occur in our life. And so we're not able to turn things around from a negative to a positive direction. Utilizing a positive experience into your nervous system five minutes a day, will allow you to rob them that will allow you to build a stronger positive neural network, a neural resilience so that you can pay attention to positive events that come your way and being able to say my whole day wasn't catastrophic.

There are a lot of good things that happen, David, a lot of things that didn't happen so, so well, but I'm focusing on things that didn't work well. And also what's really important here is you start focusing on a positive identification of who you are as a person versus your negative things because when negative things happen to us, we tend to think we're negative or bad people and broken things happen and broken relationships and disasters happen catastrophes happen around us, we begin to think that we are a catastrophe that we are a broken and damaged in some way. This is a very negative mindset that's very hard to overcome and takes a lot of work to retrain our thinking. Utilizing the butterfly hug you will be able to, on a neurological level and a non cognitive level compete against this primitive reflex, your emotional, impulsive reactivity, and build a strong neural network.

One of the reasons I believe that there's this crossing over the hands is that it allows us to move across the midline. If you were to imagine an invisible line going down the middle of your body, and then you separate yourself from left and right sides of the body. You that corresponds to how your brain operates in that you have a left and a right hemisphere. You have between Those two hemispheres you have a corpus callosum all these nerve fibers that go in between communicate to either side of your body. So your right side of your brain controls the left side of your body, the left side of your brain controls the right side of your body. The only organ on your body that are is responsible for both hemispheres, in terms of muscular movement is your eye just kind of a side note.

So, by crossing the midline, we force both sides of the brain to operate in concert together. This is very important. We add on to that element imagining a calm safe place that fires up the the lobes in the back of our brain, which are responsible for visualization in the middle of our brain responsible for that fight or flight emotional reactivity memory learning her brain and provides a sense of calmness. It also because we're tapping on acupressure points which are right here in your collarbone. Yes sir we'll have throughout your body. But by pressing on this on this collarbone acupressure point, what you are doing is that you are sending a signal via the vagus nerve into your brainstem to say basically to your brain into your body chill out.

Our nervous system, in a very short simple way has a gas and a brake. trauma and stress, anxiety, constant problems that are alive is like pushing on the brake going downhill and pushing on the gas going downhill and not pushing on the brake or having no brakes to stop you. Your body is going to hit a crash one way or the other, you're going to crash your relationships, finances, etc. Or just physiologically you're going to break down. So what we want to do is we want to employ the brakes in our nervous system. And that is done by tapping on these acupressure points that will then send a signal via what's called the vagus nerve to our parasympathetic system which is our brakes on our nervous system.

Which will then communicate to our nervous system to send signals to throughout the brain left and right front and back on top and bottom. Everything's firing, everything's in Opera in with the intention of completely chilling out. Doing this over time, we'll build this experience so that when stress comes at you, you will then be very familiar with a positive, relaxed state of being and be able to push on the brakes. You won't hit the gas pedal even harder when stress comes at you and you will be able to decrease your stress level significantly. In a much quicker way you'll be able to focus on learning and not just a fight or flight reaction in your brain, you will be able to make good judgments instead of acting impulsively. And you will begin most importantly to identify yourself as a good person, despite the bad things that happened to you.

So you can see why this acting in concert with all the different ones In the brain and the body, are important to build a very strong neural resilient system. So I want you to is I want you to practice this butterfly hug five minutes a day, thinking about something calm and peaceful. If you're doing this with your child, you want to set them on your lap while they're facing forward. And you can put your arms around them, and tapping on their collarbone or undecided to their arms or on their shoulders. And you not only have the ability to create that by allow stimulation for the child, but you also have the physical closeness. And that route, heartbeats will become in sync and the breathing become in sync and you have the warmth and feel the closeness and I have yet to see a child who I've had to do this with their parent here in my office.

That didn't immediately just go conk out, because they were become immediately relaxed when doing this. It's a very powerful technique for a parent and child to do too. some alternatives to this. As I already mentioned, in addition to tapping on the acupressure points of your collarbone, you can do this on your shoulder. Some people prefer to do it this way, left, right, left, right. And that's acceptable to do as well.

You can also do this on your knees, you can't see my knees, but you can tap on your knees left, right, left, right, your arms crossed over right arm on your left knee, left hand on your right knee, and tap. That's useful for a lot of students who are have test anxiety. And when they're in school, they can put their hands under the desk and do this tapping motion, nobody can see just like you can't see them doing now. And if anyone did even see, they would think they're just kind of like rocking out to a beat in their own head. So no one would think that's weird. This might come across as weird, but a lot of people who do it regardless because it's so helpful.

Another technique that you can use that incorporates a bilateral stimulation and crossing over the midline is the reaching over and grabbing both of the ears and just provide our real light soft massaging of your ear lobes, crossing over while thinking of a calm, restful place. So all these techniques are useful to our ability and very neuro resilient system. help you deal with stress and negativity in your life and allow you to enhance learning and decrease emotional reactivity reactivity and as simple as five minutes a day. Thank you very much.