So what's going on in your body physically, right? There's actually a physical reason why you're having these symptoms, your body's actually just doing his job to protect you. So the best way I can show you is to illustrate this for you. Now, I'm not an artist, so please bear with me. Okay? So I'm just gonna kind of explain the basic organs involved and kind of what's going on.

So, that's supposed to be you. I know it looks like a gingerbread man or an alien. I don't know. So the most important organs are the brain of course, our heart. I know it's not our hearts not shaped like that. But as for you know, explanation sakes, you have your stomach and your intestines, your liver, kidney.

The major organs involved with this whole reaction. So this is all part of our nervous system. And this is what we call the fight, flight or freeze response. A lot of people will leave out freeze you always you hear a lot about fight or flight but fight flight or freeze response. And again, it's part of our nervous system. You have your sympathetic nervous system activates this and your parasympathetic nervous system deactivates it.

Now, there's actually different levels to this. So I like to kind of think of it as a gauge. When it's full blown activated, you're actually in life or death situation, right? So life or death. This is when maybe you know you're being assaulted about being an accident. An active shooter situation, your body's going to full blown fight or flight response.

But other things can trigger it just on the lower level. So it could be even down here, even up here. This could be maybe someone's nagging, someone cuts you off and almost hits your car. You know, it could be any smaller thing that is not your instant, you know, life or death, but nonetheless is to triggering, you know this fight or flight or freeze response. So what happens is you have to have a real or imagined threat a real or imagined threat. And that's because our brain cannot tell the difference between reality and imagination.

So everything you're actually imagining it thinks that is happening for real. So on the flip side of this, you can really you know, manage this and control it by imagining your goals for example, but for this explanation sakes, it's real or imagined threat No, no, the threat could be an obvious physical one, right? Someone can be like assaulting you, but it could be a threat to your social life, right to feeling alone. You know, that could be a look someone's giving you or the way someone's talking to you. Anything like that. So you just don't feel politically safe.

Okay. So what happens is, there's a signal, some interpretation, right? And it sends a signal to our brains like, okay, we're not safe, we need to get ready to either fight, punch, kick, slap, flight, which is run, or freeze. And we will love to think that we're so brave. And we would have, you know, defend ourselves and fight, but it's fight is not always the best option. So you don't know how you're really going to react until it actually happens, unfortunately, but there's a signal, right?

So your brain sends a signal to everything else. And the first thing that happens is your heart starts starts to speed up, starts beating a lot faster. The same time your stomach and intestines actually shut down. Our digestive system uses up a lot of energy, the brain and the digestive tract actually use that the most energy in our body. Think about when you eat a big meal, especially like after like during Thanksgiving or something. And you just feel tired.

You just want to take a nap afterwards, right? Because Both of your blood flow is actually kind of focusing on here in order to break down all that food that you just ate. During fight flight or freeze, eat, the opposite happens, actually, our digestive system shuts down. So if you have any food in your stomach or anywhere up here, you can actually throw up or start to feel nauseous. You know, if most of the food is kind of down here and you activate this whole system, you can have that runs. Some people have experienced that.

But you definitely feel feeling butterflies a very common symptom that's reported with anxiety, right? You just have an upset stomach. So you ever feel that that tingling feeling you feel in your stomach when you're nervous? The butterflies, right? You're literally feeling your blood flow, leaving your blood system. Pretty cool.

That's what that feeling is, is the blood flow just leaving your digestive tract, but where's it going? Well, your arms and your legs because you're supposed to be running Hitting, right? So it needs to borrow all of them. At the same time your liver is releasing sugar into your bloodstream. So now you have all this sugar because you need energy. Sugar is not bad.

It's just way too much of it is not good. But now that releases sugar into your bloodstream in order to give you more energy. At the same time, our kidney right above our kidney lives the adrenal gland, and the pineal gland. That's where adrenaline lives. And now that spits out adrenaline into your bloodstream. So do you see a problem with this?

Now you have this whole chemical reaction inside your body, but you're not in danger? Right? No one's threatening you. You don't need to go beat someone up or, you know, runaway like there's nothing going on. So office energy has nowhere to go. So you literally created this whole chemical reaction has nowhere to go.

And this is when you start to feel extremely shaky, your body just feels really shaky, or even a tingling feeling. A lot of people report that the tingling feeling, this feeling of desperation, you need to run you to do something, right. That's what's going on is almost like if you had have a pot of boiling water with the lid on, and the lid is like shaking, right is like uncontrollably shaking because it needs to blow some steam. So this is what happens when you have an anxiety attack. You literally have this whole chemical reaction in your body. It doesn't even know what to do does it can't release all of this and all this energy.

So how do you deactivated now I will say also, this doesn't last forever. This can only last maximum 20 minutes. Our bodies are not built to last that long. It's just it's just a defense mechanism is just there to protect us right. So sometimes what happens when you have an anxiety or a panic attack, it feels like forever A lot of times you can actually calm down and then have another one. So you can have multiple back to back.

And it feels like his last a whole hour, but it really doesn't. Most of it under 20 minutes, it should calm down. How do you activate the parasympathetic nervous system which is responsible to help us relax. So there are two things that the best to really calm down. Number one is deep breathing. Deep breathing works because now you have this whole chemical reaction and you're going to flood your brain in organs with oxygen, so you just and then you slowly exhale and then every time you exhale, you're releasing some of this chemical reaction through your breath.

You know, we can't see it, but in our breath is we're releasing water and different chemicals and stuff like that. So what you want to do is kind of cleanse yourself. So you take a deep breath in and exhale. Remember you when your exhale to be longer than your inhale because you're trying to cleanse yourself right and calm yourself from all of this stuff. So that was probably one of the fastest ways to start to feel, you know that you're calming down. Now you don't just take one or two deep breaths and all of a sudden you're calm, you have to keep continue deep breathing for at least, between 30 seconds or a minute minimum.

Just keep breathing. Just keep breathing, to slow down your heart rate. You know, when we take long, deep breaths, our heart starts to kind of slow down, and that helps you just calm down. Another one that really helps is to do something physical. Do something physical, because that's actually what you're supposed to be doing. You know, you're supposed to be hitting or running right using your limbs, but you're not.

So if you do something physical, it could be anything from like get up from your chair and go to the bathroom the long way. Or if you're at school or work or at your house, too. Go to the bathroom or go for a walk. If you can, that'd be great. We can always do that, right? You can also, like exercise, especially if you're at home obviously, is a lot easier.

But exercise, going for a walk. Sometimes fidgeting with something really helps. So depending where you are, obviously want to try different things. I think of like, it's good to have a list for at home and work to do. So for example, in those places, you can just drop into, like, you know, push ups, so maybe coloring or doodling or having like a stress ball. As what that's for a stress ball or fidget toy.

I know, you know, that got ruined a little bit earlier this year. But, you know, having a fidget toy really does help you do something because it's like almost impossible to just sit still when you're this worked up, right? So do something physical. If you're at home, taking a cold shower really helps you know the code actually helps us like calm down. So that really helps a lot. You notice though, like I said before, this is not supposed to happen all the time.

If you constantly activate fight or flight or freeze response, you will sooner or later have health issues because your body cannot handle this pressure all the time. So everyone's different sometimes you might have no headaches or migraines, right? High Blood Pressure is very common. digestive issues definitely because you're constantly switching off and on the digestive system. There's actually a disease called adrenal fatigue and that's when your general gland like leader has no more adrenalin to spit out. So that's adrenal fatigue.

I can draw the immune system but that's a big one to your immune system gets weaker every time you activate this. So you're going to be prone to catching every little thing. Maybe you have like really, really bad allergies or you always catch the cold. You know, just more susceptible to different autoimmune diseases. That's a big one. You know, when you're constantly active reading this.

So I really hope having this visual really helps you understand that is very physical anxiety is very physical. It's not always all in your head. Definitely our thoughts, you know in our thinking can trigger it, but your body's just doing his job. It's pretty amazing.