[MUSIC]
Hi. I'm Dr. Esme Shaller,
I'm Clinical Psychologist, and I'm
an Associate Clinical Professor
at UCSF in the Department of Psychiatry.
I'm here to talk with you about
crisis survival skills that you can use to bring
your body chemistry back down again
so that you can face another day in this pandemic.
We're all in a crisis right now,
and our bodies get really tired being
in a crisis for a very long period of time.
You may find sometimes that your emotions get so high,
and your body chemistry get so
overwhelmed that it's hard to think straight.
This may be when you're just really keyed
up because of everything that's going on,
it may be because you're literally having
a panic attack, or may just be in
bed at night, and you can't wind down,
you can't de-stress from the day that you've just had.
I'm here to teach you four skills.
These come from dialectical behavior therapy,
which is my specialty,
and it's a treatment that was originally made for
people with really chronic emotional dysregulation,
a lot of suicidal thoughts,
and who just have a really hard time in general.
These skills can be used by
anyone to get through a really difficult moment.
There's four of them, and they spell out TIPP,
we're going to TIPP your body chemistry,
T-I-P-P, but the T is actually my favorite,
so I'm going to do that one last.
The I stands for intense exercise.
Of course we all know exercise is good for us, right?
But this isn't exercise like every day,
get some exercise for your general health.
This is outrunning your anxiety.
You're already really keyed up.
Dive into it, do
as many push-ups as you can in five-minutes,
do as many jumping jacks, or burpees as you can,
run around your block.
Intense burst of exercise to bring your body in line with
where your mind and your physiology
are to help reduce the anxiety, and wear yourself out.
The first P stands for paced breathing.
This is a way to activate
your parasympathetic nervous system instead of
your fight or flight reflex in a slower way.
You may have heard of it called box
breathing, something like that.
There's a lot of variations, and
you can do different counts.
The idea is counting your in-breath,
a hold at the top,
and then your out-breath.
I find it most helpful to make
each one a little bit longer than the last.
I often do a 4,5,6.
Let's do that one together really quickly.
We're going to breathe in for four,
hold for five,
and then out for six.
Keep doing that in a pattern,
it down-regulates your whole body. It's really helpful.
You can do it smaller,
you can do if 4,4,4,
you can do longer 4,7,8 whatever works for you.
The fourth one is progressive muscle relaxation.
This is where you tighten your muscles
purposely, and then relax them and notice the difference.
Often you'll tighten your fist
as tightly as you can, and hold them for
6,7,8,9,10 and then relax
your hands and feel
the difference between holding and tightening.
I can't do this one on my own.
My mind wanders, I start thinking about
other things I was anxious about, and I get off track.
If that's you, there's links for both
paced breathing, and progressive muscle
relaxation, under this video,
you can listen to other people walk you
through a whole body scan,
great way to help with your sleep at night,
and just again rewrite
what's happening in your body in that moment.
But if you're really at the top of your trajectory,
fight or flight is in full effect.
You can't think straight,
you can't feel straight.
You don't even know what you're feeling.
I really like to use temperature.
There's some caveats with this one.
Those are in the comments
as well, or in the text under this video,
you shouldn't use this if you have
a heart problem, or
history of an eating disorder, or if you're pregnant.
But if you're not, here's what you do.
You get a bowl full of ice and water.
You can see I'm outside.
Some of my ice is already melted,
but I promise you it's really, really cold.
You take a deep breath and you put your face in
it for as long as you can stand it, 10 seconds or so.
I feel different already.
I'll tell you right now.
I only demonstrated that
because it's one that people often
don't want to try because it seems so crazy,
but it really works.
I'm already feeling my body calm down.
If you think about if you
actually fell in the ocean, and were drowning,
you would need to be calm and
centered to solve that problem,
and that's what this does.
That's what tipping your body chemistry
with temperature does,
call it an ice dive, you can
call it the dive reflex, it's really helpful.
I hope you'll try one, or all four of
these things to get through this challenging time.
Thanks.
[MUSIC].