This is your brain on stress (short) Dr. Santopietro explains the fight, flight or freeze response

In this podcast short, an excerpt from episode one, Dr. Santopietro discusses the stages of stress and how our brains react. Learn about what to expect, and how we can help ourselves or a colleague who might be struggling.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:02

Welcome to Hartford Healthcare's podcast series, Coping Through COVID. In this episode one expert, Dr. John Santo PH, Assistant in Chief of our Behavioral Health Network, explains the stages of stress we might be experiencing and even gets into our lower brain.

SPEAKER_01 0:20

I have personally found really helpful in understanding my own stress and understanding the stress and anxiety of the people that I'm working with is to frame it. Actually, there are two ways that I frame it that are helpful to me. The first one is in thinking about the stages of accepting something that's difficult. So, and we are, I think, familiar with some of these stages, but there are things like denial, you know, this isn't going to happen. And then the next stage is bargaining. Well, maybe it's going to happen, but you know, we can we can go out to dinner with that one more time to the next phase, which is anger. And I think we we notice that there's a fair amount of anger around from time to time in our workday. And one of the things about thinking about it in these stages is that it normalizes it. It's a normal reaction and it's a normal stage in understanding and processing traumatic things. But the last stage is acceptance. And I think as I look around, most of us have gone through those stages and are at some level of acceptance of it. But it's also not static. So you couldn't have a good day when you know you're at acceptance, and the next day you come in and you've gone down a notch to anger or bargaining, and just to be f flexible around that and to certainly cut yourself slack, which is hard for us, and and be cutting others slack as well. The second way I think about what's going on or frame what's going on, and this has to do a little bit with being a psychiatrist and thinking about the brain. So the things that we're dealing with, the stress that we're dealing with these days, is the kind of stress that hits us in our lower brain and in the not the upper brain, not the part that we use for executive function, but the people talk about the reptilian brain, or you can think about the amygdala, not to get too technical, but that part of your brain that really gets heated up under severe stress and emotion. And if we had a an X-ray monitoring people coming in, I would imagine we would see that people's amygdalas are pretty lit up as they're coming in. And one of the reasons that's helpful, again, is as we're talking with each other, those of us uh in leadership as we're talking with the people that we lead to have flexibility to be able to say this person is right now, you know, I'm locating them somewhere in their midbrain, and my job is to help them get out of that into their upper brain, or even as we notice our own behavior. Before, you know, you walk in with a patient, before, you know, you're going to be walking in with your team in an important moment to check in with ourselves about where am I operating right now? What do I need to do if I'm in my lower brain to regulate myself so that I can be thinking the way I need to be thinking? Because we're all making lots of uh important decisions and we want to be making them with the uh capacity that we have to make uh the best decision. So those have been uh two other ways that have been helpful for me in understanding the stress. I'm not sure if they'd be helpful to others.

SPEAKER_00 3:27

And at the risk of putting you on the spot, are there any tricks to get out of our lower brain?

SPEAKER_01 3:34

No, that's uh that's a great question, actually. And in some ways it's a complicated question because people have um their own well-worn ways. I mean, the easiest answer to it is whatever has worked for you before you want to bring out. So whether you're the kind of person that likes to take five deep breaths and notice your breathing, whether you're the kind of person that needs to make a quick call to a friend, like on the TV show where you have the lifeline, uh, whether you need to, you know, have a coffee or a drink or something to eat. There's probably many ways that people have done it before if you can remember some of the things that you have done. And even really just in the act of noticing that you're in that stage is itself a technique for regulating oneself.

SPEAKER_00 4:21

Thank you, Doctor. To hear the full-length Coping Through COVID podcast with Dr. Santo Pietro, just click on the link to episode one. If you or someone you love is in need of emotional support, help is available. Call your existing provider for a virtual visit or leave a message at 888-984-2408, and we will call you back. I'm Mr. Pierre. Thank you for listening to Hartford Healthcare's podcast series at Helping Court COVID.