From Panic to Peace: Transforming Your Response to Stress

Ep 85. In today’s fast-paced world, stress and sudden surprises can activate our sympathetic nervous system, triggering a fight-or-flight response. But what happens when we hold our breath in fear instead of exhaling? This often leads to anxiety and neurotic behaviors, which can be detrimental to our mental health. When we don’t have effective coping strategies, we may reinforce maladaptive responses to stress.

In this episode, we explore two powerful methods to break free from stress-induced conditioning. By learning to manage your breath and emotions, you can liberate yourself from the cycle of fear, shame, and discomfort that often accompanies anxiety. Join us to discover how to reclaim your peace of mind and transform your reaction to stress.

Breathe Your Way to Calm: Overcoming Stress and Anxiety and Break the Cycle: Two Techniques to Manage Stress and Fear. Take care and walk well. 

Transcript

Welcome back folks to episode 85 of the Running Man Self-Regulation Skills Project Podcast with me, your host, Dr. Armando Dominguez, PhD in Health Psychology, licensed professional counselor and an adjunct professor at a local community college. What I'd like to talk to you today about is fear reactivity and deconditioning fear. Now, one thing that we have to look at specifically when we're looking at self-regulatory skills is realizing

that what we're regulating is an adaption. It's a reaction to whatever stress is in our environment, but also it can be kind of a maladaption if that reaction, so to speak, is not the most healthy or most life engendering that we're literally jumping from the frying pan into the fire. So what we're going to be talking about specifically are a couple of methods that are very body oriented to help you

realize how to decondition our fear response and actually one of them involves embracing the fear and the other one is embracing the breath when the fear reaction occurs. So with that, once again, we're going to talking about deconditioning in our fear.

So what does conditioned fear mean? Well, it's a learned response, not unlike Pavlov that conditioned the dogs to salivate to the meat powder and the bell. And soon enough, the bell was enough to cause the dogs to salivate. We tend to associate and couple stimuli together sometimes. That's why PTSD can be a very complex issue to deal with in that whatever it is that the person is focusing upon or is most hyper-focused on has to do with what we give value to. This is called valence.

in the scientific jargon if you look up studies, but the value and the weight that it carries the trigger so to speak, that brings a person's reactivity about after the event if they survived the event that now we have post traumatic stress reaction reactivity and even on up to the level of disorder to wherever it's something that is not just one event, but can be

armando (02:41.986)
but can also be a complex series of events that have enough overlap and similarity. The similarity being the fear of injury or threat to harm to the individual, the organism, the person or fear of death, this sort of stuff. And that's when we start.

Generalizing that fear to the rest of our lives to where things that are similar in color shape sound People that look similar if there's a perpetrator involved tend to become triggers for us such that the world now becomes a dangerous place By our definition after the fact so if we have fear

That's a learning, a type of learning. If we have joy and happiness, we learn too where to find that. And we find something, let's say that tastes good, reminds us, wow, dopamine just said do this because it feels good. But not only that, it's a motivating neurochemical that says do this again.

do it more often and eventually you get to the point of developing a stash. learn how to find that, get to that and get really good at it. So in repetition over time, we become very skilled at finding that payoff, so to speak. And not unlike that, we become very skilled in the inverse sense at avoiding, avoiding pain. are hedonic by nature hedonism in the sense of a principle applied to how we live and how we learn indicates that we're

going to avoid anything that causes us pain, discomfort, and fear and move away from it and also limit our exposure to it if we have the wherewithal and the means to not be there and avoid. And also if it's something that's pleasurable to us, such as eating ice cream or having sex or maybe just doing something fun, then we're going to find ways to encourage that to be in a place where that could happen more frequently or there's a higher chance of it occurring.

armando (04:38.864)
and hanging out at the ice cream store chances are you gonna find ice cream it's gonna be one of those things we become very good at not only locating

where our payoffs gonna be but also getting good at getting the payoff whether it be getting money asking for money from our mom and dad when we're small enough to not have jobs this sort of thing so just making the point very distinct and clear that the hedonic principle that drives us drives us either away from pain or towards pleasure and we've discussed this on the podcast before many times because it is something that runs through

self-regulatory skill development and the reasons for the need to self-regulate because often our responses may cause us more pain or discomfort or make us feel uncomfortable even a shame for that matter of it something that's embarrassing to us so how can we decondition fear well we can take a couple of things into consideration one is that if we consider our

heart rate increase in our stress and breathing change, what we'll call in quotes anxiety or an anxious response or, it, this is a term that sounds negative, but it's really a clinical term. will become a little more neurotic in the sense that we have, unreasonable fears or heightened fears beyond what would be considered in our lives. Normal that may disrupt our lives may disrupt us from being able to enjoy our lives. Then this is a neuroses or what's called neurotic

And usually it's used as a pejorative to make people feel bad. But the fact of the matter is when we have that level of anxiety, stress, reactivity, we're no longer at our healthy, normal adaptive baseline. So onto the methodology. The first thing I want to talk about is the breath. The breath is involved in both.

armando (06:35.746)
but not all breathing is the same and equal. And to those of you doubting Thomas's and Thomasina's, because there are women out there that doubt as well, I will tell you that whenever I have heard, I've done the breathing.

Okay. Well, no, you haven't. You've done breathing a type maybe, but that does not equate to all breathing. That does not necessarily mean because what you work with didn't work so well that all other breathing methods don't work because you decided to be so no one decided to give you the authority to basically judge all breathing as useless because if that were the case, why do so many people do it? Why do so many people report that? Yes, it does work. Why is it that people are trying to change their consciousness by doing what?

breathing and not all breathing is the same even amongst them so what I'm going to point out are some very useful tools that work now when you use them and they will give you an immediate feedback that you can pay attention to that you can build on over time now

This is the caveat. This one that I'll be sharing first is a method that is used just to identify how I react within that moment. It's not to be held for an extended time or under pressure. That's not good. What this does is help you realize when we become very stress intense, we become insensitive to how our inner workings are because things happen so fast. But this actually kind of slows down and gives us a snapshot of how we react within the space of stress, tension, and fear.

reactivity whenever the proverbial poop hits the fan. So here we go, the very first method what I want to

armando (08:16.236)
call it is just a breath suspension and what you're to do you're not going to take a big deep breath but be in a nice seated comfy position wherever you have your feet flat on the floor nice and grounded and your arms can be on your knees or on your lap but just don't be holding your arms in front of your chest really tight don't be squeezing your leg muscles or or being tense in your neck just try to be in as comfy a position as possible and whenever you're seated or you can even do the standing but i recommend seated just because of the

stability required for you to have a rooted seat and a rooted pair of legs so that way you feel and touch the ground which is a really good appropriate receptive thing to do when you're changing a breath pattern, but whenever we stress think about and don't find an event that makes you freak out but rather think about

What happens when we get scared or afraid? Often we will gasp, we will inhale and that's a suspension of breath before we blow out and explode and move if we're running. But what if we freeze? Often we will wind up suspending breath and doing what is called a residual breath where there's this almost raspy pushing physically and mechanically or we

And we hold our breath and then we get stuck and we're stuck with our thoughts on the inside, but we're not letting the breath go. So instead of just holding onto the breath, when we're afraid, what we're going to do is practice this. And I did say practice requiring repetition, course, whenever you're nice and calm and there is no threat. So now that we kind of have an idea as to how we respond, let's go and do the response without no fear. We're to couple this with a non fear, condition. So that way.

We realize that you can do this not just when you're afraid and it kind of splits and deconditions of fear to this breathing pattern Not just gas when you're scared, but rather sometimes we need to inhale Hold for just a sec one two three four And if you feel the need to let go let it go you don't have to hold it under pressure But you realize right after you let go

armando (10:31.822)
There's also a release, there's this structure around the lungs that is called the pleura that relaxes when we breathe out of our mouth and when we inhale through our nose and hold for a little bit.

you might feel it just very slightly pressure, it shouldn't be hold it held under high pressure. If you have high blood pressure, just a very gentle sip of air and just hold for a moment and just pay attention to how you feel. And if you feel that all of a sudden you start getting the roots of anxiety, starting to kick in, let it go. Let the breath go. Just blow out.

If you want to push it out, that's okay too. But I would encourage you just to let the air come out nice and slow. Do this once or twice and just pay attention to what the inner workings are on the inside. What does it feel like inside your throat? Inhale, hold and the glottis is holding. This is going to be in the area of wherever your trachea would be. And I'm still speaking without letting air out per se, but I am able to speak. I'm not feeling stressed. And then

armando (11:38.742)
Let go and then let's see. So breathe again. Just hold for a moment. But in that space, what I want you to do is pay attention, pay attention to the fact that the fear of death and fear of reactivity, the fear of, got to get out of here or even the self-consciousness does not occur. Whenever you inhale intentionally and hold intentionally and let it go when you're ready.

It shouldn't be one where you're turning blue before you let go. If you're doing a stunt like that, I would encourage it. unless you talk to your doctor first, but this is one that just gets you in touch with.

the beginnings of where the finger reactivity starts and that's with the breath suspension because when we're under stress we suspend breath. When we're under stress we tend not to breathe out completely. We tend to hold breath high in our chest and that creates tension versus allowing our diaphragm to drop down and we'd read a little more hypogastricly which would be the diaphragmatic breath. If you do Chinese martial arts it's called the Danqian that's two inches below the navel and about two inches in. Slightly floating about maybe three to four inches

above where your perineum would be on the inside but no higher than where your belly button would be on the inside but way in the middle and that would be our hypothetical and theoretical sense of balance so to speak and if we can pay attention to that or attend to that area we understand that that moves a little more whenever we allow our diaphragm to relax but it doesn't move when

We hold our breath really high when we're under stress. allowing ourselves to let go even relaxes our abdominal structures. And that allows us to feel a little more relaxed after having suspended our breath for just a moment. But once again, this isn't about, let's see how long we can hold this. Now I will tell you that I do things along those lines. do regular meditation and breath training that requires me.

armando (13:35.516)
or I do it as a requirement of more correctly of the method to hold breath longer. And that helps me to get past that sense. Cause even with many years of training and I'm in pretty decent shape, I have always been able to hold my breath relatively long. But if I hold my breath beyond my normal, I get that fear response that is autonomic. And often our autonomic response comes up really quickly. If we are,

Trait anxious in the sense that we're just generally more anxious than the average person or what I used to be in my past after an event for instance versus it being something that just comes up as a state based on what's going on and If we practice it often enough we condition practice to it we get skilled at it and therefore we become more anxious and it looks like a Trust trait when in actuality is just a very fast moving state in many cases But we can condition our body to get very reactive now the next part is

this is whenever you are holding your breath, it, and when you just do this for just a moment, once again, if you give yourself 15 to 20 seconds, that's long, you don't have to go that long, but about 15 seconds is fair. If you can hold it that long, if you can only do 10, do 10. It doesn't matter. It's not the length. It's the awareness of what happens, but whenever you start with the inhale, we're going to do one right now. Just inhale.

Hold one, two, three, four, and I'm going to hold just a little longer while I'm talking. But while I'm talking, for instance, if that little need to suck wind comes in, breathe by all means do. But what I want you to do is practice learning how to suspend the breath just a little bit by doing a swallow. Whenever that feeling of anxiety starts coming up on the inside that says breathe now, you inhale. And then what we're going to do is override that fear response and it's fear body, fear reactivity, swallow.

without inhaling that's one if yeah you can do another one swallow again but it feels like you're pushing it

armando (15:38.141)
Inhale at that point and let it go. But this is conditioning your body to recognize how the fear reactivity comes up that has nothing to do with an event, but more so has to do with our breathing. And whenever we burn our oxygen really fast because of stress, we get that fear response. So it is something we have already that is not coupled with fear necessarily by structure, but one thing that becomes coupled based on our events in our experience and our lives. So please pay attention to

this. you inhale, hold, swallow. One, two, three, if you can, four, if you're good, right? And then let it go, but no pressure. There's no pressure held, but more so it's a conditioning to know that whenever you are holding your breath, if you can swallow, you have control of this, but also makes you aware of the fact that, I'm holding my breath. And this is where we

Stop the suspension of breath and just let go and relax.

And what do do when the poop is hitting the fan? If you realize that you're doing this, do the swallowing thing. And then after that, that'll help you relieve the tension that you're creating by doing a suspension of breath. So this is just a symptom recognition and override of the fear response. Well, that was a great exercise. So the next one that we're going to show you, this one actually comes from several methods of body work, but also one that in the martial arts of Systema, those

you that have never looked into it. They actually work on a lot of breathing through motion without suspension of breath. So if they're doing a push-up, if we're doing a conventional push-up, any one of us, what we usually do is exhale on the exertion. When we go down, we inhale when you push up, we blow out, inhale on the way down, and then blow out when we come up on the exertion. What Sistema does, they do something a little differently, and I'll kind of explain this to you. It's not different.

armando (17:40.609)
cult at all. If you're doing any kind of exertion along those lines, not talking about super heavy weights, not doing that because that doesn't make sense.

When you're a Valsalva maneuver that actually consolidates the core makes you safe. So we're not talking about that So don't try it under those circumstances but if you're moving your own body weight if you're doing a squat where you have your arms in front of you and Going back up and down or even if you're doing a push-up Or even whenever you sit down in a chair You note that we have a certain breath pattern and we have a habituated breath pattern that is based on the stressor We're put on the body the body's wise now. The important thing is about habituation

relative to stress and PTSD and what used to be one of the premier methods of getting over and healing from PTSD was the cognitive processing therapy and that involved a lot of immersion and some would say direct confrontation but really it's not it just feels that way because of the intensity of the reactivity but what Foa and Kozak

Did in their studies years back, I think Foa has since passed away, Kozak's still around, but they did a lot of studies into fear, reactivity, and habituation. Now if we look at our breathing system, it is going to habituate to certain modes of movement. When we run, we run and breathe a certain pattern. When we lift, we lift using a certain breathing pattern. When we fear,

We have a very specific and certain breathing pattern as well, depending on how sudden the onset, there's fear, terror, this sort of thing, or if it's going to be, I'm getting in a fight. And then our breathing ramps up. We, we get up, we may even ventilate a little heavier than what we used to. And some was hyperventilate. But the idea is that certain motions will bring about a certain way of breathing, depending on the need of what the body's doing, whether we'd be under load or whatnot. So back to this breathing.

armando (19:45.963)
that

share, pay attention to these things. Whenever we're doing, let's say for the sake of argument and also clarity, we're going to be considering a pushup today. If we're doing an exertion on a regular pushup on your knees or a full extension pushup.

for those of in the military, the front lean in rest, and I remember that term. So here's the thing, when we push down or allow ourselves to descend down, that is usually considered the inhale portion where we're lowering ourselves down. When we exhale, generally speaking, that's whenever we're pushing ourselves back up on the exertion. What I want you to do is whenever you're lowering yourself, just breathe normally in the sense that you're not breathing one for one, one motion, inhale, one motion, exhale.

but rather inhale, exhale. A continuous pattern, kind of like a didgeridoo breathing, wherever it's always continuous. It doesn't stop, it's circular breathing. So you're inhaling and exhaling as you're lowering yourself. Lower yourself a little slowly on the push-up and push yourself up equally slowly on the way back up. Just inhaling and exhaling, but not doing a one-for-one exhalation and inhalation for each motion. And you realize you can push and push continuously without necessarily going

one breath in, one breath out, but rather inhale, exhale on the way down, inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale on the way up. The same thing with the squat. It's easier to note if you can tolerate doing a squat. Inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale throughout the motion going up and going down. It doesn't have to be one or the other. Part of it is how we've been taught. Part of it, how we've observed other people do is how we repeat the action, but secondarily is

armando (21:58.707)
that often we figure out how to do this more effectively, but those are often based on observations by our vicarious learning that we assume without question.

When the Russians came on the scene with this type of breathing, it really kind of blew the lids off of everything because that was totally against conventional methodology. Now they did use regular breathing for other things such as weightlifting and whatnot, but this is one that if we realize that if we habituate to stress by breathing a certain way, that means we can also de-habituate how we react to stress by learning how to breathe differently.

like the breast suspension, we become aware of how I react. This is a breathing method that teaches you whenever there is stress to just keep breathing. You can be sitting at your desk and if somebody's giving you a hard time, you don't necessarily have to get reactive and shocked and stressed.

But just keep breathing. Don't suspend your breath. Realize that whenever we hear things or see things that are uncomfortable, we tend to suspend our breath and we tend to consolidate our core because we're reacting from our lower brainstem that is not verbal, but is very hypersensitive to visual stimuli that may indicate that there's threat to self or organism, sort of thing. So this breathing method, you can do it at the park. You can do it sitting down. You can do it laying down and pay attention to how you do this.

you can lay down and do leg lifts and just inhale exhale inhale exhale versus tightening up and stopping the breath and exhale up exhale down or Anything like that. It can be done in a number of ways The idea is to explore our motion in my life and how I live my life and when do I hold my breath? when do I suspend breath and recognize that that's a fear reactivity and Then work with this Russian breathing method. It's a very simple thing. You don't have to hold breath suspend breath It's not deep breathing or anything like

armando (23:55.393)
that it is just merely allowing yourself to continue to breathe throughout a motion that allows you to stay relaxed in the torso and also allows you to keep from suspending breath whenever you might be dealing with stress so that way can be more efficient with your oxygen and more effective in what you do and more efficient in your burning of energy. So those are the two methods I wanted to share today and basically this is about deconditioning the stress, the

Step one was the first one. Learning when the reactivity starts and getting sensitive to that, second to that, is working with this second tool that teaches you how to move through your life without suspending your breath, without creating more tension necessarily, because we've habituated our practice to be intense in our lives. This will teach you how to relax as you move and become much more flexible in the way not only that you feel, but also the way that you think, because often our state of body

It has a lot to do with our state of mind and what comes from it. So that's all I have today.

And this is a Sunday afternoon, just had some apples. was great. some meditation this morning. And I just want to say, thanks for listening. I've had a few people give me some feedback on the lucid dream episode. And I was really happy about that. I was really kind of excited to do that one. There is so much to that. Some of it may not be, uh, fitting for this podcast in particular, but one that, uh, with the right amount of information, you can gain some incredible skill and, it hinges upon a lot of the visualization stuff we

talked about but very powerful stuff and thank you for that feedback so if you have any feedback for me please send it to the gmail at running man get skills project at gmail I'd be happy to hear from you take care work with this breathing method lets me know how they work for you walk well