What If It's Not Your Personality? The Hidden Effects of Chronic Stress

Ep 153. The environments we live in shape us more deeply than most of us realize.

From childhood through adulthood, every experience influences how our nervous system learns to respond to the world. We learn through direct experience, observation, imitation, and repeated exposure to the people and environments around us. These experiences become patterns that quietly influence how we think, feel, perceive, and react—often long before we consciously recognize them.

Some experiences nurture confidence, resilience, and adaptability.

Others leave lasting impressions through fear, intimidation, neglect, violence, trauma, or chronic stress.

These difficult experiences do not simply disappear. Instead, they often become embedded within our nervous system as automatic patterns of self-protection.

Over time, these protective patterns can begin to feel like who we are.

A person may believe:

"I'm just anxious."

"I'm an angry person."

"I've always been shy."

"I don't trust people."

Yet neuroscience and psychology suggest another possibility.

Many of what we call personality traits may actually be learned stress responses—adaptive survival strategies developed in response to difficult environments rather than permanent characteristics of the individual.

This distinction changes everything.

The human nervous system constantly evaluates the environment for safety or danger. When chronic stress becomes the norm, vigilance becomes the default. The body begins choosing protective responses before conscious awareness has time to intervene.

What appears to be personality may instead be a state of chronic physiological adaptation.

The victim mindset and the author mindset are not fixed identities.

They exist on a continuum of adaptation.

As our physiology changes, so do our perceptions, beliefs, behaviors, and choices.

This means we are not necessarily trapped by our past conditioning.

By learning practical self-regulation skills, understanding the physiology of stress, and deliberately expanding our capacity for resilience, we can begin shifting from automatic reaction toward conscious response.

The Running Man Human Stress Regulation Model explores this critical intersection between physiology, psychology, perception, and behavior.

It demonstrates how chronic stress shapes the nervous system—and how deliberate practice can reshape it.

The environment does not have to choose your response.

You can learn to recognize your patterns.

You can regulate your physiology.

You can widen your options.

And in doing so, you may rediscover who you truly are beneath years of adaptation.

Take care.

Walk well.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:39

Welcome back, folks, to episode one hundred and fifty-three 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. And what we're going to be discussing today are two major patterns of behavior. One is going to be victimhood, and the other is going to be authorship. Now, this isn't about speaking badly of what victims are, or even speaking of like somebody that tends to be an author of their own life is somehow better, but rather these two patterns of behavior, they're paradigms on a dipole, basically part of the same continuum, but they are quite related to stress. It's not just a thinking pattern, a thinking process that occurs, but it's one that's quite physical, that reflects itself in how we speak and the beliefs we develop during stress, and we're going to discuss these two things. What I'd like to do first is give some credit to where credit is due, and that's to author Jason Gaddis. He's the author of Getting to Zero, How to Work Through Conflict in Your High Sticks Relationships. And I think he provides some really, really useful ideas as to identifying behaviorally and also conceptually how stress happens and how that gets our relationships into a tangle in the sense that we start having trouble not only communicating, but maybe even breaking relationships as a result of miscommunication and misunderstanding. But uh what I'd like to point out is that he provided some really good ideas on victimhood and authorship. And I'd like to tie them to the physiological aspect, because this is something he doesn't really get big into, but he kind of points at it, mind you, this is something that's been written probably about eight years ago, more or less, and uh it's an excellent book. But what I want to point out is that victimhood in particular and authorship in particular are two patterns of thought and behavior that are as a result seen as the extremes, and we miss kind of the continuum between and how they're actually quite connected in a way, in the sense they're part of our stress response patterns, but also what it is that happens to us whenever we're relating to people, and anytime we have conflict, generally speaking, not many of us get in arguments with a rock or a car. Now that does happen with extreme mental illness, and I'm not messing with that. What I am pointing out is that generally speaking, it's a social scheme. We have the social level that is like a level, the ground that we walk on, and that's where we interact and we get along to get along. Once again, that's allowed. It's not inauthentic, that's just necessary, and that's what we'll call or what is called the strategic self, and that's also the ego self or the self-image or the mask of the polis, the mask of the marketplace that we wear, so that we can act in a way that's appropriate and know that we're meeting the conditions of the social scheme of where we're at, at the marketplace buying fruit, or at work, wherever we're a colleague or cohort, and being able to understand that we have to act within within certain parameters that are considered appropriate, not being harassing or ugly, this sort of thing, knowing that we have more and more attention being paid to such things because behaviors are an exhibit of what our internal state is in most cases. And there are people that are really good at hiding how they actually are, like when somebody says, Hey, how are you doing today and say, I'm fine, I'm fine. And you know that I'm fine does not mean I'm okay, it's just that they're trying to bypass that and not get into what's actually underlying, and maybe it's not appropriate for work. But yet at the same time, we can grow into these patterns of self-protection and uh a relational disconnection that uh keeps us from having to feel those things or interact with somebody that might pull things out of me that I'm not ready to process, so to speak. So it's a big, deep, hairy thing. But what we're gonna focus on are gonna be the two points of one, victimhood, two, authorship, what the thoughts look like, what the behavior looks like, what might drive it, but also why it is that these two things are so important. It doesn't mean everyone's a victim or that everyone's a winner and an author of their own life. Not saying that. What I am pointing out is the these patterns are are actually quite connected in the sense that they're part of a continuum of behavior, that we want to move from one that's a little less healthy, the victimhood, to one that's a little more healthy, the authorship. And that has a lot to do with how well I feel I'm driving my personal ship, my life, so to speak, uh going through the waters of our life or the social scheme, knowing full well that our boat is on the water, knowing also that the water holds things in the deep. And what are those things? Octopi? Sharks, whale, God knows what. That's kind of scary when we think how small we are in an ocean, especially when if we're in a little dinghy, and our body, our our our life is the little boat versus a ship that we're on. And uh we become safer, metaphorically, whenever we're on a big ship with other people, and this is the conglomerate social scheme that we're part of, but whenever we feel disconnected from that, sometimes we feel like we're that little dinghy, that little uh floaty in the ocean is just mean, and we feel quite vulnerable. And um sometimes when we connect very well, we're part of the bigger ship where the whole uh volume of the number of people are there are not only accepting, but I'm part of it, and I feel quite connected. And uh the connection part is very important to this conversation. So as we move forward towards understanding the ideas of victimhood and authorship in one's life, uh, I want us to look at relationship to other people, because once again, to have any kind of conflict or relationship, we have to have other, we have to have someone else, at least one other person, a dyad. A triad if you have a triangle there of people, and sometimes there is one. Usually the third person is either at a distance that somebody talks to that the other one's not aware of, or it could be the person that's being spoken of in cahoots by two people and they're not there. So if we want to look at it in that sense, the triangular aspect of relationship uh can occur wherever you're in person, or wherever there are two people and one person is out being spoken of in rooms that you've never entered, so to speak. And uh this is an important concept and dynamic that often affects how we relate to people. Um many times we can have two people versus one, wherever two people join forces and can make the other person feel pushed out, accepted, or in the other sense, wherever two people are pushing somebody out and they're not aware of what the situation is, or maybe accepting them in, but they're not aware that they've been accepted in because they haven't been spoken to. So those are social dynamic triangulation points that we have to point out to make sense of this whole conversation. Because often those two are are reflective of the the way we interact with people, the way we relate, and um attachment styles are the big thing that um our people are really talking about now, where we have an avoidant attachment style, anxious attachment smile, then you have the secure attachment style. Much of what we've had modeled has taught us how we attach and whether or not we feel secure whenever we have somebody near us that we care about that accepts us, and whenever we're out seeking approval, so to speak, and validation not only of ourselves, of the things we do that give us a sense of security and connection with the greater whole. Now, the reason I'm pointing this out is that we're social creatures, we're wired to the group. We must have other to be healthy. And I usually make fun whenever I talk about the rough and tufts and don't take crap off a nobody person that says, I don't need anybody, but yet, you know, the can of tuna they go and get had people canning that for them, and they had to go and buy it at the store and they had to interact with somebody. So even though they may not acknowledge, they're still quite dependent on all those other people to be able to gain and transact in that fashion. And even at the level wherever you're doing a store pickup or a delivery, like DoorDash, there's still people involved. So there is a dependence by default. So we can't really ever escape unless we're on a desert island or you go off the grid and and even then there is a dependence on nature. Sometimes the social interaction can be with the fish and the birds, uh, if you develop friendship that way. We all need that. It's something that balances us and keeps us healthy. We have a lot of neuronal structure that has to do with not only body language and interpretation of tone, but also to the words that we speak and interpretation of well, what did that mean? And much of that really is what drives our social interaction, but there's also a risk whenever we speak to somebody, whenever we act or react in front of somebody, and whenever we say things to somebody, because all those three things require an interpretive factor. Now, if we have been in a very stressful, chaotic environment growing up, we tend not to trust people and what they say, but more so pay attention to what they do first, and often we tend to level an eye at them and tend to approach very safe uh carefully and safely as best we can. As an example, if we were brought up in a very chaotic environment and there was a lot of punitive factors wherever we would get punished or hit or hurt frequently, or maybe taken advantage of, then we're very, very careful as to pay an attention to what those behaviors are that will indicate I'll be able to get the things that I need safety, security, comfort, food, warmth, and maybe alleviation of pain. And the roles that we take on, this is something that's a big deal in uh substance use disorder treatment, in where people discuss the roles people play, such as the scapegoat, the clown, the entertainer, also the savior and the healer, and the one that uh is the quiet child disorder thing. And we take on a certain quality of behavior. Now that does not mean that's your personality once again, these are stress-born states that practice chronically enough become stress-born trait-like behavior. And I don't say traits because they're not physiologically endowed necessarily that we're born with, but they're conditioned, and they can become part of our personality over time if they're chronic enough, long enough, especially when we're young enough to wherever we're very, very impressionable. And we tend to learn not only from our environment, physical interaction where the environment shapes us, but also vicariously in that we learn by watching what to do, what not to do, when to do, when not to do, this sort of thing. So it can be a very volatile situation that shapes us, and therefore our attachment style, so to speak, may be reflective of that. But also a communication and the way we communicate. This is where we start getting into the the difference between victimhood and authorship and what might shape that. Now, to start off with uh the shaping of the the two main ideas here, uh let's look at victimhood. That's a big one. Now that that's a hotbed uh for all kinds of argument and topic, and I'm not talking about victimizing the victim and talking bad to them and straightening them out or telling them to get a job so they won't feel anxious or depressed, this sort of thing. Not saying anything like that. Those are some ugly things that I've heard out in the community and in clinic no less. And uh those things actually did shape how people developed, and I I've seen this day in, day out for many, many years once I was able to recognize it. But the fact is that there is a state of victimhood that uh has not only a state but a consciousness of sorts or a way of speaking that uh is very reflective of that being a victim, having been a victim, been victimized, but not everyone that has been a victim has taken on the victim state of mind or victim state of being and doing. And that is kind of not really a persona of sorts, but for this conversation, I guess it will fit. We'll take on the victim persona and the victim consciousness or mindset and also language that supports that way of doing things, and it sounds almost dirty when I say it, but it's not so much victim as in weak, but rather recognizing that it's a pattern of survival at the survival level, the self-regulatory skills that we've been talking about, it's physiological first. And our consciousness is reflective of that state. So if we haven't overcome things or we've been overcome, overrun and overwhelmed, and that we learn uh a learned helplessness behavior, that we have to do what's called uh a very yin or negative, not in the bad sense, but one that's a drawing or magnetic way of getting attention by being not only pleasing but placating those that are in power, then we start seeing what might drive some of this behavior and belief pattern, the belief pattern that stems from um being overcome and overwhelmed and being underpowered and unable to control what's going on in the environment gives us uh what we start developing as a external locus of control, to use an old psychological term. And when I say external locus, let's call it external environmental focus. Because if we have an external environmental focus, we know that there are things out there that I can manipulate, that I can control, that I can change that may alleviate my stress or give me a sense of comfort. And this tends to resemble what people describe whenever they have extreme anxiety and and obsessive compulsive disorder, yes, OCD, not in all cases and not in the clinical sense where I'm diagnosing, but I'm saying this is very reflective of what people say when they have OCD, that by controlling or tidying or straightening, that there is a measure of relief of that anxiety. And anxiety, once again, is not a separate state from fight-flight. It is part of the continuum moving toward extremity of fight-flight hypervigilance to wherever all bits are off in its life or death. And it may feel incredibly uncomfortable until one straighten things and keep things tidy and clean, even though we know the rest of our world is falling apart, or maybe emotionally I'm not doing great, my perceived sense of stress goes down by maybe straightening the bookshelf, maybe dusting a little bit, maybe mopping the floor, knowing that I cleaned the best baseboards with a toothbrush, this sort of thing. And I'm not making fun or light in any way. I'm just making a very distinct point as to what it can look like. Now, how else can this manifest in the sense of victimhood or that victim aspect of consciousness that we're talking about, in that whenever we do things, we feel like nothing that we do fixes what's going on inside by just changing our mind internally. It's not just about believing in myself and then it starts getting better. I actually have to do something outside to create change that makes me feel better internally, knowing that whatever change happens that makes me feel good inside is driven by the outside. By default, that's an all the time 100%. And that's the closest to an absolute I'll ever speak, but it drives the point home. Now, what kind of things might we see with this victim quality that we're talking about? Well, the shedding of responsibility and accountability is first. Never can be involved in a sense where you can get blamed, because it's responsibility and accountability aren't bad things, but what they're actually saying is that I don't want to take the blame. It's like the dark side of the same coin. You turn it over and the word blame is coupled with what did you do? Responsible. We're going to hold you accountable, punitive punishment. You deserve this because this was happened because you did this. And sometimes being in that state of I've been at the point of victimhood, if we look at this as an inverted triangle where the triangle is not flat on its base like a pyramid, but rather the point of it, almost like a spinning top, is on the ground, and that's the smallest base, but that's where the individual is, and everything is pointed at them. The other two points of the triangle, according to Gaddis, it's a really good idea to look at it this way, is the one point at the bottom is me, and all that pressure and all that weight from the social scheme is down on me and is pointed at me, and the point can indicate hurt, and I don't like the spear. That's hurting my feelings, hurting my physical being or my social standing where I could be cast out and not be part of the group. And I need connection. I need connection badly, and I see connection. And I see connection in a rescuer, that's one point of the triangle at the very top that's offbalancing. Then I seek to find who is responsible for my discomfort. That's the villain, the other point of the triangle, opposite of the rescuer up top, where the base is inverted and it's once again the top part of it, and the weight of it's on the victim. And the relationship is that if we can identify the villain, we're always going to point and blame. But we identify the rescuer, this is where we relation uh relationally speaking, are going to be reaching out to try to get them to our side. And often this consciousness of the victim is one where, hey, come to my side. This is where we start seeing bandwagoning, where we start seeing, hey, don't you agree that if somebody does this, that it's like that instead, where they want you to agree with their idea, and that is a very conceptual in their mind, save my ego, save my idea of person by being together with someone else. They're trying to create a connection, a social connection, such that they're not standing alone. They want to be part of a group, they feel isolated. Once again, they're at the very base point of the victim triangle at the bottom, and all of this weight is going to fall on them. And blame is like death. Blame is death to the ego. Blame is death to the self-image. Blame is death to the value of themselves, which is very small. Blame is death to that sense of uh self-esteem that is very small and attached to what they do on the outside, and often people that are very esteem broken will often do the bling. They will put on the clothes, the show, and the quaffed hair and the makeup and the smell good, all those things that are externally visible, experienceable, and palpable to somebody else they interact with is trying to sell an image, an image that they're trying to doll up so that you'll accept them because they're so beautiful you can't not accept them. And this is quite indicative of how vacuous and empty one feels whenever one has been possibly abused or neglected. And worst of all, whenever we're children, the attention that a parent gives us, it's life. Their eyes on us is life. Being seen is one of the healthiest things you can give children, equivalent to the time that you put in with them sitting on the floor playing Legos and passing time with them, letting them know that you're valuable. There are a lot of adult things that we do. One of those adult things that we must do is parent with love and kindness and give our time because that's just as important as paying the bills. And um, whenever we don't get that, we start seeing the development of that victimhood, of that blame. I can't be blamed or else I won't get all the good attention from mom and dad or whoever the caregiver is or the person that raises them. So something important to think about here as well is that the accountability and responsibility is hard whenever you've grown up that way, and you may run into people, adults, that will not take a blame. They'll do everything to avoid being involved in things where there might be some responsibility for for an action, even if it's good for them. They may avoid it because they don't want to put themselves out there, so it limits their growth and their function as an individual. But once again, the victim aspect is reflective of the state of being. Now, the state of being on the physiological side, just to add a couple of things, the more comfortable you are, and the more in a state of not only ease but gratitude, you kind of assume that everything is that needs to be there, is there. Um, we tend to be more at ease and comfort with people and self and even by ourselves, then we tend to see less of these victimhood states of thought and behavior, and uh especially about accountability and responsibility, where we're more apt to be able to accept that, yes, I did that, and yes, that was a mistake, but I can do this, I can fix it, and be in a state of mind where I act I can actually see myself doing this in my own mind. Now, the other dipole of this, whenever we have an increase in the sense of urgency, that's where we start seeing where the state of mind that comes along with a victim's mindset, I don't want to be alone, uh, I gotta be connected, I can't be responsible, accountable, I won't take blame. And I will blame someone else, and I'm gonna look to connect with people, even if it goes against my own values and principles. The higher the urgency, the more we start seeking for that which we feel is missing, the connection, the safety, the comfort, or maybe where it is that there's somebody else I can blame. I start looking, and we may even start invading people's space where we want to get close because we don't like being alone, can't stand being alone. So uh that's gonna be all I'm gonna say about that part, but that has to do with once again uh elevated levels of arousal. It tends to parallel higher heart rate, lower levels of uh higher cognitive function, where prefrontal cortex goes offline and our rationale goes out the window, so to speak. Now, the next part, what we're going to be talking about is authorship. How can we move from the state of discomfort and victim mentality, victimhood, or victim behavior to one of authorship wherever I start writing my life? Now, there is a famous author, Mr. Steven Barnes, whom whom I love. He's a friend on Facebook now. And um his science fiction was the first science fiction that I ever read that I really, really enjoyed as an uh older person. I was probably in my 30s when I was going uh through uh undergrad and moving into grad school, and uh his first uh book that I read called the Kundalini Equation, I was hooked. It was amazing, and he's done a reissue of that book as of late, and it's actually out on Audible, and I would encourage you to listen to it. It's an amazing story. But uh the reason I mention uh him is that he has a course called Life Writing, and I remember buying it on VHS many years back, and um I wore that thing out, but he was talking about how being able to write, like writing a character, would be similar to the story that we're writing of our life, our own narrative. And very important ideas here is that we write our life. We're the the authors of our narrative or how we're going to be. And if all the world's a stage, everyone's an actor, uh takes on a new light when we realize that, well, we're part of that. Being able to act in a certain way does not mean inauthenticity. It just means that I'm trying to fulfill the role that I want to be, and sometimes it's not to fake it till you make it, but do it in the sense that you have this goal of building skill conditioning and repetition that even though someone may say that you're trying to act as if what you're doing is acting with intention of becoming, and it's not inauthentic, it's a true desire, and that's okay. Uh, but with authorship, if we take a look at that triangle that we use for the victim, where the victim is at the very bottom of the point of the triangle, and uh the villain is the top corner, and then the rescue is the other cur uh corner. We see where the relation is, but the pressure's all on the victim. For the author, we invert that triangle and the base is down just like a pyramid. But at the very bottom corner is a challenger to our ideas, our things, what we do. And on the other corner, there is support. Those people that support us that we interact and reach out for that. But um, at the very top, at the apex, at the peak, the capstone is the author. That's me. That is us, that is you. Whenever we can take not only the challenge and criticism, and we'll get it, but not be in any way knocked off your center, do we always have a base? And you have those supporters that would indicate to you that, yeah, you're gonna have people once you put yourself out there, they're gonna have an opinion, and the first thing they do is they try to tell you what's wrong because they're projecting their insecurities. And um, I will make a very distinct point. I have a uh a friend that um that has a martial arts program that she teaches online, phenomenally skilled individual, and uh she's from uh Chechia, and I I love seeing all the stuff she puts out there, but her students from all over the earth are really, really encouraging to hear because they're changing their lives as a result of her coaching and teaching of of uh Hungar Kung Fu, the Hungar family kung fu. And um she's got my props because uh amazing work that she does, but she's doing it for the right reasons and she's teaching it well, and it's not kung fu light, it's the real thing. But also it's about a lifelong journey. But there are people that are trolls and they detract of her, but uh there are people that say some horrific things. It's like, why do you say such things whenever you know this individual is doing good work, but yet at a distance, people cast rocks and the internet being what it is, we have trolls, and trolley be is trolley do, and um they will be by the nature of themselves doing what they do, and that that's part of it. The idea is not to hang on to it, block them if you must, but there's always going to be that sort of thing. And in real life, in the social scheme, you're gonna have them in the in your face, you're gonna have people saying things behind your back. Once again, that triangulation being spoken of in rooms you've never entered in a good way or a bad way occurs. Uh, but in the office that authorship sense, um, there are going to be places where they're gonna be speaking of you to bring you into the fold, so to speak, and to support you and help you. And it'll support that bottom corner where the supporters are, but also base you out, give you better stability, so that way you can weather the discomfort of what real life throws at you once in a while. And the authorship at the peak, hey, that is an amazing thing. That means that we shine our capstone. And uh, that is a good thing. Now, why are these two things, the victimhood and uh authorship idea, so connected? Well, whenever you have that sense of authorship, you have a sense of a plum and comfort. That means that you're not in a hyper-arousal state or a vigilant state that's chronic or perpetual, like you tend to have with a victim state that turns on with a switch, but you have a greater degree of comfort and ease most of the time, stayed in the state of gratitude and comfort, and knowing that things are being worked out or that I have a way to work them out, and I can actually plan forward, I can actually see myself in the future versus just experiencing myself in the right now and fearing what's going to happen in the future because of the right then, but not being in the space of the immediate moment, which means I'm I'm in the state of running or fighting or fleeing, uh, even though there may not be a conflict. And sometimes our own nervous system condition will want to protect us, and that's what it's doing. But uh when things generalize, it's not always such a great thing. But um this is kind of a yin and yang perspective on authorship of life and victimhood, wherever life is taken from is by the external environment. The authorship is one that is of an internal locus of control wherever I have an elevated level of sense of I have more uh ability to control what's going on outside of me by keeping control of what's going on inside of me. And those are important things. Now, what I'd like to point out relative to these two ideas is that um when we're discussing conflict, not all conflict has to do with disagreement. Sometimes it has to do with a very immediate misinterpretation. I'll give a very specific, for instance, whenever somebody is getting up out of bed, for instance, and uh let's say you have a back pain and you make a face, and let's say your spouse sees you and immediately interprets that as, oh, they're angry at me, not knowing that you have a twinge of pain in your back, and they run around with that idea the rest of the day, well, they're mad at me. I don't know why. I didn't know what I do. I start becoming very internally focused, thinking, what did I do? Start questioning. We start taking that victimhood mentality to the point of, you know, there's something that I did, it's my fault. And that's a collapse of behavior versus one where the individual would be doing the exact opposite, where we have uh posturing, where we start seeing people acting out and trying to intimidate by their behavior because really they're very scared on the inside. And um, whenever we have that misinterpretation, it can happen within a fraction of a moment. We have to rem remember that our capacity to communicate is we have to interpret body language first. We can see a body moving and differentiate a male and a female at 500 yards on a flat plane, and they look like little ants way out there, but yet we're still able to tell the difference. We're really hypersensitive to that. And it's seeing at that distance, that does not require that we be able to bring them into focus in detail and see their clothes at that distance. You can't. That is uh a very subtle aspect of our wiring wherever you don't have to have clarity and detail and 3D depth to be able to determine motion and sensitivity to type of motion. And uh we have some of that, and that's our deep, deep wiring that has to do with survival and determination of threat or friend or foe, so to speak. And mind you, that hat starts happening at about 13,000ths of a second, where our conscious mind starts making sense and labeling at 1.2 seconds was a twelve twelve hundred milliseconds. That's kind of wild. That's 400 times faster than the conscious mind that we start perceiving and making sense of interpreting at the neurological level and making safe, so to speak. So that's a lot that we've mentioned. And once again, these two ideas are really potent, and we see these every day, but this isn't about being a victim. This isn't about being the penultimate author, but understanding that there are states of body that underlie the states of consciousness to develop these two ways of being and doing in a life. So I want to tell you thank you for passing this uh late Sunday morning, early Sunday afternoon. It's already afternoon here in West Texas. We have a lot of high heat and high winds happening. And um, I want to tell you thank you for coming along. And uh the Running Man book should be out within this next week or so. We're getting the cover uh finished and it should be uploaded to Amazon, and I will let y'all know as soon as that is up. And I'm hoping we'll patronize that book once it's out because it is proffering the running man model. I'm really proud of that book, but it's uh going to be one that can be incredibly helpful not only to individuals that want to get better self-regulation skills, but also one that clinicians, non-clinicians, sports psychologists, or even coaches and teachers can use and for business leaders to help not only manage self, but understand what happens whenever others are under stress, too. It's a useful tool. And once again, I appreciate your time. Take care. Walk well,