Free Your Mind: How Stress Hides Your Authentic Self

Ep 155. Free Your Mind. Return to Yourself.

Every human being longs to live as their authentic self.

From childhood until the end of life, we seek more than achievement or success—we seek acceptance, belonging, meaning, and the freedom to become who we truly are.

Yet the modern world often pulls us away from ourselves.

Although our lives have changed dramatically over thousands of years, our nervous systems still rely on ancient survival programs designed to respond rapidly to danger. These neurological systems evolved to help us survive immediate physical threats—not the chronic stress, anxiety, social pressure, uncertainty, and information overload that characterize modern life.

Our brains still respond to today's stress with yesterday's survival strategies.

When these survival systems remain activated for weeks, months, or years, they begin shaping how we think, perceive, and interact with the world.

Fear becomes caution.

Hypervigilance becomes identity.

Anxiety becomes personality.

Stress begins writing the story we believe about ourselves.

But what if that story isn't really who you are?

What if many of the characteristics you've come to identify with are not permanent personality traits, but adaptive stress responses developed by a nervous system trying to protect you?

This realization changes everything.

The Running Man Human Stress Model teaches that self-regulation is about far more than reducing stress.

It is about recovering yourself.

By learning to recognize the earliest physiological signs of stress—both within ourselves and in others—we gain something incredibly valuable:

Time.

Distance.

Choice.

Freedom.

As our nervous system becomes more regulated, our perception becomes clearer. We become less reactive, more adaptable, and more capable of responding intentionally rather than automatically.

Instead of living through the filter of fear, anxiety, pain, and negative beliefs, we begin experiencing life through clarity, resilience, curiosity, and genuine presence.

This is not about becoming someone new.

It is about removing what stress has placed over who you have always been.

 Who Are You Beneath Your Stress?

The Running Man Human Stress Model offers a practical, physiology-first approach to helping people reduce unnecessary suffering, build resilience, expand their stress tolerance, and rediscover the person beneath chronic stress.

Because beneath fear...

Beneath anxiety...

Beneath hypervigilance...

Beneath self-doubt...

You are still there.

Free your mind.

Free yourself.

Become who you were always capable of becoming.

Take care.

Walk well.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:39

Welcome back, folks, to episode 155 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 has to do with, well, what are the benefits of doing self-regulation in the first place? That's what this whole podcast is about, self-regulation skills and becoming skillful at that. And we know that that applies to post-traumatic stress reactivity, anxiety, perceived stress, worry, fear, and even if you get the jitters. And I had somebody ask me, well, what do you do with like test anxiety or or having fear of speaking in front of crowds and in public? And I was explaining that this applies perfectly to this because it's useful, and I use this stuff whenever I've gotten and still get the little butterfly jitters once in a while. So what's the benefit of using self-regulatory skills? Is what we're going to be discussing next. And it's going to be the immediate and also the long-term benefits. So we'll start off with the short-term benefits, because the metaphor of the mind that would say time as an immediate is much closer as in within arm's reach, so to speak. Notice the language I'm using. And that is an example. It's done on purpose. Rarely do I do things accidentally. Not that I don't make mistakes, I've trip plenty, but uh the point is that even in the linguistics that we use to describe what we call distance from comfort or distance from discomfort, they become kind of a idea that we make a mental picture of in a sense. And it's at the level that's preverbal that occurs at uh the brainstem level that has a lot to do with how we're more arbore arboreal and recognizing patterns of what look like fruit and being able to recognize patterns on the ground, like certain carpets that might make you feel kind of nauseated or something like that because they're in quotes too busy has been the term, actually often will resemble patterns that look like um I would say like a snake uh pattern or this the diamond back pattern of like a rattler here in Texas. And that can make you respond very similarly, but that's an old pattern recognition thing that had to do with how do I stay alive. Now, the immediate benefits will start with that of practicing the self-regulatory skills and more specifically uh the running man health um human stress model uh will help you make sense of it because I've organized it in a way that makes it not only teachable, but uh self-sustaining in the sense that once we become aware of it, uh we recognize it, you no longer need the book after that, and uh you start realizing that all that information is within us. We just have to become aware of it. And whenever we use the self-awareness term in quotes, it becomes broad. And the way it's being pushed in and self-help is problematic sometimes because it's something that usually says that once you're aware, that's it. It's like whenever you're walking on the ground barefoot, you can tell whenever you're on the ground barefoot versus wearing socks, or maybe even the signals are cut off because we're wearing really thick shoes, this sort of thing. But yet when you take your feet off, it it's a different world of experience, so to speak. And not unlike that, awareness is something that varies depending on what you're doing. But once you get it, you know how to access it. And that's really what the Running Man Self-regulation skills project is about, but also not only awakening a person to self-awareness about things, but making one more aware of the fact that you can consciously use these tools to make a difference in your life so you can free yourself. So the immediate benefits, and I'll get back to freeing oneself as a concept because it is a big deal. And the immediate benefits when we experience sudden onset stress, when we experience fear, when we experience pain, oh, I dropped a rock on my foot. My favorite of all metaphorical ideas that I don't like actually doing, I've actually broken tarsal bones with my uh club bells, and the knobs on top are perfectly round, so even though they didn't fall from a distance, uh free fall, they tipped over, but yet the perfection of that roundness cracked some tarsal bones on my right foot. That was not a lot of fun. I've done that twice, mind you. And uh that tells you about my uh deafness of foot. But the reason I use that as an idea is that we have memory, and how we relate to memory, generally speaking, is visual first before we ever have words and opinions that are higher cortical executive function thoughts about it. And when we experience things, generally it's from the bottom of the brain stem up to the up higher levels of the brain, the midbrain that are more survival and emotion-oriented, that are taken in perception before they ever become signals that get interpreted into words. And we're gonna add the time frame, the time frame at perception, at the immediacy of percept, once a signal comes from the environment into our eyes, our ears, this sort of thing, but we'll use eyes in this perspective because this makes the most sense right now, is within thirteen thirteen thousandths of a second, which is four hundred times faster than our conscious thought begins at the executive function level that starts at 1.2 seconds, which is pretty still, in comparison, fast, but not nearly as incredibly fast as at the thirteen thousandths of a second. And that is even so fast that we can't even with our bioprogramming determine friend or foe. So by default, we become reactive and respond to things as their potential threat. And even though it may be granny holding up a cup of cocoa for us, if it's very sudden onset, we have to treat it. And once again, this isn't a decision we consciously make by the volition of our character, our ego, and our person as we know by name, that we've been raised by this lady that's given us cocoa, but rather at the neurological level. So this is a pretty powerful idea that we're working with. And it's a neurological reality that we're we're quite able to measure. But at that level, that means that we're treating all things that are sudden as potential threat. And even though it's inaccurate, and once we realize, oh, it's just Grammy, she's bringing me cocoa with marshmallows, no less than a little cinnamon. That's so awesome. And notice all the language that I added after the fact, not only opinion, but even some emotive words and thoughts going along with that. So I filled in the narrative to make the story fit what made me feel comfortable at that moment. And that's what our higher executive function does. Now, that signal at 13,000th of a second in comparison to a twelve hundred milliseconds, which is 1.2 seconds, is incredibly fast. But also, that's also incredibly before even our emotion gets in. Emotion comes on even before our thoughts and words come up. So just to give us context, why this is important is that this level of immediacy is that level of stress that we come up with where self-regulation skills shine as well to keep us from getting overwhelmed if something is compelling. And let's say that wasn't Granny. Okay. Let's say it's somebody that I may have mistaken as granny and like, wait, hold on, who are you? How'd you get in the kitchen and what is that? That doesn't look like cocoa okay. So now we start making differential sense versus my prior experience that I have identity and experience with grandson, grandmother versus this is a stranger wearing a dress and a wig, and I don't know, are they gonna mug me with that mug? They might. Now, why am I using this? It's to give us an idea as to what the difference may be and the potential. We may have dolled it up and very quickly made sense of stuff inaccurately. That's not grandma, that is somebody else, and oh, I forgot, I'm on the set of a movie or theater, and uh yeah, I totally got scared thinking that or getting reminded of my prior experience, and that was grandma. So I filled it in. And fact of the matter is I was just helping build a stage and I was sitting back relaxing, and I got surprised by somebody and I got taken back into reverie based on my past experience. Well, yeah, that can happen. But that also is one of those things that can fill in what it is that we call our experience moving forward that is colored by our past, our experience, our knowing and expectations, so to speak. So, how does self-regulation skill help at this most immediate level? It can help us lower that jump in heart rate, that immediate stress, and help us be able to manage things with more higher cortical function versus it being running away in the sense with higher heart rate, and we err on the side of, oh my God, this is dangerous. I need to turn the the heart on, so it starts to trip hammer, blood pressure goes up, heart rate goes up, breathing changes in the sense that we take big deep sonorous breaths where we're starting to suck wind, and I am miming that a little bit for y'all, and that's wherever we start breathing more oxygen in so we can burn more as we go, because we have now become more skeletal muscle dominant by default. We get tense, and once the blood flow starts to evacuate the front part of the brain, we no longer have as much IQ available. It's not that you're not smart, it's just not you're not as smart right now because somehow the fuel to fuel that IQ that you have, it's going to the muscles. So you can flex and you get swollen, you get all this vascularity going on. And what happens next is that you either run really fast or fight really hard, or you might be uh in the process of being overcome and you have to find a way to survive somehow. So escape and evasion is what the primary thing uh that that's going to be as an ideal that we're going to be thinking. It's very simple thinking, no less. And we're going to identify with that. We're going to have a memory of it later. And it's going to not only make sense, but it's going to shape who I become, so to speak, whenever I'm dealing with stress in the future. So this has some very long-running effects, but the immediate benefits of the running man model is recognizing what happens, being able to perceive and make sense of things more quickly without jumping to a conclusion, not knowing that that wasn't a threat, but rather it just looks weird because it resembled somebody and I made an error in reasoning. And this is the first big point we're going to make, is that we're wired to survive, but also we're also wired to be able to adapt whenever we don't have enough information, when we have inaccurate information, and we jump to working conclusions, okay? And that doesn't mean that we're jumping to conclusions in in the long-term sense, but we can't uh jump to a conclusion that would be a workable one because our brain is starting to move towards binary reasoning in the sense that it's one or two, up or down, black or white, right or wrong, my way or the highway. And whenever we have that kind of simplicity, that means our ability to make a decision goes up in the sense that it gets a lot faster. We reduce the time it takes to make a decision. Now, our chances are being inaccurate 50-50. Uh, it's probably more than that, but just from the perspective of you only have two choices, you pick one or the other, one's gonna help you, the other one won't. But it's not that perfectly absolute when things do get reduced as well, because there may be other variables, but the largest uh emphasis I'm placing on is the fact that our mind becomes simplified. Our ability to decide gets very, very uh limited, but it doesn't make it stronger. Sometimes we get stuck in in what we call analysis paralysis when we have too many options. We can have an uh uh an equivalence of that when we freeze, where we can see what we got to do, but the freeze response may overcome us and keep us from making a good decision that will either engender life and protect us or cause us to forfeit our life accidentally if it's really that dangerous. Now to add further emphasis on the benefits of the immediate whenever we're using the running man model, one of the things is recognizing symptomology within self. Another one is that if I recognize the stress in somebody else and I'm not stressed, I can see the stress coming down the pipes. I can avoid, I can prevent, or start doing things strategically that can keep things from unraveling in a really negative sense. And that doesn't necessarily mean start encouraging rapport in a verbal sense, but rather we have to realize communication before rapport happens. Rapport is communication with trust. But whenever we're looking at where communication starts, it's at the body language level. And we're so sensitive that we can tell the difference between a male and female at 500 yards on a flat plane, that means body language is incredibly important. Anything that we reduce down to motion, body languages, motion, even facial body languages, is movement of the face, the facial muscles, even the head, inflection, tone, eyebrows up and down, this sort of thing, and even the way we move our mouth and place our hands around our face, grooming behaviors, this sort of stuff, tell us things before words ever get spoken. And if those things don't match with the tone or the sound of it, they sound inauthentic or insincere, we're probably not going to do business with them. And that's literally 93% of any kind of communication before it ever becomes talk. The talk or the words, the verbiage, the message, that, the lexical stuff, 7%. That means it holds very little sway in the immediate moments of what could become not only potentially stressful, but incredibly dangerous. Now, the immediate benefit of the running man model, I've been saying this twice, here it is, you're able to maintain calm generally when things are about to get difficult. You tend to allow yourself the opportunity to maintain more executive function so you can keep your choices. You don't allow the environment outside of you to choose for you. Even if it's sudden, you keep more of your choices available. That means you have the possibility of being able to see things that even maybe the person that might be stressing you, or even an opponent, or even somebody's trying to prey upon you or set you up doesn't have because they're very focal and want you to fall within a certain pattern of behavior. If you don't, you're no longer good. If you're too resistant or seem like too much trouble, you're probably not going to get picked. And this isn't just people that want to prey on you to kill you, but also people that want to prey upon you and get you to to buy, to get you to do certain things where they try to go you into doing things that maybe you don't want to do, and that kind of influence and manipulation on an everyday level is very close to us. And it doesn't always have to cost us our life, but it can cost us dignity, our our own value of self and how we see our interactions, or maybe even feel vulnerable to situations where maybe people are rallying others based on a lie that may be about you and has nothing to do with anything true, but yet people will do that because sometimes people are afraid and they will gather together where there's a strong influence, a strong character, where somebody may inflect and be really believable or me maybe even be an incredible storyteller and get people to jump on the bandwagon and all of a sudden you are now targeted. And those things happen every day in work situations, but the problem is that we're wired to be part of the group. And whenever we are not accepted, this is for men and women, both our survivability or a sense of survivability that we've inherited for many hundreds of thousands of years from the cave person times, whenever we were kicked out of uh one village to a tribe or a little group of humans trying to survive, you now become the baloney sandwich, you become not only huntable, but more accessible to eat and uh kill for that matter. And those things may not be occurring in a modern sense every day at work or at home with family, but those feelings that tell you that it's that serious, that wiring is still there. Those programs are still there, and they're there for a reason. So being able to calm the body, learning how to use the self-regulatory skills, being able to stay in peripheral visual awareness largely is a symptom of how calm you are in an environment. Whenever you have to look around over your shoulders more, left and right, and you're scanning more, that means you've lost some peripheral awareness. That means chances are you have a little anxiety. You may not have called it anxiety yet, but you may be experiencing it. Heart rate going up, breathing changes, intention, and maybe even a little sweating or clamminess in your palms, or fidgety, or feeling like people are looking at you when maybe they're not, they just may be looking, but you're keying in on eyes because whenever you're targeted, how do people target you? Well, they see you first. Their eyes will move in a direction toward you. And if you're feeling unsure, insecure about yourself in your mind, or unsure, insecure in your environment, don't know the people here, a lot of people moving around, and some of them may be sketchy. Yeah, they may feel like they're looking at you, and if you don't pay attention to who is looking at you, then once again the baloney sandwich is the problem. That means you are it, and that's the problem. So often we have to get up and make egress, get out of there, find a way out before you interact with people, and that's okay. And we start making up all these stories about offending people, being embarrassed, and it's not about that. It's about keeping your organism safe and alive. So, in that sense of how this model helps you in the immediate, it helps you recognize what's happening. It doesn't erase those things. Those things are there for a reason, but also what it does long term, shifting gears a little bit, and not only helps you navigate situations that are stressful, it helps you go into those very same situations with more calm, more plum, and more a sense of wellness and comfort, wherever you don't feel like everything is a threat, but you can see and read things and not start telling yourself a story of that's dangerous and this is going to happen, that's gonna happen. But rather recognizing where the potential could occur, but not hanging on it. Recognizing where things may not be well and listening to your body and paying attention to the fact that, okay, maybe I don't need to come in here before you sit down there and not getting caught by that catch-22 wherever I have to do the social scheme, put on the mask of the marketplace and act as if I'm okay when really I'm not. And that means that one of the benefits of using this model is that it allows you to be true to yourself whenever things are not being true to you because the environment owes you nothing. It doesn't owe you safety. People do not owe you protection. Now there are a lot of good people out there, and we know that. But whenever it comes to the neurological load, what we call the allostatic load, not only in medicine, but in neuropsychology and psychology and physiology, the allostatic load is even immune system stress. But whenever we're talking about the stress of the environment, it owes you nothing. You, however, have the task of surviving it and overcoming it and becoming better at surviving that very thing that we call our everyday environment. And it's not all dangerous and and thieves and pirates with knives and swords drawn with, you know, uh every sword drawn against you like Muslim Sashi used to as a swordsman, not anything like that. But the tools that we draw to be able to make it through that, we have to recognize that the potential threat's there. And it's always gonna be there. And there are times that we're being made for a target or not, and we don't even know it. We don't even know we're playing that game with the predator zoo because if you meet criteria, they will seek you out. Whenever you break pattern, then they're like gonna drop you like a hot rock, like somebody's following you on the highway. Next thing you know, they turn off because it's too much trouble. But you have to be that too much trouble, and that does not mean acting aggressive, but rather being aware. The more aware you are of your environment, your survivability goes up. If your survivability goes up chronically enough, stress goes down. And that's the important thing about this running man model. It's not just about dealing with the psychological, emotional, ooey-gooey stuff that goes on inside of you that we tend to think that therapy is about, but no, this is the hard-hitting stuff that makes a difference, that makes a difference in you, that allows you to make a difference in the life that you want, and also with your children without getting all tense and not letting the harsh environment make you harsh. It doesn't make you hard. It allows you to be flexible in response, in response to what? Those things that our environment does to us, and that pressures us. Pressure that causes irritation that makes us grow. And we are always growing and adapting. And that's okay. That's what we're supposed to do. But the better you get at adapting and recovering, or returning to your sense of self after restress and not getting stuck in the stress, and not developing an identity because of the stress that says, I'm always the anxious one, I'm always angry, I'm always sad, I'm always depressed, I'm the depressed one, or I'm the melancholy. No, no, no, no, no. Those are not you. Those are the states that you're experiencing, but if you experience them chronically enough, we tend to forget that you are running that through your nervous system. You're the filter of that experience. But also the consciousness that is you, that's you. That observer that allows you to see the thoughts that you're thinking, that's you. That's the real you. And the social mind that we have. Whenever we're sitting in the back of our mind, so to speak, watching us interact in the social uh scheme in the marketplace, and realizing we do have a more social self. And and that's not inauthentic, that's getting along to get along. And that's okay. That's how we get the things we need to survive. Now, how does the running man help you? Long term, you have a greater degree of self-centered, not necessarily selfish, self-centered, aware quality that allows you to make sure that you're safe so that way when you're moving out and about, you don't have to think it to keep it at the forefront. You practice it, you become skilled over time. When you become a more skillful observer of self, of environment, the skillfulness, once again, I have to emphasize that, is something that's born of practice. You can read it once, fine. You can talk to somebody, fine. You can go to a counselor, fine. But are you fine as a result of that because you keep it as knowledge? No, you just become a junk collector if you don't put it to work. You don't want to be the junk collector, you want to be the person, and I'm telling you not to do what Armando says, but rather to do Do what benefits you the most, and that's that gain skill, so you can gain gain greater quality of life and greater quantities so you have better memories long term. And it's not all sh overshadowed by the uglies and the feelings and the upsets, the depressions and the angers and the anxieties, all this stuff that tends to take away those things that make our life shine whenever otherwise the environment would have done what it does anyway, but your experience did not have to be colored by those things. And what I'm telling you is that this method allows you a way to wrest W-R-E-S-T from the hands of oppression, the oppression that is self-induced. We don't do it on purpose, but rather it's neurologically conditioned into us that we stress and it oppresses us because that oppression is a protective mechanism. Depression is a protective mechanism. Anger, anxiety, post-traumatic stress reactivity are all protective mechanisms that teach us how to keep ourselves alive even though it feels uncomfortable, even when there is no immediate threat, but we're responding to it because the reactivity is generalized to make sure that nothing ever hurts us again. And that limits us, but that also keeps us from being from being the most me that I can be. That beautiful, unique human being that is you, that was never blemished, regardless of your experience. That's the you that observes you having this experience of thought, seeing yourself having this brilliance, feeling yourself experiencing food, touch, love, excitement, fun, scared, all of those things that we experience as a human. This is the you that observes you having this human experience. That's the real you. Now, the other book that I wrote called Poco Chico, and uh it's a little visual book, and I said it's a kid's book, and it's available on Amazon. It teaches the idea in a visual metaphor about that sense of self, the true self. And a lot of people have gone to therapy, and um Gabor Mate talks about that and and uh and quite a few others about the inner child, and this is not a new idea, and it's okay to have that sense of self, that sense of purity, cleanness, and and unperturbed, unblemished idea of self. They may have touched your body and hurt your body, scared your body, frightened your body, traumatized you. I'm saying they as in the environment, they as in a person, persons or experiences, and those things happen in life. Pain in life happens, but you don't have to suffer. How we relate to it, this is where the running man model shines. It doesn't cure, no medical promises here. But what I'm telling you is that you can become more skillful at regulating yourself, how you respond, how you react to those things that come up that were memories, even when there's nothing happening that is really trying to threaten you, or even when it is. It is an effective effective methodology. It is a system of doing things that is a skillful practice. It's a skillful way of living a life wherever you have greater quantity of quality, experiences and things with less fear, less fright, more control. Now, you don't want the nervous system that doesn't protect you, that doesn't go into fight flight, oh shit, it's gonna hit the fan reaction. You need that. That's what keeps you alive. It shouldn't be driving your life, however. And this is about regaining control and put it in its place. And it doesn't mean squash it and hide it and never uh ever encourage it to come out, embrace it because that's you too. That is the dark self, that is the dark shadow self, that is the Poco Chico self, the little bitty one, that all our creativity and love and kindness, curiosity and wonder and and uh affection and and excitement to explore comes from as much as our protective mechanism to fight. It is a savage one, it has to be. It is also the most loving kind and cutting a little creature that you can have, like when you hold a little kitty or a baby and you get that, oh, that oxytocin bonding feeling. You have that. The stress keeps us from having that bond, that oxytocin warmness that we experience when we're close with people, loved ones, and even little creatures, and even just generally being kind to other people and extending a generative, loving hand and kindness towards other people in public that we don't know. This is something that we experience as humans. But this is also not a promise. But I can tell you that once you practice using the methodology within the running man human stress model that I teach at this podcast over and over is that you're going to gain greater quality of life. Yes, but you're going to get a gain a greater sense of self in the sense that you are in control. Control is a tough word because it provides a sense of like clutching something, and we're not trying to clutch our ego or hold our ego and make it more hard, and that way it solidifies, and then when it breaks, that we realize, oh well, it was really quite fragile. No. What we want is a flexible, adaptable sense of self that does not hold on to ideas, and it's okay to be wrong. Whenever we have the wrong idea, be teachable, be flexible, be adaptable, and be willing to realize just because you held held the wrong idea or somebody taught you incorrectly or incompletely, that that did not define you. That's not your character. That's information you gathered as being a human in this existence. And whenever we're more flexible and teachable, then we're more amenable to not only experience other people and their ways of doing things, but maybe even provide insight. And maybe they provide insight and we grow as well. The idea is that we need to be out there more comfortably, more at ease. And if you look at everything on social media and the news, it's all about fight, flight. You need to fear the war and this and that and all that mess. And don't do that. Don't do that to yourself. There are things that are being done to keep people's attention because attention is money. And any attention that you provide that tires you, you have less energy to do the things that you like. Limit whatever social media you do, limit however much news you do. If you must listen to news, do that. Talk to somebody about it and do it for a few minutes, but discipline yourself. Stay away from that because it shapes how you see and believe things to be based on the emotional reaction that precedes the best of your best thinking. Now, I wanted to share something with you and before I close. And this model of the running man model provides some insight into how we experience things moment to moment. And this is the first time I put this out, but I share this with you because it was a deep realization after developing this model that has been working in the background over and over, but it has to do with significance. And whenever we have stress, our attention narrows. It's not the first thing. But what does happen is that significance in an environment changes, how we perceive it, how it comes into our eyes, how it comes into our ears based on level of stress, how we interpret that. So if stress goes up, that means the significance of external environmental things, generally speaking, because this can occur internally too. But for our uh communication right now, the external environment becomes stressful, significance changes. We start looking for those things that'll make the biggest difference in our immediate survival. So significance goes up as stress goes up. Significance determines attention. So if it goes up, that means I'm paying attention to that. Whatever that is, it may be a flaming block of gelatin. Who knows? But I'm paying attention to that because that's not only novel, it's different, it's consuming my attention, that's energy as well. But I have to be able to pay attention to it because I don't know what that's going to do. Notice I said I don't know. The I don't knows and the unknowns go up whenever our stress goes up. That means our inability to interpret goes down. Doesn't mean that that was not interpretable, it just means it's so novel. I don't have answers for that. And that could be very stress-inducing. Attention determines perception. So whatever it is that I'm attending to will determine why I'm taking in as information. By default, that cube is taking my attention. That means what I'm perceiving is I'm going to take in as much information about that. And I'm not thinking that on purpose. It is happening to me part of my physiological programming that I have already. Perception is what determines experience. How I see things, my interpretation is going to determine how I experience things. Is it going to be a negative thing? Is it a good thing? Maybe that's a green jello flambe that somebody left as a gift. I don't know. That's a good interpretation. But it could be some of that blow-up jelly that people use, then I don't want to talk about that. But the idea is it could be anything, but yet my perception determines experience. If I have fear, I will negatively lean in the direction of interpretation negative versus interpretation positive. Now, experience determines time. How I deal with it, based on my experience, is going to determine not only how I interpret, but how I interact. If I interact, and maybe I should be running already, because what if that thing blows up? Okay. So time determines memory is the next thing. Experience determines time, how much time I give, and then time determines memory. How long I'm there is going to give me more information that will either solidify that information in my memory as something that is survival significant or not. So how long I spend on it gives me more information to make sense of things. Memory determines identity. How I remember that is determined by the significance, by the attention, by my experience proceeding, but also how I determined whether or not something was safe or not, and whether or not I interacted with it. And if I interacted and ran in fear, that's going to have something to do with how I identify. Whenever I deal with that kind of novelty, I run. And that means I'm a coward, in quotes? No, not necessarily. I'm a survivor? Yes, we can say that. So you understand how I'm changing that idea. But look at that progression. Look at it. Pay attention to it. There's some really subtle things that happen when stress goes up. And this is where the running man models helps us be more aware and make us more capable in differentiating those important things that determine whenever things are stressful at work, at home, with family, with relationship, and how we interact and how we have to recognize that something is really threatening to us, or am I just interpreting it that way because it's faster, it's an expedient. That means I spend less time and I save more energy. And at the end of the day, it becomes about how much energy I'm spending. And if I'm already exhausted, I have less narrowing, uh rather, less bandwidth, I have a narrower mindset and capacity to understand. I'm going to be a whole heck of a lot less patient. I'm going to be more apt to have anger and anger outbursts because anger shakes loose the emergency stores because of the adrenaline. And we're going to be burning dirty and grouchy and kind of not nice to be around. And um we have to see that energy expenditure has a lot to do with how we determine how we interact with our world. So that's going to be it for today. I started earlier later this morning, rather, in the early afternoon, and it is a Sunday afternoon now, very beautiful outside. We're expecting some rain. But uh the running man book, uh Resiliency in the Face of Fight or Flight, is out on Amazon. And the one that's out right now is just a temporary cover that should be getting replaced sometime this week. And if you want to wait till the regular cover comes out, that's okay. Uh, we'll probably be informing people here pretty soon. But it's been in print. I wanted the information to go out because it's it is that important. I've gotten some wonderful feedback from the people that have looked at it and seen it already, and there are some people that are telling me, wow, that that's just so helpful, and that's an incredible thing. I'll give you an insight on chapter three that has to do with the geometry of stress, the actual startle response and what our body does in startling, and kind of the the thought process that goes along while that's happening too. So it starts from the physical and moves on to the practical application of that and the physiology and the psychology and the neuropsych is it's all in there, but it's not explained in like a textbook. This is all written as a narrative, like if you were sitting in the backseat of your mind and experiencing this and it's going down the symptomology and in a very bullet point way, and it's not narrative heavy, it's not jargon heavy, it's light reading. It's a lot, but the the thing is that this is the model, this is not a theory, it is a way of doing things, and it's just skillful art. Counseling is skill that is artful in a sense, but also this isn't counseling. But the artfulness of learning how to interact with others and with self, this is it. And uh definitely a useful tool, and I certainly encourage you. And if there are people that you feel could benefit not only from this podcast, but from that book, hey, go seek it out. I'm going to put the link at the bottom of the list today for the book on Amazon. If you'd like to do that, if you want to wait till the final cover and the final edits are out, that's okay too. But the information, the content itself is solid, that's good to go. But other than that, I just want to tell you thank you for listening. And I'm glad I could share this Sunday afternoon, late Sunday morning with you. And I'm so happy to be able to talk to you. And I appreciate your time. Take care. Walk well.