Running Man Self Regulation Skills Project
Understanding Stress, Anxiety, and Decision-Making: Unveiling Your Paleo-Caveperson Wiring
Explore the fascinating interplay of stress, anxiety, and pain on our ability to think, choose, and act in modern life through the lens of our paleo-caveperson wiring and survival programming.
Discover why we sometimes exhibit socially inappropriate behaviors under stress and find it challenging to make sound decisions in tense situations.
Gain insights from psychology, neuropsychology, physiology, sociology, biology, and social dynamics, explained in everyday language without overwhelming scientific jargon.
Tell me what you would like to hear on the podcast and your feedback is appreciated: runningmangetskillsproject@gmail.com
Book Link for the Running Man Resiliency in the Face of Fight or Flight on Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/Running-Man-Resiliency-Fight-Flight/dp/B0H6YGJ4WJ/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2BOI7ZY2912AF&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.PCsHx0Q_bb1rbtF4Vdy8-Q.KiSLfzdnqigm6wCU3kvtrKmnfGdICRvwM8WLVhfpx8Y&dib_tag=se&keywords=running+man+resiliency+in+the+face+of+fight+flight&nsdOptOutParam=true&qid=1783315890&sprefix=running+man+resil%2Caps%2C305&sr=8-1
rogue musician/creator located at lazyman 2303 on youtube.
Music intro and outro: Jonathan Dominguez
You can Support the running man self regulation skill project at:
https://www.buzzsprout.com/2216464/support
Running Man Self Regulation Skills Project
Before People Hear Your Words, They Feel Your Nervous System
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Ep 157. Before People Hear Your Words, They Experience Your Nervous System Every day we communicate. Whether at home, at work, with friends, strangers, clients, or family, our lives are built upon thousands of social interactions. Yet beneath every conversation lies a powerful force that most people rarely notice. Our nervous systems are communicating long before our words begin. Human beings are constantly reading subtle social signals. Facial expression, posture, breathing, movement, eye behavior, vocal tone, rhythm, pacing, and emotional presence all influence whether another person perceives us as safe, trustworthy, competent, or threatening. Much of this communication happens automatically. Long before conscious thought, our brains begin asking: **Is this person safe?** **Can I trust them?** **Should I approach or withdraw?** These rapid assessments shape conversations, relationships, leadership, teamwork, negotiation, parenting, counseling, and even conflict resolution. This is the hidden language of human interaction. Modern neuroscience and social psychology demonstrate that emotions and physiological states are contagious. Stress spreads. Calm spreads. Confidence spreads. Fear spreads. Our internal state influences the emotional climate around us. This phenomenon—often called **social contagion**—helps explain why one calm, regulated individual can stabilize an entire group, while one highly dysregulated individual can increase anxiety throughout a room. Our presence matters. Our physiology matters. Our voice matters. One of the most powerful yet overlooked tools of influence is **prosody**—the melody, rhythm, cadence, and emotional tone of our voice. A calm, melodic, well-regulated voice communicates safety. Safety builds trust. Trust creates influence. Influence creates cooperation. Whether leading a team, resolving conflict, teaching a classroom, counseling a client, raising children, or navigating difficult conversations, our effectiveness often depends less on the words we choose and more on the physiological state from which those words emerge. The Running Man Human Stress Model teaches that influence begins with self-regulation. When we regulate ourselves first, our communication becomes clearer, our presence becomes more reassuring, and our ability to positively influence others increases dramatically. Leadership is not simply speaking louder. Authority is not intimidation. True influence begins with creating safety. Because before people hear your message... They experience your nervous system. Regulate yourself. Shape the environment. Create trust. Influence with presence. Take care. Walk well
intro outro music for episodes 1 through 111 done by Jonathan Dominguez Rogue musician. He can be found on youtube at Lazyman2303.
New musical intro and outro music created by Ed Fernandez guitarist extraordinaire. To get in contact with Ed please send me an email at runningmangetskillsproject@gmail.com and I will forward him the contact.
Donations are not expected but most certainly appreciated. Any funds will go toward further development of the podcast for equipment as we we grow the podcast. Many thanks in advance.
https://www.buzzsprout.com/2216464/support
Welcome back, folks, to episode 157 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 we're going to be discussing today has to do with social cues and biological contagions, social signaling. And these are some things that have a lot to do with self-regulatory skill development, but also what it is we have to regulate against. And those are the stressors and anxieties and fears that may arise immediately when often we're not sure what may be cueing us. It may not always be something that's going on inside of us, per se, in an active sense, but it can start on the outside. And we'll be covering not only the influence that we can create using that very contagion, but also how we arrived and how self-regulation can help us more effectively override those signals that maybe want to make us fear or flee for that matter. And if we can overcome that, then we stand the chance of maintaining our choices moment to moment. And that's a good thing. So to start the discussion, what I'd like to do is touch upon some really awesome stuff that's come down the pipes, and many of y'all may already be familiar with polyvagal theory. And this started getting developed by uh Dr. Stephen Borders, uh scientist, researcher, and uh psychologist in 1994, I believe. But uh there are three aspects of this that actually parallel much of what falls within my running man human stress model. Now, I didn't borrow literally from the ventral vagal theory, sympathetic theory, or even the dorsal vagal theory that was actually complementing each other all the way uh while they were developing this uh scientifically. But these are things that uh through observation, clinical acumen on my part, and also research and study, um I determined were important things to pay attention to. And whenever Dr. Porgis came out with the polyvagal theory, it made a whole lot of sense about what it is that I'd learned in how to manage stressful situations whenever you're in the middle of it, and also understanding what it is that drove it. And now I'm giving credit where credit is due. Now, this isn't something I borrowed from liberally, but once again, it was developing parallel to the timeline whenever I started working on the development of the running man human stress model. And um I certainly like the the distinctions that he puts in here. So I'm gonna describe the three major points of this and then we'll move on to the discussion. But um, the three stages um in self-defense, let's say, the ventral vagal uh aspect or the front part of the vagal system, uh, they call this social engagement. This is like the baseline or the safe state. Whenever we're we can be uh physically close to people, and our center line doesn't have to necessarily be closed or with our hands up necessarily. And this allows us like to read body language and de-escalate threats with your voice and stay mentally clear in the process. So there's not a whole lot of threat. Uh the second aspect of this is the sympathetic uh dominance and uh mobilization, the fight or flight is where this becomes activated and uh when dangerous sensed, and sense can mean perceptual in the sense of visual auditory, it could be temperature regulation, this sort of thing. It could be a smell, even. And uh even uh pheromone type signaling can affect how we respond, not just in the attraction sense, but also the the fear uh sense as well. And uh this can create a spike in heart rate and adrenaline and whatnot. And um, whenever we're sympathetic dominant, we're more reactive, but that also means the heart rate's going up and blood flow is changing. So if we're sitting down and our heart rate goes to about 140, you're exercising sitting down, that potential for panic, anxiety, and fright tend to be much higher. And uh we tend to lean more into the fleeing stage, and we can actually freeze here as well, not a good place to be. Uh, and this is the next aspect the dorsal vagal response, the immobilization freeze response. This is the final primitive fallback. And uh, if you're like fighting or fleeing, if it's possible, uh chances are it may become impossible if you're stuck in the freeze for that moment. And the freeze often is transient. Some people get stuck there. Uh, but the reason I'm pointing this out is that we don't necessarily have to go there, and if we can maintain some measure of regulation over that heart rate spike and also that sense lock wherever our visual tends to be more forward, and we're having a hard time moving our eyes left and right to be able to scan, then we might have a chance of not staying in freeze because we may freeze for a fraction of a moment and go to mobilization. Uh, a lot of times we can get stuck in that freeze, and that that's not a good thing. Now, this can be considered automatic generally because it happens so quickly, but uh there are some aspects of this where we can inject our executive function and planning uh before it happens in the sense that we condition and train to it. So if we're more familiar with it, we're more apt to be able to overcome these states. Now, uh the way that uh Dr. Porges has separated it, those three aspects, I tend not to separate it on purpose because it's not always that necessary to be that distinct as far as by the naming and labeling of it, but the recognition of the symptomology, absolutely. We have to be very, very familiar because the more familiar you are, then it's no longer one novel and two uh not only interesting but potentially shocking, we don't know what to do with it. If it's so new that I don't have a response to it, that could lend itself to some freeze potential. So, well, once again, these three things I want to separate, um, not necessarily apart from what the running man model does, but rather to elucidate more the fact that these things occur within us whenever we are stressful, and to lean into the polyvagal theory is nothing but helpful. And I certainly give credit there, it's just given more clarity to what it is that I teach and do. But uh, as far as self-regulation skills go, we're gonna move forward and we're gonna be talking about how we enter into a space and how we influence based on not only our presence, but also the tones that we speak with and how we arrive generally and how whenever people arrive as well, where the influence may go and what might be some things that we may be able to control and some things that maybe are out of a control that uh we have to pay attention to so we can maintain not only one center, but two our own sovereignty in the moment so we can choose for ourselves versus letting the environment choose for us. So this is something that's uh straight out of the running man uh book that I've just recently published, and it's chapter 32, and it's called Social Signal and Biological Contagion. And the reason I named it this is because much of what we get are cues to respond. It doesn't mean that we don't have free will. I don't I'm gonna throw that term out the window. I know that Dr. Sopolski mentions that we don't have true free will, and that's okay. But at the neurological level, the signaling, uh, there are some conscious things we can do to kind of shift that, but at the very microcellular level, we don't have a whole lot of choice as to what's going on there, and uh there is some distinctive um influence from the cell level all the way to the macro where we're actually physically acting and deciding on things. So it's not like we don't have influence. We do. Do we have a perfectly absolute free will? I would say not, but I would also say that we do have things that resemble that, and then we start getting into more of the philosophical, religious, spiritual thing, and we're not gonna do that because that will take us away from what's gonna be helpful in learning self-regulatory skills. So back to chapter 32, social signal and biological contagion. Why would I want to talk about this today? Well, whenever we think about what we do moment to moment, everything that we do is an interaction, a transaction of sorts when we're out in public, even when we're interacting with family, when we're taking time and passing family time together, and there are arguments or disagreements, or even agreements and enjoyment time, wherever they're little things that are not necessarily things to worry about, but they are the ebb and flow of what we'd call human interaction. Absolutely cool. And that's what occurs above the social scheme uh at the level just above the social level that I'm always speaking about. But the potential for not necessarily dark evil, but rather our shadow self or shadow behaviors to arise and what our propensities and proclivities are that aren't always spoken, but are generally felt very viscerally, that drive what it is that would become our choices moment to moment, even if it makes somebody upset or irritates them, but yet it is true to us and what makes us feel good, or at least in in our mind at that moment, allows us to think that we're getting what's best for us, uh, can cause for some differences. So, what are some of the social cues and signals that we might see? What what are some of the biological contagion uh effects that occur just by being around people that are stressed, tense, or anxious? Well, we'll kind of talk a little bit about this. So let me go ahead and read to you a little bit out of the book. And this starts with human beings do not regulate alone. Doesn't mean you don't have a choice, mind you. It just means that there are more things going on in what we call regulation than just merely our choice to do or not to do. So we're constantly reading one another tone, posture, breathing, uh, facial expression, distance, and pace, the speed at which things are going. And before words are fully processed, the nervous system is already responding. This is social signaling. Much of the tone that we speak tends to be a precursor to what we decide on based on how it sounds to us, and that sound is a feel um generator, feel as in F-E-E-L within me. That was too easy. So my speller's not working today. It's Sunday evening, it may be a little broke right now. But uh, whenever we have sense or feel as a result of that sound, we we already moving in a direction of sorts to make sense of what it is that I'm hearing and the way it's being delivered. Body language too. Once again, tonals are about 43% of the influence of any one message, and uh more so than the words themselves, how we arrive, what it looks like our body language and the sound of it are tonal. If uh we're a little more, we would say melodious or maybe even uh our prosody, the way we deliver our speech is smoother and soothing, we're probably more apt to be heard and listened to as far as the message that we give. Now, section one, regulation is social. Most people think of stress as an individual experience, but nervous systems interact. One person's state can influence the state of another. This is where we get vicarious learning, but there's also vicarious influence. Nobody talks about that, which which is really cool, but at the same time, if you don't know what's happening, a lot of times we may even feel slightly betrayed by the environment or the people we're with, not knowing how I got to the decision I'm making and why am I buying this car? Calm can spread. Urgency can spread faster, and urgency and calm both have body languages that go with that. This happens automatically, often before anyone realizes it. Section two, the body reads before the mind. Social interaction begins before conscious thought. The body notices, tight posture, elevated breathing, sudden movement, vocal tension, facial contraction, all these little things, these little segments of micro body language and movement are being read and essayed, and we're making an average of sorts to make sense of what direction we may have to go or act within. So the next thing, these signals are interpreted quickly, often faster than words. And whenever I say quickly, let's look at the range of speed that we're looking at, we're talking three thousandths of a second is where the initiation of the signal hitting our eye or our ears occurs before it starts moving in the direction of our executive function, our prefrontal cortex, that comes on at about 1.2 seconds, where we start making sense of stuff. That's 1200 milliseconds, which is 400 times slower than that first three thousandths of a second, wherever this the signal starts. It starts making sense at about sixty to one hundred milliseconds, but we're gonna treat it like threat. Between 150 to 300 milliseconds, we can determine whether or not it's a friendly, familiar, or maybe a foe. We can determine that decision. After that, from 300 to 1200, that's when our signals start getting labeled, named, and organized. Well, I know them, I don't know them, and oh, they're acting like a backside, whatever um we want to call them, a donkey. But we start making sense in narrative and words and organize in that sense too. Especially if it's something we don't know, or if it's somebody we do know and they're acting out of character. So some things to think about, of course, as far as what do we mean by quickly? Often faster than words, that's for sure. This is why someone can say, I don't know why, but something felt off. The body noticed first. Emotional contagion, this is section three. Emotion moves through groups. One anxious person can raise the tension of a whole room. One regulated person can lower it. If somebody can maintain state and center, yeah. We will actually calm people if you're acting calm and if you're in a leadership position that can actually get the room to settle and not go into a frantic frenzy. It is nervous system synchronization. This is not a metaphor. Humans are built for co-regulation. We're wired to the group. We seek our reference in the group. What reference am I talking about? Well, reference to how is everyone else thinking and acting. If they're freaking out, maybe I should freak out too, because if they saw something that I don't, whoa, I better wind myself up to make sure that I'm ready to go, and that's how sympathetic dominance becomes out of control. Uh whenever things get really serious and everybody's running, you better make sure you're equivalent to that run, because if they cannot run you, then you're the baloney sandwich and you get eaten. So something really important to pay attention to right there. So we affect each other biologically. That means our physical body is changed as a result of being in the same space as me. For hypervigilance spreads easily. Disregulation is often louder than calm. Urgency attracts attention. Fear narrows focus. Strong emotion demands orientation. Now the important thing is this is why. Uh panic spreads quickly, conflict escalates socially, and group tension becomes self-reinforcing. The system prioritizes survival signals. Whenever you see or hear news where there are groups of people, you hear the news people talk about mob mentality. There's also a more positive uh turn on that that's not always great, called groupthink. Wherever we start all thinking similarly, it doesn't have to be bad, but similar. With the mob mentality, it tends to be one where people lose that sense of I'm responsible for what's going on, and they give themselves permission to do individually bad things. People get caught, law catches up, and then of course they get charged if we're lucky enough to catch them before they do bad things. But here the idea at the physiological level, how I interact with that. If somebody is panicked, think about gossip. When people have that tone, that high pitch, and even that sense of of almost authority when they speak of something without necessarily having evidence, they seen they sound very believable, very, very uh intense, and therefore we're more apt to believe something because a long time ago, when we're living in more simple times, if somebody came up and said, Oh, this is dangerous, I saw this, and what if it wasn't this, but it was one of those instead, and oh, those things, oh yeah, it's just a cow. That's not a giant bear. That's okay. We'll be okay. We were more apt to be able to absorb and tolerate a mistake or mistaken identity than we were uh an actual problem. So sometimes we have a lot of stop starts that aren't necessarily real, but our body should be able to remain vigilant whenever it needs to, because what if something turns bad? So even though we may, in the absence of accurate evidence, be overactivating, if we didn't have that, what if something really happened and I didn't activate at all? I could very well lose my physicality, I could just die. So the next thing, the system prioritizes survival signals. This is an important thing. So the social pressure for alignment, when someone is highly activated, they often seek others to match that state. You might hear people saying, Hey, did you hear that? What do you think about this? Do you think this is correct? And don't you think this too? They start trying to do bandwagoning and get people to stand with them because they may not have the evidence, they may be afraid. But in that social sense, if they get validated, they somehow feel like they've somehow made themselves more safe. Even though that may not be actually the case, the fact of the matter is we may be more apt to try to pull people in just so we can feel stronger or more right, just by virtue of what is called primacy. The more people that say this, therefore it's more accepted. It must be true. Of course, I'm saying that in quotes, because that's not necessarily the case, but often a lot of cases and also social movements have gone in the wrong direction based on popularity. If somebody is listened to or someone's considered an authority based on what they look like, and then things go really bad. And uh this is an important thing too, once again. When someone's highly activated, they often seek others to match that state, but this may appear as strong emotional language, repeated urgency, pressure for immediate agreement, escalating intensity in conversation. So the louder one seems, therefore they try to lend authority. Because if it's not true, I wouldn't be speaking as loudly or as intensely. And this is when people that may be dishonest may raise or escalate and demonstrate, because that's supposed to show you how important important it is, because when things are threatening and I'm acting as if I'm giving threat signals, that means this must be important, so we better listen. And that can basically lead us astray very quickly. At a deeper level, this is often a bid for safety. If you feel what I feel, I will feel less alone in it, and that's really the bottom line of it. And um it's not always a nefarious thing, but it can be. But whenever it's more a social thing, often somebody may be seeking affiliation because there's safety in numbers, and that's a very deeply seated gut visceral level thing that we have to pay attention to, and it's not always about dishonesty, it's about just I'm feeling unsafe or I'm scared, but maybe the words aren't there to be able to articulate that. So section six becoming the stabilizing signal. The goal is not emotional detachment, it is stable presence. A regulated person can, generally speaking, slow the pace. It'll reduce that unnecessary escalation and create psychological space, a little room to think and breathe, but also a slowdown that makes us feel like urgency isn't quite as high as I might think it is, or might be feeling like it is because my arousal label is up, so seeing someone else not aroused can signal us down, improve collective clarity. We can think out loud and talk and maybe see about seeking evidence together if we need to do that. This is not weakness, it is leadership. The nervous system that stays organized often becomes the reference point for others, and this isn't a dynamic social situation. Of course it works in business as well, but something to pay attention to, mind you. Boundaries prevent contagion. Co-regulation does not mean absorption. Just because you're with someone else doesn't necessarily mean that you become what it is they are or who they are, or somehow just have to blindly accept what's going on based on how they're telling you things are. Without awareness, people can take on the state of others, and this leads to emotional exhaustion, reaction, reactivity, loss of self-stabil self-stability, and healthy boundaries allow, connection without collapse. That means you don't fall into what everyone else is doing. You're still able to maintain your center, your sense of self and presence without contagion. You can do that without necessarily having to fall into what the common suggestion is, if everyone's freaking out and you're at center, you may want to pay attention to that, but it doesn't mean you have to become that. Especially if you know full well that everything's okay, but everyone is overresponding. Sometimes you may have to become that reference point of calm and center to bring things back into order. Empathy without losing center is an important thing. So the next thing, leadership is physiological. This is a novel idea, really, and uh it is one that physiologically we know occurs in nature, but it also occurs in the boardroom, it occurs in families and relationships. And uh leadership is not only verbal, it's not just the words I say that tell you, yeah, I know what I'm talking about. People follow the state before they follow instruction. If you do not resemble that leadership capacity, chances are there are going to be questions, and you may even have people that are dissenters because they don't believe it. If a leader is rushed, reactive, hypervigilant, that spreads. If a leader is grounded, clear, present, that spreads too. State is leadership. Choose what you want to transmit, every interaction sends signals. The question becomes, what state am I teaching right now? Because you're instructing the whole space that's out in front of you. Whom it is that is in front of you doesn't really matter second only to the intensity of their state. Can they receive it and whether or not are are they paying attention to your state or are they? Learning from your state? Are they being signaled or guided by your state? And if theirs is out of whack, maybe they're just looking for a a more calm signal so that they can feel safe. Because once again, we are wired to the group and we seek to affiliate to feel a sense of safety whenever I'm in that state of discomfort. Because people are learning from you. Your breathing is something they pay attention to, not consciously, but we tend to mirror that. Your pacing, the speed at which you're speaking and moving, your posture. Are you upright? Or are you crouched and curled, shoulders forward, tail tucked, and looking around left or out and looking worried? That's a good question, right? So your attention, what are you being attentive to? What are you paying attention to? Are you paying attention to looking left and right to see where things are coming from? Are you centered and aware generally and know what to pay attention to? And people will cue on you if you're not doing what everyone else is doing. That's a stark contrast in many cases, but often becomes easier for them to train and train rather into what you're doing and attending to versus what everyone else is. It may give them pause and slow them down, especially if they haven't seen the evidence for why they're freaking out. So closing reflection on this is you're never regulating alone. You're always technically being influenced by environment, people in your environment, and your level of stress within. Your state enters every room before your explanation ever does, before your words ever get spoken, how you present, how you arrive, and the words you speak in the tone will support that. Stress spreads. Calm spreads too. This is not about controlling others, it is about understanding that your nervous system is always communicating. Communication isn't verbiage, it's not language spoken, but language delivered based on how we act, how we deliver that, and the sound of which the words we deliver are delivered in. The tone. It's about understanding that your nervous system is always communicating. When you become aware of that, regulation becomes more than personal work, it becomes relational responsibility. And that changes how you lead, how you love, and how you move through the world. That's an important thing, once again. Understanding that our social interactions are social contagion. They're also influence teaching, in that we provide the example in how we're going to act, how we will be, how we arrive, and in many cases it also determine who it is we'll be interacting with, because there are some people that won't want to be around it because it's too new for them. Maybe it's too much information. And whenever we see people panicking, often we become followers, not unlike sheep, not calling people sheeple, even though that's a cool term, but uh we do get influenced in that sense that we will be more flock-minded and more apt to move in the direction that the mass moves, because there is safety in numbers. Your chances of getting picked off individually, even in a social sense, if we don't keep in mind that, you know, it's a survival orientation day-to-day. Even though things are safe, nobody wants to run around thinking about that in the forefront of your mind, but in the back of your mind, always making sure you have your P's and Q's taken care of as far as safety, driving with your seatbelt on, looking left and right before you enter intersections, also before you enter a room, make sure that you look in before you go in. Sometimes, whenever I go into a room, I will turn the lights on before I even step in. I don't want to trip on stuff. But at the same time, what if somebody or something is hiding there? You don't want your whole body in there, but maybe just your hand, and that is the least amount of damage that you can you can take if necessary. But uh in the the sense of doing that, that doesn't mean being paranoid. Those are just little things that we do. Same thing like when we eat. You don't turn your head left and right when you're swallowing or else you might start choking. Little things like that, well, that'll run the risk of giving us a sense of longevity and survivability, not only moment to moment, but day to day. Now, today is Sunday evening, and it's the latest I've done a podcast in quite a while. Most of the time it's in the morning. But uh I do want to just reiterate that uh the Running Man Resiliency in the Face of Fight or Flight Book is available in print uh at Amazon, and it is also available in Kindle format for e-readers. And I certainly would appreciate if you go and patronize Amazon and see about seeking these books out. They're very, very helpful. There are also others that are coming down the pipes too, and I'll be discussing uh those more as we go. But uh if you have any questions or any concerns, or even a feedback, hey, send them to uh the email at running man get skills project at gmail. I'd love to hear from you. Now, there are a couple of things I'd like to add as well. One is that uh one of my friends from overseas is or was at a martial arts conference in Brighton, England. Very cool, and uh took her psychological, sports psychological knowledge and her her fighting prowess to the stage to give a presentation on the animal self and self-regulation and what we get from traditional martial arts training. I'm so happy to see that. But there's also a YouTube video videos actually where they do a documentary-style interview of her and how she actually got into the martial arts, uh, kung fu in particular, and how she got into teaching and and fighting MMA, which is just a phenomenal watch and listen, and it's terribly inspiring. Also, there is uh Mr. Chris Lomas that is in um the martial arts as well, but is in England, and he's been doing quite a bit of research for addiction science about substance use, and uh his most recent paper he'd uh uh sent out has to do with how addiction is impacting metabolism, and much of how our body responds is conditioned. We learn to do things a certain way so we can get high and whatnot, but yet our body's metabolism, not unlike we adjust to sugar and become diabetic over time whenever we become dysregulated with our insulin, it's a metabolic difference. So those are some phenomenal things to pay attention to. Psychology and addiction science are changing as we speak. And these ideas 30 years ago, 25 years ago, whenever I started getting into this field, uh, were not thinking these things, at least not very loudly, and they're becoming very pronounced, and there are definitely things to pay attention to. But I will tell you too that uh not unlike the polyvagal theory, this running man human stress model that I've put out actually works right in line with all of these things, whether it be sport and better performance to also uh addiction science, and how do I regulate those things that are not only my cravings and stressors and anxieties, but also post-traumatic stress reactivity? How do we deal with that? And on top of that, how do I make my thinking better and perform better in what I call my life? It doesn't have to be in a sportive sense, but how can I get more quality of life and higher quantities in my life so I can have a more together life? Well, uh there are ways, and much of what I teach is something that is conditionable. We can learn. And all of this is not just read it once and now you know it you can do it. It's practice. You have to get familiar with these methodologies so that way when the poop hits the fan, so to speak, you're able to do them. And there's no lie there, there's no magic pill. And there are pills you can take, but it'll leave you wiped out, and that's not what you get because it'll knock the intensity off of crappy thoughts, but it won't change your crappy thoughts. You can go to counseling, it'll make your crappy thoughts a little better, but it won't change the intensity of the stress that you feel whenever stress comes on. And the self-regulatory models that are out there, not just mine, are the things that teach us, well, how do we do what we need to do to make things better? And it's one of those underlying factors that really must be worked at so we can increase that quality of life so we can become better what it is we do and love our loved ones and squeeze them even more just because you know we're able to, and not having to fight so much with those things that make us feel really uncomfortable or really bad. Now, what I want to tell you is thank you for sharing this Sunday evening with me. I'm happy to have shared this podcast with you today. And once again, uh go look for the book on Amazon and uh please like, subscribe, and share on YouTube. I'd love to see my YouTube channel grow. And this podcast is available on all platforms that you can find your podcasts on, and I'm certainly glad to have spoken to y'all. Y'all take care. Thank you. Walk well.