COURSE STRESS Transcript - Stress - Pres - Til - Luchau - 20120926tl

Transcript: ‘Understanding the Body-Mind Effects of Stress’ Webinar with Til
Luchau, 26-Sept 2012

Brian: Welcome to tonight's webinar
entitled, "Understanding the Body-‐Mind
Effects of Stress" with Til Luchau. This is
the second webinar in our brand new Body-‐
Mind series, and we're very excited to share
this with you absolutely for free.

A certified advanced Rolfer and professional
coach, Til is the Director and Originator of
the Advanced Myofascial Techniques Works
taught at Advanced-‐Trainings.com. He's a
former somatic psychotherapist, resident
practitioner at the Esalen Institute in
California, Faculty Chair of the Rolf
Institute's Foundation of Structural
Integration Program, and adjunct faculty in
Europa University's Somatic Psychology
Degree program.

We look forward to benefiting from all this
experience, Til. Welcome back.

Til: All this on-‐the job training. Amazing.
[Laughter]

Brian: Great job.

Til: What an amazing thing. Yeah. Here we
are. We're starting a little late, but I think
we'll be able to go through the full time.
Brian, should we just plan for the usual hour
for this point, or what do you suggest?

Brian: Yes, please. And folks, if you need to
log-‐off, we will have a recording available.
We understand that you may have a client
or something like that, but if you can stay on
for the full hour, that would be great. Okay,
Til.

Til: All right. Thanks, Brian. Well yeah,
superhuman efforts by Brian, and go-‐to tech
support. Who knows what the problem was.
Dialing three different phone numbers he
gave eventually got me in, but here we are,
© Advanced-Trainings.com p1
(image copyrights retained by original sources)
everybody. And happy to be with you. It's a
perfect start to the evening, and I hope you
can stay with us to the end.

This has been an amazing topic for me to
research. I picked it because, number one,
it's so common. We're all dealing with it.
You know, so many people that are dealing
with things not working – for instance, now
I'm trying to get my slides to advance.

Things not working, or things going wrong,
or things not going as expected, and picking
stress as one of the topics I offered was kind
of an obvious choice. And actually, it was a
popular one. I offered it, and we did it on a
poll, and we got answers back from you.
Stress was number two in popularity of
things you wanted to hear about in terms of
body-‐mind issues that affect the work we do
as hands-‐on practitioners.

So the other titles in this series – I think
Brian mentioned some of those. We have the
Proprioception webinar, which was just re-‐
recorded. It should be up soon. There's
tonight, the Understanding the Body-‐Mind
Effects of Stress. And then November 28th
we have Working with Chronic or
"Intractable" Symptoms.

Now you can sign up for those where you
signed up for this one,
ABMP.com/webinars; or on our website,
Advaned-‐Trainings.com.

Now down at the bottom there there's a
little link to Advanced-‐
Trainings.com/abmp12s that will get you
the expanded slideshow from tonight, and
some other offers, and then we'll also post
the recording there probably next week,
once it becomes available.

So now that we're here, or now that I'm here
at least, first take a minute and just slow
down and actually arrive because we'll get a
lot more out of this time together if you're
able to avoid multitasking. Just give us
your attention. I think there's plenty to pay
attention to here.

Engage your body. In fact, I'm going to take
a deep breath and invite you to join me in
that. So just take a big, deep breath. Excuse
me while I put the microphone aside.

And then engaging your mind. So as you
have questions, please type them in to the
place that Brian suggested. If you're
listening to the recorded version of the
course, you can go to the Facebook page
that's associated with this series. The link
will be at the end of the webinar, or you can
search for ABMP Body-‐Mind Series, or my
name, Til Luchau, and you'll pop up that
private Facebook group and you can ask to
join. We'll let you in. You can ask questions
or have discussion there too.

An overview of what I'm going to cover
tonight. Understanding the body/mind
effects of stress. Where and how to work.
The actual hands-‐on implications of that
understanding.

What we can do for ourselves as humans,
as organisms. And a little stress
management, self-‐eval. That will probably
be a take home eval. It will probably be
something that you can do on your own.
That's my prediction. If there's enough time,
I'll actually go over it on the call, but the
slides will be here, and I'll give an
orientation to it, and then you can do it on
your own. It's pretty interesting.

And then resources for learning and
referral, and some links and references at
the end.

A quiz that you'll take for CE credit if you're
doing it for credit, either with ABMP or with
us. Here are the questions.

According to the webinar, which factor
most likely determines whether hands-‐
on work raises or lowers blood pressure?
According to the webinar, which factor?

And then how do elevated cortisol levels
affect hyaluronic acid and proteoglycan,
which are important connective tissue
constituents?

Which stress-‐management methods did
Epstein's study indicate was most
effective? It would be which of these,
because it's a multiple choice question.

And then which of these was listed as a
possible sign of Level Three – that is
ongoing – stress indicating a need for
"significant intervention from
professionals"? That will also be a multiple
choice question.

And then according to tonight's webinar,
which breath activity generally evokes a
parasympathetic relaxation response?

All right. Here's some statistics to get us
started. This is done in the USA, but I bet it's
the same throughout a lot of the western
world, and in the eastern world now too.

Percentage of people in the USA who
regularly experience physical symptoms
caused by stress. What would you guess
that to be? Place your bets. According to this
research, seventy-‐seven percent regularly
experience physical stress.

Regularly experience psychological
symptoms caused by stress, seventy-‐
three percent.

Cited money and work as the leading
cause of their stress, seventy-‐six percent.

Feeling of living with extreme stress,
thirty-‐three percent.

And then the people that said they were
living with extreme stress thirty years
ago in 1982, it's only ten percent. So it's
gone up more than three times. And this is
one of the most shocking statistics that I
found getting ready for tonight's talk. How
much stress has accumulated, how much
more stress people are experiencing and are
talking about than they were just a couple of
decades ago, and how important it is that we
understand what it can do and what we can
do about it.

So to understand stress, what we're going
to think about is a cycle. And this cycle's
relevant to stress as well as trauma.
Traumatic responses are very similar to
what the physiology and the mind and the
emotions do in response to a traumatic
event.

There's a stressor, there's a response, and
there's a resolution, or not. Sometimes it
doesn't resolve, and then it just cycles, keeps
going.

But let's look at the stressors for a bit, and
it can be different kinds of stressors:
physical, mental, or emotional.

These are mutually reinforcing domains
and they can lead to positive feedback
loops. For example, a physical response of
stress – if you're stressed about something
physically that'll lead to a mood of anxiety,
and in a mood of anxiety we tend to have
different kinds of thoughts. So we might be
mentally more alert for threats, or perceive
things as problems when in other states of
mind we may not. And seeing things as
stress or problems will further increase the
body's response, and so it becomes a cycle
of one stressor feeding on another, and
increasing the stress until you get to some
kind of resolution.

Let's look at physical stressors for a
minute. Sapolsky, Robert Sapolsky says, "A
stressor is anything that knocks the body
out of homeostasis." Homeostasis being a
state of equilibrium that the body can return
to its own in the internal environment.

So a physical stressor being anything that
affects that internal homeostasis, such as
physical danger or threat. An example is a
predator-‐prey situation that's often in the
research literature given as the situation
that our physiology is modeled around. How
to deal with a physical threat from, say, a
predator.
And another example, could be a physical
strain or demand. Let's go back and look at
the last picture after we study this one.

The hurdler isn't quite keeping up with the
pack. Physical strain or demand. But here's
another example of a physical danger of a
threat.

They're still around, even though not all of
us are being chased by lions anymore.
There's still physical dangers, and there's
certainly physical demands put on us.

And then pain. Pain is a type of physical
stress that the body responds to like these
other threats, danger, strains. And that's
something very relevant to most of our
practices.

Now another type of stressor is mental,
and it has the same physiological
response as physical stress. It's a really
important point. Your physiology doesn't
know that the overloaded pile of stickies on
your computer, or a lion chasing you – you
have the same physiological response, the
same chemical responses are involved, the
same vital statistics change, and the same
feelings come up.

And here's an interesting issue: primates –
we being one of them in one point of view,
one being a kind of primate – primates
have brains capable of producing
physical stress through anticipation and
assessment alone. So we can get ourselves
physically stressed out just by anticipating
danger, not actually experiencing it, or
assessing a situation as threatening, or
pressuring, or difficult. That would cause the
same physiology – just our anticipation and
assessment.

The source of mental stress is usually the
assessment that "life's demands exceed
your ability to meet those demands." So I
think most of the stress examples I can think
of, and I invite you to do the same, have
their root in this habitual assessment that
you make that you're not going to keep up.
Life's demands are going to be too much for
what I can do, and that's a state of stress,
whether it's temporary or ongoing.

Back to some statistics. In the U.S., the
things people list as the biggest sources of
stress: job pressure, money, health,
relationships, poor nutrition, media
overload, and sleep deprivation. Those
are the top seven according to research that
was just published a couple of months ago.

Think for a second how many of those you
would say have a mental aspect as opposed
to a purely physical one. You could say
maybe the only purely physical stressor
there might be health, or perhaps poor
nutrition. Well yeah, there's also a physical
element to sleep deprivation. They all have
physical effects, but in terms of the things
that gives rise to these issues, it's an
entangled web between the mental stress,
the physical stress, and in the modern world
– in our existence – most of our stressors
tend to be presented as mental stress, as
opposed to being chased by lions, etcetera.

Now those states give rise to an emotion or
a disposition toward an action. That's one
definition for emotion. A sort of disposition
toward a kind of action, a reaction. And a
state of emotional stress means your
emotional homeostasis is disrupted; you
have a loss of equanimity. You have a loss
of being centered, or being able to respond
and are measured proportional to what you
start responding in ways that aren't
proportional or appropriate.

Feelings or moods related to physical or
mental stress; could be pressure…

…irritation…

…worry…
…anxiety. Many of us have experience with
this. I'm not telling you anything you don't
know.

Fear. All these are responses to physical or
mental stress, and they are feeling states
that also give rise to mental, and therefore
physical, biochemical stress.

So these three things, three kinds of
stressors together evoke a response. They
evoke a response in our, also, body, mind,
and feelings, and that response is in some
ways very primitive and very strong.

It's basically doing that to keep us alive. So
our response, back to Sapolsky – a pretty
well-‐known researcher on the physiological
responses of stress – he did a series of
studies with baboons and he would watch
baboons and then take blood samples – he
was one of the first guys that did that – to
measure actually what was happening in the
blood in different kind of social interactions
that they had in their troop.

But he says that stress response is, "The
array of physiological adaptations that
ultimately reestablishes balance."

So in nature, this stress response we're
having, whether it's, you know, getting mad
or screaming, which I felt like doing a little
while ago when the audio wasn't working to
the call here, or all the other things that
happen in a stress response, their function is
to actually try to reestablish a balance, to
discharge the cumulated energy, or to scare
off a predator, or to shift the emotional state
in such a way that homeostasis could be
reestablished.

Let's talk about some of the physiology or
neurology of stress. The amygdala gets a lot
of attention these days. Its primary function
is the perception and response to threat,
fear, and aggression. It's basically a threat
detector, and it's wired in in such a way that
it has very quick access to reactions. It's
about to be highlighted in green right there,
so it's that green little nodule, and there's an
almond shape to them. A little almond-‐
shaped nodule deep in the brain.

And they very quickly tell the body, the
brainstem, to respond with action before
you even have a conscious idea. And there's
some research that just came out that says
even a placebo response happens at the
amygdala level, before you're even
consciously aware, let's say, of a
practitioner's – if we consciously identify a
practitioner's face, your amygdala has
responded to that face according to past
associations. It's happening in a
microsecond where we have a physical
reaction based on our amygdala.

Now if our amygdala determines it's not a
threat, it sends the signal to the upper brain
where you can make decisions about what
you do, and you can have a more measured
response. But otherwise, it's just instinct
kicking in that can go right to your
brainstem and you react.

And one of the reactions is the release of
adrenaline. Adrenaline is released by the
adrenal glands, and is very fast acting. It
changes your physiology almost
immediately. And that's the fight or flight
response. And we'll review that in a minute;
most of us are familiar with that. But that's
basically the array of physiological
responses that helps us either fight off a
danger, or flight – get away from it.

Another interesting thing that happens with
the stress response is the release of cortisol,
and that's also released by the adrenal
cortex, by the kidneys, but it's released
more gradually and it has a more gradual
effect than adrenaline.

Its function is to help increase blood sugar
and metabolism so you have the fuel you
need to run quite a ways from that lion. The
adrenaline is going to make you scream
back at the lion, or jump, or perhaps even
freeze. The cortisol's going to help you have
enough energy to keep running.

While it's doing that, while it's helping you
escape it's doing a bunch of things to help
you survive. It's inhibiting your immune
system. Who needs to be immune to stuff if
you're going to get eaten? And it initially
increases the dopamine in your brain's
pleasure pathways, meaning you have a
greater sense of pleasure. It's the
excitement, the high that comes out of that
rush of stimulation. The adrenaline high
almost; there's a cortisol high as well. But
over time, if you're chronically exposed to
cortisol, which is what happens if the stress
doesn't resolve, the dopamine release
goes down, and pleasure gets curbed. It's
not so fun to be stressed anymore. A lot of
things stop being fun at that point.

Then the third phase is resolution. And
resolution in the natural world involves
escape, getting away, getting away from the
source of danger.

In the modern world, say for mental threats
or mental stress, the escape could be mean
something else. It could mean getting out in
nature, some other way of escaping or
getting away from the stressor.

There's also ways to get away from
stressors that say they are more
disembodied than embodied. Let's make
that distinction. So an embodied escape is
something that puts you more in touch with
your physical awareness, your physical
existence, your proprioception, you could
say. A disembodied escape is something that
takes you out of your body. It distracts you
from the threat, from the problems. They're
both useful. You can guess which one's going
to be more sustainable.

When you're in an embodied escape, you're
actually processing the chemistry. It's
cleaning up the cortisol and the adrenal
byproducts and getting back to a state of
physiological homeostasis. That happens
somewhat too in a disembodied or
distracted escape, but it's only because
you're not paying attention to it. There's no
physical – if you're sitting there, working on
the computer like this guy is, there's not
much physiology helping you out with that.
It's mostly a mental distraction.

And discharge is another part of the
resolution. So the physical discharge – in
this case running away or escaping helps –
the actual chemistry involved and muscular
contraction – helps to resolve the chemical
effects of the stress.

So muscular contraction involves ACh,
which activates the parasympathetic
response, and it also releases
endorphins, both of which gets you chilled
out. You start to rest a little more. You go,
"Wow. I've made it and I've escaped." You
know, "I'm done with my day." Or, "We
survived that webinar with the twenty-‐
minute delay when the sound didn't work."

And then the parasympathetic "rest and
repair" phase kicks in, and that's really
the body's antidote, or in a way the body's
counterpoint, to the fight or flight
response. It takes time to turn back on the
immune system and turn on the repair
functions. It turns back on reproductive
functions. Lots of things happen in that state
– digestive functions – so the body, and
mind, and feelings can repair themselves.

Now stress, this is a point of view on this,
but one point of view is stress isn't always
bad or all bad. That it can even be fun, and
you can see that in the behavior of different
animals, including humans, who actually
play with stress and they tend to play with it
in environments that let it resolve so that
you know it's going to be predictable.
There's going to be an outlet for your
energy that stress mobilizes. You're going to
have some degree of control.

In a rollercoaster you can either hang on or
not, you can scream or not, but you know
it's going to stop too.

That when there's social support, meaning
other people are either participating in that
stress with you, or the stress discharge, and
that you also have the expectation that
things will improve. This rollercoaster's
going to stop, for example. [Laughs] It's just
a rollercoaster.

But there's a lot of things we do that give us
a mild amount of stress as a kind of
stimulation, and that's actually – in some
points of view, that's actually helpful, or it
makes people more productive. There are
other researchers that say that no amount of
stress is healthy. That because people these
days are dealing with so much unresolved
stress, that even these adrenaline-‐producing
activities add to the chronic stress response.
If you don't have a baseline that you can
return to.

Now when a stress response is not
resolved, the effects accumulate and
become chronic, and that stressed state
becomes "normal," and some writers like
Peter Levine call that "sympathetic
tuning," meaning you are tuned – like you
can imagine a musical instrument that's
sharp or flat. You get tuned up toward the
sharp end of the scale where your normal
becomes aroused at a sympathetic fight or
flight level. And that's a lot like unresolved
PTSD. It ends up being that you have a lot of
the same symptoms that come with that at
that state.

So as I mentioned, a stress response turns
off non-‐essential activities such as
growth, immune system response, bone
and tissue repair, reproductive functions,
and then over time, that stress response
is actually more damaging in most cases
than the stressor itself.

Short of being eaten, the thing that's
stressing you out is actually a lot less
harmful than your response to that, to what
your body does to try to cope.

Thirty years ago, ulcers and heart
disease were the only known stress-‐
related illnesses. Now in several places the
statistic is cited, ninety percent of
illnesses are thought to have a stress-‐
related component.

Let's look at some of the ways the brain
changes in chronic stress, because this is
something that really got my attention. The
more I'm doing these things, the more I'm
turning into a kind of brain geek. I'm just
loving the way the brain works. It helps me
to understand so much of what I see and
experience in my clients. But in a chronic
stress situation, the amygdala actually
grows extra neurons, neuronal branches,
that branch out into the rest of the brain. It
gets more wired into the rest of the brain,
and that means it has even more access to
the brain, so when it's at all activated, it
tends to talk even louder. It has more ways
to connect and affect the brain.

And the learning and memory centers
shrink, especially the prefrontal cortex,
which is responsible for the anti-‐amygdala
response of deciding what to do as opposed
to just reacting. Those actually lose volume,
lose weight, and don't function as well. So
you don't learn as well, you don't remember
things as well, and you're not able to think
through reactions as much.

Now this is long-‐term structural changes in
the brain. This is scary. And I wasn't able to
find any research about the reverse for
these things, but the brain is so plastic that
I'm optimistic that if it can tune itself to
stress and actually change its structure so
that it perceives things as more stressful,
when stress resolves repeatedly it can
plastically adapt to that situation too. It
starts to perceive things as not being
stressful the more we have those experience
as well.

It's similar to the concept of long-‐term
potentiation of synaptic relationships
between two axons, where the more
particular synapse pathways used, the more
facilitated it gets, the easier it is to use. So
the more you have a stress response, the
more likely it is you'll have a stress response
to other things.

And in the trauma world, one of the
catchphrases is, "One trauma connects to
any trauma." So the same is true with stress.
Once one thing stresses you out, everything
might stress you out.

It might be that the car didn't start, but you
yell at your kid. It might be that your client
was late, but you have a hard time sleeping
at night. Trigger something in you that has a
hard time sleeping, say. And that's just as a
result sometimes of habituation right at the
synaptic level.

Now that's also reversible. We know that
long-‐term potentiation is reversible at the
synaptic areas, and it's reversible by
alternative experiences. The more you have
other kinds of experiences, the more those
get facilitated and it provides an alternative
route besides just the habitual, stressful one.

Connective tissue, one of our favorite
topics in this kind of work. Hyaluronic acid
and proteoglycans. I remember first
learning about those when I had to write my
entrance paper to the Rolf Institute back in
1985, researching these things. They're
connective tissue components that are
responsible for the plasticity and the
health of the connective tissue. One of the
things they do too is modulate
inflammation and facilitate repair within
the tissues.

They're found in all kinds of connective
tissues including muscle, bone, cartilage,
skin, fascias, etcetera.

So it's the stuff that makes the connective
tissue shiny. It's the ground substance, or
the background matrix that these other
components of connective tissue are
embedded in.

So that sheen you see in this great picture by
Ron Thompson is that hyaluronic acid, for
example, and proteoglycans, which are
responsible for the hydration there.

When you're exposed to cortisol as a result
of stress or pain over time, that cortisol
increases the breakdown of those
components and inhibits their
regeneration. So I'll say it again. It
increases the breakdown of hyaluronic acid
and proteoglycans, and inhibits their
regeneration so they can't repair
themselves, they can't – the body has a
harder time making new cartilage surfaces,
which is what is shown here in red.

These are articular cartilage surfaces that
are responding to – arthritis induction's a
kind of stress by breaking down, and the red
– there's a dye that's been inducted,
introducing the joint to stay in those places
that are breaking down, losing
proeoglycans.

The tissue effects of constant stress or
constant cortisol stimulation – your tissue's
not as plastic. It doesn't change as easy. It
gets literally stiffer or more brittle. And it
gets more increased, it's more susceptible
to inflammation because these
components help modulate inflammation.
And stress from other parts of your life can
make your tissues more inflamed and more
susceptible to go there if anything traumatic
happens to them. And it slows down
healing, of course.

It also – cortisol especially has a role in
weight gain, and it's part of why some
people eat to deal with stress, because
they're being flooded with cortisol that are
changing the blood sugars and they want to
eat more.

And they're especially in the abdominal
area, and this has actually been correlated to
people that have survived an abuse, either
physical or psychological abuse – tend to
have higher abdominal fat deposits. And the
abdominal fat in particular is particularly
difficult for the body to reuse, and
particularly has a lot of byproducts and
things like that that the body almost
experiences as toxic when it does have to
metabolize it. So it's a tough thing when you
start getting that cycle of stress and weight
gain.

There's three different levels of stress. In
this model that's used by the Canadian
Centre for Occupational Health and Safety –
and I found it useful just to kind of answer
the question or start to address the
question, when do you need to get help? Or
when do you need to help your clients get
help?

And immediate stress has a lot of the kind
of usual autonomic nervous system fight
or flight signs including increased heart
rate and blood pressure, rapid breathing,
sweaty palms, inhibition of lacrimal and
salivary glands. You don't tend to cry when
you're really frightened. That comes a little
later. Your mouth gets dry also. Generally
contract muscles, sphincters, and
vascular system – all constrict. Indigestion
and nervous stomach, part of this is a
result of cortisol, but part of this is part of
the stress response too

Now if this goes on for a while – this is all
normal and some ways healthy responses.
This helps you deal with it. But if they go on
for a while, don't get resolved, the effects are
worse. And I'm not going to go through and
read all these. You know many of them. Your
sleep starts getting disturbed, which leads
to memory loss, which depresses your
immune system. You get more colds and
flu. You see an increase in medication, or
smoking, or alcohol consumption. And it
impacts people's relationships and
performance at work, things like that.

And the Canadian Centre for Health and
Safety lists these signs as things that you
are going to need "the help of medical
and psychological professionals." At least
they're recommending that to say this is a
point at which whatever you're doing isn't
quite working, and there's time to get some
help. And I'll talk more about alternatives
for help.

Now Level Three, ongoing stress, when
you've been dealing with this usually for a
longer period of time – and by the way, how
long it is is just as important as how strong
it is. It may not be a very strong stressor, but
if you're dealing with it a long time, it can
have very strong effects.

Insomnia, errors in judgment, etcetera.
Autoimmune disorders, eating disorders,
chronic fatigue, etcetera. The CCOHS says
these are conditions when you see these
signs, it means you need significant
intervention. A lot of these are medical
conditions; they need medical interventions
from either conventional or an alternative
practitioner. But you're also needing to take
some serious steps to dealing with
whatever's causing these things – the stress
responses, the stress situations, the stress
habits you have that you're dealing that are
causing these things.

What you can do for clients.
What you can do, what we can do is
massage. Therapists, or bodyworkers, or
structural integrators, whatever our
practice is, what we can do for clients –
there's a lot we can do, and a lot of studies
that have shown that the bodywork and
massage does a lot of really good things.

It relaxes the autonomic nervous system,
stimulates the parasympathetic response,
has emotional effects, reduces depression,
increases immune system function, and
reduces blood pressure sometimes.

The last one's interesting because if
sometimes bodywork will increase your
pressure, sometimes it'll reduce your
pressure.

And Brian, I wasn't able to give you a heads-‐
up about this because we didn't have our
audio there beforehand. Do you want to do a
poll now, or should we do this part?

Brian: It would take me some time to enter
it. [Technical discussion 00:29:58 to
00:30:05]. It would take me some time to
enter the poll, so what we can do is just pose
it as a question and people can type in their
answer in the question box, and I'll try and
get an assessment that way.

Til: Nice.

Brian: Okay, so – go ahead.

Til: So the question is – yeah. Question is
which factor of these four would most
likely determine whether hands-‐on work
raises or lowers blood pressure?
Direction, depth, pain, or speed? All
things that describe the kind of work. Type
in your answers into the question box. What
do you think it is? And Brian, you can tell us
what you see.

Brian: Okay. It seems like there's an equal
amount of answers. Speed and pain. A
couple of depths here and there.

Til: Well I'm going to say those are both
right, but for the purposes of the poll here
and for the CE quiz later, we're going to say
pain is the one that's been shown to be – in
research situations – to be most relevant
with blood pressure.

Brian: Okay.

Til: Painfulness of the work, whether people
experience the work as painful or not has a
direct correlation to whether it raises or
lowers their blood pressure. So some kind of
fast work, like I'm just thinking about – I
don't know – about maybe tapotement or
vibration, things like that – can actually
lower blood pressure. But if the work is
painful, that often will increase blood
pressure. So pain is the answer that the
research is pointing to.

So when we think about ways to work with
people that are either dealing with a stress
response, or we're helping people modulate
that, the first thing that comes up is slowly.
We want to work slowly. And we want to
incorporate stillness in our work, pauses,
still times where people actually just get to
settle and feel their body's response where
there's not a lot of input and activity.

Rhythmic work has a very calming effect, so
whether you're working with the rhythm of
the breath, with cranial rhythm, or other
kinds of rhythms, that's been shown to
have a very calming effect on the nervous
system.

Compression is an interesting one, and this
was – if you ever saw the documentary
about Temple Grandin – I think that might
be just the name of it. She's a professor at
the State University of Colorado in Fort
Collin in animal husbandry, and she was
born autistic, and she watched the cows
calm down. She lived on a ranch here in
Colorado. She watched the cows in the ranch
calm down when they were put in a
compression device that would squeeze the
cow and calm it down for whatever they had
to do with the cow – give an injection or
treat it, something like that. So she invented
the one for herself. She called and – she
invented this little press she could use. She'd
call and she got really upset, and it would
squeeze your body, and it would calm her
down quite a bit. And there's a really
touching movie – kind of a biopic that was
made about her that's fun to watch.

But that's relevant to bodywork because
we're doing a lot of things that compress the
body, and there is a neurological response to
having compression in the body that calms it
down.

And then the general attitude that we have
in our work of listening versus
manipulating. So we're actually perceiving
with our hands, as well as delivering input
or change, and this little amazing picture
here that I think I show in every class that I
teach because it's so amazing just shows
what happens when we don't do that. We
end up having to hold our clients down, or
we get uncomfortable in our own bodies,
etcetera.

Now other ideas about where to work now,
as opposed to how to work generally
where to work: around the joints because
the joints are so richly filled with
mechanoreceptors. Relevant to what we
were talking about in our proprioception
webinar, you're going to be talking to the
brain pretty clearly, pretty loudly, and very
effectively around the joints.

The same is true in the superficial fascias,
the outer layers of the body because of the
concentrated string of mechanoreceptors
and free nerve endings.

And then at the tendinous attachments,
the places where the tendons, the muscle
fibers turn into tendons, and the places the
tendons attach onto the periosteum of the
bone. The Golgi response there is a calming
response that decreases the tone of the
muscles involved.

Specific places to work, I am going to go
through these somewhat rapidly so that we
will have time – I think we might even have
time for some of the optional things. I'm
watching my time here.

Cranial fascia. Sutures – because the
sutures are covered with cranial fascia, and
because of the craniosacral movements,
the rhythm of the craniosacral pulse, say,
the cranial fascia is a particularly effective
way to work with stress.

The cranium is also a place of the cranial
nerves leaving the brain, and those are
largely parasympathetic nerves. They
have parasympathetic response on the body.
And the cranial fascia is also a place that
accumulates tension and strain, partly
because of facial expression and the eyes,
but also because it's a connector the
left/right, and front/back of the body, and
so these strain patterns tend to cross over
here, tries to communicate or equalize itself
across the cranial fascia.

And this amazing picture from Primal
Pictures shows a very careful dissection of
the layers of the fascia that are over the
bone, which you can see cut away that
reveal the dura mater and the pia mater of
the brain within it.

The face, particularly important in a stress
response. Because our faces express the
stress we're under with physical expression,
we can actually change that expression by
working with the face, and that does have an
effect on your neurotransmitter balance.
And I think I've mentioned that now in a
couple of webinars where actually changing
– having an expression that's more like a
smile actually increases your biochemistry
to the point where it mimics what's
happening when you're happy, and you
actually feel happier. Even if you start with
the face, as opposed to start with the
happiness, then that result is you feel better.

Jaw tension. It's, you know – most of us
clench our teeth when we are under some
pressure and strain. And the temporalis
muscles, as is being shown here in this little
video short, is one that's involved in a stress
response.
Suboccipital region. Righting and
orienting reflexes. Now just keeping your
head up is something your suboccipital's
doing all the time, and in a traumatic or a
stressful situation, you actually have a
response that involves looking around and
getting more alert, and sometimes the neck
becomes hyper-‐erect or a little tighter, as a
way of spotting and orienting to whatever
the danger might be or whatever threat
might be there. So that tension can
accumulate and change the myofascial
structures involved, and then also nerves
that pass through the suboccipital
structures that can cause different kinds of
headaches, or different kind of neurological
symptoms at the back of the head.

The hands. I mean we could pick any part of
the body and talk about how it's relevant to
stress, and most of these, I think, are
probably known to you, but just to look at
some specifics about why some of these
areas are effective.

The Pacinian corpuscles are concentrated
around the joints of the hands, and they are
mechanoreceptors that again talk to the
brain rather viably, fill the brain full of
signal, and don't leave a lot of room for
other stuff. And one of the parts of the brain
they fill is the somatosensory cortex, and
this little distorted figure here is modeled
proportionally to the amount of brain
dedicated to each of the body parts. So the
hands are huge. In fact, because we have
two hands, there's more of the brain
dedicated to the hands than anything else.

Now here's a schematic video from Primal
Pictures showing the sympathetic nervous
ganglia and the parasympathetic ganglia.
The parasympathetic right now are in green,
and they're down at the bottom. That
corresponds with the sacral nerves and the
pelvic floor.

We're looking behind the viscera now to
where the spine would lie, and those long
yellow strands alongside where the spine
would lie are the sympathetic ganglia, so
that's where many of the sympathetic
functions have their associated ganglia.

The parasympathetic ones. Yeah. So these
are now green. The sympathetic ones are
now green. The parasympathetic ones,
which are concentrated in the sacral nerves
found in the pelvis also worked their way
back up into some of the organs, and then
some of those parasympathetic nerves come
down through the cranial nerves through
the head and have their effect there.

So just working with the belly and the
viscera will have a big effect
parasympathetically. It will actually resolve
sympathetic responses because those are so
deep, but have a visceral or calming effect.

Same with the sacrum. The sacroiliac
joints. My next article coming out is about
these joints, and here's a couple of
illustrations from it where working the
sacrum, the side joints, has a direct effect on
the physiology of the body. Structurally for
sure, but also functionally, and that people
seem to calm down and their states seem to
change when you work with those joints.
And last but not least in terms of where to
work – in fact, maybe this should be the first
one, is the breath. Breath is so intimately
associated with parasympathetic and
sympathetic activity. The startle response,
taking a gasp, taking in a quick intake of
breath is how our body starts to charge up
that sympathetic reaction. Surprise, alarm,
fear, shock, anger – all these things that
cause us to do a quick, sudden inhale are
sympathetically activating.

While the opposite, laughing, say, or sighing
are parasympathetic activities. Expiration
– letting the air go, releasing that breath,
releasing the trauma.

So with just these simple ideas, you can do a
whole lot in your sessions around breath. If
someone's in a stressed situation,
emphasizing the exhale, working for things
either structurally or functionally, or
awareness-‐wise, you get in the way of the
exhale, can really change someone's
parasympathetic state and make that more
available to them for sure.

And then there's our embodiment – what
state we're in. What, say, state of activation
we are in ourself because our clients will
tend to mirror us and vice versa.

Who knows if it's the boy scout mirroring
the monkey, or the monkey mirroring the
boy scout? Who knows. But they're both
having a good time, and their good time is
building. They're resonating and changing
their limbic responses mutually. It's like a
positive feedback loop of laughter in this
case.

So if we're able to work with our own
physiology, or our own mental states or
emotional responses, our clients will
unconsciously, or sometimes consciously,
actually be shifted by that too.

Now here's where we teach what we need to
learn really because there's some really
interesting statistics of how bad generally
caregivers about dealing with stress,
especially people in the caregiving
professions, whether they're
psychotherapists, or physical therapists, or
medical personnel – like those are the
people who are involved in this particular
study.

But they consistently rated themselves
worse in terms of stress scores than the
national average. Preventing myself from
becoming stress, worst. Managing reducing
stress and experience of caregivers are
worse. Recovering fully after I've been
stressed out, worse, etcetera. Recognizing –
on and on. And there's a lot more about this
topic and other kind of sobering charts at
that website listed there.

So we're getting to the part of the call where
we're going to talk about what we do, what
we can do in response to being stressed.
And stress management in one model of
thinking about it generally falls into one of
four categories, and this little stress
assessment thing we're going to do is
adapted from Robert Epstein, who's a writer
about stress. But he's not the only one using
these categories.

Stress management is thought to be either
relaxation techniques, managing
thoughts and the way you perceive
things. Preventing stress from occurring
or managing sources of stress once
they're already happening.

And let's actually go ahead and do this. We
do have time to do this. If you have a piece
of paper, or some way to jot down some
numbers for a second, count up how many
of these that you do. And these are under
the category of practicing relaxation
techniques. Now these are not the only
ways, of course, but this is a way to give
yourself a quick little score.

I schedule some relaxation time every
day. I sometimes visualize soothing
scenes to relax. I use special breathing
techniques to help me relax. I regularly
receive body work as a way of reducing
stress.

How many of those are you able to check?
Just get your total. Zero, one, two, three, or
four. So write that down. And again, not that
these are the only ways to practice
relaxation; this will give you a sense.

Managing sources of stress. How many of
these are you able to check off?

Having adequate shelf, file, and drawer
space. I consistently put important tasks
ahead of unimportant tasks. I have
resources for help, delegation, or support
when I'm stressed out. And I have no
trouble keeping my work area organized,
unlike this fellow. Actually a picture of my
office at times with huge tidal waves of
paper about to overflow and overtake his
desk.

How many of those are you able to check
off? Write that number down too, as number
two. So we have a total for number one, now
we have a total for number two. We're going
to have four totals altogether.

The next category, preventing stress from
occurring.

I practice avoiding stress before it starts.
I plan my schedule in a way that
minimizes stress. I spend my time each
morning prioritizing my day. And then I
have a clear picture of how I'd like my
life to proceed over the next few years.

How many of those can you check? Write
down a number, zero to four. And that's
another way of actually preventing stress.
All these things you do that avoids getting
into a situation where you're going to have
to be stressed out anyway.

Final category, managing thoughts.

I regularly examine my thoughts and try
to shift any stress-‐producing beliefs that
I have. I'm aware that my thinking is
sometimes negative or stress-‐producing;
some self-‐awareness around that. I keep
myself calm by being selective about
what I pay attention to in my
environment. And I often reinterpret
events to reduce the stress I'm feeling.

And these are adapted from Robert
Epstein's assessment questions. Can you
write that total down?

So now you have four totals, and you're
going to add them up. You have a total for
each one. And this is, again, something – if
you didn't follow through in the call, you can
go back to the slideshow later and do that
because this will give you some useful
information, even if you couldn't relate to all
the questions. If you had your own
alternative ways of doing this same thing,
it'll give you a kind of an overview.

So you're going to total these up. You're
going to get a grand total out of these four
numbers, and then it will tell you what it can
mean.

And generally twelve or more means
you're using things – you have ways of
dealing with stress. Sixteen were possible;
sixteen's the highest possible score. And
twelve or more it means, yeah, you're using
quite a few of those.

Eleven or under – now this is again
subjective – or if you're under two in any
single area, there's room for
improvement there. There's other ways
perhaps that you could look at that kind of
thing. Again, there's many options for
accomplishing those different goals besides
the ones in the test, of course, but that might
be an area to look at.

Seven or under for your total score, or
one or under in any single area – that's an
area you maybe really want to either get
some learning or studying in, or get some
help in because that's probably an area
that's a lot more available to you to use as a
resource in dealing with the stress you
might experience.

So we're not going to do the poll because of
our fast start tonight. We didn't have time to
set these up, but you can go ahead and type
in your answer box, your answer to this
question: which of these stress-‐
management methods did Epstein's
study indicate was most effective? What's
your guess?

Out of those four we just went over, one of
them by far and away was more correlated
to people reporting less stress and reporting
higher happiness scores for themselves. It's
a self-‐reported study. And I'll give the
website that we can actually go take a more
detailed version of that assessment and see
those results.

But go ahead and type your answer in.
Which one of these four: practicing
relaxation; preventing stress; managing
thoughts; or managing sources of stress?
How's it looking there, Brian?

Brian: It looks like we've got all the bases
covered. [Laughs]

Til: The answers are all over the place.

Brian: A lot of people say managing
thoughts, and a lot of people say relaxation
techniques.

Til: This is interesting. Epstein wrote about
this when he did this study. Those are the
ones he expected to be most effective. Guess
what? Those were the bottom two…

Brian: Wow.

Til: …in the research. He correlated least
clearly to people reported being less
stressed. And this is just one study. It's a
fairly large study, but it was one study – I
don't think it was particularly – it wasn't
written up for any peer reviewed journals or
anything, but it was written up in "Scientific
American," so it had some – you know, it
managed to get past their reviewers.

Actually managing thoughts and practicing
relaxation techniques were the lowest
correlated. Now some of that may be an
artifact of the questions he asked, of course.
I could think of a lot of great questions to
ask about managing thoughts and practicing
relaxation that he didn't ask.

For example, in some ways you could say
spiritual practices are a way of managing
thoughts or practicing relaxation
techniques, and his study didn't go into that.
It was more working under irrational beliefs
of the way you interpret experience, which
also are very important skills.

But in any case, those were the ones that
correlated least effectively with stress. The
one that correlated the most effectively was
preventing stress from occurring, far and
away from any of those other three. People
that practice ways to prevent stress from
happening had much lower stress scores
and much higher happiness quotients,
happiness scores.

So it's sometimes the easiest place to
practice, but some of it has to do with being
proactive rather than being reactive. If you
can keep stress from happening, you never
have to go there. You don't have to recover
for it, while a lot of these other things are
going to be reactive. You're going to have to
manage those sources of stress; means the
stress is already happening. You're just
finding ways to manage it, which is an
important skill, but it may not be as effective
as actually figuring out ways to not even go
there. So yeah, that's the one that was by far
the most effective.

And that's things like creating a to-‐do list,
planning a schedule, having a vision, having
a plan, let's say. Making choices around
what you say yes to. In some ways you could
say "No" is something that has more of an
impact on your stress. The answer, "No, I'm
not going to take that project on. I'm not
going to do that extra client. I'm not going to
do that thing" is going to have a much better
effect on your stress life than "Yes" does.
"Yes" is important too, but "Yes" seems to
add; not doing things seems to create space.

So what you can do for yourself. Planning,
prioritizing, scheduling with stress in
mind. Again, coming out of that research,
this can be a very effective way to keep your
stress manageable.

Just like this person is, just crossing off time.
And there's the old therapist trick of
scheduling yourself in as a client. If you have
a hard time taking time for yourself, put
down appointment with Til in your – you
know, fill in your own name in your
appointment book, ands o then there's some
space built in that you can take for yourself.

This guy's saying, "Hey Ed, can I call you
back? I'm in the moment here." So it's just
practicing these different things, including
the idea of an electronics Sabbath. This
idea is becoming more and more popular
because electronics are so pervasive. My
fourteen-‐year-‐old son is not at all on board
with this idea, but he does it. He goes along
with it and has a great day when he does.

But in theory sometimes we slip up, but in
theory we take that once a week day and
our day varies, but we take a day without
our electronics just because electronics, as
amazing as they are – here we are together,
connecting electronically – they bring so
much more bandwidth into our life than we
have yet figured out how to deal with in
many cases.

So planning, scheduling with stress in mind.
And then here's an idea: multitask only on
purpose. So so many of us get in the habit of
multitasking constantly that we don't even
choose it anymore, and we end up
increasing our load. So we're even doing
things to relax while we're getting things
done, like these examples here.

And a great example of this is Seung Sahn,
an early American Zen teacher who's
famous for saying, "When you eat, just
eat." This whole practice of Zen was based
on just doing what you're doing. When you
sit on the cushion, just sit on the cushion.

And then the story goes one day, one of his
monks saw him eating his breakfast and
eating a newspaper and said, "Sensei, what
are you – didn't you say when you eat just
eat?" And he says, "Oh yeah, yes I did." And
he says, "And when you eat and read the
newspaper, just eat and read the
newspaper." So in any case, just multitask
when you need to. Do it consciously because
then it gives you some element of choice
about it.

Here's an interesting one too. What you can
do for yourself, "The mental trait of
openness is correlated with better stress
resilience, more white matter in the
brain, better health, and longer lives."

In this model there are five basic traits.
Openness is one of them, and it's the one
that's most correlated with better stress
resilience, and there's a reference for this in
the resources, if you want to look more into
that.

So practicing just open-‐mindedness;
openness to trying new things, new
experiences. These people that show a lot of
these behaviors have a much lower level of
stress chemistry in their body, more white
matter in their brain, which means they
make more connections between things,
better health, and longer lives.

Physical stressors. Some of us, maybe all of
us, know these things. Exercise, rest,
getting bodywork. Taking time for your
physical well-‐being.

And this is the ground of our being, the
ground of our work. This is what we do. So,
you know, you don't need me to tell you.
This is so important that we do that, we
include that in our practices. And the
physiological effect it has of processing the
biochemistry of stress, you're literally
cleaning up and metabolizing the cortisols,
the sugars, all those kind of things that leave
you feeling stressed.

Emotional stressors. What you can do for
yourself around emotional stressors.
Getting social support is the big one.
Having people to talk to, having other
people that are dealing with similar things,
staying connected to other people – that's a
big factor in how effectively people deal
with emotional stress.

Cultivate enjoyment. Take time to really
enjoy things. And one of my teachers, Julio
Olalla said that, "Gratitude is the only
voluntary emotion." Emotions seem to be
in our every day experience a result of some
other state. That could be, that may not be,
but certainly gratitude is available to all of
us as a choice. You can choose to see things
in a way where you're stressed, or you can
see things in ways where you're grateful for
what's happening. There's a sense of
enjoyment behind that.

And then to finish here, I just have a little
gallery of some appreciative…

or enjoying faces for you to – ten.

So just look at these. Let your body respond.
Put your mirror neurons aside. Take a
breath, exhale.

But you're all just looking at these difference
faces. This gallery of faces to close out.

Different states of enjoyment.
Celebration…

Gratitude…

Appreciation…

Fun…
And just pleasure…

All right.

So some resources for you. If you need
them for yourself or you think that you're in
a situation where a referral is necessary,
along that Level One, Two, Three model that
we went over, medical professionals, of
course, for medical issues – either
conventional or complementary.

Therapists and counselors, and that
includes psychotherapists, and also pastoral
counselors.

Coaches are a way a lot of people are
dealing with stress issues, or the factors that
make people stressed – the financial issues,
or the health issues, or the time
management issues, say, and wellness
coaching in particular is becoming an
interesting specialty. There's – I put up a
little website there, coachfederation.org,
has a directory of its certified coaches. It's a
coaching certification body that I'm involved
with as a certificant – let's put it that way.

And then the interesting thing is you're
seeing more and more health coaches or
wellness coaches where they're being
employed by health insurance providers
such as Kaiser. They find it much more
effective, cost-‐effective and humane really to
be helping people make changes in their
lives around health and their wellness, and
treating them once they're sick.

Churches are often a source of different
kinds of stress or pastoral counseling. There
are different kinds of resources – social
connection.

Community health centers often have
stress programs geared to particular age
groups. And all sorts of places to go for
stress referrals.

More resources for learning. Here's a link
there where there's a bunch – there's a
summary of different hands-‐on work
research that's looked at the different
relationships between hands-‐on work and
stress.

And there's a really good hour-‐long
National Geographic video that you can
get on Netflix as well as other places. It's
called Portrait of a Killer, and it has a
bunch of – Robert Sapolsky quoted a couple
of times in here in his baboon research as
well as some interesting British research
looking at British civil servants and how
their stress levels mimic baboon troops and
things like that.

And then more details on that stress
management self-‐assessment we did,
mystressmanagementskills.com. You can
do a detailed version of it there, and see a
more detailed score, and read some of the
interesting things around this research
there.

Now these are some of the references if you
want to go further into these things. They're
going to be in the slideshow. We have the
extended slideshow.

I want to thank Primal Partners for the
anatomy illustrations and the animations we
had. They do an amazing job of helping
people learn more about anatomy and they
support our trainings.

And then the different things you can do
through us include, well, if you go to this
website advanced-‐
trainings.com/abmp12s we'll include an
expanded slideshow. We'll have the
recording playback up there, and a text
transcription of this webinar's audio that
we finally got working.

And other specials there to help you get
involved – I'm sorry. I should say you need
to subscribe to our e-‐letter to get these
things, but if you don't want to continue
receiving the e-‐letter that's fine. You can
cancel your subscription at any time after
that point. And you can join the discussion
group on our private Facebook page. Just
search Facebook for "ABMP Body/Mind"
There's also a direct link at that website,
advanced-‐trainings.com/abmp12s.

If you have any questions and things that
don't get answered tonight, that's the place
for them.

Brian, we did it.

Brian: Nice work. And you kept your
cortisol levels in control. I was very
impressed. [Laughs] Hey, we've got a couple
of questions. Do you want to take a few?

Til: Yeah. I'd love to. We still have a little
time. Let's do that.

Brian: Okay. Great.

Til: I hope to have some resolution after this
[laughter] after that audio thing.

Brian: Sounds good. I had a really nice bath
last night actually.

Martha's wanting to know if you can explain
the ACh kick-‐start of the parasympathetic
system a bit more.

Til: I'm not an expert in there, but the
reading I've done, ACh is important for
muscular contractions with the body – the
nervous system actually used to signal a
muscle to contract. But it also – it's a
parasympathetic response, and I don't think
that's an accident because really what that
does is it gets your body ready to repair the
results of a lot of exertion at the same time.

I just told you just about everything I know
about that right there, but there are some
really great resources, and actually if you
just Wikipedia – if you want to learn more
about ACh look it up there. They do have an
amazing ACh page there.

Brian: Okay. Great. Max is asking about the
compression strokes. Is there a specific area
of the body for the compression strokes?
You know, to help calm everything?

Til: Temple Grandin would just crawl in this
big thing just made of two sheets of plywood
and a foam mattress, and squeezer her
whole body in there, and that's mimicking
what they do with cows. Now I'll bet
compression anywhere – just about
anywhere – tends to be calming. And my
wife has worked a bunch with autistic kids
doing bodywork with them, and she says
that's pretty popular, even if they can't
stand light touch, but deep, static
compression's pretty popular.

Brian: Okay. Great. Did you say there was a
movie made about the woman who…

Til: Yeah. Temple Grandin. Temple Grandin.
I think that's the name of the movie, but
certainly if you were to do a web search on
her name, G-‐R-‐A-‐N-‐D-‐I-‐N – Temple Grandin
– you'd come up with the movie.

Brian: Great. Thank you. Somebody had
asked about that. I guess it's the same as
swaddling. Like some of my friends have
swaddled their babies.

Til: That's right. I hadn't thought about that.
That sounds right.

Brian: Okay. Janelle is asking – so it seems
stress causes premature aging on a very
physiological level. In young people, I
wonder if that can be reversible in chronic
stress situations, even once the connective
tissue has been broken down. What do you
think about that?

Til: Now if we're going to say gratitude is a
voluntary emotion, then we can practice
being grateful for our glasses being half-‐full,
and who knows to tell you the truth. A lot of
objective truly – objective level. I don't think
that's actually been studied as much as
breakdown, at least I haven't been able to
find as much research about repairing
regeneration – that's what happens when
things break down and get damaged.

But we know how plastic things are. We
know the body does heal, and the body's
always healing. In fact, stress gets in the way
of healing. When you remove the stress, the
body just heals. So I've bet a lot of these
premature aging and things like that can be
reversed. Well I think most of us have been
through periods of feeling older than other
times, and then getting rejuvenated again.
So on a short-‐term level for sure, but even a
long-‐term level.

Brian: Okay. Matthew – I'm sorry.

Til: Go ahead.

Brian: Matthew emailed in and he said that
the woman actually got an Oscar for that
movie. That's kind of an interesting fact.

Til: Did she?

Brian: Yeah. How about that?

Til: I didn't know that.

Brian: Okay. So let's see. I'm going to take
two more questions. Catherine's wanting to
know what's the first change in the body
that the brain looks for to reset to more of a
parasympathetic dominance.

Til: Interesting question. She wants to know
the first change in the body the brain uses as
a signal to go into parasympathetic. I don't
know, but I would guess it's that muscular
contraction. I bet it's physical movement.
That's part of the resolution phase – actually
moving, let's say, you know just – on
metaphorical terms, moving the energy, but
actually physically moving things around
inside your body on a tangible level is a way
the body starts to reset, both through the
ACh response, but also just metabolizing the
different things that have been released as
part of the stress response.

Brian: Okay. Very good. Probably even the
breath, although that would be the
physiological…

Til: There you go. The movement breath.
Part of the breath thing is just pure
movement, of pumping the fluids and the
air.

Brian: Yeah. That's kind of what comes to
me.

Til: Also – yeah, I think you're right. I think
you're onto something. Breath is a big one.
The exhale. And then also the mental
reassessment of maybe things aren't so bad.
Sometimes that's the first trigger too.
Realizing, "Oh, maybe I'm not going to get
eaten today."

Brian: Right. Right. Let's do one more. And
folks that are emailing in about the CE
credit, a little patience. I will go over that
again, so if you just hang on for just another
minute or so and I'll walk you through how
to do that. Stephanie is asking – we'll leave
this. This will be a nice food for thought. Do
you believe, especially since you were
studying the brain – do you believe that the
brain response to vibrational therapy, like
tuning fork therapy – and therefore could
help reduce stress and regulate stress
hormone levels?

Til: Interesting.

Brian: I know.

Til: I don't know a thing about vibrational
therapy or tuning fork therapy, but I can
imagine that I know the brain does respond
to sound, sound being a kind of vibration in
a very observable way. You can actually map
out on a scanner the brain's response to a
sound wave. You change the pitch, you
change the quality of the sound, and the
brain wave changes. It's almost like the
brain resonates along with the sound that's
coming in. So I can imagine a situation
where – you know, or scenarios where the
use of sounds could be therapeutic for just
the brain activity.

Brain: Well fantastic. Well Stephanie, I think
you just gave us an idea for another
webinar, so thank you very much. [Laughs]

Til: You're just going to tune in and listen to
a tuning fork for the hour next time. I think
we'll just do that.

Brian: It would certainly be a little easier of
a start than we had today. [Laughs]

Til: Definitely. Thanks for your patients with
that, Brian. You really did a great job.

Brian: Yeah. Well thank you to everybody
for their patience. That was, like I said, a
good example of the understanding the
body-‐mind effects of stress. That was, you
know, really apropos actually. So again we
apologize to everybody for that little snafu
in the beginning, but thank you so much for
tuning in tonight.

Til, another fantastic presentation. Second
one in our series. I'm already excited for the
third one, which is going to be on – let's see
– I had that earlier. On November 28th, right
when I come back from Thailand after the
wedding. So I'll be really relaxed and ready
to present, so look forward to that one. So if
you haven't signed up for that…

Til: Adjustable symptoms.

Brian: Exactly. If you haven't signed up for
that, you can do that on abmp.com. And Til,
again, phenomenal. You always have
wonderful insights to share. You have such a
rich history and a beautifully inquisitive
mind, which I sincerely appreciate. Thank
you so much for sharing tonight.

Til: Thank you.

Brian: All right. Well have a sweet night.

Til: Good night, Brian.

Brian: Good night, Til. And if you want to
stay on…







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Transcript: ‘Understanding the Body-Mind Effects of Stress’ Webinar with Til

Luchau, 26-Sept 2012

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