Tian Dayton

Our emotions are physical, they travel through out our bodies on something called peptides. Certain chemicals are designed to bind to like receptors on our cells, in what functions as a seamless emotional, communication network. Stress related chemicals like adrenaline and cortisol or calming body chemicals like serotonin and dopamine drive and influence how we think, function, feel and act. We can learn to use these chemicals of emotion to our advantage rather than our disadvantage, we can take charge of our emotional reactions, in other words, before they take charge of us!
If you feel yourself beginning to enter that emotionally frayed and fried zone, try some simple mood managing strategies. Next time you’re sitting in front of your computer and your body morphs into a vibrating mass of little, stingy sensations or you hear one more piece of lousy financial news and your gut starts to glue itself to the inside wall of your back try one of these:

SLOW DOWN YOUR BREATHING
…..and calm your nervous system. The breath connects the body and the mind, so slowing down the breath has the effect of calming the body, mind and emotions. Breathing is a bodily function that is regulated by the autonomic nervous system as well as the conscious voluntary nervous system. Breathing is the only body system that creates a bridge between the conscious and unconcious mind/body, bringing them into a mutual balance. If our breathing is uneven or labored, our emotions and our mind may become agitated. What do we do the moment when we get scared? Hold our breath, right? When our brains anticipate danger or we get scared, our breathing rate increases so that more oxygen can be sent to the blood cells and muscle fibers to prepare us to fight or run away to safety. Also, when we’re stressed, our breath rate needs to increase in order to clean our blood of those toxins that we’ve build up. That’s why we want to run or exercise to get rid of stress, so we can rid our bodies of those annoying little stress needles and feel normal again.
We can try to consciously relax ourselves by slowing down and deepening our inhalations and exhalations, thereby stimulating our relaxation response and calming our emotions.
When the brain and body are calm, fewer toxins are introduced into the blood stream and respiration slows way down. When we sleep or quietly relax, our breathing tends to become slow and rhythmic and our emotions calm.
Try it for yourself right now. Simply draw deep, rhythmic breaths, allow your diaphragm to expand as you do and observe calm coming to your body, mind and emotions.

THINK UPLIFTING THOUGHTS
In a Harvard study, two control groups were set up in order to measure how what we’re thinking affects or bodies and our emotions. The first control group was asked to watch films of Nazi war crimes. The second, films of Mother Theresa at work. After watching the films each group had blood drawn. The group that had been watching Nazi war films had elevated levels of “stress chemicals” such as adrenaline and cortisol. The group watching the Mother Theresa film had elevated levels of “feel good” chemicals such as serotonin and dopamine that made them feel emotionally regulated and calm. Blood chemicals went back to normal after about twenty minutes. But here is the interesting part. In a second part to the study, subjects were then asked to continue to run the images of the films in their minds throughout the day. Hours later, the results were the same. The group that had been watching Nazi war films had continually high levels of stress chemicals coursing through their blood while the group that had been watching Mother Theresa experienced continued levels of feel good chemicals of emotion.
What we think about all day, really does affect how we feel. Try it, spend five or ten minutes consciously thinking thoughts that make you feel calm, happy and good inside and see what happens to your emotional state. And if you’re not convinced yet that calm is better, try thinking upsetting thoughts or watching something scary or disturbing on TV (easy to find) and see what happens to your emotional state. What we think about really does affect how we feel, if you want to bring calm to your emotions you now have two powerful tools, calm your breathing and think uplifting thoughts. And if that’s not enough:

TAKE A HEART BREAK
Calming your heart or achieving what researchers at HeartMath call “heart coherence” brings emotional calm to your whole body. Regulating heart rhythms also brings calm to blood flow and every body organ and system that the heart influences. You can achieve this coherence in heart rhythms in as little as one minute.
Try the following next time you’re feeling stressed:
• Take a break and mentally disengage from the situation.
• Bring your attention to the area of your heart.
• Recall an experience in which you felt
happiness, love, or appreciation, or just meditate for a
moment on those kinds of thoughts and feelings.
• Re-experience these feelings while keeping your attention
on your heart. Let your breathing be relaxed and regular.
Remember, therapy isn’t about insight alone, it includes making mental and emotional health sustainable and renewable through trading stress inducing habits for emotionally calming ones. Forr more on these subjects check:Emotional Sobriety: From Relationship Trauma to Resilience and Balance tiandayton.com
NOTE: Dr. Tian Dayton will be starting a weekly advice column on The Huffington Post: “Ask Dr. Dayton”. If you have a question you’d like answered please email it to askdrdayton@tiandayton.com with “Huff Post Question” in the subject line.

Human beings aren’t the only ones who experience stress. All vertebrates–fish, birds, and reptiles–respond to stressful situations by secreting the same hormones that we humans do, such as adrenaline and glucocorticoids, which instantaneously increase the animal’s heart rate and energy level. Our fear response, remember, is nature’s way of keeping us safe. We all have it encoded into our DNA, whether fish or fowl, human or animal. But fish and reptiles metabolism doesn’t get derailed and deregulated the way it does in people and other primates, like baboons for example. Baboons and people, it seems, are both intelligent enough to think our way into lots and lots of stress.

Dr.Robert Sapolsky of Stanford University found that “Primates are super smart and organized just enough to devote their free time to being miserable to each other and stressing each other out. . . . For example,having your worst rival taking a nap one hundred yards away gets you agitated.” A professor of biological and neurological sciences, Sapolsky has spent more than three decades studying the physiological effects of stress on health. “If you’re a gazelle, you don’t have a very complex emotional life, despite being a social species,” he says. “But primates are just smart enough that they can think their bodies into working differently. It’s not until you get to primates that you get things that look like depression. . . . If you get chronically, psychosocially stressed, you’re going to compromise your health. So, essentially, we’ve evolved to be smart enough to make ourselves sick.”

Sapolsky’s team has found that baboons, especially “type A” baboons, often have chronically elevated levels of stress hormones that impact their health negatively. “Their reproductive system doesn’t work as well, their wounds heal more slowly and they have elevated blood pressure. . . . So they’re not in great shape.” Interestingly, both low-ranking and type A baboons are among the most susceptible to stress. But here’s an interesting finding, relationships and social connections can actually counter this stress response. Baboons who need baboons, it turns out, are the luckiest baboons in the world, just like people who need people. Among baboons, social isolation may play an even more important role than social rank as far as stress goes.

“Up until fifteen years ago, the most striking thing we found,” says Sapolsky, “was that, if you’re a baboon, you don’t want to be low-ranking, because your health is going to be lousy. But what has become far clearer, and probably took a decade’s worth of data, is the recognition that protection from stress related disease is most powerfully grounded in social connectedness, and that’s far more important than rank.”

That’s why when you’re feeling stressed out, calling a friend, gossiping with a co-worker or going out for a walk or lunch with someone you can make you feel so much calmer.And human beings can even take stress reduction to another level, we can do something that animals aren’t equipped to even conceive of. We can think creatively. We can imagine ways of seeing a situation, for example, of reframing and understanding it that can turn what could be a stressor into something that we don’t worry about or that we can manage differently. We can reflect and come up with imaginative and novel solutions. Human beings can, in short, conceive of and create change; we can use our minds to reframe, to see things in a better light. “We are capable of social supports that no other primate can even dream of,” says Sapolsky.

For example, I might say, “This job, where I’m a lowly mailroom clerk, really doesn’t matter. What really matters is that I’m the captain of my softball team or deacon of my church”–that sort of thing. It’s not just somebody sitting here, grooming you with their own hands [as in the primate world]. We can actually feel comfort from the discovery that somebody on the other side of the planet is going through the same experience we are and feel, I’m not alone. We can even take comfort reading about a fictional character, and there’s no primate out there that can feel better in life just by listening to Beethoven. So the range of supports that we’re capable of is extraordinary. We can use our creative imaginations to get all tied up in knots or to do just the opposite, to enjoy and relax into the life we’re living.

One fifty minute session per week is simply not enough to change a person’s life. If insight is to translate into meaningful life change it needs to be accompanied by small daily actions and lifestyle changes that translate insight into action so that change becomes sustainable and renewable. The fifty minute hour is a crucial underpinning for change because it’s where we can work through inner conflicts that may be keeping us stuck and blocking our ability to grow. But if we really want to see change in our lives, we need to take a holistic approach both as therapists and clients not only to what goes on in the therapist’s office, but outside of it.

We live in the middle of a constant cascade of information; we know random factoids about everything from the anti-oxidants in blueberries to why crossword puzzles help us to slow down the aging process. But what we know doesn’t necessarily get translated into what we do or who we’re able to become. We can have all sorts of great insights but if we lead lifestyles that put us under too much stress, eat foods that make our moods spike and dip, drink caffeine that makes us buzz and crash or use alcohol or drugs to manage emotional turmoil, insight won’t help all that much. We’ll still feel stressed out, out of balance and all over the place. When we “know too much” and “do too little”, or if we “know better” but “do worse” discouragement follows. We set ourselves up for disappointment because we know enough to have high expectations but we undermine our progress by living lifestyles that create stress and imbalance. We think “I know better than this so why isn’t change happening?” “I understand what triggers me and what my issues are, so why do I still get triggered and have issues, why do things still hurt?”

Emotions are a lot like the weather and people are like any other ecosystem. If a person’s emotional insulation layer gets compromised by too much stress and toxic living, they will experience the same sorts of extremes in their emotional climate that global warming causes in our weather system. They will have trouble with self regulation, they will tend toward emotional extremes because their ability to self regulate will be undermined. It will be harder for them to simply live comfortably in a balanced emotional mood.

Therapy is a wonderful place to examine emotional and psychological patterns of thinking, feeling and behavior that get us into trouble so that we can change them. This is where insight can be very freeing, once we understand the origins of particular patterns we “see” what’s going on and feel able to change them. But, if we’re going to therapy, gaining all sorts of good insights then living a lifestyle that undermines what I like to refer to as our “emotional sobriety” we may not see the changes we’re looking for.

If we want to make therapy sustainable and renewable, we’ll need to make lifestyle changes that go far beyond the office; the kinds of changes that become self generative and self sustaining. In order to do this, we need to understand how our emotions, bodies, thinking and action all work together as a well oiled machine, or how they get out of whack if we don’t take care of them. Over the next few weeks I will go through some of those changes one by one and discuss the underpinnings of good emotional sobriety and balance.

Some friends and I were sinking into that backdrop of twilight sky, flickering lights and people in motion that make eating outside in this city so strangely cozy and entertaining…and we got to talking. There are some benefits to this recession when it comes to returning New York City to some of its livability and charm. Is it my imagination or because people are going out less do they seem to be enjoying it more? Maybe it’s just summer and everyone is more relaxed, traffic is down and the streets are calmer but something about New York City just feels less frantic. There are tons of folks, for example, streaming into the park; friends, lovers and families with little children loaded down with picnic baskets, laying down blankets and settling in for free concerts and movies. Sidewalk restaurants are full of attractive, interesting looking people leaning into animated conversation over bread, wine and plates of pasta.

And an added bonus, some of the worst kind of New York types are less in evidence. The wannabes who walk down the street shouting into their cell phones, trying to look like wheeler dealers, the masters of the universe types who stare …..somber and smug…. through the tinted windows of their black limos; the over dressed, over jeweled and over-ampted shoppers for whom nothing is quite right. You know the types? When there is less money to spend or show off, well people do less spending and showing off. It’s a relief.

This recession has done a lot to remind people of what’s really important, to get us to reflect on how things got so out of control to begin with; it has been humbling and sometimes being humbled brings out the best in people. Humbled people tend to be less preening and competitive and more focused on getting on with it and enjoying the moment. The simple pleasures seem worth more; walks through the park, dinners with friends; noticing and valuing what you already have and where you already are instead of always wanting to have more and be somewhere else.
And culture becomes more important again. After all going to the museum is cheap entertainment and a lot more elevating (well this could be argued, I suppose) than shopping. Seeing a play, though not cheap, is still less than some evenings can add up to in New York, it’s good value, more bang for your buck. An experience to be remembered.

When rents fall more people can live here. The City was rapidly on its way to pricing everyone but big money makers or people in rent control out and that’s not healthy. New York needs its art loving, people oriented, intelligent middle class, the ones who are here to use and enjoy the city rather than possess and own it.

Maybe we’re getting our city back so that those who live here, raise their families here and love the little stuff that makes this city “this city.” They can can remember why they wanted to live here in the first place. Strolling down Fifth Avenue, meandering along the side streets of downtown, Chinatown, bagel shops, corner delis, book stores and the rare mix of people from all walks of life can be rediscovered. We can take a momentary break from breathlessly getting ahead, stop and, well not smell the roses exactly, but love that feeling of being surrounded by something alive and endlessly interesting, a city that has a pulse of its own that never stops beating. And we can actually spend some time just enjoying each others company instead of constantly networking and “getting ahead” to a place that no one can quite define. If less affluence means living more in our bodies and less in our heads and wallets, then maybe we can learn something about ourselves during this period, maybe we can remember the value of doing less and enjoying it more.

You can actually make your body systems function more efficiently by regularly taking a little 90 second break to focus on calming your heart. What goes on in our hearts affects our entire bodies. The heart’s electromagnetic field far out-powers and out-ranges that of the brain or any other body system. Calming the heart calms the circulatory, nervous and respiratory systems, not to mention a host of others like the digestive and excretory tracts. If we’re calm in our minds and emotions, our overall level of physical functioning is enhanced and improved. If we’re frequently or chronically stressed or upset, our overall level of physical functioning is reduced. “Emotions such as tension, frustration, and sadness can trigger a drop in the blood supply to the heart,” say Childre & Howard of Heartmath. When we’re under stress, the body assumes its survival is threatened so it releases adrenaline into the bloodstream which in turn activates the body’s fight or flight response. When this emergency response becomes chronic, that is if our stress response gets revved up too often throughout the day, the actual beating rhythm of our heart, our “heart rate variability” can become deregulated and chaotic which then throws off all of the body systems that the heart impacts.

Take a Heart Conscious Break
Because the heart is such an efficient organ, we can use it’s effective and intelligent functioning in our favor if we are conscious about it. If we adopt strategies to calm our hearts, our whole body will calm down as well in a matter of seconds, not only will we reduce stress, we’ll enhance healthy body functioning.
Activities like consciously relaxing, meditating or praying nourish and calm the heart and hence, the rest of us. These activities produce what’s called, the relaxation response–a physiological state that is exactly the opposite of stress, a state that reduces blood pressure and increases blood flow to the heart. Not only does this calming create feelings of peace and serenity in our minds, it creates them in our bodies as well. To experience the benefits of this “intentional heart focus,” try the following next time you’re feeling stressed:
• Take a break and mentally disengage from the situation.
• Bring your attention to the area of your heart.
• Meditate or ponder for a moment on those kinds of thoughts and feelings that make you feel calm, peaceful and relaxed or recall an experience in which you felt those feelings and “go there in your head”.
• Re-experience these feelings while keeping your attention on your heart. Let your breathing be relaxed and regular.

This little 90 second to 3 minute break done throughout the day can actually keep you healthy as well as happy. Don’t let stress build, the more you consciously focus positive feelings and relaxation on your heart the more you’ll strengthen and expand a reservoir of peace and calm within you. While you’re eating your omega 3’s, olive oil and veggies, don’t ignore your heart, conscious calming is heart smart living, too. Tiandayton.com