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Hi, everybody. Welcome back. Glad to have you here with me. We are going to continue our discussion today of foundational strategies. We're going to talk about the second foundational strategy for anxiety mastery. In the last two, we talked about finding your why. That's your first foundational strategy, finding your why, and why that is so essential for your anxiety mastery, an essential starting point that will affect all of your strategy, selection, and also your overall levels of how your brain appraises your demands versus your resources, et cetera. I really recommend that you go back and review those episodes if you didn't get a chance to listen to them, because it's a really important starting point. But today we're going to talk about our second foundational strategy and I call this know your context. Because we know that not every single strategy, not every single tool that we have in our toolbox is going to be available in every single context. Some ways that this is true are obvious. For example, we're not always going to be able to select our situation. Sometimes we have to stick with the situation, we don't have a choice about selecting our situation. And so we're going to have to rely on other types of strategies. But one of the very most important things that I want to teach you about knowing your context is about, uh, understanding the level of your emotional distress, the level of your anxiety. Because your emotional intensity is going to determine which types of strategies you can use. And I just want to go back very quickly to reviewing what we talked about a few weeks ago, I'll put a link to this episode in the show notes for those of you who missed it. But an episode where we talked about how, when our brains are evaluating stressful situations which includes anxiety situations, our brains are really evaluating the balance between our resources and our demands. And we talked about how, when our brains feel like our resources are up to the demands, then we create a challenge response and that involves feeling like we want to approach the stressor. It gives us a feeling of excitement and pride and it, it triggers hormones and autonomic reactions that help us to meet the stressor. It actually increases blood flow to our brains. It increases our cardiac efficiency and this facilitates our cognitive performance. However, there's another way to appraise stress. When our brains on the other hand appraise that our resources are not up to the demands of the situation, then it will trigger a threat response. And this makes us feel like we need to avoid and defend ourselves from the stressor. gives us a feeling of anxiety, shame lowered self-esteem. And it triggers a different set of hormones and autonomic reactions. We get less blood flow to our brains and it debilitates our cognitive performance. So we're going to talk a little bit more about this threat response. And when we're in a threat response, when we find that we're in a state of anxiety, and how this is going to influence what types of strategies we can use. I want to bring up an article, an important article by Veilleux et al from Practice Innovations in 2022. And they bring up some really important concepts. They talk about how important it is to develop a toolbox of strategies, an emotional toolbox of strategies, that includes both cognitive, or reappraisal strategies, strategies where we're using our brains, and physical, response oriented strategies, or strategies where we're using basically our bodies to calm us down. Because they talk about how, when our emotional distress is high, this is another way of saying that when we're in that threat response, Cognitive strategies or strategies that require our brains become unproductive because , we have reduced blood flow to our brains, which impairs our thinking and our survival oriented instincts takeover. The authors of this article called this, the thinking threshold, and this is an important concept. Because they help us recognize that there is a point beyond which thinking is obstructed due to this intense threat response, this emotional distress. And when our thinking is obstructed, we should not use the tools in our toolbox that rely on thinking, that rely heavily on thinking. When we have that high emotional distress, we can't depend on cognitive strategies to help us out. When we're in a moment of high anxiety, we can't think our way out of it. Because our brains' blood flow is reduced. And so we have to, in those moments, rely on physical, bodily, behavioral strategies, rather than cognitive strategies, that can help calm us back down to the point where we can think again. And so they really emphasize an attention to context. A consciousness of when each type of tool is going to be appropriate. And that these thinking tools, these cognitive tools are appropriate and powerful only when our emotion intensity is low. When our emotion and our threat response overwhelms our brains, then we've got to rely on physical and bottom up calming tools. These include things like breathing protocols and cold water and movement. And we'll talk about these in depth in upcoming episodes. But I want to just show you quickly a diagram that kind of summarizes what we just talked about. We'll come back to it later. I'm not going to explain it completely right now. And again, for those of you who are just listening, there's a link to this diagram in the show notes if you want to look at it later. But I'm also explaining it in detail so you should be able to imagine it. But this diagram shows our emotional distress over here on the left and it gives kind of three different levels for emotional distress. Of course, we know that there's a lot more than three, but just to make it simple I took it down to three. So we can have zero to low, we can have moderate and we can have high. And when we have zero to low levels of emotional distress, we can use those high cognitive load strategies, those strategies that require a lot of thinking. When our emotional distress is high, however, we have to use strategies that don't require a lot of thinking. We're going to use those bodily calming strategies, physical calming strategies to calm ourselves down. Now that's a basic introduction to this diagram. We'll come back to it in a minute after we've added another concept.

I want to also teach you about a very powerful concept that appraisal therapists put forth and they talk about how appraisals, our brains' appraisals, or assessments, or evaluations of the situation, they can happen unconsciously or consciously. They can happen automatically or non automatically. They can happen uncontrolled or effortfully. They can happen swiftly or deliberately. Simple appraisals will happen quickly and automatically, often within a question of milliseconds. More complex appraisals on the other hand are often more labored. I want to read you a quote by Dr. Phoebe Ellsworth and I'll put a link to this, to the article this quote comes from, in the show notes, but she talks about how "any appraisal or combination of appraisals can become automatic over time, as the type of eliciting situation becomes more familiar. Appraisals of a truly novel situation, except for the few biologically built in stimuli, are slower, less certain and more conscious than they will be the 30th time the situation is encountered." So she's emphasizing a really important point here. And that is that any appraisal or combination of appraisals, even those that are very complex and slow and novel can become very familiar and automatic when they are repeated. When it's been done, 30 times, the brain is a lot more efficient at doing it and it doesn't require as much conscious interference. So Dr. James Gross, who's a psychologist at Stanford, we've talked about him before, he talks about thinking of it as if they're two poles on a continuum. So we have this continuum where at one end is conscious effortful and controlled, complex Uh, PR appraisals, and on the other end is unconscious, effortless and automatic appraisals. And you can picture that a process that begins over here at these conscious and effortful appraisals can move along the continuum and get to the point where it becomes effortless and automatic with practice. Basically increasing practice of any type of strategy leads to that strategy becoming more automatized. All appraisal variables can be processed more or less automatically even complex ones can become instantaneous if they are practiced. It means that appraisal modification becomes easier the more we train it. And so self-regulation strategies that are energy intensive, like those high cognitive load strategies that we talked about a minute ago, those that require a lot of brain power, they can become streamlined and efficient and even automatic and unconscious as they become more familiar and rehearsed. So this is another concept that I want to add to those I talked about so far. I talked about understanding your level of emotion intensity. And I talked about understanding that certain tools are appropriate for certain levels. And this is the third concept that I want to give you. And that is that energy intensive and difficult strategies become easy and automatic and even unconscious when we practice them. So basically what this means is that the number of tools in your toolbox that are available, even when your brain is offline can be increased if you can practice them. You can practice these hard strategies enough that they will become automatic. It's just like physical skills. Sports, sewing, music. These skills become automatic and easy and even unconscious, the more we practice them. And the same is true of anxiety management. So what this means is that becoming a master at anxiety self-regulation involves not just learning to self-regulate in those moments when you've got high anxiety, but learning how to practice ahead of time, before those moments of high anxiety, how to do proactive Um, regulation, so that you can incorporate self-regulation practice into your daily routine and slowly automatize these high cognitive load strategies. So these difficult strategies can become easy if you will practice them so they can become accessible even in situations when your brain and your thinking powers are hampered. So that's the importance of practicing high cognitive load strategies regularly. Because even in those moments of intense emotion, these strategies can be accessed.

So we're going to go back to this diagram once more. We've got our emotional distress levels, right? Zero to low, moderate, and high. When our emotional distress is zero to low that's when we can use these high brainpower strategies, these strategies that require a lot of energy, a lot of thinking. These proactive strategies that we do before our emotion intensity is high. This is when we try the hardest strategies. This is when we try new strategies that we don't know how to do yet, that we've never done yet. We do it when we don't have a lot of emotion intensity, our emotional distress levels are low, when we've got low levels of anxiety. That's when we want to really practice these intensive, more difficult strategies that require a lot of thinking. When we've got sort of a moderate, emotional distress level, moderate anxiety levels, that's when we can use strategies that require a medium cognitive load. So in these moments, we need to use easier strategies. We can still use our brains, but it has to be a lower cognitive load, a little bit easier strategies. But we will also have access to those strategies that we have practiced enough that they have moved from a high cognitive load to medium cognitive load. So we have reduced the difficulty of certain strategies and then they're available even at these moments of moderate emotional distress. And then moving down to where we have high emotional distress. That's when we have to rely on low cognitive load strategies. Reactive strategies that are reacting to our physical response. We've got to prioritize those physical bodily, behavioral strategies and those can calm our bodies down. But in addition, we can also use all of the strategies that we have practiced so much that they have become automatic and we don't have to think about them anymore. So we will have access, in those moments of high anxiety, we'll have access to physical bodily strategies that don't require a lot of brain power, and also to any of the strategies that we have practiced so much that they don't require a lot of brain power. So we want to practice proactive strategies or antecedent strategies, strategies that are high cognitive load, we want to practice them proactively before and emotion intensity is high. And the objective of practicing them before we actually feel intense anxiety, is that it can reduce the overall cognitive load of those strategies so that they can become accessible, even when we are feeling some distress, and they can actually get to the point where they prevent threat appraisals from happening. We can get to where we're good at not only regulating emotions that are active, but we can get to where we're actually preventing certain emotions from coming in to play. preemptively regulating, we're making it so that certain emotions won't happen because we are proactively engaging in these strategies. But that's what we do when our emotion levels, our emotional distress levels, are low. We use these high cognitive load strategies and proactive strategies.

For example, the strategy we talked about in the last couple episodes of finding your why, that is a very high cognitive load activity. That requires a lot of thinking. A lot of self-reflection. A lot of journaling. Probably over a period of several days or more. It's a high cognitive load activity. But even though it initially requires a lot of brain involvement, once you've found your why, you've identified what is most important to you, you found your sense of purpose, then you can begin practicing judging competing desires in light of your overall chosen purpose. And integrating that purpose into moments when you feel a little bit of emotional distress and being able to determine, what are your priorities in the situation. So in other words, as you practice implementing this finding your why once you've chosen it, it becomes easier. It can even become automatic. So the general rule to remember is that we need to practice cognitive strategies repeatedly and often while we're calm. Long before those moments, when we feel intense anxiety. So that they become automated and easier to access even when our emotional distress levels are high. And we prioritize reactive or response oriented strategies for those moments when the threat appraisals have already been triggered and we already have intense anxiety. And we use those physical strategies to reduce our anxiety intensity back below that thinking threshold, that threshold where our brains will work again. So we want to get it down below that so that our brain comes back online and we can use those cognitive strategies again. So we'll talk more in the future about these response oriented Strategies . But just to help you to understand the moments when you need to prioritize those over thinking strategies, over strategies where you need to use your brain. So a state of high anxiety is not the time to attempt to use a new strategy of any kind. Whether it is physical or cognitive, because new strategies require a lot more conscious interference. They require a lot more thinking. And even a mildly practiced strategy is not going to be available in those moments when you have high anxiety. High anxiety will only be regulated by physical soothing techniques that can calm your brain from the bottom up. And once your body has been calmed, then your brain can come back online and your cognitive techniques can become accessible again. So the key is first identifying your level of emotional distress and second of all, it's matching which tools are appropriate for that level of emotional distress. And even That practice of identifying what your level of distress is and thinking about what tools are appropriate, that's something that you need to practice when your emotion intensity is low, because if you leave it for when it's high, that even that will be too much for you. But the third concept that we brought up that was really important was this concept, that those tools that will be available to you in moments of extreme emotion intensity, the number of tools that can be available to you in those moments can be increased. With practice, you can take tools that are only available in those other moments of medium or low emotion intensity if you practice those tools, then they become more automated. They become more unconscious. They become quick. They become easy for you to use and to access it doesn't require a lot of thinking anymore. So it's really important to remember that repeatedly uh, practicing different techniques will create durable change. It will make difficult strategies become easy. It will make effortful strategies become automatic. And then you will be able to use them even in moments your emotion intensity is high.

So that's our basic concept for today, which I called knowing your context. And it involves understanding that not every tool is going to be available to you in every situation. And part of that will have to do with your level of anxiety. When your anxiety is low or not even on, when you're not feeling anxiety, that's when you practice high cognitive load strategies. That's when you practice strategies that require a lot of brain power. When you're feeling medium levels of anxiety, you can still use some strategies that will require thinking. But they have to be easier strategies, or strategies that you've practiced. And when your anxiety is high, you need to rely on physical, soothing, bodily soothing strategies to calm you down to the point where you can get below that thinking threshold and you can have some brain power again. And those strategies, those physical calming strategies are the first priority. But in addition to that, if you've practiced strategies, so much, certain strategies so much that they've become automatic then those will also be available to you even when you don't have a lot of thinking power. So that's a really important concept. I just want to put out there for you to understand before we move on to our actual practical strategies that we're going to start next week. And every week we're going to talk, not just about the theory behind different strategies and how they fit into the process model of our emotion generation process, but we're going to talk about how you practice them, how you implement them, how they become part of your daily routine so that you can actually incorporate them, so that they can become a part of how you see the world and they can become automatic for you, so that they're no longer effortful and labored and energy intensive. But they are just default for your brain. It's part of the way that your brain default reacts to different situation. The key is in practice.​

So thanks for listening today. And tune in next time for some important situation modifying and situation selecting strategies. Thanks.