We've been talking about ways that we can use our feelings to improve our happiness, and especially the ways that we can use our bodily sensations as part of our feelings. How we regulate our body better for happiness. One of the things we need to pay attention to is regulating our fight or flight system. Now, it would be nice if life was calm all the time that you'd always feel rested and everything was going to plan. But of course, that's not how the world is and that's not how our bodies are built. Our bodies are built to be in one state when we're resting, with the ability to have mechanisms that will absolutely freak out if something bad happens and we need to either fight or flee. If you're walking around and you ran into this snake, you would immediately have a very strong physiological reaction. Your heart would start beating, your pupils will dilate, your digestion would stop. You would do everything you could to get out of there. It's not just physical threats, it's also social threats. This fear of rejection. If you've got cues that you might be rejected or somebody might be mean to you immediately again, that fight or flight system is going to kick on. That's a fight or flight system. It doesn't feel good. It causes a lot of stress in our bodies, a lot of anxiety. To really understand how we regulate that system, we need to know how it works. The most basic part of how it works is that when our body is in one mode, it can only be in one mode. In other words, when you're in fight or flight, you're basically in fight or flight. Our body is switching between two different systems. One that's a state of heightened stress, heightened fear, heightened flight, and another that's a state of rest. How does this work? Well, this is a feature of what's known as our autonomic nervous system. This is part of our nervous system then it's not the central nervous system like our brain and all this stuff. It's the part of our nervous system that's getting innervated all over the whole body. The autonomic nervous system is a way that our central part of our nervous system can talk to all the other stuff that's going on. It's like what's regulating all our behavior and it has these two states. Snake pops up, the sympathetic part of your autonomic nervous system will turn on. This is the stress system. You happen to see a snake, the stress part of your autonomic nervous system will turn on, namely your sympathetic nervous system. What happens? You have all these mechanisms that automatically change your pupils, change your heartbeat, change the amount that you're breathing. They shut off all other functions like they shut off your gut, they shut off your sexual function. Everything else can wait so you can get away from that snake. But that's just one side of the system. This is the sympathetic stress side of the system, the fight or flight side. You also have the second side that turns on once that threat leaves. That's the parasympathetic nervous system, the so-called rest and digest system. That means your heart rate goes back to normal, you can turn on things like digestion, sexual function, all that good stuff. The key though, is that these systems can both be on at once. If you're activating the fight or flight and your sympathetic nervous system is on, all that other stuff shuts off. That means that often when we're activating our sympathetic nervous system are putting our bodies into a state that doesn't feel very good. That stressful system when your heart's beating fast and you're acting like a tiger snake has just jumped out, that doesn't feel awesome for our happiness. But if you run that system all the time and you don't turn on the rest and digest system, you're putting your body under a lot of stress. You're not taking the time your body needs to chill out and rest and that can set you up for a lot of chronic health problems. In fact, there's evidence that if you are running your fight or flight system all the time, if you're under chronic stress, here are the health problems that you can look forward to, you're probably going to have digestive problems. You might even get things like acne, running your fight or flight system, being stressed all the time isn't great for our skin. People self-report being often, frequently sick and having things like headaches. In addition, this is a recipe for bad sleep, which we also know is really bad for happiness. It's also a recipe for things like fatigue and even reproductive problems. If you're running your fight or flight system all the time, your parasympathetic system can't come on and that means things like your periods might get messed up. Down the line you can be in line for erectile dysfunction like not good things. It raises this question of how can we regulate our fight or flight system? What can we do to turn this off? Thankfully, we have our psych pro tips. The biggest psych pro tip here is that there's one hack we can consciously do to switch systems. Usually these systems just switch automatically. There's one conscious thing we can do to turn on the rest in digest system and that is through our breath. Particularly the deep act of not just taking any old breath, a really deep belly breath where you're filling up your belly with lots and lots of air. What you're doing there is you're activating your vagus nerve and you're confusing your body. If there was a tiger there, you wouldn't be able to take a deep belly breath. Your body is like wait a minute, deep belly breath happening? Can't be a tiger. Switch systems. Switch systems. It sounds annoying when you're upset and somebody's like just take a deep breath, that can even sound pretty bad. But actually they're really onto something because the act of taking a deep belly breath can really help. Let's try it. I want you to notice in your body with this sounds. Everybody on the count of three, you're going to take a really deep breath. You stomach as big as possible, 1 2 3 and exhale, like super slowly out, even more slowly. One more time count of three, 1 2 3. In, in, in, deep, deep belly and out for five, 1 2 3 4 5. Just take a second to notice. What's your heart doing, what's your body doing. That was just two breaths and you can notice that you're a little bit more chilled out. That's the power of our breath. We can really use it. When somebody says that you're upset, like just take a deep breath. Remember they're tapping into deep neuroscience about the autonomic nervous system that can really help you. It's a hack that whenever you're feeling anxious or whenever you're feeling spiraled, you can just hit it. Because it's having a direct effect on your physiology that will then have a direct effect on your thoughts and your feelings and your emotions.
