Priscilla Xu

Key Takeaways

• 5 minutes of Psychological Sigh: Double inhale with your nose and exhale with your mouth to feel calmer.
• Trauma is when fear has made a mark on the nervous system, and the fear shows up as it is not supposed to and does not have any protection function.
• Panic attack: great fear response when there are no fearful stimuli
• How is trauma processed?
  • 1. Relive the experience in a clinically safe environment
  • 2. Make the experience into a bad boring story so that when you relive it again and again, you will not have a strong fearful traumatic response.
  • 3. Replace the negative story with a positive memory with the fear response.

What is Fear?

• Fear is an evolutionarily old emotion and thinking appraisal response.
  • It protects humans from many dangers by putting humans in a fighting mode. Aggressive behavior can show up.
  • Fear involves stress and anxiety, but stress and anxiety can both be felt without fear.
    • Fear is not stress or anxiety.

Definition Panic Attacks, Trauma, and Panic Attack.

• Trauma is when fear has made a mark on the nervous system, and the fear shows up as it is not supposed to and does not have any protection function.
• Panic attack: great fear response when there are no fearful stimuli
• The Hypothalamus Pituitary Gland Adrenal (HPA )Axis
• The human nervous system is divided into the autonomic and somatic (voluntary) nervous system.
  • The somatic nervous system controls your walking and running skeletal muscles.
  • The autonomic nervous system controls autonomic functions such as digesting, peeing, sweating, heart rate, stress response, going to sleep, etc.
  • The HPA axis is a pathway that controls the release of adrenaline and plays a role in the stress response.
    • The axis can be genetically altered when the nervous system marks the fearful stimulus.

The Neuroscience of Trauma: The Amygdala, Threat Response, and Top-Down Processing of Fear

• Amygdala is an almond-shaped cluster of neurons that process emotions like fear and aggression.
  • Amygdala has more functions than fear and aggression, but that’s off the scope of today’s topic.
  • The amygdala connects to the nucleus accumbens for controlling dopamine release and the periaqueductal gray area for freezing your movements in fear.
    • This is the Threat Reflex
• Panic attacks and phobia activate the threat reflex through the amygdala
  • .The reflex system is a bit “dumb” because it is generalized to different stimuli.
  • The prefrontal cortex (PFC) is a location in the brain that involves executive functions such as planning and interpreting situations.
    • The PFC can build a narrative in your brain and mistake the memories as very dangerous.

How to “Undo” the trauma in therapy?

• First, fear is something you learn in one trial. This is called one-trial learning.
  • One trial learning stems from classical conditioning.
  • Fear is one trial because your brain is wired to protect you from danger.
  • Fear is a memory pathway.
    • The system prepares you for a fight when you think about what danger might occur in a certain environment.
  • When fear does not physically harm someone, one can be mentally harmed. However, the body takes it as the same fear response because it is a generalized response.
    • 1. Relive the experience in a clinically safe environment
    • 2. Make the experience into a bad boring story so that when you relive it again and again, you will not have a strong fearful traumatic response.
    • 3. Replace the negative story with a positive memory with the fear response.

Transgenerational Trauma

• Polymorphism and child abuse with risk of PTSD symptoms in adults.
• Parental olfactory experience influences behavior
• Those two papers showed that people can be predisposed to fear and trauma.
  • This means that one can be more easily startled.

How do you know if you are traumatized?

• Some people have higher interoception.
• Fear balance is maintained by bodily feedback to the insular cortex in mice.
• Insula is a brain structure that has an internal map of your body.
  • The job of the insula is to pair the internal landscape with the external world.
• When insula is inhibited, you can disconnect the establishment of a small bell ring, evoking a small, fearful shock (a light bell ring will be very scary instead)

Tools for Managing Trauma

• Repeated exposure to short-term behavioral stress resolves pre-existing stress-induced depressive-like behavior in mice.
• Depress a mouse. And gave the mouse 5 minutes of intense stress. The short exposure to stress decreases their depression.
• 5 minutes of Psychological Sigh: Double inhale with your nose and exhale with your mouth to feel calmer.
• 5 minutes of Deliberating increasing stress: Cyclic hyperventilation to create stress.
  • This can increase the likelihood of a panic attack.
  • Do not ask your doctor before.
• Dr. Huberman says that it does not matter how it evokes stress because it is self-directed.