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Dr. Kaufmann speaks about why we age and how to stop it
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Today’s Sharing
an excerpt from the blog of Colette Baron-Reid
If you’re in a stress response—you’ve activated your fight / flight part of the brain and the thinking mind goes buh-bye. You can’t think. You’re on patrol seeking potential threats because you’ve been exposed to something that pushes the trigger button. There’s a spectrum too—from mild—where you are in low-grade stress and you’re constantly managing your surroundings—to high where you feel threatened (happens a lot on social media) that triggers past memories stored in the body, that then triggers behaviors and survival techniques you may not even know you have. So you act out of fear and cause more difficulties for yourself and others because you’ve also kicked an invisible hornet’s’ nest and it takes a beat to calm down for the buzzing to move on.
You can’t think until you step back and breathe.
So restraint of tongue and pen and keyboard (especially keyboard these days) is a necessary step. Deep breathing, even if only 10 times, can calm the nervous system down and restore your capacity to think. I learned from a dear friend to “put a pin in it,” knowing that whatever is there can be responded to if I could take a beat and breathe, and if it’s not important to address right now—it can wait until the rational mind and calmer emotions come back online.