Hi, and welcome to the In The Cortex podcast.
We are your hosts.
I'm Poloma Garcia.
And I am Danny Parakoni.
And we're the founders of In The Cortex, an online community with programs that show
people the tools that they need to change their lives, their brain reorganization, no
medication, just movement.
When you get your brain out of survival mode and regulate your nervous system, you start
to live in the fun, logical part of the brain, the cortex.
Subscribe today and learn how to live your best in the cortex life.
And now, on to today's episode.
Let's start out with a quick cortex moment from one of our members.
Okay, so picture this.
You have a young boy, my son, 13, 14 years old, just getting into adolescence, big growth
spurt, trying to socialize, and he has massive social anxiety.
And the social anxiety comes from not being able to interact.
He always feels like he's being interrupted.
He can't join in conversations easily.
He has funny things to say when he writes, he's hilarious.
When he's on his own, he's hilarious.
But he always feels like he's being interrupted or that he can't participate fully and interact.
That anxiety spills out sometimes in anger, sometimes just a little bit sad, a little bit
down.
Just not a happy situation for a 13, 14 year old boy, especially when it's your own son.
Now fast forward, this kid is now grown.
He lives in a foreign country.
He's a podcaster.
He's a public speaker.
He owns his own company and has tons of friends.
He's extremely funny, extremely sociable.
So what happened?
What made the difference?
We ran into a methodology that had to do with creeping and changed his life and changed
our lives as a family too, because nobody wants to have an unhappy or anxious family
member.
And that creeping and crawling allowed my son to reorganize his brain, to organize his
thoughts, to be able to speak quickly, get rid of his anxiety, and turned him into another
person.
I know it might sound incredible, but people that have knew him before and people that
know him now can attest to this.
He is a different person, changed his life, and he became a better version of the great
person he already was.
Okay, Danny, today we're going to talk about something that lots of people relate to, which
is anxiety.
And we want to start out this episode of saying that we feel you.
We are here from a space of empathy and compassion in talking about something that's not easy
for anybody to navigate.
We're talking about where it's coming from, and we're going to tell you a few things that
you can do to diminish your anxiety, both in the short and the long term.
So first, let's take a second to remember what anxiety feels like if you're somebody
who's ever felt anxious, which is most of us, slash probably everybody, at some point in
your life.
Close your eyes and just think about where do you feel that anxiety?
I know for me, for example, it's usually in my stomach.
It's like in the pit of my stomach.
I know some people feel like nauseous.
They feel like their heartbeats are to race.
They feel like maybe even a cold sweat.
They'll feel it in their chest.
And of course, that goes usually accompanied with racing thoughts, right, of whatever's
making you anxious.
Sometimes people don't even know why they're anxious.
They're just feeling this feeling and there's no reason for it.
So Danny, tell us a little bit about this.
Why do we experience this and when is it normal?
There is a spectrum here of what is normal.
And a lot of times we can experience as humans whenever we're walking to a new experience
or something we haven't had and baseline for understanding what to expect.
We start to get that feeling of like, whoa, I'm stepping out of my comfort zone.
Something new is happening.
It feels a little uncomfortable because it's something I haven't experienced before.
So in that case, that's when we have that anxiety.
We have a little bit of the butterflies in our stomach and we kind of have that prep
for something new is coming.
I need to be ready for whatever's coming my way.
I'm in an alert state.
Then it goes a little bit further.
If you're someone who does really feel anxiety deeply and it's your everyday experience,
that's when it starts to stop you dead in your tracks.
That's why it's kind of got that spectrum of when is anxiety something that we all experience
and then when is it too much and I can't just get on with my everyday life.
Exactly.
That's the challenge is when it starts to interfere with your everyday life and you
can't push yourself into these new experiences or even do just your day to day activities
because you're constantly feeling anxious or you just always have that undercurrent of
like anxiety, anxiety, anxiety, anxiety, anxiety, no matter what you're doing during the day.
And so let's just talk really quickly about a few statistics.
Anxiety disorders are the most common mental illness in the US affecting 40 million adults
in the United States.
And there was an increase in people reporting high levels of anxiety during of course the
pandemic.
So it went from 19.8 in 2018 to 19 to 24.2 in 2020, 2021.
And I think a lot of us can relate to that, right?
Yeah, the pandemic really rocked everybody at some point on this planet.
So what do you think about when you hear the term survival mode?
And is it somebody who's thinking of like a caveman running from a saber to tiger, usually
my favorite example?
Is it the show survivor?
Is it a child that falls into a pool that can't swim?
Is it a car coming at you while you're walking across the street?
Or even a pandemic that definitely was a thing that put a lot of people into survival mode
or you're someone who's like, huh, I've never actually thought of survival mode.
I have no idea what you're actually talking about.
So let's break down what is survival mode.
Survival mode is when your brain and your body are reacting to a stressful life or death
situation.
There's no long term or medium term plan in that moment.
It's all about what is happening right here and right now.
So for the examples of a child falling into the pool that can't swim, that's a right here
right now moment.
You're not going to sit there and contemplate and be like, hmm, I wonder if they're going
to get themselves out.
You're like, no, jump into action, save the child out of the pool or a car coming at you
down the street.
You're like, oh my gosh, there's a car driving down the street at me.
Do I sit there and think out my different things?
No, you immediately jump out of the way and survive.
And that is what your survival brain is designed to do.
And if we go back to the caveman example, that was obviously very relevant in caveman
times.
We are not being chased by tigers anymore.
I mean, obviously unless a tiger gets out at the zoo and or you're living out in the
middle of nowhere and there's tigers everywhere.
Some people are, some people do for sure.
But and I think people who are listening just don't experience that on the daily.
So the examples of, you know, more common examples of a car coming off the road and
threatening you, that's when you want that survival brain to turn on and we want there
just to be that reaction.
However, there is an instance where or many of them where stressors are coming at us and
your brain is constantly in that state of is this real survival or not?
And if you already have a dysregulated nervous system, or if you're prone to being in survival
mode more times than not, you're going to experience everything coming in as a real threat.
So we always like to break down what's a perceived threat and versus a real threat.
So the real threats are the ones I mentioned, child falling into the pool, car coming at
you, the pandemic for a lot of us, right?
But then the perceived threat could be something as something we've all experienced, like someone
left you on red on a text message, right?
They didn't respond to you right away, especially in today's instant gratifying world.
Missing a deadline at work or forgetting something when you needed to bring something with you
and you forgot it.
So basically anything that's not going how you want it to go, but it's not considered
a life or death situation.
Those are perceived threats.
That is your brain still interpreting the information as stressful and still turning
on all the survival centers, all of the survival hormones like adrenaline and cortisol that
get your brain and body pumped up and primed and ready to take on whatever is coming their
way.
So most of the time though, after you experienced something like that and it was a perceived
threat, say you were left on red, they didn't respond to you right away and you went down
that whole entire spiral of, oh my gosh, what did I say?
What did I do?
I started texting them like crazy, like when you're responding to me and then they're like,
oh, I just didn't have my phone.
It was charging and you're like, oh my gosh, I can't believe all those things I just said
and did.
And now you feel really embarrassed.
You're like, I can't believe I did that.
And that was because your brain did not have the ability or the bandwidth to zoom out and
look at all the options because you were in survival mode.
And that just shows that that's not living in the cortex.
It's just a moment of, hey, I was totally responding to right here right now, full on
reaction mode.
And yeah, and nothing ever really good comes out of those moments.
Well, after most of us have a disorganized brain, a dysregulated nervous system, brain
that's stuck in survival mode from the time we're little because that's when we missed
out on that movement that preps the brain to understand the survival brain and actually
operate from the cortex.
And so after spending years and years and years responding to this, to your life in this
way, you're creating these really, really strong ingrained neural pathways in your brain.
And this becomes your go-to response.
And we've all seen it in somebody or some of us have experienced it where the second
something starts to happen that's maybe not going your way or you start to think maybe
something bad's going to happen or something's going to be out of alignment with what you
wanted.
Boom, you go back into that fight or flight reaction.
So it's fight, you might get really angry, start screaming, throwing things, flight,
you might just avoid, avoid, avoid, avoid, avoid, get away or freeze.
Sometimes people are just like, okay, genuinely don't know what to do.
And you just stop dead in your tracks like you said earlier.
And so we all have those reactions that we sometimes we want to get out of them, but
we just can't.
And so there's a lot going on there, of course, because neuroplasticity works both ways.
It works for the amazing changes you can experience when you're doing something new, when you're
learning new things, when you're reorganizing your brain, but it also works in the other
way where it really does solidify these go-to reactions that sometimes are not logical and
they're definitely not serving us.
There are a lot of reasons for this.
It happens because of our genetics, right?
Just an individual, a group of genes that are involved with who we are as humans.
There's epigenetics as well, which is how the environment, the behaviors can cause changes
that affect the way that our genes are working in our day-to-day life.
A lot of time that comes from our parents, what they've lived, what they've gone through,
and that gets transmitted when we're born.
We also have our brain chemistry.
Everybody has a difference of neurotransmitters and chemicals going on in their brain.
If you, for example, naturally have a low-level serotonin, then your brain is going to be
more prone to anxiety in your day-to-day life, right?
We all have the norepinephrine that totally spikes when we go into that fight-or-flight
mode.
We're like, these chemicals can become addictive.
Without knowing, we don't want to go into that fight-or-flight mode, but our brain can
become addicted to just reacting that way because the truth is, adrenaline is very, very powerful.
Sometimes our brain doesn't know how to get it.
If we're not somebody who understands, oh, maybe I'm just going to go for a run or I'm
going to meditate, I'm going to do something else to balance my brain out, do some brain
work, do some ITC work, then a lot of us will go back into that really, really strong fight-or-flight
mode connection because the truth is, in the moment, it doesn't feel great, but afterward
we have that adrenaline release.
Your brain gets a lot of what it was seeking out.
Our personality is also going to affect the way that we react to things.
Of course, life events, different traumas that we've had, different things that have happened
in our lives, and this is where the movement comes in.
If we are somebody who didn't move enough in that first year of life, and this is something
we talked about in our last episode, if we didn't get enough of that movement in the
first year of life, our primitive brain did not finish developing and understand what
Danny is saying, how to distinguish communically with the logical brain, which is the cortex,
to distinguish what is a real threat and what is a perceived threat, which is why we end
up getting into this cycle, this loop of anxiety, anxiety, anxiety, anxiety reactions.
It's really important to note, too, that if you do go through something that's traumatic,
that survival brain is wired and designed to come back online and to take over to help
you through the task.
The key part is then to help it reintegrate and lie dormant again, waiting for the next
survival situation to happen.
That's an important part.
Even if you did do all the movements as a child and you did get them, your brain totally
wired where it needed to be, then you still could have moments of it coming online.
That's where a lot of PTSD comes from.
When we have a lot of our vets that come back, they have a lot of moments of reverting back,
and it's because their brain went back into survival and they didn't bring it back into
cortex.
What do we now know about the subconscious stuff?
What about that?
There's so much other stuff that's going on that we talk about.
That's really, if you think about it, it's really just your script on how you handle
life.
When Loma mentioned, what did your caretakers do?
How did they handle situations?
That was when you were in a critical time of just downloading it.
You think about your upbringing.
You think about how that is now transferred into your life.
We mentioned this in a previous episode of, oh my gosh, it just sounded like my mom.
Where did that come from?
That's that subconscious.
This is where our attachments, Jeff, comes from our programming or learn response.
That's something to also take into account when we're talking about anxiety and how you
are perceiving events and stressors in your life.
Exactly.
What the thing is, now we get into what do we do about it?
Most models out there are top down.
We're thinking, we've all heard the typical count to 10, take a deep breath, count to
10, and think positive thoughts.
That bleeds into that toxic positivity where you're like, I can't.
I'm in survival mode.
I cannot think positively.
That is the literal thing that my brain is struggling with right now.
It's only looking at the right here and the right now.
That is where we come in and we're doing bonds up.
We need to get the brain, the nervous system regulated so that it's able to get out of that
survival mode much, much, much quicker.
Like Danny said, zoom out and look at the reality of what's going on and decide, how
do I respond to this rather than letting our primitive brain react?
This is how we're designed to operate.
This is why we have our parasympathetic nervous system, which is the rest and digest.
We have the sympathetic nervous system, which is our fight or flight reaction, survival
brain, but then we're always supposed to go back into the parasympathetic nervous system
afterward to rest and digest and let our bodies and our brains process what just happened.
That's where we were talking about that adrenaline moment where you're like, you feel it after
a release, you feel it after you've done something big.
That's something that we're all supposed to go back into.
Unfortunately, the way that we're all wired nowadays, or a lot of us are wired nowadays,
we're spending most of our time in the sympathetic nervous system in that reaction state.
Yes.
While this episode is focusing mostly and just focusing on the topic of anxiety, it's
very much aligned with the very first pillar that we talk about in the cortex, which is
the pons.
The pons is the part of the brain that is really the reptilian, primitive part of the
brain.
It's developing from zero to five months of life, and it has many jobs that are very
critical and helping.
This is where it's interesting.
Anxiety is very much rooted in being able to manage your fight, flight, or freeze, or
fawn response.
That is exactly what the pons job is to do as well.
Now, we're not trying to say that we're curing anything and that, hey, by doing this, all
of a sudden you have no more challenges in life.
We're just showing that there's a very giant overlap between anxiety and the pons and a
lot of other functions of the pons, regulating your automatic functions like breathing and
digestion.
What happens when you're in an anxious state?
You're not breathing.
I've had so many people tell us, I've just realized I wasn't breathing.
I never took a deep breath.
If you think about it, it's up in the upper chest and you're, when you're in that really
hyper ventilating state where you're just breathing through your chest instead of breathing
deep down in your belly, digestion is off.
So many of us complain of stomach aches when we're really anxious.
Again, that's the same function of the pons as being able to regulate that automatic eye
of movements.
If you think about from the survival standpoint, your eyes are tracking and looking for negative
perceived or anything that could have harm to you.
Being able to move your eyes horizontally automatically should be an automatic function, right?
But if you don't have that in place, and that's where your cortex is constantly taking over
and having to do more work, and that's where you then have to learn how to compensate.
So this is where anxiety and the pons development overlaps because if your pons is not wired
to do the basic functions, your cortex has to take over.
And that means it's exhausted by the end of the day because if your eyes aren't tracking
horizontal to the automatically, then your cortex has to figure out different ways to
get that job done.
So maybe you have to turn your whole head and the list goes on and on.
So there's a lot of overlap here regulating your sleep, your emotional regulation, your
vestibular input, your hearing, your motor control, your pain and temperature sensation,
your proprioceptive system, all of those functions are coming from the pons.
And those are all things that get altered if you're also someone who is experiencing anxiety
on a daily basis.
So pull them up.
How do you develop the pons?
The pons develops when babies are creeping and you've heard us talk about this before,
hopefully, but we don't mean creeping like stalking your ex's MySpace page.
We mean creeping like when babies are on the floor, they're on their belly and they're
moving from point A to point B. It kind of looks like an army crawl.
And most babies will do this movement from zero to about five months of life.
We don't want to get too technical with the timelines because everybody's brain is completely
different and some people need more movement than others.
And that's what's developing the pons.
And so that's how we can see where somebody's brain left off in development.
We had in the cortex, we can see you move on the floor and say, oh, you're at 20% development,
50%, 90%, right?
But if you're right now curious, by the way, if you want to know kind of like what you're
developing is, you can always get an assessment with us or you can take our brain organization
quiz, which is linked in the show notes.
And that goes more off of like the behaviors that are associated with different parts of
the brain that can be underdeveloped.
But it's always a fun thing to see and see if it resonates with you, by the way.
And so what about if people can't get onto the floor right now and start doing our program?
Let's give them a little tip, Danny.
Yeah.
So taking the quiz is a really good step because you're going to have, you're going to associate
all the behaviors there and you'll be able to see it.
But then there's always the actual movement that comes on and people go, oh my gosh, this
totally makes sense.
And just so you can experience a little taste of what we do here at ITC, we really want
you to feel in your body how to calm yourself immediately.
Now this is hard to do if you're in survival mode because you're not, you don't actually
have access to this.
So it's a good thing to try now while you're in your cortex.
And the more you times you try it, like Paloma mentioned earlier, the more that you will
then be wired to go to this movement when the time comes.
So it's just a reminder.
So it's called a brain hookup.
It is from Brain Gym.
We always like to make sure we give credit where credit is due.
And what you're going to do is if you're sitting or you're standing, doesn't matter what position
you're in or lying down, you're going to cross your ankles.
So notice if you put right on top of left or left on top of right for your ankles, you
can also sit crisscross.
You can also just take your whole leg and cross it over.
And then you're going to take your hands out in front of you and your palms are facing
each other as your palms or your thumbs are straight up in the, to the ceiling.
You're going to turn your thumbs down.
Now your thumbs are pointing down to the ground.
And now remember whatever ankle went on top is the same hand that goes on top.
So you're going to cross your arm over the other hand and you're going to interlace
your fingers.
And then once you're in this position, it's going to feel natural just to pull your fist
under and into your chest.
And then from here, you're going to take your tongue and put it up to the roof of your mouth.
If you're having a hard time walking through that, you can always check out the video that's
in our show notes.
And it's a lot easier to see that visually.
So holding the tongue to the roof of your mouth is actually where your tongue should
always naturally rest, but it's also really good for helping calm down that limbic system,
which is in charge of your emotions.
Holding yourself into this position is calming all your energy.
And if you think about it, if you've ever been in an argument, which I'm sure not a
lot of you have been, just kidding, wink, wink, you're going to naturally cross your
arms over your chest or in a lot of times our culture and society think, oh, that person's
body language is so turned off the way they have their bodies just closed off like that.
We see it so different here at ITC.
We see it as you are now controlling and calming your system because you're bringing all that
energy and bringing it in to calm itself down.
And also when your tongue is on the roof of your mouth, it's also activating the vagus
nerve, which is a big, big piece in helping you calm all that emotional sensation that
you've got going on.
So try that brain hookup.
Try calming yourself.
Try to hold yourself in this position while maybe if you have a child in the home who's
going into their survival state, you hold this position and say nothing because boredom
is the best way out of survival mode and into the cortex and just help calm your energy
so that way you can calm the energy of people around you.
This is our go to move whenever we have like a presentation to do or we need to help somebody
else stay calm.
We just control our energy and calm ourselves down.
And then it has this amazing effect of carrying over to everybody else in the room.
Absolutely.
And that's a once you try it, you'll see the difference that you feel and that you notice
in everybody else in the room, but we will say this is not addressing the root.
This is just kind of like some a tool for you to use when you're feeling like you're about
to go into that mode, into that anxious feeling, into that stressed out feeling.
But this will help you in the moment.
It's not going to help you in the long term.
In the long term, what you want to do is get your brain organized and get that solid neurological
foundation you need, hopefully with us.
If not, you can do it on your own, but by doing the creeping, the crawling and integrating
those primitive reflexes that are still getting in the way and really keeping you in that
primitive brain.
So that was our episode for today.
We'll see you next time.
Thank you so much for joining us.
Make sure to follow us on Instagram.
Make sure to share this podcast with everybody.
We really, really are grateful for you to listening and listening and helping us spread
the word that the brain can change and life can get easier when you live in your cortex.
Make sure to follow us at inthecortex.com.
That's our Instagram.
Our TikTok is in underscore the underscore cortex.
Our Facebook is also in the cortex underscore us, our website, www.inthecortex.com.
And last but not least, because you've listened to our podcast, you can use promo code Brainiac
for $10 off your first ITC payment.
So thank you so much and we will see you next time.
Bye.