Hi, everybody. So this is going to be my final audio in this series on fight-flight symptoms, and as I've already mentioned, one of the biggest factors underpinning anxiety disorders I find is that people often tend to misinterpret their fight-flight symptoms. And therefore, I think some evolutionary biological understanding of anxiety is going to really, really help people to overcome it and to understand it better and perhaps, to develop an improved relationship with our own bodies and threat system.

Obviously, catastrophizing and misinterpreting our symptoms is very likely to make it worse. So before we look at that, I want to bring you back to the five areas CBT model, which we've already talked about. And that is that different situations evoke different thoughts, we don't tend to have a feeling without a thought. The level of feeling influences our physiological responses, which in turn, affects the way we behave. The way we behave influences what we think, etc, etc.

Now, if we're in a situation, which causes us to feel anxious, we enter into a fight-flight situation, our oxygen gets sucked through our bloodstream, and it goes to our muscles to inflate our muscles preparing us to fight or to run. And that can cause us all kinds of problems. I've heard it referred to previously as it's a bit like us getting a frontal lobotomy, where we can't think straight. And typically, what we know is that usually the greater the anxiety, the greater our cognitive impairment, and our ability to generate rational thoughts becomes more impaired.

I always use an example of this really, which is, imagine you were walking down your local high street and you saw a lion walking towards you? Do you need to fight or prepare to fight it in some way? Run, hide, play dead? Or do you need to sit there and ponder what exactly a lion is doing in your local area, obviously, that's going to lead to a more certain death. So there are basic evolutionary purposes behind why we tend to go into that, it's more of an impulsive response rather than a rational response.

Now as oxygen is getting diverted into our bloodstream, it can affect the way in which we breathe. One tends to breathe more shallowly, or apparently, about 25% of the population can hold their breath when in fight or flight. Now, potentially, that is what we call in the business low hanging fruit, i.e., we can do something about that quite quickly. And I tend to like it when a client got as quite impaired breathing responses to their anxiety because just a bit of education can steer them in the right direction.

Now, there are tonnes of breathing exercises out there online, we're certainly going to cover more in other audios, perhaps in other series, and we've also potentially got a mindfulness series coming as well. So I'm not going to dwell on it too much here, perhaps a simple box breathing exercise. But essentially, yeah, calm, regulated breathing for a minimum of three minutes is likely to have a really positive impact on your anxiety. And it's a go-to really, the basis before you go to anything else in treating anxiety. We tend to sort of build other strategies around it. So think about that. Guys, do you breathe shallowly? Or do you hold your breath with intermittent breathing when you're in fight or flight?

If you do hold your breath, you're very likely to quite quickly notice dizziness, tight chestedness, or tenseness. Now, this is kind of interesting because those aren't actually symptoms of anxiety. They are symptoms of not breathing properly because of anxiety. That's a different thing altogether. shallow breathing can have a similar impact over a longer period of time really. What happens of course, is that we either over-oxygenate our brain or under-oxygenate it, and because of the way we think it as humans, it's really, really common to notice these symptoms, and then engage in what we call in CBT, the catastrophic misinterpretation. I might die, I might faint, or most commonly, I'm losing control. Now that might be a thought, or it might be a felt sense. But of course, if you have that thought or felt sense, and you're already in fight-flight, what's that going to do to your symptoms? And that's where we can sometimes see panic cycles forming.

So really, really important to just engage in calm, regulated breathing, to breathe through it, and remind yourself that, you know, our breathing gets impaired for a reason, when we're anxious. There's nothing to fear. Now something also interesting happens with our adrenal responses, our adrenal glands open up, and the evolutionary function is to sharpen us up so we can run faster, run longer, hit harder, etc. Now, we don't tend to like that response when we're in situations where we haven't asked for it. But think about situations perhaps where we have, like, if you've got on a rollercoaster, or you're driving a bit faster than you usually would. We don't tend to mind that because we chose it. You know, I chose to drive faster, I chose to abandon myself to fear on this rollercoaster.

So what's the difference between that and feeling adrenaline in a job interview, and that is quite simply association. And we can also get catastrophic misinterpretations around adrenaline too, and usually, they're similar, I might die I might faint. I'm losing control. And of course, that has a similar effect on our anxiety and can sort of feed into panic cycles. Okay, but actually, we don't need to worry about adrenaline at all. It's really rather interesting and rather helpful most of the time.

How many times have you been anxious about a situation about a barbecue or job interview or social situation maybe, and then 20 minutes in half an hour in, you feel absolutely fine? One of the reasons for that is because there's a ceiling of adrenaline, we plateau at a certain point where the body says, I can't take any more of that. It plateaus and then we eventually start to dump it, metabolise it. So you don't need to fear adrenaline either. Essentially, guys, you don't need to fear anxiety. And the best way to treat it is to start with at least the basis of understanding it, and trying to appreciate what it's trying to do, the protective evolutionary element.