Sometimes it’s difficult to defuse Threat Lockdown, particularly if you’ve been in it for a long time. Because protective mode is physiological, it’s often best to use physiological means to calm yourself down. Exercise, sleep, and meditation can help calm your mind by metabolizing or counteracting the stress hormones that have been flooding your

Most of the people I treat live in a near-constant fight-or-flight mode. This stress response is an automatic function of something called the autonomic nervous system, the part of the nervous system that regulates involuntary functions, including heartbeat, breathing, and digestion.

Remember that when dealing with any form of anxiety, our task is not to fight our own nervous systems but to help them relax and enjoy cooperating with our conscious intentions, like sensitive animals that have learned to trust kindly humans. When we get hijacked by anxiety patterns, we’re dealing with literal wild things: sections of our nervous

how she anticipated a stressor, how she responded to a stressor, and how she recovered from a stressor.