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Hey everyone, just a quick announcement. We'll be wrapping up our year with a time and task Management workshop. This is an online workshop and it will be happening on December 10th and 17th. We're intentionally holding it during the holiday season because this is often a time of extra stress and anxiety when it comes to planning as well as we want to support you in dialing in some of your time management strategies so you can go into 2025 feeling really strong. You'll be joined our awesome community of people that listen to this podcast from all around the world. All sessions will be recorded and available indefinitely for viewing and listening in case you can't attend the live sessions. So if you're interested, go to Drummer in the Great Mountain.com workshop and I'll leave a link in the description.

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Welcome to the Drummer and the Great Mountain, a podcast where we share effective tips and practices for working with adults Add ADHD in a natural, effective way without the use of medications each episode Join me your host Batman Saram, along with the author of the Drummer and the Great Mountain, Michael Joseph Ferguson. Join Michael and myself in an interactive discussion of sharing our stories as we journey together in transforming what can be the gift of being what we call hunter types. This podcast is intended to be your audio companion to the book written by Michael, who joins me each episode where we both will strive to foster dialogue, give you our personal insights and share both of our experiences on this similar path that we are all on. Our intention and hope is that along with the book, this podcast gives you an additional perspective as you listen to us delve deeper into each chapter of the book to give you even more tools to go along with what it is that you are reading. Visit us at drummerandthegreatmountain.com to purchase the book and look for more tools, tips and updates as well as giving us feedback on this podcast. Join our growing global community of creative types, entrepreneurs and out of the box thinkers on our shared journey. Welcome to the Drummer and the Great Mountain podcast.

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Welcome everyone. Thanks for tuning in. I'm your host Michael Joseph Ferguson. How are you all doing? In today's episode we are going to be talking about how to feel safe and this is a really, really important topic. We often talk about anxiety and stress, but we don't necessarily have a conversation about what specifically is happening biologically with anxiety and stress and when you get to the core of that you can really unlock some pieces in your life that feel maybe feel stuck because anxiety either overtly or subtly is having an impact on you. Moving forward. So in today's episode, we are going to be talking about how all fear and anxiety is about feeling safe. Our ability to powerfully imagine and have a really powerful imagination as ADHD individuals can often be a curse because that same creative mechanism can imagine all sorts of negative things that trigger and cause anxiety and keep us from moving forward. So feeling safe is biological. It's not conceptual. If you are reliant on always figuring it out or performing just right in order to solve a problem, you'll always run into life situations where there is no resolution that you can come up with in that moment. And in those moments, you don't have capacity to think through clearly. Because when we're in anxiety, it takes over part of our cognitive processes. So not feeling safe can exacerbate all of our ADHD symptoms. It can lead us into making poor decisions, getting caught by distractions and all kinds of addictive behaviors. So most importantly, fear and not feeling safe take us out of the driver's seat. It shrinks our life down. It keeps us from seeing the positive and proactive actions and options that are available to us. And this is subtle. It can creep into fears about money and finances, speaking up for yourself when you need to to fears about the world and fears about your future. So the key is, anxiety happens. It's just part of life. But when you have some key tools in your toolkit, you can get yourself back online quicker. So understanding the mechanics, the science and the biology of fear is what we're going to be talking about. And more importantly, we're going to be talking about very specific actions you can take to bring yourself back to a feel of safety and calm. And you can optimize your mental and creative abilities when you are in this space of feeling calm. This is not a one and done. This is an ongoing process for all of us. Some of you struggle with anxiety and fear more than others. Speaking as someone who struggles with it myself, I can tell you that what we're going to be talking about are road tested ways to make yourself feel safe. If you know someone who's struggling with anxiety, you may want to share this episode with them. I am not a trained therapist, however, because I have worked on this for a long time in terms of my own anxiety and also working with my coaching clients in creating more stability in their lives. I think there's going to be some good tips that may be valuable to them. Now, an important note here is if you're really struggling with anxiety, it's crippling your life. Please Please, please find yourself a good therapist. Find yourself a good TR practitioner so you can get the support you need. So there's a couple companion episodes that might be helpful to you as you listen to this episode. Those are episode 93, the Brain Chemistry of Courage, episode 89, Dopamine Detox, and episode 99, Stress Management and Addictive Behaviors. All three of those go very much hand in hand with what we'll be discussing today. Okay, so as a little teaser of what we're going to be talking about a little bit later, let's start with specifically, how does anxiety and fear manifest in our body? And it happens in very predictable ways. So when you're feeling anxious or stressed or in a high state of fear, there's certain very specific things that happen. One is your muscles will contract, your breathing becomes shallow and often speeds up a little bit. Your heart rate often increases, and this is usually combined with mental visuals and talk that's telling you why you should feel anxious. And it's often this mental component that is the driver of the anxiety. So a little bit later, we're going to be talking about how we hack this process and reverse engineer it so we can bring ourselves back to a feeling of safety and calm. Okay, so let's unpack this a little bit. We need to understand what is going on when we experience fear and anxiety. What is this connected to? Why do we even have this in the first place? Why should we even experience fear and anxiety? What's the point? Point of it? So we need to understand that this is connected to a mechanism in our brains that has kept us and all of our ancestors alive so that you could be here right now. So this mechanism is very old. It is connected to our reptilian brain, which basically is there to make sure all of our biological functions are working and that you don't get ate, you don't get eaten by the tiger, or you don't fall off a cliff. And if any of your ancestors had that happen before they had progeny, you wouldn't be here. So it worked. It got you to here. The problem is this same mechanism, when it's exposed to the modern world, sees countless things that it deems as being a potential threat to our survival, that it's constantly getting triggered. So before we can go into strategies, we need to look at a little more in depth on what is actually happening in the brain biochemically. So we have a part of our brain called the amygdala, and this part of our brain is what Dr. Harry Berry calls the gunslinger Dr. Harry Berry is a specialist in panic attacks. And basically, this part of our brain is constantly scanning the horizon and it's saying, okay, is that a threat? Oh, if it is a threat, okay, this is the tiger. The tiger is going to eat you. It's either fight or flight. Either you're going to fight the tiger or you're going to run. You're not going to sit there and think about the situation. So when it gets triggered, it, it triggers the release of adrenaline and cortisol into our bloodstream, and that motivates you to either fight or run. And if you've ever gone through a panic attack, which I have, I know know them well. Sadly, you know the experience. You want to move. It's like you almost can't stop yourself from moving because this adrenaline is so strong and it just courses through your body and you feel strong, but you also feel like you have to do something in that moment. Now, it's very important to recognize that when your amygdala gets triggered, your cognitive functioning goes down. Because you're in a fight or flight situation. You're not supposed to sit there and think about the situation. So the issue becomes, when our amygdala is constantly being triggered by our environment, our cognitive functioning goes down. So it is so important for us to understand how to make ourselves feel safe so that our amygdala is not constantly getting triggered because it really is impacting your ability to think clearly. Now, when they do brain scans of people that have anxiety challenges and anxiety disorders, they find that their amygdala tends to be larger than normal. Conversely, people who meditate regularly often have amygdalas that are smaller than normal. Okay, so that's the terrain. So keep all that in mind as we go into strategies, because basically what we're going to be doing is hacking, hacking into the amygdala and telling it to calm down because it was falsely triggered by something in the environment. Okay, so we're going to break down the strategies of how to feel safe into two categories, short term and long term. Short term strategies are how to immediately get yourself back to a calm space because you're triggered and you can feel it in your body. And longer term is what are the strategies that will create stability and, and an overall sense of calm in the long run? What are some things you can integrate into your life that were that are more likely to create an experience where your anxiety is reduced? You're feeling more calm because there are some support strategies built in. Okay. Starting from short term Strategies. Let's first define a term that we'll call baseline. When we're at baseline, we feel calm, we feel relaxed, we feel centered. We'll call that baseline. And if we are experiencing anxiety, meaning that a part of your brain has detected a threat, you will be experiencing some very clear biological cues. There's going to be three of them. Your muscles tend to contract, your breathing becomes shallow and often speeds up, and your heart rate often increases. And all of that is usually accompanied by mental images, mental chatter telling you why you should feel anxious. And this is often the driver for the anxiety. So we're going to reverse engineer this mechanism. We're going to be focusing on our breathing, slowing down our heart rate, relaxing our muscles, and quieting the mental chatter and the imagery. Because that is the experience of anxiety, we can reverse engineer that to get ourselves back to baseline. Now, starting with the breath. If the challenge is that when we're anxious, our breath is shallow and rapid, what we want is a long, deep breath in, relaxing our belly, breathing into our belly, holding, and then a slower exhale than your inhale. If you can remember that. You got it. Now, there's many different methods. There's the 4, 7, 8 method where you breathe in to a count of four, you hold for a count of seven, and you release for a count of eight. That can be helpful. But what I find is it's simpler to just think, okay, I need to breathe in deeply, hold, and then slowly release. If you can remember that, that will start to calm your nervous system down. That hold at the top is there to stimulate the vagus nerve, which tends to kick in your parasympathetic nervous system and get you back to a place of calm and peace. But just REM in breath, slight hold, longer exhale. And again, what we're doing is we're hacking into part of this mechanism that's saying you're not safe by breathing. You're telling this part of your brain, you know what? We're safe, everything's good. Because if I wasn't safe, I wouldn't be able to breathe like this. So that method is extremely powerful in bringing you back to baseline. Now, let's add to this the muscle relaxation. If when we are feeling anxious, our muscles are contracted, we want to send the signal that we're safe by relaxing our muscles. So as we exhale on that breathing, we want to relax our muscles. We want to really pay attention to where there's tension in our body, where there is contraction in our muscles, and we want to release and relax those muscles. So in breath hold, slow release of the breath, and we relax our muscles and we just keep cycling through this over and over again. And we're telling this part of our brain we are safe and we can go back to baseline. Now, the third component when we're feeling anxious is our heart rate. Our heart rate tends to go up when we're feeling anxious, when we're not feeling safe. And so it's helpful to know what your average resting heart rate rate is. And if you have a Fitbit or a Apple watch or some kind of health tracker that you can wear around your wrist, it will tell you what your average resting heart rate is. And it also tell you in the moment what your current heart rate is. And that's your beats per minute. So when I'm feeling anxious, my heart rate can go up to about 80, 85. For some people, it'll be much higher. And so when you're practicing this breathing exercise and you look at your watch, it will tell you, okay, your heart rate is at 80. And if you keep doing the breathing exercise and relaxing your muscles, you'll start to see your heart rate start to go down. And that's how you know that's the biofeedback that will give you the indicator that your body is now going back into baseline. Now, I know I'll be getting some emails on this, so the specific tracker that I use is the Fitbit Charge 6. If you're looking for your Christmas present this year so you can ask for it, that would be one that I would recommend. The reason why I like this one is it's very accurate. It just does health tracking, it doesn't have email and all sorts of stuff that I don't want on my wrist. And it's very light and it's waterproof. So if you're interested, I'll leave a link in the description for that. So we've covered breathing, we've covered muscle relaxation, we've covered heart rate. Now let's move on to mental imagery and mental chatter. So many of us feel like those are unhackable, but that you can absolutely hack both of those. You can calm your brain down to what? To the point where the chatter starts to quiet down and the mental imagery starts to dissolve and you can get to that space where it is quiet. That is possible. And there's a few techniques that I want to suggest to you to explore. One of the most simple methods of quieting your mental chatter, quieting the imagery in your mind is any practice that brings you into the present moment. So a grounding exercise would be something like identifying, looking in the room and just identifying, oh, there's a cup, there's a book. I see the book, I see the kitchen, whatever it is, that's in the moment. We really ground yourself into your visual seeing, here's where I'm at. This is the present moment. Identify what is around you. You can also then bring that into your body and say, okay, what am I feeling right now? Okay, I'm feeling my feet touching my chair. I'm noticing that there's some tension in my shoulders. I'm feeling my shirt touching my skin. Something that grounds you into your body will start to quiet your mental chatter and get you back to a present moment experience. You can also use your sense of taste and smell. Those also get you back into the present moment. You may use sniff and go, okay, what do I smell? It's kind of a slight musky odor. Okay, so then that's going on. Taste. Maybe you drink a cup of tea or you have some food around you, and you just taste it, and you really bring your awareness to the taste. All of those kinds of exercises, those grounding exercises, can calm your mind down, quiet the chatter, quiet the visuals, and bring you into this moment. Because often the mental chatter, the visuals tend to be about something in the future. There's something that you're worried about, there's something you're feeling anxious about, and you want to bring yourself back to the present moment. Now, there are two very specific meditation practices that I've found to be very effective and very predictable in terms of quieting your mind. The first one goes very much hand in hand with the breathing exercise we just discussed, which is we want to rest our awareness into our belly, into the lower half of our body. We want to really sink our awareness down into our belly. So as we breathe in, we hold, and then we release, we want to really rest our attention in our belly, and we want to really relax the belly and really bring our attention down into the lower half of our body. And the experience tends to be that your mental processes start to slow down. You start to feel like life is slowing down, both from your breath, but also just resting your awareness into the lower part of your body. There's a sense of slowing down. And you will find that as you continue to do that, your energy is no longer in your head, which is where it is most of the time. You're thinking, your awareness is in your head, and you're starting to really slow down. Into your body and there's more body awareness and that's where your attention is. And so the mental chatter tends to slow down in quiet. This was a meditation practice I learned from a Buddhist teacher and I was so surprised to find it helpful because I was like, oh, that's just so simple. Like I must have done that before, but I hadn't. It was such a simple exercise, but I don't think I'd ever stumbled upon it especially put some real attention to it. So that would be the first exercise, just resting your awareness into the lower half of your body, especially your belly as you're breathing and really go for that Buddha belly. When you see all those images of the Buddha, he's laughing and he's got the, the big belly. Just really like, let your belly really relax. I think we often tend to really contract that part of our body when we feel like, oh, if I'm not in shape or whatever. We tend to really pull in in our belly. So just relaxing. Your belly can feel so good and it may take a little bit, it may not feel comfortable to do it right away. So I want to encourage you to just stay with it for a bit until you really feel a sense that your belly is fully relaxed and you're just like. And your consciousness is really resting in your belly. It's a very satisfying and nourishing experience. The second meditation practice is called the Bit Meditation. That's body image talk and that is a meditation I learned from Shinzen Young. And I will leave a link in the description to the episode called Meditation that we've done in the past where I walk through that exact process. Shinzen Young is one of the top meditation teachers in the world. They actually study his brain at various universities because he's attained a very high level of meditation practice and they want to understand how that actually impacts how his brain functions. So highly recommend for you to check that meditation practice out. It's something I utilize all of the time and I just found it to be very easy, very useful. And so just check out that episode. I'll leave a link in the description. So those are the short term immediate. I need to get myself back to a baseline state exercises. But now let's talk about longer term because there's longer term strategies that can give you an overall sense of feeling safe, that if you put some energy towards them, you will find they will pay dividends. So first off, in terms of longer term strategies of feeling calm and safe, there's just the general, what I call the basics which Is supporting your brain health. Regular cardio, exercise, eating a healthy, higher protein, lower carb diet, omega 3 fatty acids, reducing the sugars, reducing the artificial flavorings and preservatives, all those things can lead you to feeling overall less anxious. Specifically, if you are someone that drinks a lot of caffeine and struggles with anxiety, that may be something you may want to explore reducing or eliminating. I do not drink any caffeine. I haven't drank caffeine in a very long time and I function just fine. So there might be a transition period for you in doing that. Especially getting off caffeine can give you headaches and things like that. But if you find yourself constantly feeling anxious, start with testing out, reducing or eliminating caffeine. So in discussing long term strategies of feeling safe, feeling stable, feeling calm, we need to talk about community, belonging and social anxiety. Those are very important topics for us to discuss. Because they're not conceptual to this very deep part of our brain. They're very much primal needs that relate to safety. It's important to remember that up to 200, 300, 400 years ago, it was very difficult to isolate ourselves and survive depending on the environment. So a part of our brain knows that community and tribe are absolutely necessary for survival. So if we spend a lot of time by ourselves in isolation, there's going to be a part of your brain that's saying this is not safe. You know, if something goes down and there's no community around or the warring tribe comes, you know, we're not going to be okay. And that low level of anxiety, I think hits many people more than we are aware of now. There's been a lot of talk recently about the connection between isolation and addiction. And I believe it's because this part of our brain is just which has evolved over many, many thousands of years, knows that when you're alone for long periods of time, survival may be a threat to you in that moment. So having community, having people around you that you're talking to on a regular basis, going and seeing people, those things on a very deep level in our brain say we're safe, it's okay, we can relax. Because if something happens, these people may help me out. Now this is not on a conscious level. This is on a very deep subconscious level. So in terms of a longer term strategy to create more a sense of calm and peace and safety, Putting energy towards community is almost a must. It's very difficult to push against these deeper waves of our brain chemistry. So this may look like volunteering somewhere. This may look Like a church group. This may look like a support group. This could be like 12 step, a meetup group, a study group. It could be a yoga class that you love going to every week. Pick whatever it is that you would like to do, but make it a regular part of your schedule. Now, I've watched people that I've coached over time find community in this way and their lives completely turn around. They feel much better, they feel more calm, they feel more energized. And it's because this deep, deeper part of their brain is finally getting a sense of like, okay, we're safe. There's community around, there's a sense of belonging. Now there's the other part of this is social anxiety. Many of us struggle with social anxiety. I've heard from many of you who've emailed me that this has been a topic that you really want me to cover in detail. It's something that I struggle with as well. And what I can tell you is this is the same basic mechanism that we need to be aware of, which is that if we were in a tribe back in the day and we had something go down where we were banished from the tribe, we may not survive. So social anxiety possibly, possibly could be connected to these deeper feelings of if there's a rupture in the social fabric, if I'm angry at this person, if I express myself in this way, I will be banished from the tribe. And that wiring runs very deep. So it's, it's helpful to think about it in this way so you can hack it and go, okay, wait a minute, I'm safe. I need to express myself in this situation and it's okay. And when you have community around you, when you have other people in your support system that you can talk to and say, I'm having this situation with this person, you don't feel as it's so life or death. You can feel a sense that, okay, you have context for it. You can have a confrontation with someone if you need to and have a conversation, express your needs and it's okay. But without that, if you're very isolated and you have something come up with someone, it's so much more of a life or death experience. So again, coming back to having a support system around you is almost essential in getting to a place of long term calm, peace and stability. In terms of feeling safe, it's important to turn down the noise. Meaning that if you're constantly getting signals that you are not safe, specifically from the news, then because we have the ability to know exactly what's going on anywhere in the world at any given moment. If we're constantly doom scrolling and looking at all the things that are happening in the world, if we don't give ourselves a break from that, our amygdala will constantly be on guard. There's always going to be the next thing that we need to protect ourselves against. Now, going through Covid, I think many of us had that experience of lockdown when we were just like constantly worried about what's going to happen next. And I think that experience collectively did have an imprinting on us, some more than others. So it's important to take breaks from the news, get out into nature, and experience life in the present moment that is calm, safe and stable. When I go to the beach and I go for my run every day, I'm staring at cliffs and ocean and tide that have been coming in in basically that exact same way for thousands and thousands and thousands of years. And so when I'm tuned into that, I'm reminded that no matter what's going on in the world, this location right here is probably not going to be much different a thousand years from now. And that consciousness really helps my brain quiet down. So nature exposure, even just l listening to the sound of birds, can be really, really calming to our nervous system. And some people postulate, and I got this from John Young and some of the people that work with him, that this potentially could be because the birds in a natural environment are telling the rest of the environment whether or not there's a threat. So if there's a large predator in the environment, the birds will react to it. So if the birds are singing, that means that all is chill. And our ancient brain most likely does know this. And so when we hear the sounds of nature, when we hear the sounds of singing birds, I believe it triggers a deeper part of our brain that we're safe and the environment is safe. And finally, I want to talk a little bit about the brain chemistry of courage, which was an episode I did a while back. And specifically what I'm referring to here is if we over time start to recoil from experiences that have created anxiety for us, maybe we've had a traumatic experience, but even on a lower level, just things that you start to feel anxious about, as you recoil from those experiences, it strengthens your amygdala, meaning that what you fear persists and gets stronger. So exposure therapy, which is basically putting yourself consciously into a situation where you feel uncomfortable or anxious so you can re pattern the experience, is a very helpful strategy. Especially as you get older, because as you get older, you have more and more experiences of trauma and anxiety. And so if you don't push against that tendency of recoiling from anxiety, your world will start to get smaller and smaller and you'll become more and more anxious about a lot of different things. And so if you listen to that episode, you'll hear me talk about my experience with driving and panic attacks. And it is something that I constantly have to push towards of like if I'm in traffic, I need to tell myself, okay, wait, I can't just recoil from this. I've got to breathe and be with this. Because if I do, I'm continually telling my brain this is safe, I'm not in any danger, and I can experience more of life because I can make it through those kinds of experiences. Because when you do this, the trigger goes down, you feel less triggered in the experience and your brain starts to associate that experience with something that is safe and the anxiety levels go down. This is well known, this has been well documented. But it's important for us to make this a practice. Otherwise our world does become smaller. Okay, so that's it. I hope that was helpful to you. As a reminder, we have our upcoming ADHD time management workshop that will be happening on December 10th and 17th. If you're interested, you can go to drummerinthegreatmountain.comworkshop we will spend a little bit of an extra time talking about planning for the holidays and also planning the upcoming year. So if you want that extra support in your life, would love to have you. And until next time, be well.