Why Am I Losing It?
Why Am I Losing It?
Do you sometimes feel like you’re not yourself, as if you’re losing it? Have you noticed that these experiences are always followed by stress or anxiety or even panic attacks? Today I’d like to teach you something very interesting about the brain and about your energies.
In Chinese medicine there’s something called the Triple Warmer. The Triple Warmer is an energy system controls your fight or flight response. When you experience a trauma or experience something very, very stressful, the Triple Warmer will have three basic responses: Fight, flight, or freeze.
These experiences can be physical or emotional, but in general tend to be emotional experiences that cause the Triple Warmer to respond. When you’re in one of these stress responses, the body will generate chemicals in the body. In these moments or situations, you are physically unable to think clearly because these chemicals will cause you to feel one of three ways.
Sometimes you will get very, very angry, which is why sometimes people will yell at their children and they don’t know why.
Sometimes you can be put in a state of flight where you want to get away even though there’s no real physical threat.
Finally, sometimes the chemicals will freeze you, for examples when you see a politician on television and for a minute or so he won’t be able to say anything. This is because the chemicals in his body literally froze him.
So, the key is to know how to calm the Triple Warmer. There’s a sentence I love to use and it’s, “Fight, flight, freeze or calm the Triple Warmer.” The good news is there’s an easy way for you to do that, and all you have to do is to put one of the palms of your hand on your forehead and the other palm on the back of your head. Then, take a few deep breaths and hold that position for at least two minutes. You can do this while watching television; you can do this while lying down in your bed. What it does is it forces the blood to go back to your forebrain, and when the blood is back then the Triple Warmer relaxes and the stress response disappears.
You can then go a step further. If there are things that make you feel bad, for example when your boss or when your wife or your husband is yelling at you, once you’ve held this position for at least two minutes and you begin to feel relaxed, then you can think about stressful events, and because the blood stays on your forebrain it will knock off the stress response. This means that next time you go into the same situation you won’t feel the same stress because you’re slowly teaching your Triple Warmer to stop reacting when in fact there is no threat. I hope this helps, you can send me your questions if you want.
Olivier