at the heart of addiction, but also at the heart of a challenged life, challenged in the ways that life shouldn't be challenging, is this lack of distress tolerance. And I have a question about distress tolerance specifically. What can we do to increase our distress tolerance? Like what practices? Maybe we just have to experience distress to know how to navigate distress.

Well, we're going to experience distress. We experience it all the time. And I think it's, and you may be able to articulate this even better than I can, but, you know, I think we need to look at stress, right? Not all stress is bad. We need stress. We need stress to move around in this chair.

I need to be able to walk around. My muscles need to tense and I need that stress. Was it Hans Selye's work around eustress and distress? We're going to experience distress. And it's not about avoiding distress. It's, you know, how are we going to walk through that distress? And so I like to break practices down into a couple of different ways.

So proactive and reactive. Proactive are going to be things that we schedule, you know, I'm going to do, you talked about yoga nidra. We can talk about that a little bit more. You call it a non-sleep, deep rest, other forms of mindfulness and meditation that actually allow us to raise capacity in our, our nervous system.

going to therapy, coaching, being involved in a community, doing physical exercise. These are things that we're going to schedule going into the cold plunge, which does allow us to experience something and stay a little bit longer. And it gives us, you know, it's so many, it's, we have one at home and when friends come over to use it, it's so funny because I think the first time they're going to do it.

And I know you've had a lot of people, we actually, I was at your home a couple of years ago and there was a guy who was doing it for the first time. And he's like a big, I don't remember this, but he's like a big athletic guy. And he, he was freaking out, getting into, terrified.

Right. And it's just cold water. There's no, it can't, I mean, it could hurt you if you're in there for however long to get hypothermia, but it's not going to hurt you. So having practices like that that allow us to move through that level of fear can translate to fear or distress can translate when it, it comes in real time for something that we, that I know I can walk through this.

Yeah. Because adrenaline is ubiquitous in stressful circumstances, which is just a bunch of science nerd speak for the stress response is always an increase in autonomic arousal or alertness, a shrinking of the visual field, an increase in heart rate, a tendency to move. People will say, but I freeze actually the freezing response.

This is kind of interesting. My lab studied this. Lindsay Soleil published a paper in nature about this in 2018. She was a graduate student in my lab. The freezing response is an active behavior. Oh yeah. Trying to hide from, from an intruder in your home, in the closet, you're trying not to move.

So people think, Oh, you know, people freeze under stress. No, the freezing response is an active response. You know, the adrenaline dump is sometimes called is, is what essentially creates the freeze response. It's why people can't remember things when they get up on stage, if they have a fear of public public speaking.

Um, and I was going to, uh, I forgot to mention in the cold plunge, cold water is a highly reliable way to elicit an adrenaline response. Yeah. It's just a great training for this feels uncomfortable. I want to get out, but I'm going to learn to control my thinking in this uncomfortable circumstance.

Yeah. So that would fit into the proactive, right? So that's something that you can proactively start to be able to manage that adrenaline as you're, as you're telling me in, in the body, right? You're, we're able to manage those feelings because what is it come down to is it's a, it's a, these sensations in our body that we're experiencing that feel really uncomfortable.

And we might be able to sense them a little earlier. Right. If we have some training, I just want to throw in one little science tidbit, as long as we're talking about using cold as a way to manage, um, distress tolerance is that the first 15 to 20 seconds after the adrenaline response hits and it hits very fast, your forebrain, which is involved in all your contextual decision-making and clean, clear strategies of what best to do is essentially shut down for about 20 seconds.

If you can make it 20 seconds, you have a far better chance of not doing something really stupid and doing something that's very adaptive. Right. Now there may be circumstances where you don't have 20 seconds, but if under stress and riding out that 20 seconds is, uh, generally going to be a very adaptive approach because then your forebrain comes back, quote unquote, online, and you could really start to make strategic decisions based on those particular circumstances.

And so that's, what's happening when we get, uh, experienced, people say get triggered by something that's, uh, uncomfortable for us. Right. Uh, you really, uh, you, you, you get a text message from your boss or your partner that says, we need to talk later. Right. A lot of people, I don't know about you, but when I get, we need to talk later, it's not my favorite text in the world to get.

Right. So someone might get that text and then they immediately go into like their perception or their beliefs or their kind of narrative about what that means. I'm going to be rejected. This is going to be disappointing. It's going to be really hard. And those perceptions or beliefs are coming out of their past.

So now sitting there looking at a text message, which is really just a, a neutral it's, it's all events are neutral. We bring the meaning to them and we want to bring meaning to them, but it's just words on a, a screen. And we don't even know what it means yet.

You're looking at those and you're not even in the present that more you're in the past. And we're never really out of the present. People say, get present. That's the only place we live. It's what, where are we oriented? Past, present, or future. Yeah. Right. In this moment, now that I'm going into this narrative from all the other times that I was, let's say I'm making up that I'm being rejected or I'm not going to get what I want.

Now I'm oriented to the past. So I'm, we could say I'm disoriented in that moment. Or to the future, you're anticipating what might be said, what's going to happen. You're out of the moment. But I would say that the anticipation is still something that's coming out of what we've experienced before.

Right. And then from there we go into an automatic reaction and it's like a fight or flight response. It might not seem like that because we don't, we might not be thinking I'm going to die from this, but if, you know, we might be thinking I'm not going to be okay.

And what is, I'm not going to be okay. That gets carried out and it's triggered in the body. I would say in the same way as I'm at threat. I'm at, I'm in danger. And this is where we're confusing discomfort. Cause even if I am going to be not going to get the answer I want, or I'm going to be abandoned, it's not life threatening.

It's not actually threatening. It's the, it's perceived threat, but I respond to that perceived threat as if it's actual threat. And I might respond by kind of going after the person, like I need to know right now being obsessive about it. I might respond by withdrawing completely and, and, and hiding from it, but it, it, it creates this cycle of kind of, uh, uh, uh, an automatic reaction to things that doesn't allow me to build tolerance for that, that stressor, right?

The, the solution to that is first be aware that that's, that's happening. And once you're aware that that happens and it happens to us all the time, once I recognize that I'm in this cycle below to, to, to find a way to stop, to intervene on that, to take a break from it, it might be just those 20 seconds.

It might be something that, uh, it might be taking a few breaths. It might be walking away from it. Can I interject something there? Because one thing that stemmed out of a prior conversation we had is I think, you know, these aspirational, um, responses of, okay, like the, the stressor hits, I'm going to take a pause.

I'm going to create the gap between stimulus and response that, you know, was it Viktor Frankl or something like that referred to? It sounds wonderful, but in real time, everything's very hard. It's very, everything's different. And so, uh, you know, what can we do to prepare? What are the things I like this notion of proactive tools that, that we can schedule, um, cold plunge being one of them.

We'll talk about yoga, nidra and some other things, but, um, but one of the things that I've learned is that there are sensations in the body that come about and it will be different for different people, but there are sensations in my body that come about very fast because the adrenaline response is fast.

And the more that I pay attention to those, the more I'm able to pick up on them at, at earlier stages of the, the stress response, kind of like seeing a big wave coming from further out. And the, the yogis talked about this. I learned about this also from you that like to, in meditation, we can start to see the quote, it's mystical language, but that like the subtle ripples of our perception.

Whereas when we're going through life and we're just kind of around, it's like being on a train and we're just seeing stuff go by all the time. I think that the concept is, is stilling leads to seeing. I love that. The more that we can still the mind, the easier we can see what's actually happening versus what we perceive as happening.

So what you say is so true that it is hard. If the first step is to, to, after we recognize that this is something that happening is to stop when we're in the middle of response. How do we stop? Um, something that I work with the people and I actually heard you talk about in a, in a different way that I really appreciated in, uh, one of your essentials podcasts where, you know, in that moment, when we're in that reaction, you know, the, the, the, the sympathetic nervous system has been activated.

The solution though, is not to deactivate the sympathetic. It's to activate the parasympathetic. So our practices and tools that I think are the most beneficial is how do we activate the parasympathetic? A great question to ask ourselves once we recognize that we're in some sort of stress response, I like to tell people to ask is, am I, or is anybody around me in immediate physical danger?

And if the answer is no, first off, if I can ask that question, it's probably the answer is no, but most of the things that we experience every day are not life-threatening. Actually, probably the thing that we experience every day that's most life-threatening, that doesn't bother most of us is driving in a car, right?

And we were hurtling down the road and just trusting that someone's not going to cross over that other line, but that won't scare us. But, you know, uh, getting someone that you're in a, uh, a committed relationship with or that you're emotionally attached to that says something you don't like might throw you into a spiral.

I mean, it speaks to the unbelievably powerful aspect of, of human connection. Yeah. I mean, likewise with the earlier example of the kid in video games, we think about this kid and the video game as like the, the only players in the interaction, but to take a video game away from a kid is to also remove him from his social context.

We know that social isolation is one of the most, um, potent stressors for, for any mammal, especially humans. I mean, from what I've read in, you know, tribes would basically shame someone out of it. If they did something really terrible, you know, they would send them out of the tribe and that was like death, you know, they only survive together.

Now we can live alone because of, you know, technology and human advancement, but like serve, like live physically alone, but you know, we're not at the top of the food chain, really. You know, if we were out in the, in the jungle or back when we were, uh, nomadic and we still have that within us that we need that connection.

We need that. Thank you. you