Dr. Shadé Zahrai

We call it the spiral interrupt technique.

When this is happening, the part of the brain that's activated is the emotion center, the threat detection center.

It's trying to identify everything that could go wrong to keep you safe.

So what you can do is control your attention.

Bring your attention back to, what can I control right now?

By literally saying to yourself, this is my brain doing what it does.

I am safe to act anyway.

So again, simply by doing that, by consciously controlling your thoughts, you are re-engaging those prefrontal regions, which reduces activity in the amygdala, in the fear centers, and allows you to have that moment of rationality to then decide what's next.

I love that you mentioned that one as well, this idea of caring.

Because when we acknowledge that our brain is just doing what it's wired to do, and then we can...

We can essentially interpret what we're feeling in a way that's going to serve us.

And so we can either interpret that heart rate, as you said, as you get into the overthinking of the overthinking and then you're stressed about the stress.

It's called a meta emotion where it's like an emotion about an emotion and it just spirals out of control.

Or you can say, no, no, this is my brain is just doing its job.

I'm prepared.

I'm ready.

I'm going to be of service here.

I care.

I care about delivering a good outcome.

And it's powerful when you recognize that.