Speaker 1: 0:01

Welcome to the Jack Hopkins Show podcast, where stories about the power of focus and resilience are revealed by the people who live those stories and now the host of the Jack Hopkins Show podcast, jack Hopkins.

Speaker 2: 0:20

Hey, this is Jack Hopkins. Earlier today I think it was this morning I posted something on X that led to me promising I would post a video later with a method, a technique, if you will, for quickly and easily grounding yourself and moving as much of your brain activity as possible to the prefrontal cortex and away from the limbic or emotional center of the brain, more specifically, a little almond-shaped structure known as the amygdala. And the amygdala is kind of the fear center of the brain and its sole purpose in life is to ensure our survival. Because that's really what fear is all about that fear response when a real threat in real time presents itself. For example, you are walking down the street thinking about something that happened yesterday and then suddenly from the periphery, from the side, somebody jumps out with a hammer to attack you, that you are under attack. The amygdala has detected this threat and has initiated that sympathetic nervous system trigger which most people know as the fight or flight system. And when you hear it like that, keep in mind there's always one being left out of the equation, because there are actually three things, or three possibilities there, if you will, in terms of how we respond behaviorally. There's, of course, fight, which is you attack the attacker, try to injure, disarm and end their threat. There's the flight, which is to run like hell to use potential cover or objects to put something, a barrier, in between you and the attacker, either until you can get backup help or they give up, or you can catch your breath and prepare to fight again should they make it to you or get around the barrier. Or three freeze.

Speaker 2: 3:03

Everybody forgets about the freeze option and the reason for that, I think, is because the freeze option looks so much like nothing that it's easy to watch a video of somebody and come to the conclusion that they just hadn't yet initiated either the fight or flight option. That's almost never the case, because those triggers happen so quickly and faster than conscious thought could keep up with. There's not really a delay between the fight or flight from the time the amygdala triggers that fear response, from the time the amygdala triggers that fear response. So if you see a video clip of somebody being attacked, for example, and all you see happening is them standing there for three to four seconds, it's not that they are trying to decide should I do fight or flight. It's that they have entered the freeze response or flies. It's that they have entered the freeze response, which is one of the three available neurological decision points, if you will and I shouldn't say decision, because that's not a conscious choice, that's all happening at rapid speed on the unconscious level. But it is one of the three fight, flight or freeze potentials.

Speaker 2: 4:28

For many things, the freeze option is the most dangerous. If you are fighting back, you at least have the chance of disarming the person getting the knife, the weapon, the hammer, whatever it may be, and in some cases maybe it's just their bare hands. So you are working to disable or shut them down. If you run, especially if you are faster than the person you are running from, then you are putting distance between yourself and the attacker. And unless they have a gun and can shoot you from a great distance, the more distance you put between yourself and the attacker, generally the safer you are. Now that's true probably for 99% of the instances. If they have a handgun, if they have a long gun, a rifle, then that changes dramatically, simply because a long gun is so much more accurate at longer distances. But I guess my point is is if you are fighting or flighting or running, you are generally creating a safer situation for yourself. If you are in the freeze, however, then neither of those are true, because if you're being attacked and you freeze, you're not putting distance between yourself and the attacker. If you are being attacked and you freeze, you are taking no meaningful action towards shutting down your attacker or disarming the attacker or ending the threat. So the freeze is like a bad deal. It's a really bad deal, but it happens. And the less trained someone is to exit the fight or flight stage and take conscious control from that point on of what's happening, the more likely they are to wind up in a freeze state where they are doing nothing at all. And this isn't particularly relevant to the technique or the method that I'm going to share with you, but I share it with you because I guess it's relevant, in that you have an understanding of the fear response, the triggering of the sympathetic nervous system, which again is the fight, flight or freeze system, which is all about your survival.

Speaker 2: 7:18

Now you may wonder, jack, if you're telling me that the freeze response as a potential response is like, really dangerous, why would that, from an evolutionary standpoint, why would that be part of a survival response? Why wouldn't it just be fight or flight, fight or run, that would make more sense, wouldn't it. Fight or run, that would make more sense, wouldn't it? You can make that argument. But you can also make the argument if you are using evolution as the explanation for how this came to be neurologically, then you can think of many examples where freezing would be a life-saving maneuver. For example, there are forms of predators, wildlife out there that if you are moving through a certain geographical territory be it jungle, forest, desert, whatever the case may be and you have a particular type of predator that has kind of locked onto you or is trailing you, freezing might be the life-saving action. That happens Because there are some predators that are triggered by movement. There are some predators that really struggle to see you once movement stops, so they track you by movement and then are triggered to attack by further movement, are triggered to attack by further movement.

Speaker 2: 9:07

So, again, from an evolutionary perspective, there was likely a time and a reason for the freeze response to exist as one of three ways of protecting the person having that or one of those three responses. The person having that or one of those three responses In the modern world in 2024, and I guess we've been in the modern world for longer than since 2024, but right now, the freeze response and I suppose if somebody really wanted to go down to brass tacks and really examine this, maybe somebody can find a situation where, even now, today, where the freeze response was still relevant and important In general, today, the freeze response is dangerous. The most useful two are fight or flight. Again, the only reason I tell you this is because the method, the technique that I'm going to be teaching you is to do one of two things to avoid you from manufacturing fear in your mind that pushes you into a fear response in the absence of an actual threat in your presence in real time, where there is no person with a hammer closing in on you, where there is no true danger in the moment. But because of our capacity for manufacturing fear through our imagination, we go ahead and cause that amygdala to trigger a false alarm. So the method that I'm going to share with you is to teach you how to keep that from happening so easily, from happening so easily, and it also serves to, once you've entered into that fear response, to be able to walk yourself back out of it and not get immediately pulled back in Now.

Speaker 2: 11:24

Why is this important? Why is it important to be able to do any of those things I just described. It's important for I'm going to make it one main reason there are several different subcategories, but let's just keep this simple. It's important because once that fear response has kicked in and the sympathetic nervous system is triggered, the prefrontal cortex, our thinking brain, the logical brain, the brain that we use to solve problems and it's the part of the brain right behind our forehead that part of the brain begins to close down, it begins to shut down.

Speaker 2: 12:03

The prefrontal cortex does not operate optimally under stress, and when there's a significant amount of stress introduced and in the situation we are talking about, it's introduced via a fear response and the amygdala, kicking the sympathetic nervous system into gear, our ability to rationalize, our ability to think logically, our ability to problem-solve vanishes and we find ourselves in a real oh-fuck moment. And we find ourselves in a real oh fuck moment Because there will be enough of that prefrontal cortex thinking left available to know that we should be planning, thinking, applying logic and everything else to extract ourselves from a bad situation, but there's not enough of it left to be able to do so. We'll probably just have the awareness that we need to do so, but not the ability to do so, which is the same as not even realizing we need to do so. When we can keep that prefrontal cortex functional and open and operational, then we can plan effectively and we can do so even when there is a stressor present that has everybody else's mind locking down and shutting out their ability to think clearly. We can learn how to do that and keep thinking logically and clearly in some pretty high levels of stress, but it doesn't happen by accident. It only happens because we know how to do that. It almost never happens by accident never.

Speaker 2: 14:08

So you either know how to do it and or have trained so extensively that it's just become automatic behavior that no longer requires conscious thought, or you are at the mercy of the sympathetic nervous system response and the only way out of it for you at that point is long after the danger has left, or there is no more danger and the sympathetic nervous system is no longer needed and so kind of burns itself out, if you will. The problem with that, with a lot of the types of danger we face in modern society, with violent crimes for example, the problem is that long after the threat, whatever form of threat that was, has left or is no longer there or is no longer engaged in that violent behavior, long after that's gone and disappeared I should say long before, but I got twisted there on Hallows trying to explain that. In short, what I'm saying is, if you kill me right now or lethally injure me so that I'm going to die in a few minutes, it doesn't matter that the source of danger has left, it doesn't matter that you've run up to me, stabbed me in the heart and took off running, and so ten seconds from now there's no danger in my immediate area. But if my heart has been dealt a lethal blow and I'm just bleeding out and it's going to take a few more pumps before I lose consciousness, then having the sympathetic nervous system wind down really is meaningless, because I'm winding down with it. It's called die. That's not the goal with any of this.

Speaker 2: 16:14

So we need to be able to remain functional in terms of our thinking, in terms of not getting sucked into the fear response which leads to the sympathetic nervous system response when there is no real danger in our immediate environment. So, for example let me give you an example For example, when we see this fucking wrinkled old douchebag of an asswipe, michael Flynn and his bald-headed midget posting these videos talking about military tribunals executing the enemies of Trump and all of the other bullshit that they're putting out for the purpose of scaring people, namely Democrats. What we have to realize is, as threatening as that is in terms of a potential danger at some point down the road, no matter how lethal they make it sound, unless they are in the same room with you when they are making those threats, there is no immediate danger to your safety. There is no immediate danger to your safety and that means there is no legitimate reason for that amygdala to trigger the fear response and for you to have a sympathetic nervous system response where you kick into fight, flight or freeze. That doesn't make any sense at all, because once you are in the fight flight or freeze there's nothing to fight, there is nothing to run from and there's certainly nothing to freeze up about and try to keep from seeing you. In that instance. You have created the danger in your head with your imagination, albeit prompted by some type of trigger, like some video from Michael Flynn or the Santa's elf partner that he's got, but everything after that was stuff you created. In response to that, you make images of somebody closing in on you or getting ready to hang you or shoot you or stab you or incarcerate you, whatever may be, but there's nothing in reality. There's nothing happening in any space close to you that could be called legitimate danger to you. Right then are afraid of it. Then, in terms of like really feeling a strong fear response. You've manufactured all of that fear.

Speaker 2: 19:12

What we need our amygdala to be able to do, we need it to be able to operate without false alarms, without the little boy cried wolf syndrome. And here's why, just as we walk through a parking lot today and hear multiple car alarms going off and never even look up from our phone or the person in front of us we are looking at, we just go on in the store. We pay no mind to car alarms. Why? Because they go off all the time, and all of the time we used to, every time we heard one go off, look around and we saw nobody breaking into a car. We saw nobody driving off in a car at high speed, and what we found out pretty early is that those things go off a lot when there's no reason for them to go off, and so now we treat them like nothing.

Speaker 2: 20:10

That same thing can happen with the amygdala and our fear response and the resulting sympathetic nervous system response. If it goes off unchecked, over and over and over again, with there never having been the detection or evidence of there having been a real threat in our real-time environment at any point during that process. On some level we begin to dissociate from that alarm. We still have the feelings that go along with that rush of the adrenaline and all of the other chemistry changes that happen in us with that sympathetic nervous system response. But on another level we recognize there's nobody in the room with a knife, there's nobody charging at us with an axe, there's nobody aiming a gun at us, that when we look around, there is no real danger. And so, even as we continue to feel the fear associated with the response, we're simultaneously learning to judge the alarm that triggered it as learning to judge the alarm that triggered it as, eh, here I go on this emotional rollercoaster ride again. It sucks, it feels horrible, but it's not really about anything truly dangerous. That's not a good response or association or condition set up to have it defeats the entire purpose of the fear response.

Speaker 2: 21:49

So, again, I just wanted you to have some. Look, we could talk, or I could. Anyway I could talk about this for the next two days. We could drill down as deep as you wanted to go on the biochemistry and the neurological aspects of it and the cognitive and the psychological aspects of it, and for me I find that all interesting, but it's not particularly relevant for you as the end user of this technique to know. Like I said, it's interesting perhaps to you, maybe something you find fascinating, but it's not something that you have to know to be able to use what I'm going to show you.

Speaker 2: 22:32

I just want you to know, going into this, that if there is not a real threat to your safety or life within your environment in close proximity to you right now, that any fear you are feeling is manufactured fear. It is not real, it is not authentic fear. Now, what you feel is identical to what gets triggered with authentic fear. But authentic fear occurs when the threat introduces itself in close proximity to you in real time, and that amygdala notices what's happening long before you are consciously aware of it and then it kicks that same sympathetic nervous system response into gear With fear. That's not authentic, since there is no danger or threat in real time for our amygdala to notice and kick into sympathetic nervous system response. We manufacture the fear that walks us right into the amygdala, going and then kicking off the same fight flight or freeze. I just want you to know that part of it, because most of what you're going to be working to downregulate between now and the election is going to be manufactured fear. It's not going to be authentic fear. I can just about guarantee you, no matter who you are and where you are right now, that at no point between now and November 5th is Donald Trump going to drop out of the ceiling into your office, your room, your bedroom, your house or your backyard. Nor is Michael Flynn, nor is Ivan Raiklin, or however the fuck you pronounce that dude's name, or any of these other MAGA clowns. That's not going to happen. There's not going to be a real danger to you in real time. That happens between now and the election Almost certainly so if you are having sympathetic nervous system engagements, then you know you're manufacturing the fear. You know you've manufactured that fear. You can verify that Looking back.

Speaker 2: 25:00

Wow, I just I freaked out, man. My heart was racing and my brain just kind of fogged up. I couldn't think it was. I felt like I was dying. In retrospect, an hour later, you can go fuck man, was there any? Did anything happen in my actual environment that was threatening? Oh shit, nothing did Nothing even remotely like that. There's your evidence, there's your proof. You manufactured it. You triggered that fear response in your amygdala in the absence of a real threat, and then your nervous system did what it is designed to do when a threat is detected real or not so that it can save your life.

Speaker 2: 25:50

Here's the method, here's the technique when we go into our peripheral vision. Peripheral vision I know most of you know what that means, but I want to elaborate on that a little bit. Peripheral vision even though I'm looking forward right now and haven't moved my eyes from looking forward, I can see in the periphery Without moving my eyes. I can see my fingers moving. Now my eyes are pointed forward, but since I have my attention spread out to this entire area, I can see both what's in front of me, I can see my fingers wiggling to the side of me and I can see everything in between in a space about like this about as far down as my arms reach and about as far up as my arms will go. I can take all of that information in without ever moving. And what happens is when I take my attention, when you take your attention into this vast expanse area surrounding you and you have your attention scattered out all throughout and are aware and noticing everything within that space, it kicks your parasympathetic nervous system and your parasympathetic nervous system. Think of it as the opposite of the sympathetic nervous system.

Speaker 2: 27:28

The sympathetic nervous system, again, is fight, flight or freeze. Think of your parasympathetic nervous system as rest. It is designed basically to heal and restore energy stores, both mental, emotional, physical. It is the counterbalance to the sympathetic nervous system. In fact, the sympathetic nervous system represents such a stress to us that were we to remain in that fight or flight or freeze response perpetually, we would die very soon. The strain that it puts on our heart kidneys, our brain, on our heart kidneys, our brain, our vessels, the aorta, it puts an incredible amount of stress on our body.

Speaker 2: 28:27

But because it's designed to only operate briefly and short-term for the purpose of saving our lives, the evolutionary development said well, yeah, long-term it's kind of bad for your health, but when somebody's trying to kill you, are you really fucking worried about your long-term health? No, you want to make sure you live to see another day. You'll worry about the long-term once you make it there there, but we've got to get there first and that's going to require a such an intense response in you that your strength goes up. Your ability to process oxygen and open up your airways and to run like hell or fight like hell needs to be there or you won't live to see tomorrow. So it's a stressful event and the way we develop it's like there was this thought process as to well, wait a minute. You know there are some pretty shitty things that happen in the world.

Speaker 2: 29:29

There I do run into some real threats from time to time, things that try to eat me or kill me. Maybe I ought to have some type of system that counterbalances things, such that, once I've been in a fight, flight or freeze response, maybe I need another part of my nervous system that gears things so that my heart rate increases, so that my heart, so that my blood, so that all of the facets of my physiology return to that baseline of like chill state, by the way, that is required for me to be able to rest and recover, not to mention allow me to enter into the deepest stages of sleep at night where the real healing takes place. Maybe I ought to have a system like that. So we then develop this kind of counterbalance system, one that saves our life and is for intense short bursts of fighting or running and, in some cases, freezing, and then this other one that you know we're operating most, because that's the one that keeps us chill, lets our prefrontal cortex function, and really it's what allows us to be an effective and contributing human being to the human race. By and large, people who are acting out of the sympathetic nervous system engagement they're usually not working on a long-term project or contributing to anyone else, because fight or flight is all about me surviving. There's no room for thought of others.

Speaker 2: 31:32

So, again, the first step of this method, then, is to go into peripheral vision, because peripheral vision, or I should say entering and then keeping our attention there in peripheral vision triggers the parasympathetic nervous system and starts to calm down, without us really knowing the processes within us that are taking place to calm things down. But we don't need to know, it's not important. All we need to know is that when I do this, this thing feels good and I can think. So, step one go into peripheral vision. You know what the beautiful thing about this is. The most beautiful thing in the world about this is I can do this without anybody knowing I'm doing a damn thing. You could be sitting right across from me. You could be sitting right across from me and I could have been looking just past you at, maybe, a film that they're showing on a table next to somebody else and you had noticed that I was watching that and from there I could go into peripheral vision and initiate my parasympathetic nervous system without you having any idea that that's taking place.

Speaker 2: 33:02

So it's something you can do anywhere, at any time. You can do it at your office desk, you can do it at home while you're watching TV with others. You can do it in a waiting room at the doctor's office. You can do it anywhere, because there's nothing observable for people to see other than the spontaneous sigh that usually happens within a few seconds and that happens in response to the parasympathetic nervous system. Having engaged to the parasympathetic nervous system, having engaged, you'll just get this spontaneous where you just feel like the world's been lifted off of your shoulders, you feel relaxed and that's that parasympathetic nervous system having been initiated. So I guess they could notice that. They could hear you sigh or they could see you sigh, but they would have no idea why that happened. They might think you did it intentionally, not knowing that it crept up on you, it just came out of nowhere. It even caught you off guard, it's like.

Speaker 2: 34:07

So that's step one. It's easy, it's undetectable, as though that matters, I don't know. Maybe sometimes it does matter if you are at work, but I don't think too many of us are worried that somebody might catch us going into our peripheral vision. That doesn't seem to be something that would be a problem for most of us. So that's step one. Step two is to let the lower jaw drop down. Just about that much, however, just about that much is. I've never taken the time to measure it. It's not much, but it's more than enough to help deepen that parasympathetic nervous system response and do something else that's critical to the outcome that we are going for. You let your lower jaw drop down about a quarter to a half an inch. There I gave it a number. So it looks like this If you were watching somebody, you still probably wouldn't think, oh, here's somebody that's doing a technique, but there would be some movement that's detectable and it looks about like this, right, see, I can keep lips together and do it like, or I can be willing to open my mouth or let my lips separate and do Okay. Let me explain why that's important.

Speaker 2: 35:23

When we think, when we're not speaking but we are thinking about something, we tend to sub-vocalize, it's called sub-vocalization. Sub-vocalization is the conversations that we have inside our head, like we are speaking either outwardly to ourselves or to somebody else, but it's all taking place in here, silently, not so silent to us because we hear it but nobody else does, but because certain micro movements of our tongue, our throat muscles, our jaw muscles, the muscles in our lips, since they are so tied to the normal external language that we speak right. And it makes sense that they are tied, because we can't externally communicate with the spoken word without using the muscles that form those micro movements. Right? I mean, if I'm going to speak, it requires muscular contractions of my tongue, my throat, my cheeks, my jaw, my lips. Therefore, since they always occur in unison, of course they are linked. But what that also means is that when I'm inside my head sub-vocalizing meaning I'm talking, but just in here Nobody else can hear it I will unconsciously have the same on a micro level, the same contractions in the same muscles in my tongue, in my jaw, in my throat, in my lips that I would have on a larger and more pronounced scale of intensity if I were speaking outwardly and externally. And the reason I unconsciously do that is because it helps me think, since speaking and those muscular contractions always work in unison.

Speaker 2: 37:38

If I try to speak inside my head without involving those same muscles at least to some degree of activation and contraction, then something predictable happens, and I'm going to have you experience it right now, so that, rather than tell you first, I can show you first and then we can talk about it. So here's what I want you to do I want you to just look, wherever you are looking, leave your eyes pointed in that direction, but I want you to take your awareness out into you and see the things far off to the side of you, as far up above you as you can see and as far below your field of vision that you can see. Just notice everything there and, while you do, take the tip of your tongue and just lightly touch it to the roof again, ever so lightly and then let that lower jaw drop down about a quarter to a half an inch. Okay, now I don't know how long it was, Didn't time, it Wasn't counting, I'm going to say five seconds maybe.

Speaker 2: 38:42

But if you were actually following along, if you were engaging in each of the things that I asked you to engage in and we're doing them simultaneously you no doubt experienced quieting inside your head, which probably seemed really weird, because a big complaint for a lot of people is their head never shuts up. They're like yeah, I'm just trying to chill out and relax in my head, can't shut it up. And when you can't shut it up, that's because you are sub-vocalizing like a son of a bitch and don't even know it. What I had you do by touching the tip of your tongue to the roof of your mouth ever so lightly, and dropping that lower jaw down, relaxing that jaw, let it drop down about that far. I disengaged or you did. I didn't. I asked you and guided you to disengage the primary movers of sub-vocalization. We tied your tongue up literally by asking you to touch it to the roof of your mouth. It really kept it from doing any of the normal micro-contractions it would if you were either speaking externally or sub-vocalizing by dropping your lower jaw down about a half an inch. We further disengaged that sub-vocalization because, as you'll notice, it's pretty hard to talk without moving your jaw. Now, sub vocalization, when it's really going on and you are really I mean somebody's really tuned in and knows what they're looking for. Sub vocalization looks like this Okay, I've met people who work in some interesting areas, so I'll just leave it at that who are trained in reading, not just detecting.

Speaker 2: 40:44

They are trained in reading and decoding Sub-vocalization. Think of it as lip reading on steroids. Lip reading is when somebody actually is talking but you are not close enough to where you can process it auditorily. You can't hear them, so you use the visual sense to look at the shape of their lips and the movement of the facial muscles in the lips and the throat and then make an educated guess about what letters and words they formed and spoke. And lip readers can be incredibly accurate. So too can the best I mean the best, and that's really all I've ever encountered were a couple of the best, and that's really all I've ever encountered were a couple of the best. I'm sure there are some shitty ones out there, just like there are in any other field, but the people I experienced who could read.

Speaker 2: 41:41

Sub-vocalization can detect micro-movements that I couldn't even see. I didn't even know there was movement happening. I didn't even know there was movement happening. So their sensory acuity skills are so finely honed and trained that they see movements that the normal person doesn't even see. And then not only do they see them but they are able to pretty accurately not as accurately as lip reading, but pretty accurately decode what was going on in that person's head conversation-wise, pretty freaky stuff. So again, by having you touch your tongue to the roof of your mouth, drop the lower jaw down, boom and my head just went silent. It went silent because I couldn't sub-vocalize. I tied up the speaking slash sub-vocalization muscles. When you combine going into peripheral vision, touching your tongue to the roof of your mouth and letting your lower jaw just drop down and relax just about half an inch and just kind of let it go slack, that combination of actions will allow your parasympathetic nervous system to engage and you will have disabled anything that could interrupt that engagement. You will feel it If you were to hook yourself up to a blood pressure monitor or galvanic skin response, which measures really slight detections in perspiration or the amount of sweat that's being produced on your skin, which is another measurement of stress response, of stress response.

Speaker 2: 43:35

If you were doing all of the biological and physiological measurements of your internal states, what you would notice is that the longer you were engaged in that parasympathetic nervous system, the more of a reduction you would have in your heart rate and every other common sign of a stress response. And there are many. Those are just the key ones, the most commonly tested. And the reason that would happen is because the parasympathetic nervous system is doing its job, which is all it can do. When the sympathetic nervous system the fight, flight or freeze is triggered, it does its job because it's all it can do. All it can do is prime you to fight, run or freeze. That's it. That's the extent of its capabilities. Likewise, your parasympathetic nervous system can only restore.

Speaker 2: 44:37

Using this technique, even for a few seconds at a time, will keep your prefrontal cortex and your rational, logical and analytical thinking alive and well and able to function To the degree that you are experiencing a stress response. That prefrontal cortex will shrink down and the fear centers of your brain will be the dominant force For the next 22 days at a minimum. You do not want your fear centers to be the dominant force. You want your rational, logical and analytical thinking to be the dominant force, because that you always hear me, or I assume you do, I assume you're somebody who follows me. If you don't, whatever the case may be, if this is the first time you've ever heard me speak, then welcome. But here's the thing we want to be able to be concerned because I say it all the time worry and concern are not the same thing.

Speaker 2: 45:55

Concern is where you logically and analytically recognize a challenge or a problem or a potential problem, and then you stay grounded and stay in that parasympathetic system response so that you keep your prefrontal cortex able to be utilized, and then you think and plan and strategize from that part of the brain in the absence of a fear response. You acknowledge that. You recognize yeah, there's some ugly shit that could happen as a result of this real ugly. It's like you're reading a history book of something 200 years ago. You can rationalize that whoa, that was crazy, fucked up man, that was wicked. But you don't feel a fear response about it 200 years later because you recognize there's a 200-year gap between you and women and, to some extent, by triggering the parasympathetic nervous system and arrest and restore for these and operating from there. It's kind of like giving yourself that 200-year gap where you can recognize, freak out and by doing so then shut down the thinking brain. That's where we want.

Speaker 2: 47:18

We don't worry because, as I say, I think every day or write. Some days I might write and say it every day there's never there, just isn't. And I'll debate anybody on this till the cows come home. There is never a reason to worry. Are there reasons to have a fear response? Hell yes, if something that's dangerous to me in the moment, in my environment, in close proximity to me, that can harm or kill me, I want my amygdala to kick the fucking action into gear, trigger my sympathetic nervous system response and prepare me, before I even realize what is going on, to fight, run or, in some cases, if I'm in the jungle, run or in some cases, if I'm in the jungle freeze. I want that to happen. It's designed to save my life.

Speaker 2: 48:20

But worrying and a fear response have nothing, nothing in common. In fact, you can't worry when you are actually having a fear response because at that moment you're so occupied with the threat there's not much thinking going on. Well, there is no prefrontal cortex action going on. At that time there's no thinking, it's primal responding. So I often or I used to, I should say tell my clients, if you find yourself worrying or feeling anxious along, just drop to your knees and just be thankful, because that's proof, that's as much evidence as you can ever hope to get that nothing dangerous is actually happening to you.

Speaker 2: 49:09

It's not Because if something dangerous was happening to you at that moment you couldn't worry, you couldn't be anxious, because anxious always involves thought and creating images and having felt responses. That would not be happening. If you were having an authentic fear response in response to true danger in a moment in close proximity, you couldn't. So, as step one, I tell people if you're worrying or anxious, be like fuck man, I, I'm good, I'm good. I might be feeling something uncomfortable, but it only means there's not something actually happening to me right now, because if there was, I couldn't worry or be anxious. And that is a fact. That is a fact you can take to your doctor, your psychiatrist or to anybody else you want to, or you can even contact me and have them debate me. It's irrefutable, it is a fact. So if you've been worrying a lot or anxious, just know that. For starters, that means nothing truly dangerous has been happening to you during that time, because if it was, you wouldn't be able to worry or be anxious.

Speaker 2: 50:31

Now, given that worrying and feeling anxious are like zero states of productivity where nothing useful happens, even though it's a sign that nothing dangerous is happening to you in the moment, you probably don't want to waste feeling the worrying effect or anxiety because it does nothing helpful for you. It's all manufactured fear. Say again, worrying and anxiety is 100% manufactured fear. And given that it is, wouldn't you rather be able to enter and then reside in your prefrontal cortex, where you have that sense of detachment, where you can really clearly think, strategize, rationalize, plan in an unfettered way that produces some of your best thinking you'll ever do while you're alive? Wouldn't you rather do that? If you would, then I would urge you as often as possible and it's not possible to overdo it or to do it, and you can do it for as long of a period of time at once.

Speaker 2: 51:53

I mean, if you want to do it for three hours at a stretch, knock yourself out, or you can do it for as brief of a period of time at once, like 15 or 20 seconds, often as you want and as often as you can, go into your peripheral vision, touch your tongue to the roof of your mouth, let that lower jaw drop down and let that peripheral well, I guess, let the peripheral vision tongue to the roof of the mouth and that jaw dropping down a bit guides your parasympathetic nervous system into activation, where the resting, the restoring, the recuperative effect and the opening up of your prefrontal cortex this part about it is it feels good. It feels so good that you will find yourself wanting to do it more. The more you do it, the more you will want to do it. And the more you activate your parasympathetic nervous system, the more you rest, recuperate and restore. And the more you rest, recuperate and restore, the more you will be able to rest. Because it becomes a neurological habit. Your nervous system gets the equivalent of grooves worn into it, where the more something happens, the more possible it is for it to happen.

Speaker 2: 53:20

If you're going to have an addiction or be addicted to something or have something that just happens automatically and spontaneously, wouldn't resting, recouping and recovering and healing, wouldn't that probably be one of those things that would be okay, that you'd be like yeah, man, I can do this, I can dig this, this is good. And the more I do it, the more it reduces my risk for heart disease, stroke or being pissed off at my spouse for leaving the lights on or whatever. I'm just a better human being when my prefrontal cortex is open, I'm not living from the fear center of my brain and I feel relaxed and chill. The fear center of my brain and I feel relaxed and chill. Oh, and I also think about a thousand times better than I do when I'm fighting, running or freezing, and it's really that simple. I hope you found this helpful. I really do Use it. It's not one of those things. That's the beauty of it. Anytime I've ever taught this, it's not one of those things that I teach and then I kind of in the back of my mind I have to go well, gosh, I hope it works for them. That's never even a thought. Why? Because we have the same wiring harness, we have a brain, we have a spinal cord, we have the same nerve bundles. In other words, if you pull in a volkswagen and a volkswagen and pull out the wiring harness, you go oh, they're the same same model of car. Yeah, they're the same, so we could put this one in that one and this one in that one if we really wanted to, because they're the same. That's a pretty good metaphor for our wiring things that if you replicate them, they are going to work in the same way for this person as they do for that person or that person or that person, and the aspects of this technique that all qualifies as some of those things.

Speaker 2: 55:49

If you go into your peripheral vision, you don't have to hope that it will activate your parasympathetic nervous system. It will. If you touch your tongue to the roof of your mouth lightly and let your lower jaw drop down about that far and do this all at once. You don't have to hope that it reduces the amount of thinking or talking inside of your head. It will. I don't have to hope that the more you do it in terms of frequency or the duration of time when you do it each time, that the more that happens, the better it will be for you. It will be.

Speaker 2: 56:32

These are just facts.

Speaker 2: 56:34

So the only variable here really is whether you do it and, if so, how much.

Speaker 2: 56:40

That's it. It's not a will it work for you or, gosh, will it work for you. That's not even on the table. It will. It will work to the extent that extent of the frequency that you use it and the length of time that you do each time you do, and it's as simple as that. This is one hell of a tool and I think as you begin using it you will discover just how much of a crazy insane in terms of effectiveness of a tool that it is for helping you maintain your fucking sanity in this currently insane world and to be able to chill yourself and to be able to enter into the eye of the stone while shit is going crazy all around, and it's like you're watching it curiously and from a state of fascination, in a detached way that says that's really fucked up, but your emotional state remains pretty balanced, pretty even keel, operational and functional, and that, my friends, is the goal. This is Jack Hopkins signing off. Until next time, see ya.