36: Quieting (Building Bounce: Ch 4) | S4E36

(00:00) Stephanie Warner: Welcome to Season 4, episode 36. Hello, Father.

(00:04) Marcus Warner: Hello, Daughter. It’s a lot of episodes.

(00:10) Stephanie Warner: I feel like we surprise you frequently with what number we’re on.

(00:13) Marcus Warner: I know, I’m like…

(00:14) Stephanie Warner: Season 4, episode 36. I don’t actually know how many there are, but it’s fun. We’re weekly together on Mondays, it’s great. And also, I realized in the last episode, I just let it totally float by… The people who are watching the episode were probably like, Stephanie, where are you? Why does your setting keep changing? Yes, we are still in the Deeper Walk studio area. Those who watch On The Trail get to be on the trail with us. You get the first little sneak peeks of different set designs that we’re doing for our different resources that are coming out. You’ll spy it someday soon. Father, we are going through your book with Stefanie Hinman, Building Bounce chapter by chapter in the series.

(01:16) Marcus Warner: I’m sorry, I’m laughing because there’s a Monet behind you. I’m like, yes, the ministry spent several million dollars to get that Monet…

(01:23) Stephanie Warner: IKEA, IKEA, okay?

(01:24) Marcus Warner:Ikea. Okay, never mind. All right.

(01:32) Stephanie Warner: Squirrel.

(01:34) Marcus Warner: Never mind, it’s not hard to interrupt. I’m easily distracted.

(01:39) Stephanie Warner: We were practicing some quieting right before this episode with some nice little music. It was good. Anyway, I won’t stop to explain that. I was saying, we are in Chapter 4 of Building Bounce, all about quieting. And the goal of this series is to help you to grow your emotional resilience so you can thrive on your deeper walk with God. For this series, we want to direct you to the DIY book club kit for this book. You can use this for personal reflection or with your book buddy or in your group at any time. So there’s a link in the description for a free discussion guide that you can download for this book.

So let us dig into Chapter 4. Now that we’ve gone through an overview of the ABCs of Building Bounce and the brain science model and all of that, we’re going to circle back and go a little bit deeper into the different levels. We are starting the ‘A’ of the ABCs, which is appreciation. So the next episode is directly about appreciation, but this episode is about quieting. So I’m just gonna open with, why are we beginning with quieting?

(02:56) Marcus Warner: So resilience is almost synonymous with quieting. It is the ability to not stay overstimulated by the emotions that we’re feeling, but actually to begin to quiet. So we’re starting with quieting because appreciation and quieting go together. And frankly, it doesn’t matter which one you start with. You can start with appreciation as your doorway to quieting, or you can start with quieting as your doorway to appreciation. They’re kind of cyclical, they kind of feed each other.

So we’re starting with quieting just because when you are triggered and you’ve got big emotions, it’s like those emotions hijack your body and you’re trying to get control of your body back from the emotions. So the principle here is that we experience all of our emotions through our bodies. Take something like anxiety. Sometimes you feel it in your ears, sometimes your cheeks, sometimes your chest, sometimes your stomach, or sometimes your hands or your legs. So part of being self-aware and part of even the validation process, is about recognizing how your body is being affected by emotions. Which makes sense because if the amygdala is firing off a bad signal then my body will react like I want to cry. I want to pout. I’m going to experience those low energy emotions physically in the same way that I experienced the high energy fear, anger, emotions physically.

And so because there’s a physical component to every emotion that I feel, quieting is essentially about quieting my body. And that is, how do I reclaim my body from the emotion that has hijacked it and at least make it more manageable? If not, get rid of it completely. How do I make this more manageable? And so that’s what we’re doing and why we’re doing it, kind of rolled into one.

(05:10) Stephanie Warner: And just to be extra clear, what do we not mean by quieting?

(05:18) Marcus Warner: Well, it means we’re not getting rid of the emotion. Quieting doesn’t mean I went from super triggered to no emotion, but it went from super triggered to manageable. Or it went from really worked up to, okay, I can get through this. That’s a different level. I’ve quieted enough to be functional.

So that’s what we’re after here is functionality. We’re also primarily looking at it in two ways today. One is my body. And that’s the main way, the first way. The second is my mind. I can have a racing mind. And so we have to learn how to quiet our minds and take control back from that as well. But again, it doesn’t mean that everything is all better. It just means that things are more manageable.

(06:06) Stephanie Warner: Yeah, and a quick word for people who might be like, wait? Quieting my body or doing all those kind of feels a little new age? Can you speak to that concern?

(06:15) Marcus Warner: What we’re not doing in that sense is we’re not emptying our minds for the sheer goal of having an empty mind. We’re not quieting our bodies for the express purpose of quieting our minds so that we yoke ourselves to a supernatural spiritual force, like you might do in transcendental meditation, or yoga or something like that. What we’re doing is quieting in the sense of taking back control physically, of the body. Quieting in the sense of getting rid of the racingness and the compulsiveness of the thoughts in our heads.

(07:02) Stephanie Warner: Awesome. Well, let’s get into it. So in this chapter you kind of start with a big overview, where you talk about our rhythms and how God created things. Sabbath and stuff. And then you break down into quieting your body and we walk through the acrostic BEST. And then we look at quieting your mind and we walk through the acrostic DREAM. So we’re gonna follow that today. Anything you wanna say about the big picture before we start?

(07:35) Marcus Warner: Now it’s a good reminder because the big picture of rhythms of rest in our lives is important because even physically, you have to have breaks now and then. Every single day if you’re getting triggered to the max to where your body is under incredible stress every single day, you need breaks from that periodically. And when you can’t get them it’s going to affect your physical health. It’s going to affect a lot of other things about you as well. There is a rhythm to all of this that helps with our resilience and knowing that you have a break coming. Knowing that you can take a break is an important skill set. Learning to pay attention to when I need a break. So that’s kind of one thought about the big picture level.

(08:25) Stephanie Warner: I think a lot of people will feel guilty about resting. They’ll feel guilty about stopping. I know I’ve talked to different friends about, you know, but I should be doing this or I should be doing that. Having to train themselves to think, no, I should be resting right now. This is the appropriate thing to be doing at this moment.

(08:46) Marcus Warner: If they’re going to feel guilty, they can guilt themselves to be resting, right?

(08:49) Stephanie Warner: We want balance. There are also times when we should be disciplined and doing things, but rest is good. And God even demonstrated that in the seven days of creation. He showed us that he would rest and that it was good.

(09:07) Marcus Warner: Yep. I would say that rest is an act of worship. And the way God designed time to be experienced is that we actually begin with the evening, which is the wind down time to go to sleep. And so in the evening, we have our family dinner and we are together with our people. We are quieting and winding down the day and we’re going to sleep. And our day starts that way. And then in the morning we get up and we join God where he’s already at work and we get going with the day, there’s a rhythm to it. And that’s the way it’s designed to happen.

And when it doesn’t follow that design there are consequences. Not in the sense of punishment, but in the sense that it’s not functioning according to design, things aren’t going to work as well as they’re supposed to. And we’re going to be more stressed out and more overwhelmed when we don’t have that rhythm of being with our people in the evening, and quieting and getting rest. And one of the reasons that rest is an act of worship is that it’s a sign of trust. I trust God to take care of things so I can go to sleep. And that’s good.

(10:22) Stephanie Warner: That is good. Well, let’s talk about “BEST” practices for quieting your body.

(10:32) Marcus Warner: BEST stands for breathing, exaggerating, soothing, tensing, and I added one, tapping. Instead of just walking through BEST, I’m actually gonna put them in the order in which we usually do them. Okay?

(10:45) Stephanie Warner: Okay, sounds good.

(10:48) Marcus Warner: So we actually start with exaggerating. And what I mean is not, if you’re feeling angry, let’s feel rage. That’s not what we’re talking about. Or if you’re feeling afraid, let’s get you feeling terror. That’s not what I mean by exaggerating. Exaggerating is about the body. And what we mean here is we want to exaggerate the body’s reaction to an emotion. And so if I’m already feeling a little tense, then I make myself really kind of beef up  making my body feeling the tension. When I exaggerate my body’s reaction to emotion I’m taking control of my body instead of letting the emotion control my body. I’m the one in control of this.

So let’s say it’s anger. I’m going to flare my nostrils and grit my teeth, I’m going to clench my fists, and I’m going to do the things physically that you do when you’re angry to increase it slightly. So the exaggerating part of this actually has to do with getting control of my body by saying, it’s not just the emotion making this happen. I can control making this happen or not making it happen.

(11:53) Stephanie Warner: And to clarify, we’re not saying you’re in a heated conversation with somebody and now you strike a “Hulk” pose.

(12:00) Marcus Warner: That’s more fun that way, but no, it’s probably not.

(12:02) Stephanie Warner:  …but it is more fun that way… Usually you would do the exaggerations in private unless you’re with someone you really trust and they know what’s going on, but I just had to throw that in there.

(12:18) Marcus Warner: Even with people you trust, I think you’d have to be careful with, you are making me so mad, I am turning into the Hulk. It’s probably not the message I want to send.

(12:33) Stephanie Warner: But sometimes if our mutual mind is good you know, we might say, “overwhelmed”!

(12:41) Marcus Warner: That is true. Actually, one of the things that they teach at Thrive is to raise your hand when you’re overwhelmed. Like, that’s enough. I need a break. Okay, that was on the edge of what I can handle. Or that one, that’s okay. You have to be careful about the signals you send to people that say, you are the reason I am in distress. Unless you’re truly in it like a threatening distress situation. We’re not talking about doing this in front of people. We’re talking about in private when you’re dealing with your emotions, the first thing is actually an exaggeration. It can be a slight exaggeration which you can even do in front of people. Some kind of a slight thing.

Sometimes it’s as easy as just tensing and releasing muscle groups. Squeezing fists, squeezing your legs and letting them relax. With exaggeration again, the purpose of it is for me to be in control of what’s happening in my body, not the body itself. So once I exaggerate then I want to soothe. My most core way to soothe is by putting my hands on the shoulders and rubbing down. As I rub down I’m thinking to myself, I’m rubbing the stress and energy out. Then as I do that I began to breathe.

As you point out, you breathe in through your nose, hold it, and then out through your mouth. And you can vary the timing on this. We recommend four seconds, four seconds, four seconds, like you’re breathing in a box. But there’s some benefit to varying the timing on this thing and changing it up a little bit now and then. The goal of all of these things is physical. I’m kind of rubbing out the tension and I’m breathing deeply because a lot of these emotions make me breathe very shallow.

So this is all part of taking control of the body. When we get to the tensing and tapping, tapping has to do with tapping your collarbone. And the reason you tap your collarbone is that there’s a nerve. I think it’s called the vagus nerve. I feel like it’s Las Vegas when I say that.. There’s a nerve that goes under our collarbone that is sending the signals from my amygdala out that overwhelm the body. So by tapping it, it can interrupt that signal a little bit. That’s why you see more and more people teaching folks to do tapping things when they’re feeling stressed. So I’m like, try them all, combine them, and vary them up. But the normal pattern is exaggerate, soothe, and breathe. You could go tapping, exaggerate, then to breathe. So I put them into the word BEST just so we can remember it

(15:45) Stephanie Warner: So in the book you have breathe in a square, exaggerate emotion. You actually say, sing and soothe and tense and release. Do you want to mention why?

(15:55) Marcus Warner: So sometimes singing involves both the right and left hemispheres of the brain. And so it can be a nice way to quiet. We do something we call extreme quieting. Extreme quieting is like, if I’m having a panic attack or I’m in such a state that I can hardly breathe. I can hardly function. I’ve got to do more physical things. And so that’s where I may do jumping jacks. I might sing to myself out loud. I might then force myself to hold my head still and move my eyes, because I’m trying to get control of my body.

So a still head, moving my eyes down, up, side to side, and the jumping jacks, I’m getting out excess energy that’s running through my body. I’m doing all these things. Then I will always come back to breathing. And the goal here is to kind of flush out the stuff that’s overwhelming me, understanding that it’s going to take 20 to 30 minutes for an adrenaline rush to fully clear out of the system. So it can become manageable, but you’re not going to be completely quiet for a little bit there.

(17:13) Stephanie Warner: Any more you want to say about quieting your body or shall we move to quieting your mind?

(17:18) Marcus Warner: Let’s move to quieting the mind. We’ve covered quieting the body in quite a few different podcasts.

(17:24) Stephanie Warner: We have, we have. And I can try to link some of those too. Quieting your mind. DREAM, appropriately.

(17:30) Marcus Warner: DREAM, yeah. When you battle anxiety, this becomes especially important because your thoughts are the source of your emotion. And with anxiety, it’s not uncommon for there to be this flood of emotions and anxiety always makes you think, “what if.” And so the problem with the “what if” scenario is that you’re not afraid of one “what if” scenario. You come up with a thousand different variations on that “what if” scenario.

So even if you solve this one, another one will pop up, and another one, and another one. And just wear yourself out trying to solve every scenario that you can imagine. Because you can always think of a scenario you couldn’t handle. And that’s what causes the anxiety, I am stuck in the imagination of a scenario I’m pretty positive I could not handle. And so what I need to do sometimes is, instead of trying to talk myself out of that, you actually need to distract yourself out of it.

And that’s what the D for dream is, distraction. For example, like with little kids. Sometimes when they’re really elevated and they’re escalating, the best thing to do is to distract them out of that by getting their attention on something else. And you’ll see people do this also with certain people who have certain mental issues, distraction is actually the best thing to do. Because you’re not going to talk them out of it and you can’t hit it head on. You have to actually get the mind focused on something else.

So one of the things I found helpful is, because I’m so into the problem that is causing the anxiety, I will distract myself into a different problem. Well, what about this problem? By focusing on a problem that’s actually manageable and like, let’s tackle that one. Maybe it takes me half an hour to solve that problem, but by the end of it, I’ve had a chance to calm down a little bit by distracting myself from the other one. So that’s not the whole solution, but it can become part of the solution.

The R is replacement. I am not just saying, stop thinking it, stop thinking it, stop it.

(19:50) Stephanie Warner: Which is just reinforcing thinking about it.

(19:52) Marcus Warner: Right. That would just be reinforcing the problem, not solving the problem. So what we want to do is replace the thought. So this is where you’re like, well, God, what do you want me to be thinking instead? And distraction can be a form of that because in distracting myself, what I’m doing is I’m replacing my thought by focusing on something else. But there can also be a level where I kind of have a bag full of replacement thoughts that I’ve already collected through the years, so that when this comes I can pull it out. I’ve got ammunition for these replacement thoughts that I’m going to be using.

This is where we usually talk about turning your mind into an anteater, and how I want to attack the toxic thinking in my head. And the number one strategy for attacking the toxic thinking in my head is to come up with replacement thoughts for those. When I find myself thinking these thoughts, I recognize that it’s happening and I have my replacement thoughts ready to go. That’s ideal and that’s something that you can build up over time.

(21:04) Stephanie Warner: Yeah, and I find that sometimes if it doesn’t happen to be just a common thought, it’s more just an emotion or something. Sometimes I will be like, you know what, I’m going to practice memorizing a Bible verse. Or I’m going to pray or I’m going to sing or something. I’m going to replace my thought. It’s taking all of my attention onto something else if I can’t combat it.

(21:27) Marcus Warner: I’ll put it another way. A lot of times with anxiety you don’t notice it first in your thoughts. A lot of times you notice your anxiety first in your body. And so you want to quiet your body. And sometimes you don’t want to go searching through your brain as to why am I so anxious? Sometimes that’s not the best strategy. You don’t want to go through and think through the hundred different things that could be making you anxious. Is it necessarily the best way to get rid of your anxiety?

So once I notice it in my body and I do things to quiet my body, sometimes distracting myself out of it and coming up with a replacement thought like, what do I need to focus on here instead? And it could be memorizing scripture, quoting Bible verses, doing things like that. Those are great replacement strategies. So that’s all part of that.

(22:11) Stephanie Warner: Awesome. All right, Engage.

(22:11) Marcus Warner: E is engagement. One of the things I noticed that was the most helpful to me when I was stuck in anxiety was that anxiety pushes you into the back of your brain. I picture the anxiety like the Frankenstein bolts on my neck, it’s just flashing all over the place and all the activity is kind of back here. But when I could engage with a person…  Sometimes just sitting down with somebody, making eye contact with them and being completely engaged with them, it distracts me from this number one, and it replaces some things. It also is moving my brain activity into the relational forefront of my brain, particularly with the people I was interested in. I found it very easy that by engaging with them it helped me get into the relational part of my brain and quieted my brain about as fast as anything I could do.

(23:20) Stephanie Warner: Well, I even just think on, and this might be too specific. Sometimes what you’re anxious about is other people. You get so locked into your brain on, oh, this is how they would respond, or this is what’s going on. Actually engaging relationally solves half the issue because reality isn’t actually what was in your mind. And so with just getting your whole brain engaged relationally, all of a sudden you’re like, that problem wasn’t as big as I thought it was.

(23:53) Marcus Warner: And honestly, it doesn’t have to be the person you’re having the anxiety about. I am engaging relationally with somebody and that is getting my brain back into the relational space and my head. And then when I’m feeling more like myself, my problems don’t feel quite so big. The thing I was anxious about doesn’t feel quite so overwhelming because now that I’m my relational self, it’s okay, This is going to be okay. So those are the first three of DREAM.

(24:25) Stephanie Warner: Yes, and the fourth is Appreciate for five minutes.

(24:28) Marcus Warner: Appreciate, which is our whole next podcast, practice appreciation. So when I went into this battle for the brain thing I really only had two strategies when I first started, and the rest of these kind of came up. But those strategies were spiritual warfare, like get out of here Satan, and appreciation. I wanted to practice appreciation and then began realizing, no, there are all these other elements to the engagement, the replacement and distraction. But appreciation is training my brain so that no matter what’s going on in my life, there are things in the world to appreciate. And it’s stopping and smelling the roses. It’s not fixing. I don’t have to fix problems to be okay. There are still things to enjoy in life and it’s okay to enjoy them.

(25:19) Stephanie Warner: Yeah, and enjoying that doesn’t fix it necessarily. Like you say, it’s giving the rest of your life some dignity. Your whole life isn’t just about the problem. There’s other things going on. Yeah, that’s good.

All right, M is make a plan. And so this is good. This is helpful.

(25:40) Marcus Warner: So I learned this one from Stefanie Hinman. She was co-author on the book. She’s like, this is the standard thing they teach people on dealing with anxiety. You ask what’s the worst thing that could happen? What’s the best thing that could happen? And then you write down, well, what’s the most likely thing to happen? And then you make a plan to deal with what’s most likely to happen. And that plan shouldn’t be more than two or three steps. For example, you might be anxious about debt. You know, what’s the worst that could happen? Well, it can get pretty bad, it can get kind of ugly.

So you write that out. What am I actually afraid of here? This is what I’m afraid is going to happen with all of my debt. Like, what’s the best that could happen? Well, I could find out I’m inheriting a billion dollars from somebody and money will never be a problem again. And what is most likely to happen here? I’m going to need to do a strategy. So what’s my first step? I need to contact this person. I need to contact this person and I need to contact that person. I need to ask them for help to put this thing together. That’s my plan.

(26:51) Stephanie Warner: What’s my next step? And then what’s my next step? Once I’ve done that one, then what’s my next step?

(26:56) Marcus Warner: Yeah, and then you get a next step after that and your next step after that. So what tends to trigger anxiety? There’s about four different categories of this. This is not in the book. This is bonus material. Perfectionism triggers anxiety because I feel like if I don’t do this perfectly, I will cause a problem I cannot handle. And so my fear of what I don’t think I can handle causes me to want to try to be perfect to solve that. So that’s one source of anxiety. Another source of anxiety is what they call, “catastrophize thinking.” And that happened to me all the time. Especially when I was in a certain season, it took like just one little thing and all of a sudden my mind ran to the end of the world. It’s like, oh no, the world is over.

This is the “we’re all doomed kind of thinking.”  Catastrophic thinking comes on so fast that you can’t possibly take that captive before it happens. So it took some time to develop the counter habits that gets those things solved. That’s why we said, we’re not looking at quieting as something that will solve my problems immediately, but as something that can make them more manageable now.

And then give me a plan that a month from now it could be better than it is now. And a year from now, it can be significantly better than it is now. And I am working on developing the skills and the habits that make these things more manageable. So, I’m trying to remember, cause I brought up that there were four categories, which I shouldn’t have done. I didn’t have them clearly in my head when I started this. Perfection was one and catastrophic thinking was one.

But there are different things that, for different people, trigger anxiety. And you begin to notice what your pattern is. And then you adapt within this DREAM scenario and what the replacement thoughts are that you need. What are the strategies that help you distract the best? Who can you engage with? Do you have a short list of people you can connect with? Then practicing appreciation. So all those things factor together and then the more specific you are with things, it can just help you be a little bit more detailed with the plan you create.

(29:35) Stephanie Warner: Yes, tiny habits and all of the things. We will keep talking about appreciation next week. In the meantime, I was about to close out, but I need your final thoughts. But first, I want to say thank you. Thank you to everybody as always, for being on the trail with us. We are so grateful that you are here with us, and we’re so grateful for everybody who supports us in a variety of capacities to have us be here. So thank you. Thank you to our volunteers and our donors and our prayer support and our comments and everything. Thank you. Father, would you give us some final thoughts on quieting?

(30:17) Marcus Warner: My final thought will be that I just quickly looked up the four categories so people won’t be like, no, it’s causing me anxiety that I don’t know the other ones. So the first is the fear of the unknown. I feel overwhelmed because I don’t know what’s coming. And so I don’t know how to plan for it. And part of that can be, starting to look at uncertainty as opportunity? I need to replace uncertainty with opportunity thinking instead of uncertainty thinking.

The next is catastrophic thinking, which we mentioned already. I need to release my need to anticipate worst case scenarios.  We said one of them is to write out what’s the worst thing that can happen? But you don’t actually have to do that. That’s just if it’s helpful to you to do that, go ahead and write it out. But I also need to give myself permission that I don’t have to live in the worst case scenario thinking, it is okay. Because what I actually want to do is learn and grow. I just want to learn and grow. What do I need to do here to learn and grow instead of catastrophize? Third one, perfectionism, which we talked about. Again, I need progress, not perfection. How do I just make a step of progress here, not how do I be perfect here? This is kind of part of the replacement thinking of perfectionism.

The last one was overthinking. And I know neither of us ever overthink anything. But for those people who do, part of it is trusting your intuition and saying, I choose peace over the need to have all the answers. I don’t actually have to figure this all out. It’s okay. I’m just going to go with my intuition. I’m going to go with this. I’m going to trust God to work it out. And I’m going to allow myself to have a clear, focused, uncluttered mind about this. And so with a lot of these things, what you’re going to find is that there’s an element of giving yourself permission to not solve problems.

And there is an element of saying, I will be content with a step forward, not a complete fix. And so when it comes to anxiety thinking, those are some of the things that go into it. So I thought that might be helpful to people. If you’re looking for a source for this, I actually got these from a place called the Cognitive Behavior Therapy Center in Los Angeles. They have a website and they list these four areas. And again, it’s like, we don’t teach strictly cognitive behavior, but there’s an element of truth in cognitive behavior. So that’s part of what we’re talking about here with taking thoughts captive and winning that battle for your mind.

(33:03) Stephanie Warner: Yeah, this is so good and so important. Thank you, very helpful. And we’ll see you back next week. And in the meantime, I hope you have the best “DREAMS”.