Overcoming Overwhelm | Luke Reinhart | TEDxNewAlbany
several months ago even an email from everybody organizing today's event that I would be presenting today and I was super excited I had this brilliant talk playing that I was gonna wow everybody right that was my plan and I had some I had a mentor who I known he would give a TED talk before and so I reached out to him looking for advice what do I need to do to make today's talk as good as what could be and we were having conversation asking him for advice and his advice to me that day was you know I really don't think chiropractors should be giving TED talks it made me feel pretty good about myself and he went on to explain his reasoning why on what made a good TED talk versus what me that not-so-great TED talk and he perfectly described my talk and the not so great TED talks it was bad it was a piece of junk and so this conversation happened about a solid two hours before one of my first meetings with Jimmy who's helped me through this process and in those two hours I was just like okay so do I need to tell him that he needs to find somebody else I'm sorry you found the wrong guy or my other option was completely do a new TED talk in two minutes or basically clean up my other one and in that two hours I was extremely stressed out I was overwhelmed and thought of doing it was was overwhelming and it was an oddly familiar place for me so we go back four years before that I had worked in an office I was a under somebody else and I decided to start my own business and I signed the documents to start my own business eleven days before my second son was born five weeks premature so I was living forty miles away driving back and forth to the office every day working full-time seeing patients trying to figure out what was going on with this business trying to figure out all the documents securing the loan my wife was on bed rest for about three weeks checking on her making sure she's doing well making sure the baby's doing well and then all the while with that my other son who was about two and a half at the time and who had never been away from his mother for more than 24 hours all of a sudden went from being away from her for three weeks so finding out who's watching him where is he at trying to sleep with him trying to check out my wife and sleep with her it was insanely overwhelming a ton of stress and then I signed the loan I took over the business and then the baby came and things got more stressful if anyone who in this room has had a premature child Owen was born five weeks premature we were lucky enough he was happy and healthy we were able to take him home but having a five week old premature baby at home means we had alarms set on our phone every single hour day and night to make sure that we were waking him up because his nervous system didn't wasn't able to tell him that he needed he was hungry yet so we had to make sure that we were feeding and making sure he was gaining weight and in chiropractic industry when you take over a clinic for somebody else just because the color of your shirt 25 to 35 percent of the people who were there getting treatment left and so this business is going down the baby is you know he's doing well but we're stressed out we're not sleeping I was an emotional mess and I was once again completely overwhelmed so where do we get from state where we're completely overwhelmed to a place where I am today where I have a happy healthy four-year-old boy and happy Althea four-year-old practice and the answer to that really lies in how our body and our nervous system specifically manages stress so we talk about stress we're really talking about the nervous system the nervous system is made up of your brain your spinal cord and the nerves are branch off of your spinal cord and when we talk about stress once again we're looking more at what's called an autonomic nervous system the autonomic nervous systems like your automatic nervous system it controls everything that we don't think about during you today organs glands tissues and how they work these autonomic nerves are broken down into branches sympathetic fight-or-flight and parasympathetic rest and relax and there has to be a balance between these two when we have stress whether it's physical stress whether it's emotional stress whether it's chemical stress our sympathetic fight-or-flight nerves engage to help us either fight that stress or run away from it the parasympathetics job is when the stress is gone they want to disengage and bring us back down to a normal resting level let me give you an example so let's imagine right now there a bear on the red dot with me right who wants to see me fight a bear right what happens on my body my heart starts racing we start pumping adrenaline all my energy goes to my arms and my legs I go any pleat fight or flight I'm either gonna try to fight that bear or more likely I'm going to try to hurdle the first row and head towards the exits I've been scoping it out I know where they're at and so while I'm running away from the bear am I worried about digesting the sandwich that I had for lunch no am I worried about fighting off the flu bug that one of you guys brought with you today no am I worried about taking a nap no am I worried about growth development recovery from injury no no no all of my energy is complete protection dr. Bruce Lipton a double PhD says we cannot be in growth and protection at the same time and so one of the main points I want to get across today is that we have a capacity for stress there's only so much these spider flight nerves can engage before we try to take on more stress than our nervous system can handle and when we try to take on more stress than a nervous system can cope with we feel overwhelmed stressed out and anxious so how do we know well how do we know how our nervous system is doing and there's a new measurement measurement scuse me called heart rate variability heart rate variability our heart rate actually changes believe it or not when we breathe in our lungs expand it puts stress on our heart and our heart should speed up to some degree when we breathe out our lungs go down take stress off of our heart that brake pedal system should engage and we can come back to a neutral position right this beautiful scan you see behind you is yours truly this is something that we can measure how those two sets of nerves are working together the little white dot is where I scored basically how you interpret this that little black line in the middle this baseline is neutral it's complete balance between the sympathetic and parasympathetic between the fight-or-flight breast and relaxed the further you shift to one side the more dominant that side is so that little white dot is in my fighter flight side I'm very fighter flight dominant in my capacity to handle more stress at that moment in time was limited my staff would probably tell you I'm like that most of the time but that's me and so this also is measuring fatigue right this is also measuring your like fuel tank for stress your capacity for stress so the higher you score up the chart the more fall your gas tank is the lower you score on the chart the less more fatigue you have less ability you're able to adapt to stress a lot of exhaustion a lot of fatigue for someone who scored on the lower end of that score so I seeing hundreds of patients we do this in our office and I reached out to a bunch of my colleagues and we all have the same pattern where we're under this chronic stress or sympathetic nervous system engage we start running and draining our fuel tank until eventually we run out and we kind of maybe even shift over to the point where we don't really have a great stress response so what do we do what do we do to get back to what's considered normal and it really breaks down into one or two options one we want to and could increase our capacity to adapt to stress or to eliminate stress the first one oftentimes is much easier I'm once again I'm a chiropractor by trade for me when I was stressed out stuck in fight-or-flight all the time I was getting it just I've got three chiropractors I was so stressed out I current research is showing that when we adjust the spine we're actually flooding your brain with information we're allowing your brain to see what's happening inside your body more efficiently when your brain understands what's happening inside your body it can manage those stresses more efficiently and things just work better I was doing a lot of things helped me relax - we have massage therapists I was giving that was one thing that helps me relax completely helps release tension but there were some other things that really helped me get out of that fight-or-flight state when I was at my worst ROM and one of them was my faith I was able to increase my capacity for stress through my faith because I had a belief that there was an end to the stress that I was under it was a very finite and because I had that understanding because I had feeling in that faith I was able to handle the stress because I knew there was another side I also found that increasing my capacity by looking towards and communicating with a community of like-minded individuals was very very important I talked with a ton of chiropractors who had been in the spot where I was at who had struggles in business from the start and they told me their success stories about how their to the other side once again it gave me this impression that what we were as that was finite that there was going to be an end to it now the others more difficult we talked about eliminating stress right how do you tell a mother who just found out their child has cancer that they need to eliminate their stress how you tell a husband that just found out his wife has six months to live that he needs to get rid of stress or someone who has been physically or emotionally abused since they were young there are some stresses that we just don't get rid of but we also have micro stresses in our day-to-day routine that we don't often pay attention to how many times you scrolling through social media and all the sudden you see somebody that said this post and you get the perfect response and you get all fired up or how many times we want to reach for that third or fourth cup of coffee to help us get through our day how many times we turn on the TV at night to listen to the news and find out what's happening in our world just to hear the latest political argument or how some another tragic incident has happened a friend of mine who was much worse than the scans that I showed you on mine he actually created a stress Journal where he would every at the end of every day write down all the things that cause even the slightest bit of stress engaging his sympathetic fight-or-flight nervous system and then on the other side of the binder he wrote down everything that helped him relax and he works tirelessly to eliminate even the smallest stresses and maximize the things to help him relax more efficiently so I want to leave everybody today with one thought and I thought is we have a capacity for stress were not designed to carry the weight of the world on our shoulders when we try to take on more stress that our nervous system can adapt to we feel overwhelmed and we feel anxious and it affects our health the CDC CDC says 80% of the diseases we have are stress-related be conscious of the stresses that you allow in your life and pay attention to be the calm that someone else in this role needs here thank you [Applause]