Mind Body Connection

Journey to Recovery
2nd Edition
The Mind-Body Connection
Presented by: Dr. Dawn-Elise Snipes
Executive Director, AllCEUs Counselor Education
Podcast Host: Counselor Toolbox & Happiness isn’t Brain Surgery
Worksheets, Videos and Additional Resources available at https://DocSnipes.com

Activity: How Do Your Mind & Body Interact?
 What physical sensations do you have when you are angry?
Anxious? Depressed?
 When you are hungry or your blood sugar is low, what are your
physical sensations? How does it affect your mood?
 If you have been eating like crap, how do you feel?
 When you drink alcohol or caffeine, does it impact your mood?
 When you are sleepy or sick, how does it affect your mood?
 When you are stressed, how does it affect your sleep? What
physical aches and pains do you get when you are stressed?
 When you are overtired, does life seem more stressful and
exhausting?
 When you are in pain, what is your mood like?

Objectives
 Learn about the central control center, the brain
 What role does it play in
 Emotions
 Thoughts
 Physical Reactions/Sensations
 How things can go wrong
 How to fix those things

The Brain
 Your central control center
 Takes in information
 Compares it to what it already knows (or thinks it
knows) from prior experiences
 Makes a decision about what to do.
 Based on that decision it activates action
centers which excrete neurotransmitters in
order to produce the desired reaction.

Neurotransmitters and Mood Creation
 Chemical messengers take “orders” to and
from the brain through the nervous system
 The Big 5 fall into 2 main categories
 Excitatory:
Dopamine = Pleasure
Norepinepherine & Glutamate: Motivation
and stimulation (get-up-and-go)
 Inhibitory:
GABA - Relax
Serotonin – Calming, contentment

Neurotransmitters Function
 Emotional
 Happiness
 Sadness
 Anger & Fear
 Mental
 Concentration
 Learning
 Decision Making
 Physical
 Sleep behavior
 Eating behavior
 Libido
 Gastrointestinal
Functioning/motility
 Pain perception

Think About It
 When you are…
 “Afraid”
 “Angry”
 “Depressed”
 What is your body’s response?
 Are you more optimistic or pessimistic?
 Do you tend to notice the positive things or the
negative ones?

Your Senses
 Thoughts can trigger feelings and physical reactions
 Feelings can impact thoughts and physical reactions
 Physical sensations (your senses) can also trigger
feelings and thoughts
 Sight (Happy, Sad, Angry)
 Smell (Happy, Sad, Angry)
 Sounds (Happy, Sad, Angry)
 Touch/comfort (Happy, Irritable)

Mood Disorders
 An imbalance in neurotransmitters will cause
emotional, mental, or physical “distress”
 What causes imbalances
 Reduced Flow & Insufficiency
Too much “stress” for too long
Addictive behaviors
Medications
Poor nutrition
Insufficient sleep

Neurotransmitters, Addiction & Black Friday
 Normal day
 Normal store capacity is 750 people.
 The store needs a constant 500 to stay open
 The store has 8 doors to allows for people to easily enter
and exit without getting “bunched”
 Black Friday
 1500 people push through the door as soon as it opens
 Store is destroyed
 Staff is exhausted
 Takes time to restock and refresh staff
 Management closes all but two doors and adds security
guards to manage flow

Where Does the Information Come From
 Your Stress Sensor (Security Guard):
Peripheral Nervous System
 Your nervous system continues to feed the brain
information about whether the threat is:
 Continuing and something else needs to be done
 Continuing but there is no hope
 Subsiding and your brain can tell your body to
relax.

 How does all this happen?
 How does the brain “know” what is threatening?
Lets find out…

The Brain
 When you were born, there were very few things
that were “meaningful”
 You assigned meaning to things through
observation and experience
 The Uh-oh game
 Barking Dogs
 Spicy foods
 Men with beards
 When something happens you compare it to prior
experiences to decide what to do

The Brain
 Unfortunately until about age 7 children’s
interpretation of behavior is:
 Centric—Based on one thing at a time (snake)
 Concrete and often overgeneralized (all snakes)
 All-or-nothing (All snakes are bad)
 Egocentric (This snake is in the path to bite me)
 Things you learned as a child may be:
 Inaccurate
 No longer applicable

The Brain
 Interpretations are only as good as:
The information coming in
The prior knowledge
 Things that are learned in early childhood need to be
re-examined as we grow
 Once you were in middle school you could be taught
to start
 Considering multiple aspects of a situation (The snake is in
the only sunny spot)
 Using abstract reasoning (Looking for other interpretations
of events) (Dozens of other hikers have passed)

Activity
 What things did you learn or think as a child that you
either no longer believe or are no longer relevant?
 What old is
 Strangers
 All people love a party
 Why the cashier is grumpy
 Why mom is always angry or sad
 That X behavior is wrong
 That X people are bad or sick (homeless, people with
addictions…)
 That all people are… (high school)

Activity
 What thoughts or beliefs do you currently have
that trigger feelings of anxiety, anger, stress or
depression?
 Dogs/snakes/airplanes are terrifying
 My addiction makes me unlovable
 To be happy I must have a super nice car and house
 I am a failure/I will never amount to anything.
 People are not trustworthy
 The house must be super clean at all times
 When people ask you to do something, if you are a
good person you will always say yes.

What’s the Point
 Much of your anxiety and distress may come from
 Faulty interpretations of prior experiences creating faulty
interpretations of present experiences
 The brain using outdated experiences
 Negative Messages = Threat  Stress Reaction
 When you constantly bombard yourself with negative
messages
 Your body constantly perceives a threat
 You are on “high alert” all the time  Exhaustion,
depression, hopelessness & helplessness
 Your brain turns down the sensitivity of the threat response
system  Apathy and lack of pleasure and motivation

But That’s Not All…
 Simply reducing your “stress” often will not fix it.
 When you were overly stressed you may have
 Had poor quality sleep
 Eaten poorly
 Carried tension in your muscles causing pain
 To rebalance itself, the body needs to have
 Times when it is not on high-alert
 Sufficient QUALITY sleep
 Decent nutrition to fuel the system

Summary
 The brain is your central control center
 Neurotransmitters are sent out to produce a reaction to help you
 Survive a threat
 Repeat a reward
 Through observation and experience it “learns” what is okay and what is
threatening
 Things that were threatening or misinterpreted in the past may now need
to be re-examined
 Too much stress or “excitement” for too long means the brain is sending
out far more “excitatory neurotransmitters” changing the balance
 After a hard day, you often want to relax and “veg” This is the brain
sending out the “all clear” message and “inhibitory” or calming
chemicals to balance out the stress of the day.

Summary
 After a hard day, you often want to relax and “veg” This is the brain
sending out the “all clear” message and “inhibitory” or calming
chemicals to balance out the stress of the day.
 When the brain does not get the “all clear” it recognizes that it needs
to conserve the “excitatory” chemicals for a true emergency so it
turns down the sensitivity of the threat response system (basically
saying if you wont conserve energy, I will force you to)
 By addressing those old, unhelpful thoughts and interpretations you
can reduce physical and mental stress and anxiety.
 This in turn helps your body have some “down time” to recover
between stressors.
 Recovery involves not only helping your mind and thoughts become
healthy, but also your body

Mind Body Connection

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