Podcast

Guest Til Luchau joins the podcast to talk about all the feels during the pandemic shut down, and how to help yourself get through.

You can listen to Til Luchau & Whitney Lowe’s podcast, The Thinking Practitioner, or in all the usual podcast places.

Use the code BLUEPRINT at checkout to get 10% off courses for a limited time at Whitney’s The Academy of Clinical Massage and Til’s Advanced-Trainings.

Transcript:

Allissa Haines Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Massage Business Blueprint podcast, where we bring in guests more qualified than we are to discuss the big issues that I cannot handle. Our guest today is Til Luchau. Til, welcome

Til Luchau Hey there. Good to be here with you, Allissa. Like I can handle it. I don't know if I can handle it, and I don't know about the rest of it. But it's a pleasure to be here.

AH I'm glad we're attempting this together --

TL Yes.

AH -- if nothing else. [Laughing]

TL That's right.

AH Because that's just where we're at. And let me do a little intro with Til first. And I realize when we have guests, I don't normally share our backend podcast notes with them. And every time I have to talk to Til or do anything or say his name, I have to go and listen to the beginning of his podcast, The Thinking Practitioner that we'll talk about in a minute, just to get the pronunciation of the last name correct because I'm really bad with that. And I put it phonetically in my notes, and then five minutes ago, I was like oh, Til's going to see that and think I'm ridiculous because it's phonetically in there. But did I get it right?

TL Yeah. And I actually answer to anything. It doesn’t even really matter because it's said all kinds of different ways. I say Til [loo-kah] But that's -- I mean -- I get it all.

AH So all right. Less cow than I said it. All right.

Nonetheless, Til is a massage therapist, Rolfer, bodyworker, practitioner of all kinds, an educator and an author, a writer for ABMP's Massage and Bodywork magazine, which is how I learned who he was a couple years ago -- I was a little late to the game -- and the cohost, along with Whitney Lowe, of the podcast The Thinking Practitioner, which is awesome. But what I just said was a super condensed version of the depth and breadth of Til's experience in our profession and related ones.

So Til, expand on that a little bit and maybe in a way that that will explain why we're going to talk about what we're going to talk about today.

TL That's a big build up already, and to expand on that, boy, I don't know. It's -- probably the other piece that's relevant to our topic today is that I worked as a psychotherapist. I first got into the field through psychology and worked as a psychotherapist for about 15 years. I was a high school counselor. I did all kinds of stuff like that. So I've always been really interested in how does the body related to our emotional states, our belief structures, and those kinds of things, and that's what got me into this. That's probably about -- I mean, there's more to say, but that's probably about the only other thing I would add in there.

AH And before we dive into our topic, which is pretty much Allissa gets psychotherapy for free because she can't afford it, [laughing]. No, I'm kidding. That's not what we're doing.

Til, tell me what you're working on, and tell me what you want to make sure our people know about what you're doing and what your offerings are.

TL Well, that's great. I mean, the main thing I'm working on is trying to find ways to help because there is so much suffering in the world right now, and there's also -- just within our niche, within our little world -- there's a lot of anxiety and anxiousness and fear and lack of trust, so I'm just looking -- mostly I'm looking for ways to help with that. And then in terms of specific offerings, both Whitney and I are really pouring our heart and soul into the podcast -- so that's thethinkingpractitioner.com -- and then our own -- should I say something more about our online offering --

AH Yeah. Yeah, do that now, and we'll do that at the end of the episode --

TL Okay.

AH -- everybody. And I'll have all of this in the podcast notes so you don't have to remember this while you're folding your laundry or mowing your lawn.

TL Thank you. Yeah, so he teaches some really cool online courses, and his site is the -- I'm sorry. It's just academyofclinicalmassage.com. He's got a new one coming out on orthopedic massage for the cervical region. And then I have a bunch of body-mind one-hour courses, including understanding stress, understanding trauma, things like that, for bodyworkers, and then a whole bunch of technique courses too. And that's advanced-trainings.com, and we're giving a discount for Blueprint listeners. And I just got to say -- sorry. It's BLUEPRINT; enter BLUEPRINT at checkout, either Whitney's site or mine.

AH All right. We will get all of that into the podcast notes and links and everything for everyone. And I'm going to be using it because I need to take some of those body-mind courses myself. My brain has been turning a little bit to mush over this break, and I'm starting to feel it.

TL Um-hum.

AH Which is a good segue into our topic, which happened kind of by accident and organically in that we knew we wanted to get Til on the podcast, but I have been a hot mess for a couple of weeks because it's hard to not be working and it's stressful, and I'm home with children and home with children with some disabilities, and in this family that I only moved in with a year ago, and really a relatively new phase of a relationship. And that's a lie. It was two years ago. It just seems like forever. There you go.

So I was a mess. And I have had trouble scheduling appointments and keeping appointments and having my head on straight, and so I straight-up said to Til, I don't know what to talk about. I feel a little bit like a loser. I don't want to do a "what to do while you're shut down" episode because we're done with that, and we're all overwhelmed with these how to work safely when you go back to practice things because I don't want to think about how I'm going to have to wear gloves and a hat in my massage room. I just don't want to think about that right now. So maybe we could cover something like, hey, this is the brain and trauma and it's normal to feel discombobulated. And I felt do discombobulated, I didn't know how to put this podcast episode together. I was totally obstacled and stymied in my own little loop. And Til said hey, let's run with that. So we're going to run with that.

TL Yeah.

AH So Til, tell us what do we know about this discombobulation? What is happening?

TL Well, I mean, I got to say, you were very cute in your messages to me. I mean, it's -- you just said it so clearly just now too. It's just like this -- what do we do when we don't know what to do? What do we do when we're just spinning and got all kinds of things going on in our life? And there's the personal level, but it's -- I want to lay out a couple of theoretical points and maybe just some practice just to help with that.

So your question was what -- ask me again. Start me -- give me the prompt again.

AH What do we know about this feeling of being just discombobulated and untethered? What's happening here?

TL Well, one thing we know is that threat or perception of threat or imagined threat, basically turns off big parts of the brain. A lot of the brain goes offline when we think there's a threat. Or basically it's not even a thinking thing. It's when the amygdala part of the brain says, you're under some threat here. There's some threat of something immediate or something in the future. A lot of our brain just shuts off. And so the parts of the brain that get the big picture -- the executive functioning parts, the part that give you an overview, the part that give you balance -- they're basically not available when we're in that state. And we move into reaction versus thinking. You know, in nature that's really good. We want to react quickly. We want to get out of danger. But here in our socially isolated safe-at-home lives, sometimes there's not a lot of action you can take. Or you can do a month or two of action, and then at some point you go, okay, I don't know what to do anymore. But you're still -- your brain is shut off partly, and you're still getting these threat messages that are putting you in that state.

AH This is wild for me because I had not yet made the executive functioning connection, and I live with two children with executive functioning issues. But can we -- would you mind describing what executive function is?

TL Yeah. And I just got to say -- I am not -- you built me up as an expert. I am not --

AH No.

TL -- a neurologist; I'm not a scientist. I'm none of that stuff. I'm a bodyworker, and I teach and I write, and I was a psychotherapist. That's all I got to say.

AH And I promise I was joking about getting free psychotherapy.

TL Yeah, no. No, no.

AH It's a springboard for this conversation. [Laughing]

TL We need -- we all need all we can get here. So I hope some of this is useful.

Executive functioning is the part of my thinking that helps me step back and look at myself. You can say it's the witness function in some ways. It's the part that gives me an overview. So not only do I know what I want to say to Allissa when I talk to her, I'm able to step back and say, okay, I'm talking to Allissa here at my desk, here in my office, here in the state of Colorado where I am. She's off where she is. You're in Ohio, right?

AH Massachusetts.

TL Massachusetts. I don't know why I thought that. Massachusetts. So yeah, now I just filled in some of my executive functioning map. I just got a bigger picture, a bigger perspective. So that's what goes away when we go into that threat response or that trauma mode. We get into this reaction that’s taking action as opposed to stepping back and getting the big picture.

AH So what can you tell us -- you know what, I'll just stick with what you mentioned, which is why is this so excruciating? [Laughing] That was such a good word when I read that. I was like, it is excruciating!

TL Well, it's -- I mean, the reacting is -- the reacting state is excruciating because eventually it wears us out. But it's also -- it's not just -- it gets onto every level; you can say that. So your behavior gets reactive. And really extreme reactive behavior is things like avoiding. Avoiding things unconsciously or addictive behaviors, going really into things. That's what reaction is. You get really grumpy. You get really reactive. You get really irritable. You get really hostile. You can get -- at some point get really withdrawn. Those are all behavioral or emotional kind of reactions. And then, this is interesting to me, in the body, in your physiology, inflammation is reactivity too. So allergies, you can just think of as being really reactive to something. Your physiology being really grumpy with whatever it is you're reactive to. And that's going on all the time, and so those reactions get exacerbated in these kind of threat states, and our body can't figure out how to resolve those.

All those things are actually good. We want all those things going on. You want to be able -- you want to pull your hand out of the fire. That's a pain reaction. You want to avoid the thing that's giving you a lot of trouble. That's a good behavioral reaction. It's even useful to get grumpy with certain people certain times. It gets them to leave you alone or whatever. But when you get stuck in that state, that's when it just wears you out and wears everybody around you out.

AH Yeah, it sure does. We have experienced that in my household. And we found that it's good because none of us lose our marbles at the same time. It's like a cycle, [laughing] and we can predict next. It's like a little tag team of emotional regulation issues [laughing] if we're having a day but we're stuck inside or whatever.

TL Your describing a system. You're describing a system that has, presumably, some health in it as well as some stress. So yeah, somebody managed to pick up some slack. The whole system manages to pick up the slack when someone's particularly stressed out. And when I was just doing the podcast with Whitney a few days ago, and one of us said, hey, let's imagine an experiment where we take some rats and we put them in a little space, less than they're used to, and we keep them there for a long time. And let's make them afraid every day and not let them do their normal things, I wonder what would happen. And that's kind of what's going on for a lot of people. That's -- you can't do your usual stuff. You're inhibited in your mobility, often, and in your social connections. And you're essentially given the outlet of technology -- you can go listen to podcasts -- but mostly people are Zooming and watching stuff and Netflixing or whatever. And that isn't necessarily calming. It is in some ways, but in other ways it's not.

AH I have found that of the tangible things I can do that helped me moving all of the screens away from me is probably one of the most effective.

TL Huge.

AH How -- why does all of this matter specifically to bodyworkers? Like what -- and I don't want to be, again, here are the things we can learn while we're at home. But how can this information -- why is it super relevant to me, especially as a bodyworker, and what can I take from this that might inform my future work, or at least make me feel like this was worth it for some little reason professionally?

TL Well, it's an experiential education in reactivity, in stress, in self-care. I mean, we're all being put -- and fear. We're all being pushed to the next level of our experiential education in dealing with those things. And it's not -- it sounds like a lot of people are sick of trying to connect those dots. It's not always obvious, oh, I'm going to learn this and I'm going to do this with my clients. There's certainly a usefulness in that, and that's a lot of what I'm doing online in the classes. But in real life and our personal lives, there's a certain amount of just trust we got to do, that everything we do with ourself is going to help us be better, you know. We really do work from who we are. We really work from our sense of embodiment, our own relationship with our bodies, but then also how we are with these really hard experiences because people come to us with hard experiences, and they're going to resonate or feel safe or feel unsure or whatever in proportion to the amount of comfort we have with our own internal states in that way. So this is an experiential education extreme discomfort, and for sure it's going to have applications to working with clients and whatever in the future.

AH And that -- I try to -- no one ever -- when I first got a migraine a couple years ago, I got through it in a day or two, which is fortunate, and haven't had much issue since, and tried to make the best of that by saying, all right, now I have a better understanding of what's going on with my migraine patients. It makes me a little more empathetic, right?

TL Yeah, it does.

AH But I have had --

TL But it's still a migraine. It's still a migraine. It still sucks.

AH Yeah. And this is such -- even if you have to have knee surgery, there is this finite experience of I am in pain, I will have surgery, it will stink for, whatever, four to eight weeks afterwards, rehab's going to hurt, and then it won't anymore. There are always -- I've tried to kind of think through this situation, what is so different about what we're experiencing right now. And it's that uncertainty and lack of a clue about -- we're not even at the point when we can start seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. And it is so grating.

TL What we're dealing with is the question of how do we deal with the unknown. How do we deal with nonspecific threat? We're not even sure how much of a threat -- the signs point to yeah, some of us are going to have a hard time, maybe a lot of us are going to have a hard time before it gets easier again. We don't quite know how long, we don't know how hard of a time, so it's nonspecific in that way. And you're right. That is the excruciating part, the unknown part. But that itself is the process. How do we deal with the unknown? How do we, you know, manage that and live anyway?

AH So yeah, how do we? What do we do?

TL Well, a little more --

AH What do we do about this?

TL -- about the excruciating part. Reactive processes, by their nature, break things apart. When we react to our loved one in our home, we're getting space from them, we're pushing them away often. When we -- and when we have an inflammation, let's say a disease, a virus. Let's say a virus gets in your system, you have cells that go in there and break apart the virus, or try to. You have -- if you have damage, you have a strain to your tendon, you have cells that try to break apart the damaged tendon and rebuild it. So that first part of that reactivity phase is really breaking things apart and destroying. And that's kind of where we're at. We're in the kind of dissolution, break apart, destroying, just make a mess phase. And that's excruciating.

When you get the flu, let's say, you have aches and pains, not because of the flu virus but because your body breaking stuff apart to try to fight the flu virus. That's what all the achiness is. So we're having, like, achiness on lots of different levels. We're having -- some of us are dealing with actual virus discomfort. A lot of us are dealing with breaking apart of our usual habits and structures. Yeah. So --

AH I had to write that down. Reactive processes breaking things apart. [Laughing]

TL Yeah, right. Think like killer T cells. Think like macrophages. You know, think about being scatterbrained. Think about getting in a fight with someone. Those are all -- think about, you know -- all those things are basically reactive processes that are about tearing stuff apart -- tearing apart so it cannot be a threat anymore and so we can rebuild it.

AH Whoa. All right, well, we're going to need a follow-up podcast on just that. So what do I do?

TL So -- yeah, what do you do? Yeah, I know you're ready to do something.

AH I need to do something! [Laughing]

TL That’s the thing. This distress is biologically programmed to make you want to do something. That's its function. It mobilizes your energy, your motivation, you get restless, you get uncomfortable, you go I got to do something. Again, that's useful in nature to do something. It's actually useful in this context too, but it's trickier because you can't just go run up the tree and be safe, you know. We got to take the long view here. And on the long view, stress is not your friend. Stress gets you motivated, but trying to live in that state just wears you out, just wears you out. So it's employing everything we know about managing stress, honestly. That's the experiential education.

Couple things about that are it's physical. Stress is physical; it's a body reaction. So one of the most effective ways to work with stress, and trauma responses too, is physical, is through the body. There's huge things we can do in our bodies to help shift that stress response and one of the best ones starts with T and ends with H and has like an O-U-C in the middle. So anything that touches your body, any body sensation -- I know that most people aren't doing bodywork. Maybe you have a quarantine mate who you're able to do some stuff with or get touch with. Maybe you're even getting some snuggles if you're with somebody. All that's good for you. If you don't have it, you still can get physical stimulation.

Okay, now here's the other weird part. Stress -- you know, one of the -- cortisol is a complicated measure of stress. The relationship isn’t as clear as we wish it was, but for sure cortisol is part of the picture. Here's some interesting research on cortisol. Robert Sapolsky, the guy that first did some of the groundbreaking research, was doing in in Africa with baboons watching them do their different behaviors like grooming, like social grooming, sitting around touching each other. And he said, okay, I bet that changes their cortisol levels. And he designed a contraption that was basically like a blood test on a dart gun. So he would watch these baboons grooming. And poor baboons, they get whack. They get a dart right then to check their cortisol levels.

AH [Laughing].

TL Yeah.

AH Hilarious.

TL I know.

AH I'm trying to not laugh. These poor baboons.

TL He had -- exactly. He had this little mobile cortisol lab in the back of his Range Rover there out on safari checking these baboons' cortisol levels. But here's the weird part. Guess which baboon's cortisol levels dropped the most? It wasn't the one being groomed; it was the groomer.

AH And isn't that -- wasn't there a study ages and ages ago about senior citizens who were snuggling the babies in neonatal intensive care, and they found that the babies thrived more -- the babies got rocked had -- but the actual snugglers had --

TL (Indiscernible).

AH -- lower blood pressure.

TL I believe it.

AH I don't remember anything about cortisol, but --

TL No.

AH -- I learned about that I think before I even became a massage therapist or right around the time.

TL I don't -- I didn't know about that one, but that makes a lot of sense. And that's the same effect.

AH And it -- that it stuck with me. And that helped me to understand, at some point several weeks ago when I started to get really edgy, that I am super grumpy because I have not rubbed people in six weeks now.

TL Yes. Yes.

AH And it helped me when I put that together.

TL Right.

AH I was like, oh, that's what's going on. And I started taking longer showers, and I brought my weighted blanked home from the office, and I gave a massage to a kid in my house.

TL There you go.

AH But yeah.

TL Those are good tips. Because I think that anybody that sees clients regularly, even if it's only a couple weeks, has that built into their cortisol regulation cycle or your stress regulation cycle. You've got some time you're actually having that effective caring for someone physically through tough, and that has really clear physiological effects that you're deprived of most likely now.

AH And I'm realizing now it was withdrawal. [Laughing]

TL Yeah.

AH It's gotten better. It definitely got better, but it was -- and I heard that from colleagues. I realized -- before I was a massage therapist, I was -- don't laugh. I was super Type A. Way more than I am now.

TL You?

AH Yeah, who knew. [Laughing] So when I became a massage therapist, this is me calmed down ten steps.

TL Yeah.

AH And I -- and it took me -- I was probably home for three weeks when I realized that was part of what was going on. And it definitely got better. And I did a few things to help it get better very tangibly. And then also just acknowledging that that was part of what was going on made me feel a little less crazy.

TL Yep. That helps just to acknowledge it and just to do what we can. Here's another concept, though, that might help. The opposite of distress is pleasure. The opposite of distress is pleasure. The opposite of pain is pleasure. So this is useful to our clients. It's definitely useful to us now. Your capacity to feel pleasure, to hang on to pleasure, to actually embody pleasure and soak it up is directly related to your ability to handle distress and pain.

So sources of pleasure: calming comfort in your life. Anything that gives you some of that is essentially providing that missing nutrient in your neurological diet. It's like you're used to having this touch, this care for others is part of your neurological regulation. All your neurotransmitters get normalized by that. You don't have that and you've got to find other ways, and sometimes the substitutes aren't as good until you really dial it down. The pleasure one's really key. Anything that gives you physical pleasure is going to help.

AH I found -- I was thinking about this the other day when I was thinking through some -- I literally had to be like, okay, what are the things I'm doing to take care of myself. You know, I've started going for a daily walk by myself listening to my podcasts. After I went driving around -- I had to drive to the office and do some errands a couple weeks ago, and I had such a great three hours out listening to my podcasts and being in my car by myself. And I was like, oh, I haven’t done this.

TL Yeah.

AH And so I started doing a very -- just a short daily walk just long enough to listen to one podcast by myself. It's been really, really helpful.

TL That's -- yeah.

AH And then I -- it's -- and I was sort of a little bit making fun of people who were doing all kinds of baking and such while they're home and we've got these flour shortages. And then I started baking more. We didn't have hamburger rolls, and I wasn't going to the grocery store. I'm going every 10 to 14 days only when we need to. And I made hamburger rolls, and I didn't use the bread machine to knead the dough. I just did it myself because it was pretty easy. And the tangible nature -- like one, to do a task and have something -- like an actual thing at the end of it was amazing. Because massage is not super tangible sometimes. [Laughing] You know?

TL True, yeah, true. Depending on your style, but yeah, you're absolutely right.

AH And it was so great. One, it was a physically active task, there was an end result that was a product of -- and that product is something I would enjoy. So it's not just a physical task like when I clean my garden, which is not a thing I do but that's an example. And it's not like when you clean something, and okay, you have a clean space, which is rewarding, but there's no physical thing. There's no reward to eat or play with at the end. And I --

TL The tangibility of it, but then actually just the act of handling something is regulating too.

AH Yeah.

TL Just the handiwork. You think about people that knit, people that organize their, I don't know what, stamp collection in their box. If it involves your hands and doing fine work, that does a lot for the brain. I mean, your hands are represented in huge ways in your brain. Huge amounts of your brain are dedicated to hands. So when you're doing something with your hands, you're actually filling your brain full of activity that your organism goes, okay, God, finally I'm doing something; this is cool.

AH Right? And I totally -- after kind of being like, these pretentious people and their sourdough starters I was like, yeah, okay. And I went on Instagram, and now I'm following all these artsy-fartsy people who do beautiful things with their dough. [Laughing] And I'm like all right, I'm on board. I'm going to get myself a 25-pound bag of flour this week. I am down with that.

TL Yeah. Yeah.

AH So that was a really tangible thing that helped me. And that --

TL I love it.

AH -- in addition to the tiny bit of alone time to listen to the things I want to listen to was really nice. What else?

TL One time -- a --

AH What are some other ideas?

TL I got to underline the taking the walk part. Just movement, physical movement. And that's -- it could be exercise. I'm not equating movement with exercise. But just getting out and moving, just getting up and moving, that shifts your state. That shifts your mental state; it shifts your physiological state. Just going to a different place gives you a different perspective. It's like changing the channel. And if you're getting stuck in that same channel, just physically move. Physically go somewhere else and get a different experience.

But then the act of moving, the act of getting out there and exerting, maybe, or breathing, all those things are super big physiological levers for moving that stuck place inside (indiscernible) just shift things around.

AH And it helps for me -- and I know not everyone is this fortunate and/or this damned -- but to be in a house with kids and to -- and it was silly to me that it took me so long to put it together. But the little guy, one of the recommendations from his paraprofessionals is when he needs to take a break, we take a break and we do something physical. So we have all of these videos on queue. And one of the things we've been doing is we learned to do the hustle. He turned to me last week and said, will you teach me how to do the hustle? I'm like, sure. So we found a YouTube video and we learned the hustle. And then we learned the alley cat, which is so old. I remember my grandmother doing that at weddings. Then we learned Mambo No. 5, and we're going to the Cotton Eye Joe, and --

TL Dang, you're adding things to my to do list here that I hadn't even imagined I was going to put here.

AH So I put it in his learning log because I'm not following his school's curriculum. There's no way that he and I can do the work together required. We're not doing that. I am not his paraprofessional. So I'm adapting the school curriculum for him, and I put it in there as phys ed. Every day we learn a dance. [Laughing] It's fantastic.

TL Beautiful.

AH And we make videos. It's great. But it --

TL You make videos?

AH Oh, yeah, we totally. I've been actually sharing them with my massage clients. This is what I'm doing at home. What are you doing?

TL That's nice. Cool. Okay.

AH Then we actually -- Um-hum?

TL That total takes me on a tangent that I'm interrupting you with, but that sharing function is also part of that stress regulation too, where we actually show someone else what we're doing. That's a way of getting in relationship, getting interaction, that weirdly starts to actually excite the other person's mirror neurons and starts to get us synced up in a way that's calming and regulating for our brains.

AH Yeah, and I think that -- I worry. I worry that my online activity -- I see it tend to get a little manic sometimes and then I have to back away. That's definitely been a source of mania and rage for me. And I mean it in the least-diagnose-y way. I just see me getting hyped up.

TL You're not alone. I mean, the online worlds gives the illusion of getting something done, and there's plenty to do or plenty of things to engage in. But it's -- honestly the best analogy I know, and I'm just as guilty as anybody, it's junk food. It tastes good. It gives a momentary satisfaction, but it's not going to stick to your ribs, and if you eat too much of it, you actually feel kind of sick. You can't live off of that kind of nourishment. Your nervous system --

AH You know it, but still.

TL Yeah, right. We know it.

AH I'm getting to the bottom of that Doritos bag before I'm going to bed.

TL That's it exactly. [Laughing] So whatever that means. Yeah, managing your neurological diet, as it were, through Doritos or whatever, having them within reach. Having other food around. Other food is in quotes. Having the things you do with your hand, having the walk available. Whatever you can do that balances out your media diet, your neurological diet that media's a part of.

AH So how would we wrap this up? And not that this can be tied up in a bow. What do you think?

TL Yeah. No, I think there's probably one more point I should make and that's -- I mean, there are a lot of points I should make. But really one is, again, the social function, the way that you when you do share those things with people somehow, especially talking or face-to-face -- I don't know what we're learning about Zoom, but there's something about face-to-face where it actually is regulating, but also the sound of the voice and breathing and singing and humming. There's interesting theories about how that does regulate your parasympathetic function.

But then the big one is the right dose of escape and the right dose of sticking with it. That kind of balance, you know? We do need escape, you need to break it up, just change it. Just go watch a movie that makes you laugh, and that is actually going to reset your physiological state in an amazing way. Or even, like, people watch intense films to get really scared, and that will reset them too. The problem with them is they can get addictive. You get used to this intense experience and that way you going watching more of those scary films to try and get normalized. But those distractions are useful to kind of break a pattern. But then you need -- to balance that out, you need embodied experiences where you're actually feeling what's happening now in real life in your proximal environment -- not on a screen, not in your imagination, but actually feeling your sensation, feeling your body. And that's what we do when we work on someone, that's what you do when you actually take a walk, that's what you do when you relax and you feel the seat under you. That's the balance.

AH And I think weirdly and sadly and hopefully enough we'll have plenty more time at home to find that balance. [Laughing]

TL Well, its --

AH Safely and carefully, hopefully. [Laughing]

TL Yes. And the pendulum swings, you know? (Indiscernible).

AH All right, Til, thank you.

TL Hey, thank you, Allissa.

AH Tell us again where we can find your podcast.

TL thethinkingpractitioner.com, and that's where -- should I do the rest of it too?

AH Yeah, go for it.

TL Yeah, that's where you can find links to the online classes I mentioned with both Whitney and myself. He's featuring his orthopedic massage for the cervical region, and I'm making our one-hour understanding stress course free. He and I are both offering 10% for you guys, Blueprint listeners. Just enter BLUEPRINT at checkout on either Whitney's site or mine, and find them both at thethinkingpractitioner.com.

AH Thank you, Til. Thank you for your expertise and your tips and your gentleness with which all of it is delivered. It is really, really calming for me and I am sure for our listeners.

TL Hey, a pleasure. Thanks for making this happen.

AH Bye.