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When Horses Heal: Man O’ War Project at Columbia University Irving Medic...

"Widen the Window"

 No matter how much you may struggle today because of stress and trauma in your past, you can train yourself to be more resilient.

"During the course of her pioneering research into coping with adversity, prolonged stress exposure, and trauma, Dr. Stanley has worked with neuroscientists and stress researchers to test her game-changing resilience training program among U.S. military troops. She’s taught these tried-and-tested methods to thousands of individuals who work in high-stress environments.

Reflecting on her own experiences of stress, trauma, and recovery, her approach is at once personal and wide-ranging. With plenty of stories from the people she’s trained, she explains the science of how to direct our attention to perform under stress and recover from trauma.

The more we can access agency over our own situation, and rewire our mind and body, the more we can widen the window within which our “thinking brain” and our “survival brain” work together cooperatively. By building our resilience in this way, we can train ourselves to make wise decisions and access choice—even during times of incredible stress, uncertainty, and change.

Widen the Window takes on the “top-down” thinking brain-dominant tools that still dominate most performance enhancement and resilience programs—and mental health care practices—in America. As she explains, the newest scientific findings about the brain, nervous system, and body suggest these techniques are incomplete, especially for recovery after trauma. Stress arousal and recovery are survival brain jobs. Thus, widening the window requires targeting the survival brain with “bottom-up” strategies, which many mainstream techniques neglect.

Discover mind–body tools to help you cope with stress, become less driven by compulsions and emotions, recover from trauma, and enhance your resilience so you can live a truly whole life once more."

Link to book

"Vision and Breathing May Be the Secrets to Surviving 2020"

Stanford neurobiologist Andrew Huberman discusses the two things we can always control, even during a high-stress election and scary COVID pandemic - 

By Jessica Wapner on November 16, 2020

What is stress?

"Stress is one position along the continuum of what we call autonomic arousal. At one end of this continuum would be somebody in a coma. At the very other end of that continuum is a full-blown panic attack: heart racing, pupils dilating, hyperventilating. In between we have lower levels of stress [and the states of being] alert and focused, sleepy and asleep. Stress is generally a high level of autonomic arousal. It was designed to be a generic response to mobilize the body.

Sometimes that’s well matched to the demands of life. If you need to run and catch your train, you want all the things that go along with stress to go pursue that train. But if the stress response is spontaneous or excessive, it can start to feel pathological."

What is stress’s relationship to vision?

"When you see something exciting or stressful—a news headline, a fraudulent credit-card charge—heart rate increases; breathing increases. One of the most powerful changes is with vision. The pupils dilate, and there’s a change in the position of the lens in the eye. Your visual system goes into the equivalent of portrait mode on a smartphone. Your field of vision narrows. You see one thing in sharper relief, and everything else becomes blurry. Your eyeballs rotate just slightly toward your nose, which sets your depth of field and focus on a single location. This is a primitive and ancient mechanism by which stress controls the visual field."

How does this visual mode affect the body?

This focal vision activates the sympathetic nervous system. All the neurons from your neck to the top of your pelvis get activated at once and deploy a bunch of transmitters and chemicals that make you feel agitated and want to move.

Why is the visual field so connected to this brain state?

"Something that most people don’t appreciate is that the eyes are actually two pieces of brain. They are not connected to the brain; they are brain. During development, the eyes are part of the embryonic forebrain. Your eyes get extruded from the skull during the first trimester, and then they reconnect to the rest of the brain. So they’re part of the central nervous system.

Having the eyes outside the skull orients the organism to the time of day. But it also means that you’ve got two pieces of brain that can register events in the environment at a distance in order to adjust the overall state of alertness in the rest of the brain and body. It would be terrible if we had to wait until things were in contact with us before we could prepare to react to them."

Is there a visual mode associated with calmness that can change our stress levels?

"Yes: panoramic vision, or optic flow. When [you] look at a horizon or at a broad vista, you don’t look at one thing for very long. If you keep your head still, you can dilate your gaze so you can see far into the periphery—above, below and to the sides of you. That mode of vision releases a mechanism in the brain stem involved in vigilance and arousal.

We can actually turn off the stress response by changing the way that we are viewing our environment, regardless of what’s in that environment."

Read the rest of this article here

"Talking Horses"

Mental Health Today  - Feb 2008

Exerpt:

"Pet therapies that use dogs or cats to calm people with high blood pressure, or simply to cheer up and stimulate elderly people in residential care, are now widely accepted as a valid form of health treatment. But what about horse therapy? An increasing body of evidence is showing that people with mental health problems – especially those who struggle with more orthodox talking treatments – can be helped by non-verbal interaction with horses."

"Equine assisted psychotherapy (EAP) is an emerging specialism offered by a small but growing number of specialist practitioners. It involves a trained and licensed EAP therapist and a horse professional working together with the patient and horse to help the patient tackle issues such as lack of confidence, poor body image, addictive behaviours, and poor communication skills. The belief is substance abuse, anxiety, communication needs, and abuse issues, and EAP providers are increasingly keen to encourage the NHS to recognise the benefits for patients on their paths to recovery."

"Ruth McMahon took early retirement from her job as senior occupational therapist with the Norfolk and Waveney Mental Health Care Partnership, an NHS foundation trust, and in 2006, with riding instructor Nicky Welton, developed her Equine Assisted Therapy programme at Croft Farm Riding Centre in Filby, near Great Yarmouth. Their clients include referrals from mental health trusts, charities, local private mental health organisations and organisations like Independent Living Norfolk, which channels government funding to individuals for activities that they feel will be of therapeutic value to them."

"Working with horses ‘raises genuine emotions that you are unlikely to get in normal therapeutic settings,’ says Wendy Powell that people can learn about themselves by carrying out set tasks and role-plays with the horses and then processing and discussing with the therapist their feelings and behaviours, and any repeated patterns. The role of the therapist is to act as a guide; the horses are the teachers."

Of patients & horses. Equine-facilitated psychotherapy. Bates A.

Abstract

J Psychosoc Nurs Ment Health Serv. 2002 May 40(5):16-9.

"1. Horses, just by their large, gentle presence, put people therapeutically in touch with the vitality of being alive. 2. People who ordinarily shun physical and emotional closeness often can accept closeness from a horse and through therapy can transfer these skills to their daily lives. 3. The behavior of a sensitive horse display the rider's emotions to the therapist and provides a vehicle the therapist can use to teach the patient coping skills. 4. Therapists with an interest in horses can learn more about how to become involved in an equine-facilitated psychotherapy practice through the North American Riding for the Handicapped Association."

PMID: 12016689 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]