PTSD
The therapeutic process of desensitizing someone to something they are scared of in measured steps
What is exposure therapy?
This sensation is known to be one of the most dysregulating sensations for our nervous system, typically causing very strong upregulation
What is pain?
The most common and easy to remember coping strategy that can be used to downregulate the nervous system
What is box breathing? (4 sets of 4, four-square breathing, yogic breathing, tactical breathing)
This model of describing the major functions of specific brain regions breaks the brain down into three major sections
What is the triune brain?
The state we enter when we are over stimulated to the point of being out of our window of tolerance
What is hyperarousal?
A symptom of PTSD described as being overly aware of activity in your surrounds, being highly sensitive to sensory stimuli, needing to check on things repeatedly, and being extremely responsive to possible threats
What is hypervigilance?
The two branches of our nervous system responsible for the "fight or flight" and the "rest and digest" responses
What are the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems?
The process of spending time around someone with a more regulated nervous system to help downregulate our own nervous system
What is coregulation?
The three regions that the brain is divided into according to the triune brain model
What is the front brain (neocortex), the midbrain (mammalian brain), and the back brain (reptilian brain)?
The process of our nervous system becoming less activated, such as moving from a state of hyperstimulation back into our window of tolerance
What is down regulation?
When your brain retrieves a memory from your back brain and makes you feel as though you are actively re-experiencing a traumatic event from your past, as though you were there living through the event again
What is a flashback?
The branch of our nervous system that controls automatic processes in our body that we cannot consciously control, such as our heart rate
What is the autonomic nervous system?
The one aspect of our autonomic nervous system that we can consciously control, which makes focusing on this our most readily available coping strategy to regulate ourselves
What is our breathing rate?
This roughly almond-sized portion of the brain is responsible for the feeling of fear and the activation of threat responses
What is the amygdala?
The state we are in when we are not over or under stimulated, when we are feeling calm, when we are feeling pretty neutral
What is the window of optimal arousal?
This hormone, secreted by a gland with a nearly identical name, is the primary hormone driving our body's threat responses
What is adrenaline?
The length of time that a threat response is supposed to last
What is 15-20 minutes?
A natural physiological mechanism the human body experiences when being submerged in water that downregulates our nervous systems
What is the dive response?
This form of memory tends to be less detailed, stores less sensory information, and requires less prompting to recall
Front brain memory
DAILY DOUBLE
Tyler's last name
What is Moon?
The previous name historically used to describe what we now know as PTSD
What is shellshock?
The four most common forms of threat responses, also known as the 4 F's
What are fight, flight, freeze, and fawn responses?
The two senses that are most difficult for your brain to ignore, with one being an adaptive sense to appeal to in order to help someone snap out of dissociation, and the other being a maladaptive sense to appeal to
What are the senses of temperature and pain?
The one form of learning that does not require multiple exposures to the information being learned for your brain to make new neural pathways
What is survival (or traumatic) learning?
The two scientists that formulated the curve of stress versus mental performance that Tyler likes to refer to all the time in Trauma and Recovery
Who are Yerkes and Dodson?