(HS Siegel 150081 2021) Transforming Anxiety and Stress by Integrating the Embodied Brain

Course overview

Apply the principles of Interpersonal Neurobiology ("IPNB") to help your clients transform their stress and anxiety into resilience and well-being. Anxiety and stress are prevalent Whether you are a mental health practitioner, physician, or parent, you have undoubtedly experienced heightened levels of anxiety and stress in your professional or personal life in the last two years. In fact, anxiety has become the most common mental health challenge in the United States, affecting 40 million people annually. Traditional approaches focus on just managing anxiety and stress Although there are several methods for reducing anxiety and stress, many focus on managing the experience, rather than integrating it. The IPNB approach to transforming stress and anxiety Through the lens of IPNB, anxiety is understood as an outcome of an individual's state of mind based on their subjective experience and the ways that the human brain functions as an "anticipation machine" as it gets ready for what might happen next. When the stress of getting ready for something meaningful to happen arises, this predictive tendency of the brain can then narrate panic as we inadvertently construct our own mental images of a threatening future of our own imagination. By cultivating the mental functions of attention, intention, and awareness, we strengthen our ability to identify the source of anxiety and then harness the capacity to promote integration, transforming the energy of threat and alarm into the drive toward resilience and harmony.