Jenny Taitz
Appearances
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
In the kitchen one morning, rushing before work. And we have a small child. We have three small children, but one is the smallest. And he spills literally a gallon of milk on the floor. And Adam likes to make sure that things are properly cleaned. And so he starts aggressively trying to clean up the milk in such a way that he ends up cutting his hand. Oh, God.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
On the cake plate of the bottom of the fridge. And then we didn't have any bandages in the house. So then he runs to the local CVS, busy with the baby at that time. And I also, I'm not quite sure this merits a CVS visit.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
And the great thing about Adam is he came home from this and he was like laughing with my laughter. Okay, so he goes to CVS to get a bandage and some neosporin and gets into a fender bender. Yes.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
not spilled milk and I just want to double down on life is really hard and I don't want to minimize and I've certainly been through hard things myself but the fact that we can go from spilled milk to cutting your hand to a fender bender and thank god it was just a fender bender is mind-blowing and at the same time I've had these things myself like I was stressed postpartum this was the second kid I'm like picking up my nail and thinking I have no time I have to pump I have to get to work I have a book deadline I'm out of time and then I give myself a treatment
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
Literally, it was like picking my nail. Your immune system is down apparently when you're nursing. And so my friends at doctor, they're like, you have sepsis. You need to like go to the ER. Oh my God. Like stop infection or something weird. And then I'm like, okay, so I'm sitting in Cedars ER for like six hours. And I'm like, I thought I had no time. And now I really have no time.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
But we're specialists at doing this to ourselves. And to your earlier point, when we're stressed, the emotional parts of our brain is on fire. But people are also remarkably good. good at getting better with the right tools. If I had just slowed down and noticed, okay, there's the urge to pick up my nail, I could do something instead.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
Or you have like an issue at work and then you're an asshole at home. And then that's like, let's just make your whole life terrible. Now everything's bad. Those places are bad.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
I have a cure for panic. No, no, no, seriously. Nothing makes me more excited. This is my Christmas gift. I feel like you're giving me a Christmas gift. Another thing that is on the list of things that backfire that was the impetus for writing this book is so many people, especially people that are lucky enough to get help. 30 million Americans take benzodiazepines.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
Yeah, and I'm happy to talk a little bit about what my issues are with it. Yeah, tell me. So, I mean, a few things. the first thing to realize is, do you know about their history? Like how they were developed? They were testing antibiotics basically. And they noticed that mice on the verge of being electrocuted were acting passively when they were given this compound.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
And so I don't know about you, but if I was about to be electrocuted, I would like to be on high threat alert. And so then Arthur Sackler of the opioid crisis started marketing these to women in the 1950s.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
Yeah, but I don't know about you, but I don't think a pill is a cure for an unsatisfying life. And my goal wouldn't be to, like, be drugged into submission if my days are dissatisfying. I also just think it's interesting that when you need to be your sharpest... When you're stressed and you need to have your full brain to solve problems in front of you, you're taking something.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
Well, the thing that breaks my heart, Dax, is that so many of my patients come to me not realizing that there are other options. I love people and I think people are amazing. But these people seem like they might have had a brain injury sometimes. People that are incredibly privileged that keep going up on the dose because like a concierge physician is willing.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
to keep you habituate to it then you need to keep raising the dose both things are true you're abusing it more and you're building a tolerance yeah and like you I believe of course if you need this take you know a patient of mine was like I feel so bad I have to take this I'm finding out tomorrow if this ailment is terminal or not I'm like oh my goodness for me like to tell you what to do I think there's some acute use which is great one cool thing for people that are
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
are listening that are thinking, I tried to detox once and it was hell. I don't know if this is anecdotal or larger, but I've had a couple of clients recently that are taking drugs like GLP-1s and finding that their detox is going a little bit better on the benzene.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
One person that has tried that I'm thinking of in particular, he was on like six milligrams and really his whole life was on hold. Like, yeah, OK, your body is not stressed, but you're not able to get a job.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
I'm not a psychiatrist, so I can't say for sure, but this person has found that really helpful.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
And so one of the things coming back to UCLA that brought me into writing this book was a colleague of mine, a psychiatry resident, Neil Hoffman, was saying in the peak of COVID when people were super stressed, like, hey, did you see this new paper that found that this song called Weightless was found by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania to reduce anxiety before surgery almost to the same effect as a benzo?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
And I was like, what? That's crazy. Listening to a song for five minutes, actually the song is so relaxing. What's the song? It's called Weightless. This is what I play for my kids if they're not going to sleep. Wow. You could do that for your middle of the night. Oh, it might help. Yeah.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
It just opened my mind that there's so many things we don't realize that are free of side effects. We live in this world where it's like the fancier, the better, but like there's simple things.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
Yeah, there's so many things we could do moment to moment to make it a little easier. Maybe when emotions are super high, you can't do the hardest thing, but you could do something like relax your face, which automatically signals to your brain that I need to stop judging and thinking this is the worst. And then that maybe allows you to find your breath and then maybe you could do the next thing.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
And there's all these things you could stack together.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
If we could really normalize that our body's serving us. and we don't need to judge it and we don't need to be ashamed of it, then it automatically stops the cycle of your body does something, your mind makes it worse, your body then gets worse and then it's a tornado.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
I love that. And I think you could also swap the word stress for emotions. Like this is also so relevant with emotions or people judge their emotions and then judge their body's emotional response. But you could use the two synergistically.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
So many ways to regulate our emotions. I keep coming back to this three part sequence of our thoughts, our physical sensations and our behaviors. So if you dissect an emotion into like its fundamental ingredients, its thoughts, physical sensations, behavior.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
So it's like you go to sleep and you start telling yourself, I need to go to sleep two hours ago because I have this important meeting tomorrow morning. That is going to make you feel probably more tense emotionally. and revved up and then who wouldn't start scrolling on their phone. And so just noticing like, what is the arc of my emotions?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
What are the ingredients that are creating anxiety for me in this moment or sadness? Sadness doesn't just happen to you. We co-create sadness. We think sad thoughts. We act in ways that perpetuate sadness. But if we can take a step back and notice that our minds are full of like spam, a lot of the content in our mind is not necessarily useful or true.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
And if we choose our behaviors, like it sounds very simplistic, but behavior real activation, like helping people create a schedule that's full of activities that are pleasant and also give you a sense of accomplishment. You don't just want to be sitting around basking in the sun. You also don't just want to be on the Stairmaster for hours.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
You need like a good mix of activities, but doing that works as well as antidepressants for a major to moderate depression. And I'm not against antidepressants, but I just want people to have a whole host of things. So we manage our emotions by noticing how we're co-creating them and changing our behaviors and we're
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
And so one of my favorite tools all around, regardless of the emotion, is the skill opposite action because any emotion you want to change, you're angry at someone and the intensity isn't helpful for the situation or it's not in line with your values, giving them the benefit of the doubt and being a little nice.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
I mean, we think that acting angrily is somehow cathartic, but that's actually pumping up anger. That's what I would do as a couples therapist or what I do with my individual clients. You hate your spouse and you want to criticize them endlessly and be aggressive. mannerist interpretation and plan like a secret caring gesture.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
Like, can you get this awesome coffee for the person and not have any expectations or start counting? Like I did this.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
Yeah, both things are true. It's stresses like that cycle, but our emotions, the behavior that we're engaging in is creating the emotion as well. And so if I feel really ashamed, that's not just out of nowhere. It's thinking thoughts about not being enough and then acting in ways that are hiding. You go to the party and you're on your phone the whole time. No one's going to talk to you.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
Then you really feel like you're not worthy. Yeah. And so our response to our emotion amplifies that emotion, but also our response creates the emotion. Oh, what a wicked cycle. I think a lot of people have this idea that just changing your behavior isn't really going to do much. That's superficial. And I just want to say a couple of things. We do this all the way.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
And so it's not like I'm being nice and thinking resentful thoughts. It's like all the way. And it's not just helping this moment. But if I have negative core beliefs, if I have beliefs from my childhood that I'm not lovable, the only way to change those beliefs is to transcend them. them with my behavior to create a new narrative. And so this isn't just, oh, right now I'm like acting opposite.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
Or as some of my clients would say, like the George Costanza approach, it's like, no, actually you're creating a new reality and feeling like you have agency in your life.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
I love AA. I don't know if you're allowed to do this, but when I was working at the Bellevue thing, I used to go to meetings there. Well, there's open meetings. I dragged a client there also, and I was like, this is so great. He was looking at me like, we're leaving. I'm like, no, no, no, we're staying. We're staying as long as this goes. I hope this goes for hours.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
The notion of a book on stress is such an irony because who has time to read when they feel like they don't have time in it? And so the book is almost like a cookbook. Resets is kind of the equivalent of urgent care, what to do in this moment if you feel really flooded. And if your problem in this moment is your mind is really ruminating or doing those things, we have mind resets.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
We have body resets, which will also help your mind. And then behavior resets to change your behavior.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
like spam that are just simply unhelpful and 90 of people report having intrusive unwanted thoughts so if you have a repeated unwanted thought like i'm a loser because i don't have plans on saturday night not a super helpful thought to think and so if you could sing that thought to the tune of do you believe in magic it automatically loses its grip yeah well because it's silly i don't have plans on saturday i'm a piece of shit okay takes away its power
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
I get my best ideas from my clients. They're like, what are thoughts to the Hathaway song, What is Love? And then with the Saturday Night Live clip is even better. Do you know what I'm talking about? No. I think it's Jim Carrey is in a sketch singing, what is love? Baby, don't hurt me. Baby, don't hurt me.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
Okay, so if you swap in instead of what is love, what are thoughts?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
Is that it? Yes. I mean, that's one of the options you have at your disposal for ruminating. Because again, a lot of us have the same content that's just been there for ages. That's not serving us. That we take very seriously. Like I wouldn't sit there and respond to spam emails or answer robocalls. But why are we doing that with our thoughts?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
But they create real feelings. Like if I told you to think about a cockroach while you're ordering avocado toast, it's going to make you lose your appetite. Like they really affect your physiology. And so if we could even just see like any thought in the middle of the night, is worth singing.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
A body reset could also change your mind because you change your body, you could change your mind. But a popular body one, I'm just giving you one. There's many out here, many work for different people. It's like sometimes you need a tweezer, sometimes you need a hammer, different skills at different times. But if you were really stressed, if you took a salad bowl and filled it with ice,
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
water held your breath set a timer for 30 seconds and submerge your face in ice water we have all these incredible features within us that we forget like our body is truly our own walking pharmacy and so if you submerge your face in ice water while holding your breath your heart rate automatically slows down it activates like a parasympathetic response so your heart rate would probably go down like 20 beats per minute on an apple watch you would redirect blood flow to your brain and to your heart
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
Totally. And also, how can you possibly be ruminating in that moment? I don't think you should be doing this all the time, but I think just even metaphorically realizing like there's something that can help you in seconds. We have our own control, alt, delete functions within us.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
If we know what those are, yes, they take a little bit of work, but they also come with this priceless feeling of knowing you can count on yourself.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
I really like the breathing in for five and out for five, coherent breathing or paced breathing.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
Sorry, my feet don't reach the floor.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
So if you gently close your lips and breathe in for five seconds, I hope everyone tries this while they're listening. Breathe in for five, one, two, three, four, five, and out for five also through your nose. If you want to tack onto this, you could ever so slightly raise the upper corners of your lips into like a half smile, which is like a facial expression of acceptance.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
Monica has like such a model half smile.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
No, I think the smiling is shockingly. And it's a half smile and it's for you. It's like I accept this moment. So the half smile plus the slow breathing, it's like, yeah, even if you're getting a root canal, maybe you can't smile, but there's something about this slow breathing.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
It did feel nice. Five minutes of doing this slow breathing reduces blood pressure. Doing it for 20 minutes a day is known to affect your nervous system, helps with things like IBS. I interviewed a bunch of people for the book, obviously, and there's a couple, they're both psychiatrists and based out of Columbia University in New York. They actually became so mesmerized by it.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
Wow. Yeah. And again, this takes seconds. Instead of picking my nail, I could have half smiled and slow breathed and done some sort of gesture of you got this. It's OK.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
And then maybe that would have led to like some sort of problem solving of, OK, let's try to rework why I feel overwhelmed.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
Back to this thing of like, do you want to be right or do you want to be effective?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
Even planning pleasant things, a lot of times we're like, oh no, I'm too busy to do something nice. But actually doing positive experiences and really learning to savor them and relive them.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
Right. So walk is totally a behavior reset. Even learning how to assert yourself, like if you're annoyed with someone instead of stewing in it, I can give you a formula for how to ask for what you want. Say no. So you're not overthinking it.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
It's from DBT, Dialectical Behavior Therapy, and it's called DEAR MAN. And it's an acronym for describe the facts. Express how you feel. Ask for what you want. Reward like what's in it for the other person. Be mindful. Act confident. Negotiate as needed. Walk us through it. Can you give us a hard example? Yeah, give me something hard. Someone that's really annoying you.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
That's a matcha. Pistachio milk. Oh.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
Okay, there's so many times that people think, oh my God, these people want to stay with me for like two weeks when they're in town for the holidays. Most people default to hosting them begrudgingly or making up a lie.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
Yeah, a lot of people have this. Yeah, but if you're like, okay, I'm so thrilled that you're coming to town. I can't wait to see you. I realize that it's a bit easier this time of year to just keep our house to our family and really want to spend some quality time with people that we don't get to see that are going to be in town at the same time. to plan a couple of really fun dinners.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
I discovered it at Leora. Okay. Not too sweet, but little like nutty. Nuttiness? Yeah. Interesting.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
And I can also totally help you with some great local options of hotels that are right near me or Airbnbs that have good options for extended stays.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
What if the person says, so you don't want me to come? This is hard because there's so much in the book, but you have to do the dear man with also this best friend called give, which is like the give is the food for the relationship, which is being gentle, interested, validating, easy manner. So maybe the person says, so you don't want me to come? Of course I want you to come.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
That's why I want to plan these really special dinners and want to make this time not with the chaos of the aunt that's staying for two days and the cousin that's coming for another day. And part of dear man is also calculating intensity because Because sometimes people are at the airport screaming at someone at a 10 when there's no seat. What are you going to do about that?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
The person's not capable of giving you what you want. And so I also go through how to compute. Should you be at a one? Should you be at a 10? And someone might be pushing back because you're at a three and maybe you weren't a seven. And this is why I wrote this book, because a lot of people can't afford therapy or forget these when the cousin texts you.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
And for you to have basically on like a post-it how to do this in the heat of the moment, because that is stressful. Having someone in your house that you don't want there.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
I love that. And Monica, I think the thing that's great about that is then even being clear, my agenda here is self-respect. And even if someone's mildly annoyed, self-respect is my aim.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
You can get what you want. You can get the relationship and you can get self-respect if you know how to do it.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
In addition to learning how to deal with intense moments, whether your mind is making you miserable or your body feels like it's waging a war against you or you're doing things that are just spreading your stress. We also need to learn how to live a life that feels less stressful. We don't just want to go from like hard time to hard time.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
And so buffers is almost like preventative medicine, the things we could do preemptively before the hard thing.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
Yeah, so a body buffer, coming back to the promise of panic, if someone has panic attacks, one of the most research backed ways to treat panic is actually practicing panic. And so if someone feels like, oh my God, all of a sudden I'm short of breath, I'm really sweaty, I feel shaky, I feel dizzy, I feel kind of like dissociative, we can help you recreate those.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
And so the worst thing to do is to try to calm down when your heart is racing, like that's really stressful. But if you practice, just imagine you take like a straw and you pinch it so it's narrow in diameter, like a tiny coffee stir size diameter where you could take a regular straw and make that happen. Close your nose and then just breathe from the small opening of the straw.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
You could do that for 60 seconds. And you're like, whoa, I just made myself feel the way I sometimes feel out of the blue. And when it comes up out of the blue, I'm really spooked by it. If you practice recreating the sensations that you normally run from when they come up, You can kind of put out a welcome mat to them. You stop the loop of like really bad, go to the ER. This is dangerous.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
This is getting worse. But instead it's like, okay, I can radically accept how I feel because I've tried this before. I've been here before. And so recreating your body's stress response so you can experience it without.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
Yeah, or without the negative layer of interpretation. So I'm just so curious because you mentioned you had panic. I used to have full panic attacks. Have you tried this before?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
Yeah. I mean, when someone comes to my office with panic, I'm not like a cocky person, but I'm like excited. I'm like, I can treat this. And this doesn't take very long. I mean, panic again is your body's doing its thing and you're hyper focusing on it. It's almost like the Chinese finger trap if you stop fighting.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
No, I usually do La Cologne with a little bit of Laird. Do you know Laird? No. The non-dairy creamer.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
And this is my thing. It's like if you were taking a benzodiazepine, you might have never learned that lesson. You could learn this lesson in life. The panic exercises that I'm recommending take about five minutes and then you would just need to replicate. Again, this is not a random thought by Jenny Tates. This is in the Unified Protocol, which is a gold standard treatment for panic attacks.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
And it applies across the board. Like if you have those symptoms before giving a speech or before flying or during flying, you can still change your body's stress response.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
So many to choose from, but one of my favorites is called a chain. If you make a mistake, instead of doing one of two things, which I think a lot of us are prone to doing, a lot of us oversimplify like, oh yeah, no big deal. I'll do better tomorrow. Or we struggle with this thing called the abstinence violation effect of like, I can't do it. It's too much. Like I messed up once.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
Yeah. You can take a moment to like literally write down, even if you took a piece of paper and folded it in half vertically, what was the sequence of events? What made you more vulnerable? Like I didn't sleep well, didn't exercise, didn't eat breakfast. This thing happened. I did this. Write down exactly what happened, almost like you're rewinding a tape with compassion.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
No idea, but it's great. I like that there's like different flavors, not too into the seasonal ones. Like they have mocha mint, but they have like plain, a little cardamom plain.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
And then you can go and... create solutions at every step along the way.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
Totally. And then you have like a million solutions. And so instead of being like, I'm just an asshole that sends mean text to people, I'm like empowered to see what is the setup. I didn't ask for what I wanted earlier. Then I felt more resentful. Then I used my text instead of picking up the phone. And so there's a lot of tools, but people that think like, oh my God, I set these resolutions.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
I can't stick to it. You actually can if you understand what is the domino effect and how do you change each step of the way.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
Totally. Instead of I'm an idiot or I'll do better tomorrow.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
I'm really struck by certain findings. Like again, I really am passionate about things where things are very serious, like suicide prevention and something as simple. Jerome Motto is one of the first people that created a suicide prevention initiative in the 1930s. He's a psychiatrist and he did something as simple as sending people who left the hospital
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
A letter that said, I'm thinking of you and hoping you're doing well and no need to respond. And that literally prevented suicide. We don't want to do things either to us or to the people around us. We want to instead take vicious cycles and create virtuous ones and take these moments of pain. I mean, I feel like the moments I feel most proud of are the times where things were really stressful.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
It's almost like chiseling your muscles of emotion regulation. I was in a really bad mood that day. I had a shitty day and I was super sweet to my daughter on her way to swim team. Or I was especially nice to like an older person that was in front of me taking forever in the grocery store.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
One thing you could do is even thinking about the values, like how do you want to show up in your life? A lot of us are focused on what we want to get. How do we want to be spoken to? How do we want people to know? people to show compassion to us, but how do we want to show up? And so being really clear about regardless of what happens, this is my mission statement.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
I'm not going to deviate from this. In students that write briefly about their highest values, years later, they're more able to regulate their emotions and persist with long-term goals. I think also just realizing, is there some sort of word we could say that's funny and playful? Yeah, let's take a minute. This is the whole thing, like distress tolerance is how do we not make things worse?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
And then once we came down a few decibels, then we can go to the problem solving. But if there's something we could do to self-soothe, I love this idea of even a hope kit, like a collection of things that gives you a sense of hope, like looking at some pictures that just broaden your view outside of this moment that's not going well to some broader moments of connection and joy.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
And so something that could help you realize like, okay, in this moment, this isn't about who's right or who's wrong. This is about me doing what matters most to me and what my highest purpose is. And I am too dysregulated to...
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
exam and getting a sip of water and then coming back let's try to come back stonewalling is a problem like slamming doors she'll be like hey i think we both need to get some water i know i do yeah in like a lovely way not you made me so upset that i need to like but asking if you can take a minute to do some breathing I think it would be so sweet to do that together.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
Like we care too much about each other. Let's try this thing for a minute because things that are so interesting, it's like in the middle of a fight, something funny happens. You forget the fight. Or in the middle of spiraling, someone calls you and they're funny. You could totally stop. And again, it's realizing the channel can change if you let go.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
All right. Telling yourself like, okay, we could put this down and pick this up at this time. Because I think we think that we're winning by keeping it going, but we're majorly losing.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
But I could tell from listening to you that you are a masterful sentence crafter and you can totally create that.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
No, no, but to have faith in yourself.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
No, and I too, I'm like driving in the morning and I'm just like... If emotions are high on both ends, even if it's the perfect explanation, the receiver's not going to receive it. And so these are amazing ongoing relationships that it doesn't have to be right then and there.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
But I truly believe, again, like using the chain, you could totally look at the things. Repair is beautiful. I mean, repair could leave you closer than before. Yeah. And to even just see the huge thing that John Gottman talks about is even just the startup, how the start of the conversation goes is really going to dictate how it goes. You know, if you can start with like warmth and kindness.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
Yeah. If college students write for three days about something upsetting that happened to them for 20 minutes, the first day, the most upsetting thing, the second day, how it affected your life in the past, third day, how it's affecting you in the present. People that do that 20 minutes, three times, 60 minutes, six months later, they have significant reductions in rumination and depression.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
And even for people that have PTSD, five days of specific therapeutic writing, written exposure therapy significantly reduces PTSD. And this has like blown my mind. Memories during trauma or splinters and then it helps you kind of store it properly and again, removes you from the event and creates some working distance.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
Again, like there's these things out there that a lot of people don't know about and they think that they need to do these really expensive things or things that are very mysterious.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
To quote a mentor of mine that taught this CBT for insomnia class, it's a problem to be awake when reason sleeps.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
An interesting thing in a study on rumination was when people are asked to talk about something that really upset them, if 50% of the people have the opportunity to listen to researchers eavesdropping outside the door, those people stop ruminating, like literally having some sort of distraction. So some sort of distraction... Could help if the book on tape on Audible isn't doing it for you.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
I do. I teach psychiatry residents how to do cognitive behavioral therapies that I specialize in. So it's super cool. We actually do a group where we have a dozen people on a Zoom and it doesn't matter if you have social anxiety, general anxiety, PTSD, the treatment is the same.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
Have you tried like a body scan? Body scan is I could like literally send my breath to all my left toes and really focusing on the breath reaching my toes.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
Yeah. And then you move up through your whole body. And there's progressive muscle relaxation where you tense and release. Can these things take a lot of your focus? And they're very sedating. Like I am energized and in trainings where you pair up and practice doing the body scan on each other. I'm like snoring. I
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
because it's tedious too you start at like the top of your head and then you need to like your right eye lid it's super focused and it's super relaxing and i also find i like to do the slow breathing the five in five out and sometimes if i don't get to it during the day i try to do it at night and i can never do the 20 minutes i intend because i pass out probably in like seven minutes so that's also an option the slow breathing there's actually a
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
You're doing all the right things to even just realize like you're an emotion mind. The content is relevant. Have you tried CBT for insomnia?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
CBT for insomnia works as well as sleep medication for people that have a hard time falling asleep or staying asleep. And so you kind of calculate how many hours are you in bed? How many hours are you in bed?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
How many hours are you actually sleeping?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
Okay. So CBT for insomnia. And again, this is just like a short version. And there's apps for people that are listening like CBTI. It's like a free VA app that works well.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
Yeah. So basically you pick your wake time. Like what time do you want to wake up? 6.40. So you set your wake time, and that does not change. There's no snooze. You pick your wake time, and then you go to bed at about the same time that you've been typically averaging sleep. So let's say you've been sleeping six hours, so you go to bed at 12.40.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
Then you wake up at 6.40, and then that creates kind of a drive for sleep because you need a certain level of homeostatic drive for sleep because a lot of times what we do is like, oh my gosh, I couldn't fall asleep last night. Let's go to bed early tonight. And then like hit snooze.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
And those two things are a problem because it's almost like jet lag. You need to be primed for sleep. So then you get the six hours. Then once you're sleeping 90% of the time, you can add in 20 minutes after like several days. But I don't know if you've had this, but I've had this thing where I feel like, oh, I'm so tired. I didn't sleep well. And then I start canceling things.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
And so it's awesome because people can come in with social anxiety, OCD, major depression, and still get significantly better in a matter of weeks.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
Like I cancel a gym class I'm supposed to go to in the morning. And then the whole day is like set up for failure. Yeah. Sleep is a huge buffer. I don't want to understate that, especially if you're chronically not sleeping enough. Really hard to do any of the things if you're under sleeping.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
But it's like, okay, so if I get up when I feel underslept and start running at Barry's Boot Camp, I will have a better day and then sleep better the next night.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
Yeah. I ran the marathon a number of years ago and the coach that I was working with, cause I did it postpartum and I really needed a coach. He was like, just be prepared that you will not sleep that night. Cause you have to start getting a Dodger stadium at like four in the morning. He's like, it's fine to not sleep. And I was like, how am I going to do it?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
He's like, no one sleeps the night of the marathon. I'm like, if you could run a marathon on no sleep, like you can kind of do most things with no sleep.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
Or like be functional at work or as a person.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
Yeah, we do. It's good. It's hopeful.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
We have so much more control than we think. And peace of mind isn't life being easy, but it's knowing that you can count on yourself regardless of what shows up in your life.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
It works for anxiety and depression. Yeah. Anxiety disorders and depression.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
Totally. And everything is rooted in science and these things are stackable and doable. And I felt kind of weird, but I taught these tools in a prison recently and I was thinking like, this is a really shitty situation. I really hope this will make a difference. But with a lot of these tools, you have a lot of options.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
Sure. So it's interesting. I went to graduate school all hyped up. I'm like, I can't believe you can get paid to talk to people. And like, there's a science to it and you could move the needle and people can get better. And then I did all these things to kind of test the waters to see before you go to grad school for six years, do you like this? And I started volunteering at this
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
suicide prevention center. And literally the first call I got there, someone was listening in to see how I feel to the questions. And I had done all sorts of training through them. And then the final step in the training is this test call. And this woman, she was 14 years old. She had already taken a bottle of pills and was sounding pretty loopy on the call.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
And during our call, I'm trying to talk to her. Someone starts banging on the door. My supervisor who was listening on the call had called an ambulance and the girl was pissed.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
Yeah. And it gave me this sense of I really wanted a career that not only saved lives, but made lives worth living. And I was super stoked. And then I went to NYU. It was really cool. I majored in psychology and social work. And doing the social work bachelor's allowed me to literally I would be wearing my college clothes and then grabbing my Bellevue ID.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
I literally had the opportunity to be a therapist at Bellevue. Oh. Okay.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
Bellevue at that time, I don't think it's currently there, but Bellevue had a floor in a men's homeless shelter for men who were substance abusing, struggling with mental illness and homeless. And so I got to do that. And between the Suicide Prevention Center, most people were happy for the help there and working with people that were really struggling with a lot of complex problems.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
I was like, I want to be a psychologist. It's going to be amazing. And then I get to grad school. And I'm like, oh my God, these people are kind of weird. I don't want to be anything like these professors. These professors seemed super socially anxious. They didn't really have like a clear way to define when someone would be ready to graduate treatment or how many sessions it would take.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
And so this is kind of a way of getting back to this question of the difference between psychoanalysis and CBT. And I think a lot of people misunderstand that CBT is just kind of playing whack-a-mole on a problem.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
I see CBT as really helping someone both look in the rear view mirror. Can you look at what in your past has led to this moment, but also a huge premium on understanding your current mental habits and loops and understanding the process through which we struggle. And there's kind of a systematic way to measure change and there's a lot of skill building.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
So the idea is that we have 400 emotions a day, 6,000 thoughts at least a day, 20,000 breaths a day. Do we have a structure in place To navigate those, I'm all for therapy, but I also don't know if a therapeutic relationship is the way that I see a person transforming their life.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
And I think good CBT does both. My goal as a CBT therapist is I care about your time. I care about your money. Let's do this. Let's graduate. Let's keep in touch. Come visit me for spot treatments, but go live your best life.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
I love that. That's my goal. That's great. But I also love thinking flexible. And I want to just say that there are so many psychoanalysts that are totally brilliant. And I have so much respect. We love all of them. So much respect for them.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
Totally. I target a lot of what someone would want to work on in their marriage, one-on-one.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
DBT is the second thing, so dialectical behavior therapy. What is it? It's a newer treatment that was developed in the 90s by Marsha Linehan, who is a professor emeritus at University of Washington. And she herself had struggled a great deal early in her life. She came out at the end of her career saying that she felt like she needed to share with her patients. It was actually insane.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
She went to this hospital that she was hospitalized in herself and told her
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
story and the place was like windowless and depressing and horrible aggressive treatments when she was a patient there and the unit that she was on excuse me the chills talking about it is now a dbt unit which teaches mindfulness interpersonal effectiveness how to be more effective in relationships ask for what you want say no while maintaining self-respect and building relationships
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
emotion regulation, learning to kind of be able to dim down your emotions so they don't feel like they're on an on-off switch and be able to act independent of how you feel. So if you're like super mad, can you still be nice to your kid if that's in the service of your value? And then distress tolerance, how to survive a crisis without making things worse.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
And so DBT is an awesome treatment that is the gold standard in suicide prevention, but has now been found helpful well beyond that population to treat other difficult to treat problems like substance use issues.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
So stress is this mismatch between your demands, what you're facing and your resources. And so it's one of those moments when you think it's too much, I can't. And so much of stress is really subjective. The thing that's interesting to think about with that is if you have stress and believe stress is bad for you, that actually increases your risk. of dying from stress-related causes.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
And so I wouldn't get too down on your body's stress response. That's actually a huge part of what I want to share is if you normalize, like it makes sense that I have stress in my life. If you didn't have stress, your life would probably be pretty shitty and boring. Yeah.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
Yeah, so if you combine seeing stress as like the price of a meaningful life and your body's stress response is serving you, butterflies is like oxygen helping you improve performance. At-risk youth that are on their way to college that are taught that stress is okay. Everyone feels stressed. Stress is something you can deal with.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
Yeah, yeah. With the right supports, you're not alone. You have nothing to be ashamed of. And what your body's doing in those stressful moments is actually helpful, not shameful. One of my favorite papers on the topic is called Turning Your Knots Into Bows. Literally teaching people that the knots in their stomach are actually bows improves their performance on like the GRE.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
That's amazing. Because that's totally different than what happens to most people is you have a stressful event. I mean, I think as people, we're masterful at something stressful happens and we multiply it. We think the worst, 10 times worse. And then that obviously does a number to your body.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
And then the combination of your mind and body feeling like they're rebelling against you does not put you in a good position to deal with the demands in your life.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
A hundred percent. And that's why I teach all sorts of ways to get kind of out of emotion mind and more into a reasonable mind or wise mind.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
I don't want to minimize stress is very real. And a lot of us are feeling super stressed these days. But how do we stop ruminating, which is one of the trans diagnostic, like a cross diagnosis. This is one of the things we targeted my group and we deal with in DBT. But how do we target overthinking? Something happened for two minutes and you could be playing it 20 hours later. And this is insane.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
But if you're asked in a lab where there's all sorts of physiological measures hooked up to you about the worst thing that ever happened to you. Your body literally re-experiences that even if the person that did it to you is dead. And I know you had Sapolsky on here. Like, how do we break free of overthinking? This is why zebras don't get ulcers.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
I'm a world-class ruminator. I was too. And in Intro to Psych, I was like, this is me. This fed into why I got into the mindfulness-based therapies that I practice because I was like, this actually works for me. And I thought that this was just who I was. Yeah. By the end of this, I want you to be a world-class ex-ruminator.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
No, no, we're doing it. We're doing it. Oh, Maddie. This is so exciting. Do you also ruin it? So much.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)
We're going to do it. I just want everyone to hear me out. Anything I say is not something that I randomly thought about this morning, like a gym class. It's based on many research papers. what you think would work.