Four Pillars of Stress Management with Dr. David Rabin

The Four Pillars Of Stress Management

• A pillar is essentially a cognitive emotional skill that you use to stabilize and improve your health.
• They are things you fundamentally have control over.
• The four pillars Dr. Rabin uses are:
• Self-gratitude.
• Self-forgiveness.
• Self-compassion.
• Self-love.
• They should be practiced together and in that order.
• Self-gratitude is the most fundamental.
• It’s the easiest to grasp and express on a regular basis.
• Simply take the time to be grateful for the small moments in your life.
• Gratitude creates a tremendous amount of neurotransmitters when you actively practice it.
• This positive release signals to your brain that you are safe and in control.
• The first step for any kind of transformation is conscious mindful awareness.
• Changing the language you use is one powerful tool to embrace gratitude.
• Instead of saying, “I have to”, change it to, “I get to”.
• Perspective matters and is one of the things you have control over when you recognize it.
• The most common mistake when looking at the four pillars is to believe you’re already a master at them.
• It’s common to look at how you do these things for others, not for you.
• But you can’t be a master at these skillsets with others if you are unable or unpracticed at producing them towards yourself.
• Self-forgiveness is when you think about yourself from a place of empathy and understanding.
• If your best friend was telling you they did something wrong, or they see themselves in a negative or self-critical way, you would comfort them and tell them it’s okay.
• Do this with yourself.
• Tell yourself you’re doing the best you can. That you’re going to make mistakes.
• You need self-forgiveness to be able to make mistakes so you can learn from them.
• If you don’t have self-forgiveness, you can actually trap yourself in the mistake itself and become wrapped in that fear of failure.
• Self-compassion is patience for yourself.
• It balances your inner self critic­­—the part of yourself that is always saying work harder, do better, or you’re not doing enough.
• Your self-critic isn’t focused on the mistakes of the past, but the present and the future.
• You perform best when your self-compassion is balanced with a little bit of self-criticism.
• The ultimate manifestation of self-compassion is challenging because patience is infinite.
• Patience is the complete acceptance that things are as they should be and will unfold as they will over time.
• It’s important to embrace patience because you’re on this journey to reveal and realize your fullest potential, and it doesn’t happen right away.
• The fourth and final pillar is self-love.
• Self-love is the culmination of the three pillars before it.
• By practicing the emotional, spiritual, and mental skills of self-gratitude, self-forgiveness, and self-compassion, you strengthen your sense of trust in yourself.

Trusting Your Intuitive Self

• The ability to trust yourself to overcome challenges, face stress, and adapt, allows you to get to know your intuitive self.
• When you trust yourself, you can trust the messages your intuitive self is trying to send you.
• These messages are your gut-feelings and can be chills or tingles, as examples.
• Everyone has a different sense they identify with intuition.
• You were born with intuition.
• It’s a deep part of yourself and it is sending you information all the time.
• A lot of times it’s difficult to listen because you weren’t necessarily taught how to listen.
• Or you weren’t taught to trust the information when it does come in.
• Actively practicing the first three pillars is critical to form the foundation of trust that culminates in the stabilizing fourth pillar.
• Self-love means being able to provide love to yourself unconditionally, without hesitation or reservation, and without asking anything in return.
• It’s when you can show love for yourself, knowing you deserve it.
• Once you’re able to do that, your ability to express that love to others in your life becomes more accessible.
• One of the important factors in practicing these skills is the sense of safety.
• During difficult times, safety becomes even more important so that you can get into that parasympathetic rest-and-digest state.
• Dr. Rabin invented a device called Apollo Neuro to help tap into and create a sense of safety in your nervous system.
• Safety is everything in regard to thriving, having a good life, and retaining functional cognition.
• You can’t expand your cognition and reach your full mental capacity without safety.
• In fact, it’s not about whether you’re capable of achieving a higher level of functioning.
• It’s about asking yourself what is stopping you from achieving that higher level.

The Power Of Touch

• Part of Dr. Rabin’s research was looking at what road blocks can easily be removed to access these cognitive skills.
• While working with clients—mostly veterans—who had addiction disorders, depression, and PTSD, Dr. Rabin noticed they weren’t recovering with the standard treatments.
• These were the Gold Standard of Western treatments.
• Things like medication and psychotherapy.
• His clients would feel good in the office, but they’d leave, and their symptoms would come back.
• Almost every client said they felt safe in the office and did not feel safe in the outside world.
• Without that sense of safety, they couldn’t handle stress or process any other emotions in an efficient or productive manner.
• Dr. Rabin and his team at the University of Pittsburgh set out to create something that could help people feel safe outside of the office.
• If you’re focused entirely on survival, stressed out, and don’t feel safe, you are tying up considerable cognitive resources.
• Dr. Rabin wanted to remind his clients that they were safe, so they could regain their cognitive capacity and reach their full human functioning potential.
• They researched sound, music, vibrations, electricity, and ended up gravitating towards touch.
• Touch goes back millions of years throughout animal evolution.
• Touch signals safety to the brain more powerfully and quickly than any other single thing you experience in your life.
• It’s the first thing you experience when you’re born and held.
• You don’t know where you are, or anything about what’s happening around you, but you know the safety of being held.
• Touch is preconscious, subconscious. You’re not even aware of it.
• They found there were very specific patterns of vibration that created soothing sensations.
• These sensations are different for everyone.
• Some describe it as a cat purring, or a warm hug, or holding someone’s hand.
• The sensations triggered memory associated feelings.
• You don’t always remember exactly what someone said, or what someone did, but you remember how it felt.
• Soothing feelings are hardwired deep into your system.
• When you provide a signal to the body—like a gentle, soothing vibration on the skin—it activates the amygdala and the emotional cortex in your brain.
• Even though the sensation is on your wrist or ankle, it triggers the neurological response.
• Your brain becomes aware of the calming feeling and realizes that if it has time to pay attention to this sensation, you’re probably not being chased by a lion and it can relax.
• When your amygdala calms down, all the brain capacity that was trapped in that fear box is released.
• Being in a constant state of stress means your brain is constantly trying to perceive threats from the environment.
• It takes a lot of brain power to be that hyper-alert.
• Being able to de-stress and calm down frees up enormous cognitive resources for everything else you want to do throughout your day.
• Be sure to check out the unedited, extended episode on YouTube, here.

Share With Us

• Take a screenshot of this episode, tag us on social media (@DrDavidRabin & @JimKwik), and share one of the four pillars that you’re going to focus on and develop.
• It’s one thing to describe how effective the Apollo Neuro is; it’s another to experience it.
• Visit ApolloNeuro.com/JimKwik for a 15% discount on the Apollo Neuro device, so you can reduce stress and reach your full cognitive capacity.
• Get more information and visit Dr. Rabin, here.