Name: 3 doctors explain how to reframe your trauma, anxiety, and internal dialogue
Uploaded: 2025-07-23T18:43:38.000Z
Duration: 7 min 22 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

An experience enters into your ears, into your eyes.

You hear the word anxiety, you think, oh God, this thing, I want to kick out the door.

The problem with trauma is that it starts off with something that happens to us, but that's not where it stops because it changes your brain.

This negative internal dialogue isn't who you really are at all.

The wonderful thing is you can actually change the dialogue.

The trauma is not the event that happens.

We can use neuroscience and tools from psychology to flip the script on our whole mindset around anxiety.

When you take the time to tame the mind, it's really quite extraordinary, the possibilities.

One of the greatest challenges of people in the West is they have this negative internal dialogue.

It is a collection of events, experiences, commentaries from your environment that oftentimes you allow to define you and not necessarily in a positive way.

And as a result, you have an emotional response when you're listening to these voices or this dialogue or the DJ, if you will.

I'm never going to lose the weight that I wanna lose.

All these things become part of the big stone of anxiety dragging along with you.

Anxiety is the feeling of fear or worry typically associated with situations of uncertainty.

The amygdala is a brain structure that is automatically activated when you hear that bump in the night that launches your anxiety.

And the brain area that could help that calming in that situation is the prefrontal cortex, the area that's involved in executive function.

But unfortunately, in situations of high stress, high anxiety, what happens is not only is your amygdala activated, but your prefrontal cortex gets shut down too.

Cognitive flexibility is the idea that we are able to look at and approach situations in lots of different ways.

What is it about my anxiety that is difficult?

Can I bring a superpower or a gift from that?

If there's a realization, there are other ways to approach it.

First one is a superpower of productivity.

Or what if you did that and you didn't do it right?

Anxiety evolved to have us put an action on it. 2.5 million years ago, it was either you fight or you run away from it.

The way to transform it is to turn that what-if list into a to-do list.

That is how you get productivity from your anxiety.

People usually think about the military when they talk about trauma, but trauma is actually extremely common.

Basically, trauma is something that happens to you that makes you so upset that it overwhelms you.

There is nothing you can do to stay off the inevitable.

You basically collapse in a state of confusion, maybe rage, because you are unable to function in the face of this particular threat.

And what may be traumatic for you may not be traumatic for me, depending on our personality and our prior experiences.

Much of the imprint of trauma is in a very primitive survival part of your brain that just picks up what's dangerous and what's safe.

And when you're traumatized, that little part of your brain, which is usually very quiet, continues to just send messages.

The problem then becomes that you are not able to engage or to learn or to see other people's point of view or to coordinate your feelings with your thinking.

That event itself is over, but your body keeps mobilizing itself to fight.

You have all kinds of immunological abnormalities and endocrine abnormalities, and that really devastates your physical health also.

I get asked this question of, geez, I haven't meditated.

The first thing is to simply breathe in and out consciously.

Think about the air going through your nose and exhaling through your mouth.

And once you've done that for a period of time, then you suddenly realize the very nature of that action and the consistency of that, you're no longer having that same emotional response or you're not starting to listen to that dialogue.

So when you stop the DJ and then change the dialogue to one that is nurturing, supportive of yourself, your physiology changes, and then the manner in which you react or interact with other people becomes completely different.

One of the largest mitigating factors against getting traumatized is who is there for you at that particular time.

When, as a kid, you get bitten by a dog, it's really very scary and very nasty.

But if your parents pick you up and say, oh, I see that you're really in bad shape.

That dog bite doesn't become a big issue because the foundation of your safety has not been destroyed.

Think about that anxiety that is most familiar to you.

All you have to do is notice when others might be suffering from that same form of anxiety and here's your superpower.

All you have to do is give a kind word, a simple helping hand in that situation.

And it changes not only that other person, it changes the entire environment around you.

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3 doctors explain how to reframe your trauma, anxiety, and internal dialogue

anxiety

cognitive

extraordinary

approach