Anxiety? Process Your Emotions with EBT

Sometimes the most natural solution is the best one. You have an emotional brain with beautiful resilience pathways, but there is a ticket of admission for using them.

You don't need that ticket in low stress, as feelings are tame ("homeostatic"), but in times of climate change, war, emptiness, and STRESS, they go wild ("allostatic"), the brain goes offline, and we are in anxiety.

Enter EBT. It's a way to take wild and wooly emotions and transform them into flowing feelings that turn stress into joy.

It's so strange that a health company CEO told me she didn't know how to categorize our app.

I asked, "What do you mean?"

She said, "I have never had that emotional spiraling up experience before. It's not cognitive. It's not mindfulness."

I said, "Then what?"

She said, "It's EBT."

Some time ago, my genetics caught up with me. I was born with an extra nerve in my heart. My mom was, too, so we would experience supraventricular tachycardia and, for me, it meant "no caffeine, chocolate, stress," etc., and if my heart started to race, hitting the floor and using EBT to stop it.

Sometimes that worked, but it was pretty bad. One time I was giving a talk at the public health department at 9th and Market. All the public health officers were in uniform and we were crammed into a room when my rapid heart rate started.

It was rather grim, as I finished the talk, walked down to the first floor, and found a bathroom stall. I hit the floor but was now 45 minutes into the episode and far too late to "catch it." I found my way to Market Street, asked a homeless man to wave down a cab, and we raced off to the closest hospital. To this day, I don't know which one.

They applied an electrical charge through my body and $1800 later I was back to normal and feeling relieved and elated. I had made it!

That "wave" is what happens with EBT. It is a LOT more subtle, but it's a wave that flows through the body and gives you a sense that the world is not so bad after all. I think of it as an emotional wave.

That's my best attempt today to try to explain EBT!