Listen to the full 10% Happier podcast episode with neurobiologist Dr. Bruce Perry and Dr. Bianca Harris wherever you get your podcasts. #trauma #emdr #treatment #therapy #anxiety #depression

Can somebody define EMDR? EMDR stands for eye movement and desensitization and reprocessing. It's a therapeutic technique that involves moving your eyes from one side to the next at a certain rhythm while you were thinking about the traumatic event. And so the idea is to sort of bring the traumatic event to mind, then you start to feel uncomfortable and distressed, and then you do this short-circuiting activity. When you experience a traumatic event, your brain creates a memory, and then you also, even lower in the brain, your body literally retain elements that recreate the physiological state of fear. So literally 20 years later, you can see a picture of something like a car accident that you might've been in, and your heart rate will go up. That's the tiny little residual memory. But the thing about EMDR that's really cool is that what they help you do is short-circuit the default to that distressful part of the memory, because when you do pattern repetitive rhythmic activity, you're activating a much more powerful memory that was built into your brain in utero when your brain was making an association between being safe, not cold, not hungry, not thirsty, because you're in utero, and hearing, and so replicating that, that's more powerful than the physiological shred of that trauma memory.