Welcome everybody! Today we're going to be discussing using a strengths-based biopsychosocial approach to addressing anxiety. So what are we going to do? We're going to define a strengths-based approach, we'll define a biopsychosocial approach, and then we're going to talk about how that applies to anxiety. Why do we care? Well, there are a lot of reasons why we might care about anxiety because partly it can be debilitating. People who have generalized anxiety disorder or social anxiety or panic disorder can find themselves unable to participate in things like they want to do, which can negatively impact their self-esteem. There's a whole bunch of things. Anxiety also impacts how you sleep. So if you have a high level of anxiety, you may not be sleeping as well. Anxiety is anxious. Eventually it sort of desensitizes to that. So anxiety will go to sort of apathy. So what you normally would feel as anxiety is just now kind of normal for you. Low-grade chronic stress and anxiety erodes your ability to concentrate and your energy. When you're stressed out even, you know, a little bit, it makes things harder. It makes it harder to concentrate. It makes it harder to focus on what you have to do and get it done in a timely manner. Anxiety can be a major trigger for addiction relapse, increased physical pain, and sleep problems. Now we already talked about sleep problems. Increased physical pain mainly because when we get anxious, sometimes we carry tension in our head, our neck, our shoulders, get headaches, and it can cause gastrointestinal upset. So you have muscle aches, headaches, and tummy aches. And addiction relapse. Well, if you're having difficulty dealing with life on life's terms and you need something to help you escape or relax, guess what? That may be somewhere that you end up looking. So what does strength based mean? Well, it's easier and more effective to build upon something that already works to some extent. Instead of saying, okay, I am going to teach you this experiential technique, asking somebody in the past when you have tried to deal with something like this, and it's been, you know, it's worked a little bit. Tell me what you did. You know, if somebody was mildly depressed before when they wake up and they're having a bad day and they're feeling kind of blue, what do they do? All right, now they've got clinical depression. So that is probably not going to be the ultimate solution. But we can say, All right, let's look at what you did when you felt blue, and let's figure out how we can build on that to deal with this more intense level of dysfunction or anxiety or whatever it is. A strength based approach helps people identify how they're already trying to cope and builds on it.  What were you doing? What helped? And what didn't? Because we shouldn't bang our heads into the wall and keep trying to do what isn't working. Let's focus on what is working. And understanding that there are two types of strengths, your prevention or your resilience strengths are the things that you do on a daily basis to stay healthy and happy. We've talked in the in the past about vulnerabilities. Basically, prevention and resilience strengths are preventing those vulnerabilities. They're keeping you rested. They're keeping you unstressed. They're keeping you organized in order to be able to have enough energy to deal with curveballs when they come your way. Intervention and coping strengths are those strengths that you have that help you deal with the curveballs when they come your way. So when that happened, you say, All right, in the past, when you have felt anxious, what has helped what made it worse? What do you usually do? Because sometimes we will go to fallbacks that don't necessarily help. But it's just what we've always done. So we want to sort through and kind of make three piles of this helps, this makes it worse. And this doesn't do much of anything. A biopsychosocial approach means we're going to address the person as a whole. Neurochemicals, nutrition, sleep, and sunlight and circadian rhythms. We know that neurochemicals are responsible for causing the feelings of depression or anxiety or hypervigilance. Those neurochemicals send us signals out to our brain. Now, we can monkey up those neurochemicals by not giving our body enough building blocks to make the neurochemicals by having negative thought patterns that always keep us on alert. Because if we're thinking negatively, we're telling our body there's a threat. The body says, Okay, you're telling me there's a threat. So I'm going to keep sending out all of your fight or flight chemicals. So we can actually think ourselves into a neurochemical imbalance. So I said nutrition, sleep, you need to rest, you know, even if you don't need to build building blocks or whatever you need to do, we all need downtime to rest. And sunlight and circadian rhythms help the body keep the natural ebb and flow of serotonin and all those other chemicals that tell you, Okay, it's morning. Let's secrete some norepinephrine. It's time to be awake. And okay, it's evening. Let's secrete some serotonin. It's time to start getting ready for bed. Your body naturally does this. And when you start monkeying with it, it gets confused. And we've talked before about how, you know, daylight savings time can really kick you in the butt. But when you change your sleep routines, it takes your body a while to catch up, which is why some people have a really hard time adjusting to time zone changes when they travel, or, you know, simple things, even just one hour like daylight savings time can really throw some people kind of out of whack. Psychological, mindfulness, distress, tolerance, coping skills, and cognitive restructuring. These are some of the things that we can look at to help people psychologically help people change the thoughts that may be disrupting their neurochemicals and their sleep and everything else. And then socially, we want to help people improve their self esteem, their relationship with their self so they can feel okay without having to have somebody else tell them they're okay. This relieves a lot of stress and a lot of depression for people. If they're like, you know, I'm okay, even if you don't like my choices. When people self esteem is low, they're spending more time being hyper vigilant, trying to figure out what everybody else wants them to be. And then we want to move on. Once they've got a good relationship with themselves, and they know what they want, what they need and what their boundaries are, and maybe how to communicate effectively. Then we want to work on approving relationships with healthy, supportive others. And this doesn't mean everybody. We want to focus on those, you know, one, three, five people that they consider healthy, supportive other people.  So you're not going to find somebody that is the picture of mental health. If you do, I want to meet them. But we want to focus on those people that our clients find energizing, compassionate and supportive. Because our social relationships help us experience pleasure, but also help buffer us against stress. So what's anxiety? Anxiety is half of the fight or flight response. When your body perceives a threat, it says, Okay, well, can I take it? Am I going to fight? Or do I need to get away from here? Because it's either not worth my energy, or there's no way I can win this. Fight or flight? Now, when we think about it, a lot of our clients come to us, and they're talking to us about anxiety in terms of things that really aren't actual threats. They're anxious about what their boss is going to say when they go in for their annual evaluation. Fight or flight? How is that a causing the fight or flight response? Why is this raising up to the level of telling your body there's a threat? What's the threat about? Helping people understand their negative self talk and understand why they're perceiving things as threats is half the battle in many cases. Anxiety is an excitatory response. It says, Hello, get up, get off the sofa and do something, fight or flee. You've got to do something about it. Anxiety is a natural response telling you that you either need to change the way you're thinking about something, change the something, or do something else. You're not supposed to just sit there and go, Oh, wow, this is really worrisome. Anxiety's function is to protect you from danger. Now, again, we think fight or flight, we think cavemen, we think danger, we think death. But there's a lot of other danger out there that people are trying to escape from. When we talk about danger to self, you know, to our self esteem, if we fear rejection, isolation, failure at the unknown or loss of control. I've brought up those fears before. And when we look at what people are anxious about, a lot of times we can fit it loosely into one of those categories. They may be anxious about a meeting an interview that they've got coming up. Why are they anxious? Well, they are putting themselves in a position where they may be facing rejection. They are being evaluated. And they have very little control over how that interview goes. So yeah, I can see why you would be anxious. The question is, is it beneficial to use this energy to be anxious about it? Or what can you do to quell that anxiety? A lot of times it comes down to positive self talk about if I don't get this job is not the end of the world. If I don't do well in this interview, I can learn from it. Trying to find the positive alternative. So we need to ask people when you get anxious about something, you know, before your first day of school, before our first date before an interview, how did you deal with that anxiety so you could face the challenge, encourage people to look at things as challenges instead of threats. One of the problems with anxiety is it can become over generalized. So every time you hear a car door slam, you get stressed out because you figure that the cops are coming to arrest your significant other or you know, I'm working for examples here. Anytime you take something and it becomes over generalized, you see someone and you have a transference reaction. And it becomes every single person that has these characteristics is going to cause you fear. Then it can be anxiety provoking. When anxiety is overly intense or uncontrollable. Sometimes we have situations that yeah, they deserve to provoke a little anxiety just like that job interview. On a scale of one to 10, a job interview should probably warrant like a three in terms of anxiety. But if you're responding with a nine or a 10, we need to look at why that anxiety is so intense and potentially uncontrollable. When I was pregnant with actually both of my children, I had something called superventricular tachycardia, which meant that if I sat for too long, all the blood would pool in my feet. And I would have basically what most people would think of as a panic attack.  So I became very, very anxious about having to drive anywhere. I knew where every place was along my route that I could stop if I started getting tunnel vision. The nice thing was, as soon as I had the baby, that went away and I didn't have that problem anymore. And the doctor had told me as soon as you have the baby, the biggest cure for this is just, you know, not being pregnant. So as soon as I had the child, that went away and I was able to drive again. But when I got pregnant with a second child, before it was even happening, I expected it to happen. So I started getting anxious about, okay, when am I going to start having these episodes? It's important for clients to understand where their anxiety is coming from. And again, address whether is this even a realistic thing to be concerned about right now?  How are you going to deal with it? Or do you just need to let it go? And then anxiety can also be constant, if you will. Some people have low grade anxiety because they have some sort of a brain injury or biological neurochemical imbalance. It's hard to tell what percentage of the population because so much of our bodily reaction is due to how we perceive things. If we perceive a threat, our body is going to react as if there is a threat. So our cognitions play such an important part. It's hard to tell for the majority of the people with anxiety disorders, whether they have a organic issue going on, or you know, a lot of it is sort of a learned behavior. The nice thing is, you can ferret it out and balance it out as you go through treatment. Like depression, anxiety can be caused by excess serotonin. So we don't want to just assume that you know, if somebody's anxious, it means they don't have enough serotonin. Or if somebody's depressed, it means they don't have enough serotonin. So we do want to make sure that again, people don't just start going off willy-nilly and trying to bolster neurochemicals without understanding exactly what's going on. And we want them to be able to talk to their doctor. One of the things they have as a side effect on a lot of those SSRIs is it may increase anxiety. Well, you know, why is that? If you already have high levels of serotonin and you increase the serotonin levels anymore, it may increase your anxiety or your stress response. So it's important for people to be able to talk with their doctor and say, is this something that'll go away after I get used to the medication? Or is this not the right medication for me? So symptoms of generalized anxiety. And I'm going to go through this really fast because most of you are very familiar with diagnosis of generalized anxiety disorder. But we do want to talk about how this may impact clients, persistent worrying or obsession about smaller, large concerns that's out of proportion to the impact of the event. So when clients come to us and they say, I am stressed out constantly, my first thing is to say, okay. First, let's make a list of all the things that are stressing you out right now. Let me get a snapshot of what's stressing you out. And then let's talk about constantly. My guess is there are times when you're not as stressed out, what's different than highlighting those accept exceptions. And then we'll look at those stressors and look at why they're causing somebody stress or why they're worrying about them and what they could do instead of just constantly worrying and thinking about it. Worrying does no good. It just burns up energy. It's like sitting at a stoplight with your foot like pressed down on the gas. You're going nowhere.  Inability to set aside or let go of worry. Inability is what we want to focus on here. Most people can decide at a certain point that they want to let go of worry and say this is not, I'm just going to let this go because I can't deal with it right now. There are some people, especially once you get to generalized anxiety disorder, they can't just say, you know what, I'm just not going to worry about that right now. It's obsessive. So having them identify ways they deal with that so they can go to sleep so they can focus on something else, have them identify why it's so hard to let go of it. What will happen if you're not worried about this? Is there going to be a catastrophic event? Explore that with them because they may be holding on to it because they're afraid something worse is going to happen if they don't worry about it. Inability to relax, restlessness, feeling keyed up and or on edge. If your body is constantly sending out those stress chemicals, guess what? You're going to feel keyed up or on edge. Difficulty concentrating, feeling that your mind goes blank. When you've got that many things going through your head. Think about it this way. Imagine you are at a place where they make honey. And there are just hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of bees around. And you know, I love bees. I'm not allergic to them. So it doesn't freak me out. You don't know which ones might be a threat to you and which ones might not be a threat to you. People with generalized anxiety may have racing thoughts and they're just kind of swarmed by those thoughts like the bees that are buzzing around your head. And you don't know which ones are going to be a threat and which ones aren't. So you're trying to focus on all of them. How exhausting is that? And how difficult is it to go, okay, I'm going to choose this one, this one and this one. But what if I choose wrong? So second, guessing yourself about the choices. Carrying every option in a situation all the way out to its possible negative conclusion. We've talked before about playing the tape all the way through, which is true. But sometimes you play that tape all the way through and there's a positive conclusion. People with generalized anxiety disorder almost always end up playing it out and find the bottom falling out or the sky falling down or whatever you want to say. And difficulty handling uncertainty or indecisiveness. That fear of lack of control, if I can't control what's going on, that fear of being out of control, I'm going to get more anxious because whatever is going on in my life, I'm trying to hold on to and trying to control. I'm not able to control my own anxiety right now and not able to control other things that are going on. We want to look at that. Have people keep a log of what stresses them out?  You know, the top 10 things that stressed me out today. And how did you deal with them? Bring that in. Let's look over it. Let's see what worked, what didn't, what we might be able to do differently. I'm going to throw out suggestions with my clients. I'm going to say, well, have you tried this? Or you know, it sounds like this works for you. What if we modified it a little bit and you tried doing it this way? And I tell them from jump, if I give you a suggestion and you're like, no, there's no way in the world, I'm going to do that. Tell me. There is no sense me keeping trying to get you to do something that you have no motivation or desire to do because you don't believe it'll work.  Physical symptoms of generalized anxiety. Remember, we keep talking about this interaction between mind and body. Our thoughts can tell our body there's a threat. Our body will then respond with a stress response. The stress response keeps us keyed up and on edge, which makes us irritable, gives us muscle tension, because you know, you're sitting there, you're kind of like the Chihuahua on the side of the boxing ring or something. I watch way too much Bugs Bunny. Anyway, you can only be that keyed up for so long before you start getting exhausted, trembling and feeling twitchy, being easily startled. If you're sitting there and you're waiting for something to happen and all of a sudden somebody slams the door, what's going to happen? You'll probably jump out of your skin. Trouble sleeping because you can't turn down those stress chemicals.  So your body keeps saying, okay, let's prepare, let's prepare, let's prepare. Sweating, nausea, diarrhea or irritable bowel syndrome and headaches with kids. And I thought it was important to put this in there because kids are, you know, their own unique little individuals, they may have excessive worry about performance at school or sporting events, being on time, punctuality, they're worried that if they're late, somebody's going to be very angry with them. They may stress a lot about catastrophic events like earthquakes or nuclear war, tornadoes, hurricanes.  Knowing what to do when there's an earthquake, that's good. Knowing what to do if there's a house fire, that's good. Talk with it, talk with the children about what does it mean if you're not on time? What does this punctuality, why is this so important? A child or teen with generalized anxiety disorder may also feel overly anxious to fit in. They want to be accepted and they're hyper-vigilant to any signs of rejection.  They're not going to be happy until they get 100% A+++. They may lack confidence in themselves, which contributes to them trying to be a perfectionist and fit in because they're looking for other people to say, you know what, you're okay. They strive for approval and may require a lot of reassurance about performance. Likewise, they also may be very self conscious about sharing anything because they're afraid of any sort of criticism, constructive or otherwise. So biological interventions. Now we're down to the fun part. Your body thinks there's a threat. Figure out why. What is it that you are stressed out about? What are the threats? I am worried about. I am stressed out about. Sometimes anxiety is hard to put your finger on or for some people to put their finger on. So have them run through a litany of other synonyms to figure out all of the things that are causing them anxiety, stress, worry, anxiety, you know, ask them what's going on in your life that's bothering you. Then you can start to address it and figure out, okay, is this a realistic threat? You know, if so, what can you do about it? Is this something that you are worried about from something in your past? Then we can deal with it. This is where, you know, our tools come in handy, helping people figure out how to deal with the threat. In the meantime, supportive care means creating a sleep routine so the person can rebalance, repair adrenal fatigue and improve their adrenaline levels, improve their energy levels. That's easier said than done. But a sleep routine will help start queuing the body that it's time to wind down. So what can they do to a queue their body it's time to wind down, have two or three things they do before bed every night, you know, the last hour leading up to it. And how can they feel safe when they go to sleep, where they're not afraid of whatever they're worried about will get out of control while they're sleeping. Sometimes keeping a pad by their bed so they can write stuff down as they think about it keeps them from bouncing it around in their head all night long. Meditation, calming imagery. There's a lot of different interventions that may work for different people and it's important for them to be able to try some things out and communicate what helps them calm down. I'm a big fan of cute progressive muscular relaxation. You know, think back. You may be scratching your head going, what is that? When you're in school, and you came in and you sat down and you were waiting for class to begin. And the teacher said, everybody clear your desks and get out of pencil.  It's a pop quiz. And you had an anxiety reaction.  They're like, what are you talking about? That phrase has been conditioned to elicit a stress response. So the question is, why are you stressed out about it? Okay, it's a pop quiz. If you're stressed out because you haven't prepared, well, that's one thing. And that's something you can address. If you're stressed out because it's just unpredicted and wasn't in your control, what kind of positive self talk can you do to counter that anxiety? I studied, I've done all my work. This quiz can only be worth 5% of my grade. Yeah, those are the things I used to tell myself. But helping people understand that they can train their body to react with stimulation or with relaxation through cues. If you think about going somewhere and you automatically get excited, that's your body responding to that cue. If you're driving down, driving down the street, and all of a sudden you see a cop car coming up behind you with his lights on, and your heart starts to race, that may be a cue for you, you may have associated that with past things. So these are all things that we want people to understand our triggers, but also cues that tell their body there's a threat of some sort. Minimizing caffeine and other stimulants is really important, especially if somebody has anxiety issues, especially six hours before bed. Caffeine has a six hour half-life, which means it takes 12 hours to get out of your system. So if you drink, you know, if you go to Starbucks at two in the afternoon, all that caffeine is not out of your system until at least two in the morning, which means that first four or six hours of sleep you're getting isn't as restful as it could be. Try to prevent spikes and drops in blood sugar. I was bad when I was in college, my meals when I was on campus were almost always M&M's, which is horrible. You know, that's a spike in blood sugar and then it crashes and then I was going back to get more M&M's to get through the next class until I got home. Don't don't do what I did. Try to plan meals every three to four hours that have something in them that is, you know, nutritional, not just chocolate. Drink enough water. People who don't drink enough water tend to feel and if they have changes in blood sugar, both conditions may cause people to feel a little bit shaky. When your blood sugar gets really low, you may get really shaky. In people with anxiety, they may mistake this for the onset of a panic attack and work themselves up into a full blown panic attack. Things to be aware of.   Medications, SSRIs, SNRIs have been used to address serotonin and norepinephrine imbalances. Those are typically the first line because benzodiazepines are so easily abusable. But some people may need to be on benzos, at least for a short course until the SSRIs or SNRI kicks in. That's obviously between them and their doctor. Sunlight, my favorite vitamin D deficiency has been implicated in some mood issues, mainly depression, but, you know, 15 minutes, three times a day, not during the peak hours, doesn't really hurt anybody. It prompts the skin to tell the brain to produce the neurotransmitters it needs to. It says hello, it's time to be awake, time to turn on the factory. Sunlight sets circadian rhythms, which impact the release of serotonin, melatonin, and GABA. Again, in the morning, you don't want to be groggy. You want your body to say, hey, let's get up and go. So let's secrete the get up and go, um, neuro chemicals. In the evening, you want to start secreting the calming neurochemicals. But without the sunlight telling it, okay, it's daytime, it's time to be awake. A lot of times your body doesn't really realize that. I've determined that my rooster doesn't realize that either, because he starts crowing at 415 in the morning, and it doesn't matter what time of year it is, it is not light at 415 in the morning.  Exercise. Studies have shown that exercise can have a relaxing effect, but start slowly. If you go in and try to run a 5k your first day at the gym, you're going to hurt. That's not relaxing. That's painful. You can also find that exercise may increase exhaustion. If you've got a lot of anxiety or some PTSD stuff going on, there is some research that indicates that people with those types of symptoms may have adrenal fatigue. So if they're going in and they're exercising on top of that, they're just making potentially making it worse. If exercise makes it worse, if it makes you exhausted, don't do it. Talk to your doctor. Exercise should not make you exhausted, especially if you're starting slowly. But that can also be a clue that something is a little bit wonky with thyroid hormones or adrenal hormones of some sort. Psychological interventions, we want to help people identify and address their basic fears. If you're afraid of failure, you know, none of us likes to fail. But if you're afraid of it, if it terrifies you, let's talk about it. Where does that come from? And how can you deal with it? Because you're going to fail.  You're going to fail at some things. So how can you look at it from an optimistic point of view as a learning experience or, you know, what can you do with it? Another thing that I ask clients to do sometimes they're like, I don't know what I can do with it. You know, I'm just I've always been terrified of failure and I don't see that going away. I said, okay, what would you tell your child?  What would you tell them?  Probably not. What would you tell them about failure? If they try out for the football team and they don't make it and they're all depressed. What do you tell them about that? Encourage them to say, take that same compassion that they would use for their child or their sister or whomever and turn it back on themselves because a lot of times they're their own worst enemies. Rejection and isolation. Yeah, you know, we're social creatures. So rejection hurts. People don't want to be rejected. However, sometimes it's going to happen. What does that mean when you're rejected? What does that mean if you can't control another person?  Nobody can control another person. What does that mean about that person if they reject you? And why do you need that person's approval? This may come down to needing to develop your own self esteem so you don't rely on others to give you your all your validation. It also may come back down to trying to replay something from your past. Maybe your alcoholic father, you couldn't help recover and he, you know, ended up dying of, you know, alcoholism. And then you end up marrying an alcoholic and you want to try to fix them and you're not able to fix them either. You perceive that as a rejection because you're not able to control them. So having people understand what they're identifying as rejection, what that rejection means to them and whether it's important, some people are going to reject you because they've got stuff and it's more about them than it is about you. Do you need that kind of negativity in your life? Obviously, I'm being sort of flip in the in the presentation. There are you're going to approach that with a compassionate tone with with your clients but helping them take a look at what rejection means to them. Loss of control. Loss of control is something that I talk about with my clients a lot of times. The serenity prayer is something that we use in recovery. Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference. Hello, the difference that tells us there are some things we can't control. I can't control other people and I can't control the weather.  When I start to get stressed out or angry about something, figuring out if it's something that I even have any control over. And if I don't, then I got to figure out how I'm going to deal with it. And if I do, then I need to figure out a if it's worth my energy to deal with and be what to do about it too many times when there's some stuff in our life that's out of control, we try to control the uncontrollable trying to move a house 10 feet over the property line by pushing on it with your shoulder is never going to work. And that's what basically you're doing if you're trying to control something that you have no control over. That's a big step for a lot of people. And especially when it comes to controlling others, whether it be their children, their spouse, their boss, understanding that it's not all about them, that that person has to want to do whatever it is and the unknown. Some people deal with it better than others. Some people really don't like surprises. Some people get very excited about them. So, you know, it depends on your client, what's going to cause them stress. But these are things that you can explore with them. Once they start figuring out what their fears are, then helping them move into how to deal with them. Mindfulness and acceptance starts out with observation. How am I feeling? Am I anxious? Am I angry? Am I worried? What label am I going to give to it? Accepting that they feel that way. And then letting go of it. They don't have to act on it right then, unless it's like an imminent threat. It's also important to identify trigger thoughts because you may not even be in a situation when you're feeling this emotion. You may be anticipating it. Or you may have a trigger thought, understanding what you're feeling when you start to feel X-Way, that that's your anxiety. So what caused it? What trigger thoughts? What things did you tell yourself that started your body believing that there was a threat? And then to stress tolerance, it's not always about controlling your anxiety. I know that seems counterintuitive. Sometimes you just have to ride the wave. Sometimes, yeah, like going into a job interview, you are very anxious and trying to control it may make you focus on it more, which may make it worse. So riding the wave in and out. Distract yourself. You don't have to react. You're worried about your job interview or and it's at one in the afternoon. What can you do between now and one? So you're not just sitting around thinking about all the things that could go wrong. And then use distancing techniques. Step out of that situation.  See yourself succeeding in the interview. See yourself going through sort of a dry run of the interview. Relaxation skills. First, people have to understand what relaxation is. Too many people confuse recreation with relaxation. Sometimes they're the same, but not always. Relaxation is actually slowing your body down, slowing your respirations, slowing your heart rate, reducing the muscle tension. Diaphragmatic breathing is one way to start. Combat breathing is where you inhale on a count of three. You hold for a count of three and you exhale for a count of three. And you do that a couple of times. What does this do? Well, when we get stressed out, when we get anxious, we start breathing rapidly and shallowly. By breathing in this manner, we're breathing deeply and slowly. So our body goes, oh, there may not be a threat. So the heart rate starts to slow down. The heart rate starts to slow down. The neurochemicals respond going, okay, threat's gone. Meditation, you know, I put in combat breathing because not everybody can or is willing to practice meditation. And, you know, there are a lot of reasons for that. Meditation is great if that's something that you can do. A lot of people with generalized anxiety have a really hard time with meditation at first because they can't slow down their thoughts.  Start with something slow. Then move on to meditation. Maybe guided imagery. Maybe, you know, there are a variety of different meditation techniques that you can explore with your clients. And then, as I mentioned earlier, cube progressive muscular relaxation. Train your body or have your clients train their bodies to respond to a cube like relax or it's going to be okay. Something that can help them calm down and slow their breathing and go, okay, I got this. Help them work on their self-esteem so they're not looking to others for validation. They're not as afraid of failure because they look at failure as an opportunity to learn instead of a ding against their personal image. Having them examine the difference between their real self, who they are, all their characteristics and who they think they should be. This is an activity I do in group a lot with clients and we look at the ideal self and go, okay, how many of these characteristics are necessary? You know, and of the ones that are left that are necessary, how can we work on them? Maybe in your real self, you're not very patient and in your ideal self, you're just as patient as I'll get out. How can you work on that? Now, let's work on developing that and problem solving instead of just feeling bad and going, oh, I'm never going to be the person I should be. Let's do something about it. Encourage people to develop compassionate self-talk. Like I said earlier, most people are their own worst enemies. So ask them, what are you telling yourself about this interview or about this date or about this, whatever it is that you're worried about? What does it mean about you? And most of the time, they'll tell you something that's pretty harsh.  Encourage people to be compassionate with themselves when they're anxious. Sometimes you wake up and you're stressed out and that's just the way it is. Being compassionate with themselves and going, okay, it's going to be a long day today. Understanding that and understanding that they're already somewhat keyed up on edge. So they don't need to take on extra stuff right now. And then have them spotlight their strengths and figure out how to accept imperfections. And that's a big step for a lot of people. Spotlighting strengths is not as hard, but accepting imperfections takes some people a while because they want to be perfect and helping them understand that nobody's perfect may come before they can accept imperfections, encouraging them to look at people they care about and have them list that person's strengths and their imperfections and hey, you don't love them any less because they've got some. Do you? Cognitive restructuring, one of my favorite things address irrational thoughts and cognitive distortions. You can Google those. You've heard me talk about those enough, but before we can really start feeling like there's not a threat, we have to address these thought patterns. Reframe challenges or threats in terms of current strengths, not past weaknesses. So if somebody has been in relationships before, maybe they have a long history of abandonment and they feel like they are unworthy of being in a relationship. Explore with them prior abandonment issues prior times when people have left like maybe when their biological parent put them up for adoption and how that's impacting them now. You know, when you were six months old, you couldn't do anything and that had nothing to do with you. Let's look at this current situation. What control do you have in this situation? And how are you recreating past issues that don't need to be recreated? When children are small, they don't have the same coping skills and things that we think probably shouldn't bother a grown up. You know, likely bother a kid. That's okay. They're not supposed to be able to deal with everything. But if you're 25 and you're still reacting like you're five, we need to look at how are you different now? You're older, you're wiser, you have other coping skills, you have other strengths. So instead of reacting this way, how can you use your current strengths? Because you have a lot more to work with now. Create an and I use this a lot in terms of helping people who are going through recovery. Maybe they lost their children. While they were in their active addiction. And they're working on getting their their kids back. And I hear a lot of ambivalence and fear that they're not going to be a good parent. And that they might relapse and all that stuff. And we start looking at how are you different now than you were six months ago? The stuff that bothered you six months ago, you didn't have the tools to deal with. What tools do you have to deal with it now? And encourage them to look at how much they've grown. Have them create an attitude of gratitude and optimism. This can be really annoying for some people. But I encourage them to try it even if it is annoying. Creating a list of things they're grateful for or every time they have a negative thought, they need to follow it up with a positive thought. This really stinks but at least blah, blah, blah. And then acceptance and commitment therapy and I encourage you to go online and look at on the YouTube channel. You can Google the ACT matrix and there are a bunch of videos on how to use this. I'm just going to go over it real briefly here. In the act matrix, he basically talks about how on the top of the axis it's five senses. The bottom of the axis is mental. So the we're looking at how you're experiencing things bodily, you know, through smell, touch, you know, physical reactions and how you're experiencing it mentally. So something is going on and you want to consider how you're feeling it in your body and how you're thinking about it. And then you ask yourself is this reaction moving me toward my goals? Or away from my goals and why? And it gets a lot more complicated than that. But when clients start getting really stressed out and they stop and they go, okay, I'm trembling. I'm sweating. I can't think straight. I'm having a difficult time putting one foot in front of the other. I'm terrified that this is going to go south. And they say, okay, now is this moving me toward my goal of getting this job? Or are all these reactions and negative thoughts moving me away? Pretty simple answer. It's a quick check up. Is it moved? Is this whatever this is that's going on moving me toward or away from my ultimate goals? Recreation and relaxation. You know, I said people sometimes confuse the two. Recreation is important too. There's always going to be stuff that you can do. There's always going to be stuff in your inbox. There's always going to be chores that need to be done, baseboards that need to be touched up, whatever, you know, goes on at your house. There's not always going to be time when your kids are small. There's not always going to be pretty days outside where you can go out and not sweat the moment you walk out of the door. So make a list of fun things and sort of schedule it in. Make sure you're doing something fun at least a few times a week. I try to encourage people to do something fun every day, even if it's just for 15 minutes, because this increases your happy chemicals. It increases relaxation because when you're happy, you start to relax. And it also generally will increase your your positive attitude and willingness and ability to deal with other people, which takes us to social interventions. A lot of times people with high anxiety have so much such a low self-esteem and they're so worried about rejection that they don't identify their own needs and wants. They don't even much like themselves. So first, they've got to improve their relationship with theirself identifying what do they need in a relationship? What do they need in the here and now that whole mindfulness stuff? And then how can they be their own best friend? What would you want your best friend to do for you right now? Well, do it for yourself. If you would want your best friend to take you out for ice cream. Well, go out for ice cream then. Help them understand the difference between internal and external validation.  Go well. Yep. I made a mistake there. Guess I need to learn from it.  Once they're compassionate with themselves and once they know what they need, once they know what they want, once they are able to set their boundaries and go, this is what I like. And if you don't like it, help Tiddlywinks. Then they can start working on healthy supportive relationships and developing assertiveness skills. It doesn't mean you always get your own way. You know, five friends want to go out to dinner and you want to go to Italian and three of them want to go for Southern cooking and you know, whatever. You may not win. You said what you wanted and then you can make the choice at that point. Are you going to go with them to wherever they decide to go? Or are you going to go by yourself for Italian? That doesn't necessarily mean that you're throwing a hissy fit. Being assertive means taking care of your own needs. Most of the time people are probably just going to say, okay, we'll do Italian next time. Compromise. Describe the ideal healthy supportive relationship and separate the ideals from the reels. Relationships, you know, we create these images, you know, that we see on television that we read about in books that we create in our own mind of this perfect relationship. But they don't exist. So what is it that you need in a relationship? And how can you nurture that in the relationships that you've got? And or where can you find that? In people that you may not have met yet. Maybe there are hiking clubs or somewhere where you can meet people with similar interests that share similar values. New Harbinger has a bunch of resources that I really like. Matthew McKay and Edmund Bourne are probably my two of my favorite authors from that particular publisher. The Anxiety and Phobia Workbook ACT therapy for Anxiety. The Anxiety Food Solution does talk a lot about some of the stuff we've discussed in prior presentations about having a healthy diet, three colors on your plate and eating the foods to provide the building blocks so your body can do what it needs to do. Coping with Anxiety 10 simple ways. Obviously that's one of those sort of Cliff Notes books but it gives people somewhere to start. And I really really like the 30 minute therapy for Anxiety because it provides tons and tons of different tools for people to try out. Takes 30 minutes each day. They try it out. Find the ones that work. Don't use the ones that don't. Encourage your clients to go online. They can get the Google book preview if they want to look and see if any of these seem like they'll fit for them. Obviously we're not going through a bunch of techniques in this particular course so I wanted to make sure that you had resources you could reach out to to make sure your clients had the resources that they needed. So thinking about the past week thinking about what the situation was that caused the anxiety and you can ask this of your clients to if you go over some tools and techniques for dealing with anxiety say what was the situation that caused you stress. What did you do? How effective was that in the long term? If you ran out screaming and crying got you away from the situation but long term probably didn't solve anything with this new information about what causes anxiety and maybe what they need to look at what could they have done differently and would have changed the outcome have them identify two or three things they can do to address their anxiety and talk about how are they going to integrate it into their daily routine. It's important to take it that further step. They can say I'm going to start journaling. I'm going to start exercising and I'm going to start doing something else which is wonderful but I want to know okay how when are you going to do that and how because if you don't make them play the tape all the way out follow it all the way through then a lot of times it gets dumped on the how Anxiety is a natural emotion and it serves a survival function it's saying fight or flee excessive anxiety can develop when somebody doesn't have enough sleep when they don't have building blocks to make the neurochemicals they need because there's a nutritional imbalance other causes of neurochemical imbalances failure to develop adequate coping skills so they're constantly telling theirself the world is bad and threatening cognitive distortions that again generally tell the person the world is bad and threatening or you're going to be alone forever you know whatever the case maybe and low self-esteem or a need for external validation constantly is looking for other people to tell them they're okay that's very anxiety provoking because what if nobody's there if nobody's there to tell you you're okay are you okay it's kind of like if a tree falls in the woods and nobody's there to hear it doesn't make a sound recovery involves improving health behaviors identifying and building on current coping strategies addressing those cognitive distortions and developing healthy supportive and others. So a question comes in about the internet and social media and how it plays in with anxiety. Oh wow that there's volumes there social media well the internet and social media can be a great resource for people with anxiety to join support groups to talk with others who share similar anxieties and phobias but it's also there's a lot of disinhibited discussion which is you know a long way of saying people can be really ugly and nasty so if you already have a low self-esteem and you're looking for validation you're at least equally as likely to get criticism as you are to get validation online so the internet can be a dangerous place but so can anywhere it's about being cognizant of where you're going and what sort of situations you're putting yourself in I mean I think of Facebook is basically like a whole great big social gathering tea party get to know you sort of thing and I don't like those in face to face and I really don't like those online either but there's very little control there's a lot of people talking about stuff and you get half of conversations so it can be very confusing and anxiety provoking for a lot of people to be online if they can find safe places definitely definitely go there and but be aware that it's not always you know any place that was once safe is not always necessarily going to be safe so they need to know how to protect themselves emotionally from potential attacks from others motivational interviewing is useful in my opinion for just about everything because people are not going to start addressing the things that are causing their anxiety their thought patterns unless they're motivated to address them and they're motivated to change them so motivational interviewing really says okay what are the benefits to holding on to this negative thought pattern and what are the drawbacks you know going back to my favorite decisional balance at you know if you let go of this anxiety what might be different and having them increase their own motivation it's not always going to be a picnic and we talk about internal internal validation and not worrying about what others have to say that's not always easy with motivational interviewing we can help people bolster their resolve to not let other people's opinions necessarily influence how they feel so yeah I think cognitive behavioral motivational interviewing dialectical behavioral interventions are all helpful a lot of it depends on your clients some may respond better to more group experiential and group work others may respond better to cognitive behavioral it's just I let my clients lead again by asking them in the past when you've done something that has helped what has it been and that gives me an idea about what approaches might work with them


So, welcome to the 31st session on Signals and Systems and here we continue the story with which we left in the past session. So, recall there was this polyglot who had come to the King's court and who claimed to know several languages and had challenged the courtiers to find out his mother tongue. And of course, the courtiers had to find out a scheme by which they tricked that polyglot into revealing his mother tongue. So, to cut a long story short, what the courtiers did was to look for a time when this visitor or guest as you might call him, a little bit of a troublesome guest was asleep, fast asleep and kept a bucket of cold water ready. As soon as they noticed that this gentleman was comfortable in his sleep, they threw the bucket of cold water on him and you can imagine what happened. He rose suddenly with great discomfort and you can guess in which language he uttered curses his mother tongue. Well, that is in a lighter way, but the message that goes out from there is that in order to reveal something that is very special about a situation or about a person, you need to put the person into a situation where that particular thing becomes important or to put the person into a quote unquote troublesome situation as you might call it. The troublesome situation here is being awoken very rudely with a bucket of cold water. We are going to do something similar to the linear shift invariant system which disobeys or which pretends to disobey absolute summability or absolute integrability and yet claims to be stable. So, in other words, the way we are going to go about proving the necessity of absolute integrability or absolute summability for the stability of a linear shift invariant system is to subject that linear shift invariant system to such a troublesome input. We could force it to reveal if it is stable, it would force it to reveal the absolute summability of its impulse response and therefore, the necessity would be established. So, let us get down to business. Once again, let us begin with the discrete case. So, in the discrete case, we have y of n is equal to summation k going from minus to plus infinity. Well, this time we could write h k or x k first, but we will write h k x of n minus k and remember what we want is to assume that we have a bounded output when the input is bounded. You see, so what do you mean by establishing necessity? Let me explain. See, when you say you want to establish necessity, what are you doing formally? You are saying that you are guaranteed that a bounded output emerges when there is a bounded input and you are showing that as a consequence, if this is to be true for all bounded inputs including the quote unquote troublesome input, then you have no choice but for the impulse response to be absolutely summable in the case of discrete system and absolutely integrable in the case of continuous variable systems. So, let us take the particular expression for the output that we have here and if the output is bounded, we know that the every sample of the output needs to be bounded. In other words, every absolute value of the output sample needs to be strictly less than infinity. So, we can take any particular instance of the output sample. Let us do that here. So, consider specifically n equal to 0, you know you can focus on any particular sample that you desire. So, y of 0 is summation k going from minus to plus infinity h k x of minus k and now let us give the troublesome input that we spoke about. The troublesome input is as follows, put x of minus k is equal to the complex conjugate of h k divided by the magnitude of h k if h k is not equal to 0 and 0 if h k equal to 0. Now, you know I need to explain this. I have written down a formalism there but that does not really convey what I am doing. What I am doing is, I am literally pinching the input everywhere to conform to the impulse response. So, I am taking each term in the summation for y 0 and I am looking at the corresponding point in the impulse response. If that point is 0, I simply make the input 0 then anyway it has no consequence. If that value is non-zero then I put a corresponding input point which will come together with the impulse response to create an absolute sum. So, let us first work it out algebraically and then I will explain it with an informal explanation. So, let us take this input but before that let us take an example to understand this particular formalism. So, the example is as follows. You notice that I have written complex conjugate remember we are allowing complex impulse responses to be most general. So, let us take the following impulse response h n you remember the notation for finite sequences right. So, I will put at 0 the value j 1 plus j at 1 2 plus j at 2 and say 4 minus j at minus 1 and let us stop there. So, this is h n what would be the corresponding x n now take each point here that point is mapped to the corresponding negative point in x n. So, 0 goes to 0 of course but you take minus the complex conjugate divided by the magnitude look at minus 1 and bring it to plus 1. So, take the complex conjugate and divide by the magnitude now let me continue this here take plus 1 and you have 1 minus j divided by mod of 1 minus j and finally, 2 minus j divided by mod of 2 minus j. So, this is the input that we are going to take let us calculate the output in this case the corresponding y 0 is going to have k ranging only from minus 1 to plus 2 h k times h of minus k. So, essentially let us begin with minus 1. So, h of minus 1 which is 4 minus j times x of minus k. So, x of plus 1 4 plus j divided by mod 4 plus j then h of 0 comes next and that is j and x of 0 comes next and that is minus j divided by mod of minus j plus h of 1 comes next and x of minus 1 comes with it and finally, you have h of 2 that is 2 plus j and x of minus 2 comes with it and that is 2 minus j by mod of 2 minus j. Now, what do we have here if you look at it it is very simple it is simply mod 4 minus j the whole squared divided by mod 4 minus j plus mod j the whole squared divided by mod j well I am just writing it down formally you could just simplify this. So, mod 1 plus j divided by I mean mod 1 plus j the whole squared divided by mod 1 plus j plus mod 2 plus j squared divided by mod 2 plus j and that is essentially the absolute sum of h namely mod 4 minus j plus mod j plus mod 1 plus j plus mod 2 plus j have I done here I have given it this troublesome input which forces the absolute sum to come out and of course, you notice that the input is bounded it has to be because it has a finite number of samples and all the samples are bounded and if the output needs to be bounded that absolute sum of the impulse response has to be bounded because the output at 0 is equal to the absolute that is what we have done we have forced the output at a particular point to be equal to the absolute sum of the impulse response. So, we have chosen a particular input which forces the absolute sum of the impulse response to come out at a particular location on the output. Now, you understand very well what is going on you see what was going on when we made this definition here when we made this definition what we were trying to do is to give it that particular troublesome input. So, we were saying essentially choose an input which forces the absolute sum to come out at n equal to 0 in y and of course, here we have taken a little word of caution we have looked at the points where the impulse response is nonzero input a corresponding nonzero point at the negative of that value in the input and wherever the impulse response is 0 anyway that term in the summation is absent. So, we might as well put that quantity equal to 0 in the input. Now, I have shown you how to prove that this condition is sufficient is necessary for the discrete case.  So, now given this particular input we now need to establish in general what happens. So, what happens in general well in general with this choice x of minus k equal to h k complex conjugate divided by mod h k when h k is nonzero and equal to 0 when h k is 0 y of 0 becomes equal summation over all k h k h k complex conjugate divided by mod h k which is summation k going from minus to plus infinity mod h k and this must be bounded this must be finite if y is to be bounded. Notice you know note see y must be bounded because x is bounded note that x is bounded here. In fact, you can find the bound the bound is equal to 1 if you look at the magnitude of this this has a magnitude of 1 and this has a magnitude of 0. So, either x has a magnitude of 1 in its samples or 0. So, clearly x is bounded if the input is bounded you have no choice but the output being bounded if the output is bounded y of 0 must be finite and if y of 0 is finite you have no choice as you see there but that the absolute sum must be finite. And therefore, so essentially this has come out as a consequence of this troublesome input so we have proved for the discrete case that this condition of absolute summability is necessary. Now, the exercise for you which I am going to leave to you is to prove that this condition is necessary in the continuous variable case which can be done by a very similar argument to this and I would like you to do it. Thank you.


TFNN headline news update. Good morning everybody. I'm Tommy O'Brien coming to you live from TFNN, 9 a.m. Eastern time Thursday morning 30 minutes to go until the opening bell and we got markets pulling back a bit the Nasdaq. Why not? Nasdaq holding on to positive prices so far up 44 points trading at 10,849. We have the SMPs negative by one trading at 3263. That's more than 20 points though off the highs. We had overnight of 32,8450. You're looking at a Dow negative by 34 points, 26,849. Gold contract catching a bid but off of the highs as well gold up $5 at 1870. We were a solid almost $18 above there at 1887. Silver contract off 40 cents at 2275. Notes and bonds continuing the trend higher price and lower yield look at that pop. We got weekly jobless claims folks 1.41 million we'll jump over to that in a moment but the market reacting bonds trading higher. We're right now up four ticks we'll call it at 139.21 in the 30 year. You're up a solid 18 ticks, excuse me. That was the 10 year up about four ticks at 139.21 the 30 year up 18 ticks at 18106. All right, we got to jump to the news of the day. We got a lot of news of the day folks. We had Microsoft out with their numbers last night. They're lower but they're off the lows Tesla trading higher this morning. Weekly jobless claims quite a number. So the total 1.416 million they were looking for 1.3 the worry here that's actually a rise over last week. We're not going down. We're actually ticking back up okay. So before COVID we had never had a weekly jobless claim number that exceeded 700,000. Look at these numbers folks even during worst of the worst because it would take some time to play out. You were never getting these numbers. That's the 18th, 18 consecutive week of one plus million jobs initially claimed for weekly initial jobless claims. And we're now dealing about 1.4 million remarkable numbers that number out at 830 this morning in the market reacting Microsoft Microsoft revenue grew 13% despite the coronavirus. But the cloud growth slowed to 47% man the grading curve that these tech stocks are graded on. They grew at 59% for their cloud last quarter. They only grew at 47% this quarter and Microsoft trading a little bit lower this morning. But like I mentioned they're off the lows of about 205 or 208 almost and Tesla shares this morning trading higher at 1660. We also get Intel after the bell Intel up a bit right now at 61 15 and we get the king of them all Amazon as well. Stay tuned folks Larry Pezzavento coming up live right now with trade what you see will be right back in three minutes.


What's the word y'all? It might as well be snoring in this room because ladies and gentlemen, today is my Christmas. From today until mid June, I will do nothing but consume an extreme amount of basketball and I will enjoy every single second. Listen, I love the NBA off-season but the last month of it is always so dreadful. So the fact that we are back and the swing of things is going to be amazing and I got to keep the tradition alive and give y'all my award predictions. You know what, I'm low-key a perfectionist whether it be through life, through video, through my job, I'm a perfectionist. So when I was creating my list of players and I think it went MVP and most improving, yada, yada, I was trying my hardest to get the perfect, perfect players. So I went back and I watched my last year's predictions. Guess what, y'all, I got one thing right. So that kind of eased the pain a little bit when trying to create this list because it don't matter if you're right or wrong right now. It's just an avenue for me to talk about some players but if I do get them right, that is when I gloat in y'all face and say I am great at my job and if I don't get them right, who cares? You know what I'm saying? So this should be amazing. So I mentioned to y'all that we were gonna have a presenting sponsor for the entirety of the 2021-22 season and I am excited to announce that that presenting sponsor is Price Pick. They took daily fantasy and simplified it. I need y'all to hit the link in the description, download the app, use the code Kenny because they are matching all deposits up to $100. That's exactly what me and the homies did. We put 100 in and now we had $200 to play around with but if you aren't in tune, let me showcase exactly what it is. Now the app could not be more simple for y'all, right? You pick two to five players that you decide based on the stats you see if you wanna go over or under. It's you versus these stats. So for example, Kevin Arrant versus the Bucks on national TV, he won a little bit of Revenge. I see that 30.5 and I'm gonna go over on that so he is one of my picks. And you know what? I'm gonna go over for everything but I think this should be two really good games. There are two different ways you can play it though because you might not believe in Yannis' three-pointer, that ain't no problem because if I play Flex, if I get just three out of my four correct, I still walk out a winner. Now if I get them all right, I'm 5x but if I get three out of four, I'm still walking out on top. I got my homies involved. We have a league. We made a prize picks pool and it is a four group check. We're doing nothing but competing against each other. So the way this works, we all started off with $200. Well, basically we started off with a hundred, then we used Co-Kinny and it turned into 200. You know the way it goes. And we're gonna tally to see who wins the most every single month.  So D-Mail started off saying I'm gonna teach y'all how to flip 200 to 200K. We have to laugh at that one because if anybody's gonna make that flip and it's gonna be me. So y'all might be in the same boat because this is their first time hearing about this app and again, they didn't get paid to be in here but Derek says I like this app LOL and somebody emphasized it. I like how you can win when you don't hit everything. So the FlexPlay is huge. I need y'all to hit the link in the description, sign up, use the app and use Co-Kinny because they are matching every single dollar you put in up to $100. Again, PrizePix is gonna be a presenting sponsor around here for a long time. So I need y'all to get in tune and I need y'all to tweet me y'all pics every single day because I'm curious to what y'all thinking. Let's get into awards. Okay, like I said, I thought a lot about this but I didn't go too hard while I'm like I have to necessarily be right. We're gonna start off with my sixth man of the year.  I need you to go ahead and watch the entirety of the video. My sixth man of the year. Some of these things I have like sleeper pics and some of them I just ranked one through three, right? My sleeper pics for sixth man of the year, I have one Homer pic for the entire thing and this is the one I think makes the most sense. It is Alex Caruso for sixth man of the year. Some of that might get taken away once Kobe White comes back from his injury but everything I saw from Alex Caruso in the pre-season again, it's just pre-season but he showed what type of player he can be for us and I think a lot of that is moving the ball. He's gonna average over 10 points per game in my opinion. He's gonna get a lot of assists. He's gonna play the floor and be super impactful. So he is my one sleeper pic and then the other one is actually a guy that got an extension yesterday. So shout out to him. It's Kevin Herter. Now a lot of people have him winning but the reason he is just a sleeper for me is there are so many players on that team coming off the bench or just overall then they're gonna get shots. You have Kevin Herter, you're gonna have Bogey, you're going to have Galinari, Kam Reddish. There are so many quality, quality scores on that team that I'm not sure of Kevin Herter is going to have the ability to get all the shots off. I also struggled with six man a year because I wasn't completely sure who was going to start on some teams but those are my two sleepers. Hey, this is about to get super interesting by the way because I think some of my picks are kind of wild maybe not necessarily six man a year but some of my picks once we get up or up on the list you're gonna be like, Kenny, what? Again, it should be interesting. My three picks for six man a year. The first one is Jordan Clark, you're trying to get a repeat in six man a year history. A lot of people get the repeat, get the repeat stuff like that. If you can score a bunch of buckets that's the way you win six man a year in my opinion and that's why Alex Caruso as a sleeper because I don't think he's gonna score nearly on the level of Jordan Clarkson and when you think about six man a year for the most part it is like a Jordan Clarkson tag dude is Lou Williams, it's Mattress Harrell. These are players that have come in and give you 16, 17, 18 points per and I don't think Alex Caruso can do that. Jordan Clarkson definitely, definitely can. Definitely wouldn't be surprised if he ended up winning the award again but I don't think I have any repeat winners. I don't have any repeat winners actually winning it. They might be in contention though. Number two on my list is a dude we talked about yesterday when you're talking about the Miami Heat and it is Tyler Hero. I again, I don't wanna overreact or think too much about the preseason but he looked good. He looked like he got a swagger back, he's got a confidence back and they're gonna really look to him to be an off the bench scorer because they don't really have the type of player in their second unit other than him. He's gonna close out some games. He's gonna do a lot of things this season in my opinion and that is my second pick and my last one. Maybe this is a homer pick too is Derp Rose. What they rely, they relied on him heavily in the playoffs last season. They don't necessarily have to do that anymore because they have every four day coming to the team. RJ Bearish should be better. They have Kimba Walker on the team now but as far as six man bucket getter goes, Derp Rose can be exactly that. So those are my picks for six man of the year. Coach of the year doesn't really matter to me. Here are my top picks, Frank Vogel, Mighty Williams, Steve Nash. Okay, let's keep it moving. Only thing I think somebody else can win it. I'm thinking about a team that's gonna end up top of the conference is one option for coach of the year or the second option is being a team that came out of nowhere like the New York Knicks last season. And I don't know if that team exists. I could be wrong because I mean, if they're coming out of nowhere, nobody's expecting it, right? So is it JB Bicker staff? I don't really know. Let's talk about most improved player. This was the hardest one to pick for. So I went back into history. Over the last seven years, six of the most improved player candidates end up being all stars the year that they got it. So I have Jordan Poole in conversations but I don't think Jordan Poole's gonna take a huge step. But I don't know if he's gonna take the step to make an all-star appearance. Everybody else that has won this award recently jumped up to be an all-star. And they were players that were already good. Everybody knew that these players were good. Julius Rand was good two years ago, but he elevated himself to be really good. Brandon Ingram was already good. He went really good. Pascal was good. He went really good. Jimmy Butler, Victor Ledipo, these are players that already had a reputation of being quality NBA players, but hit the next step, okay? So I have a few players here. My sleeper pick, OG Annobe. I think OG Annobe is going to be really solid. We don't talk about the Raptors a little bit more once I get to my rookie of the year picks, but I think they have a lot of players that are similar mode and similar positions. And yeah, it could definitely work. But the fact that Pascal Siaka might miss the first month of the season, I think that opens the game up more for OG Annobe to get on players' maps and to win most improved player in my personal opinion, you have to get on the map pretty early. You have to get on the map on the first month of the season, average about 20 something out of nowhere and then people start thinking about you. And then a casual fan, once they stop watching, they still thinking about you for most improved player because when they was watching, you was doing your thing. And everybody's watching the first month of the season. So you gotta come out the gate and actually hoop. So here's my sleeper number one. And I looked at the Spurs roster. Somebody has to score. Somebody has to score. The team is not gonna average 70 points per. So the guy I picked is a guy that played for Team USA. Y'all know they always get that Olympic bump and that will be Keldon Johnson. How much would he jump up to? I don't really know. But I think Keldon Johnson's a super, super quality NBA player. The only thing I worry about with him is I think he would have to take a huge, huge jump because he is playing as San Antonio. And at this point in their franchise, they are a rebuilding team. And I don't know if a lot of people are watching. So he would have to elevate his play to a crazy amount for people to start watching the Spurs this year. Now, number three on my list is Jordan Poole. I already mentioned it in the pre-season. He looked amazing with Clay Thompson being out of this injury. It looks like Jordan Poole is gonna take the responsibility of taking a lot of shots, which is dope. I think he can win it. Adam Third, because of the thing I mentioned earlier, I legitimately think, and it could be different this year, but if you look at all of the previous winners other than CJ McCullum, but he didn't, CJ went from like seven points per game to 21. That was crazy. He's just got more opportunity. Every one of these players went from a good NBA player that everybody knew to a player that was an all star. And in some cases, all NBA. So my top two guys are players in that mode. These are players that we all know are really good NBA players. But which one of the players can elevate the most? And the first one is Michael Porter Jr. On my podcast, we were talking about this. And somebody mentioned Michael Porter Jr. for most improved player. And I said to them, I don't know because he already averaged 19 points per game. On like 50% shooting and 40% from three, how much better can he get? And the answer is he could probably jump up to 25 points per game. And if he's averaging 25 points per game, Yoke is still doing MVP caliber things.  He's gonna get some votes. You never know how the season goes. Somebody get injured and boom, there's an extra open spot in the Western Conference. So I think he might be second on my list. It might be a generic answer because I think a lot of people understand that Michael Porter Jr. is gonna score a lot of points this year. But I honestly do believe it as well. And my number one pick might be wild because I think everybody knows that this player is great. Yeah, I was like 19 points per game last year. He led his team to the playoffs even though his second best player only played 11 regular season games. It's Jamarrent. And my thought is Jamarrent blossoms into superstardom. And that is why I believe he could be the most improved player. Year number three for a lot of guards is the year when they blossom to the max. And I think that can happen with Jamarrent this season. So that is my pick for most improved player. Buckleley and I told y'all it was gonna be wild ladies and I told you it was gonna be wild. Let's talk about Rookie of the Year. I told y'all last year, I got everything wrong except for Yolkets. My pick for Rookie of the Year last year was Killian Hayes. It was Killian Hayes last year. I don't want to be burned this year. So I went maybe a little bit more safe this year than previous years. My sleeper picks, Scotty Barnes, I think might, is this crazy to say? He's gonna be one of the top two players in his draft class in my personal opinion. Just projecting careers and who can do what. I think he has all the tools in his bag to be great. And I don't know anything about Scotty Barnes who he was drafted but I watched Summer League and I watched pre-season. I think he does a little bit of everything right now and every single year a player like that can progress or he could plateau what's happens to a lot of players that can do a little bit of everything. But I think he has a spirit. He has the fan support to blossom into a star but I have him in sleepers because I do believe there are a lot of players in this team that do similar things. Whether it be OG on the Nobby, whether it be Pascal Sihyakam. They have so many people around him and when it comes to Ricky of the Year, my opinion is usually a guy that's giving the keys and say, hey, take the shots you want. Go get some buckets, all right? So he is a sleeper. I got Trey Murphy as a sleeper. He was stellar in pre-season and in Summer League. Some of that has to transition over and with Zion Wilson missing some time early on he might get a little bit of buzz if he goes out there and he shoots 50% from three. And my biggest sleeper is Jared Butler. Don't have to talk about it. Just saying, if you don't know the name, you gotta tune in because that boy was hoping. Now let's get to my actual top three. Number three on this list is Jalen Sucks. And I really wanted to pick Jalen Sucks to win the award but I look at their roster. I see Marquiel Foltz coming back eventually. I see Cole Anthony getting some run at the guard position. I see RJ Hampton. I see Gary Harris. There's so many guards that deserve minutes on their team. I just don't know how many shots Jalen Sucks is gonna be able to put up in Orlando but I really like the homie Jalen Sucks and his odds. Next we have Kade Cunningham. You know who's gonna be one and two. Which one did I have one? Which one did I have two? And I don't know what's necessarily going on with Kade Cunningham and his injury. I don't know if he's gonna be out for a couple of days. He's gonna be out for a couple of weeks and momentum is everything in the NBA. And I think that the winner of this award is Jalen Green.  There's nobody that's taken a ball out of his hands other than Kevin Porter Jr. And already it seems like those two players like playing together. And Kevin Porter Jr. is a very willing passer. I think Jalen Green is gonna take a ton of shots and hit a ton of shots. But I can also see it going similar to what happened last year where you have the guy that gets a bunch of buckets that will be Jalen Green slash Anthony Edwards. And you have the guy that's like, okay I'm gonna come into this organization and immediately become the leader that can be the Lamello ball, Kade Cunningham. We shall see. The only difference is that Lamello ball led his team to a playing spot and was like a top seed at one point. I don't think the Detroit Pistons are doing this this year but who really knows. Defensive player of the year. Last year I picked Bama DeBio. I was wrong there. Like I said, I got a lot of things wrong. I don't really have sleepers for this one. I feel like getting your name into the conversation of great defenders is hard. Like yeah, people that watch the game of basketball can be like, oh that's a really good defender. But for you to get the reputation of as a good defender is hard. It takes a lot of media buffs and like people that is actually watching and writing articles and stuff. Nobody's comes into the scene randomly like, oh that guy's a defender now. You have to build that reputation. With that being said, I don't believe that Rudy Go Barrett is going to win defensive player of the year this year. I think he's gonna have amazing defensive statistics. But let me show you something. Rudy Go Barrett is now tied right now for the second most defensive player of the years in the career. Do you honestly believe the voters are gonna put him on the level of Ben Wallace and the Kimbe Mutombo? I don't think they will. I don't think they will. And again, the opinion about Rudy Go Barrett is lower now than it's ever been. So I don't think he repeats and get that fourth title. I don't think it's gonna happen. My number three pick in this award is Joel Embiid. A lot of people give Ben Simmons a credit for defense. Of course, he deserves it. He's an amazing defender. But I think because Ben Simmons is such a great defender at the point of attack that people don't really realize how good of a defender Joel Embiid is protecting the rim. And if Ben Simmons is not gonna play or he's gonna play 30 games with them, yada, yada, yada. More people might realize how good of a defender Joel Embiid is on the backside. And I think that might give him some defensive player of the year, Buzz. Second is going to be Draymond Green. The Warriors are gonna be better than they were last year, in my opinion. And that means that more people are gonna realize that Draymond is still a good defender and he just finished top three last year. But my winner of this award, I'm doubling down on Bam on the bio. I picked them last year. And if he don't win it this year, I'm never picking you again, Bam. It was hard to narrow it down and not put the eye on this or Anthony Davis on this list because I do believe those players definitely have a good chance but I narrowed it down to just my three. Bam, do not disappoint me. I think that the Miami Heat are gonna have one of the best offensive teams in the league and you have to pick somebody, right? They're probably not gonna pick the wing and Jimmy Butler. They're gonna pick the rim protecting dude that can switch onto guards and do a little bit of everything and that's Bam out of bio. And now it is the pick you've been waiting for. The MVP. Now, when I think about most value player, majority of the time is going to a guy that's on one of the top two to three seeds in a conference. We have some anomaly years. Russell Westbrook, Avidon and Triple Double, even though they didn't want a top seed. It was historic here. He got it. But for the most part, it's going to one of the guys that is on one of the greatest, greater teams in the league because I mean, if you are the most valuable player to your team, your team is gonna be good. And voting is different every single year. Sometimes you get the Steve Nash pick which is not like the guy that's not gonna have the main statistics but like advanced stats, love them and his team was super solid. So there has been a disconnect between what MVP is versus who really deserves it yada yada yada yada. Cause you can argue, LeBron James has been the most valuable player for the last decade, but he don't win it every single year. There's voted fatigue, there's a lot of different stuff. So my sleeper picks, and I mean my first pick is really a sleeper and it's Jason Tatum. It is Jason Tatum. And that is really contingent on the fact that if the Boston Celtics are really, really good, it would have to be because of Jason Tatum. The next one is Jolin Bede. He does have the narrative part of his season down pack, but I just, I still believe that since Ben Simmons is there, there's a little bit of turmoil there and they might not be as good even if Ben Simmons does play or if he doesn't play and that might prevent him from snagging one of the top two seats. He was one of the finalists last year and I think he can do it again, but it's just a different scenario now. And the last sleeper pick I have is Luca. Luca's got a lot of MVP love and it makes sense. He's one of the top seven, five, whatever number player in the league, but I've mentioned this like 10 times this off season and I hope they make me swallow my words, but I don't believe in the surrounding pieces around him to be one of the top seeds in the league. And again, I do believe you have to be one of the top seeds in the league. Now I'm narrowing it down to my top three. I think that there's a possibility that Yoke's repeats. I do believe that they're gonna be a quality NBA team and they're still gonna be one of the top teams in the conference. I mentioned Michael Porter Jr. as being an MIP candidate. He's gonna help them stay afloat and I do believe that they can still steal maybe not a one seat, a two seat, a three seat if they can stay healthy outside of Jamal Murray and Yoke is just a freak of nature. Every advanced stat last year pointed that Nikola Yoke has deserved that award and I can see him replicating that type of thing. The narrative behind him, well, Jamal Murray's out for a significant part of the season and he still was great and they still were great. My number two pick is Kevin Durant. The fact that Kevin Durant only has one MVP award under his trophy case has to maybe rub him a little bit because I think they had this whole campaign when he was early in his career. He was like not number two or tired of being number two and it feels like for a majority of his career he's felt like the second best player in the league which is great, but he's always wanted to be number one. This might be a year where he submits himself as the best player in the league. He's going to be on the Brooklyn Nets, you are going to be amazing and though they have a bunch of different options Kevin Durant is the guy, but my pick, my number one pick is Yanis. And we talked about that in the video like two nights ago, so if you missed that one I highly, highly recommend it. Executive of the year? Executive of the year? Our tourist Karni Shovas because the Bulls are going to tear some people up this season. So those are my picks. Some of them a bit wild, yes indeed. But what type of video would it be on this channel if I wasn't being wild? Let me know what your picks are. Again shout out to prize picks. I really want y'all to download the app and what I want y'all to do is when you are making your picks, tweet them at me.


Thousands of people packed CenturyLink Field on March 7th for Seattle Sounders' game. The crowd size was bigger than what I expected. I had no idea. 28 hours earlier, the public health officer for King County in Seattle sent an email saying he wanted to cancel all large group gatherings because of COVID-19. So why did the game continue? ProPublica in the Seattle Times obtained hundreds of pages of emails between public officials that shed light on what happened behind the scenes. The country's first confirmed case of COVID-19 had been announced in Washington State in January. By February 29th, King County announced a cluster of cases. Today, Public Health Seattle and King County is announcing three new presumptive positive cases of novel coronavirus COVID-19, including one person who died. It was the first known COVID-19 death in the United States. The same day, Duchin sent an email to public health colleagues advising against cancelling mass gatherings. The next day, the Sounders played their season opener in Seattle with a crowd of 40,000. Over the next few days, the county's cases and deaths kept growing. Six people have died so far, all of them in Washington State. And the governor of Washington weighed in on mass gatherings. As you know, we have encouraged people who are responsible for large gatherings to give consideration whether it really makes sense to carry those on right now or whether it's better to pause those at this moment. On March 4th, Public Health Communications Director James Appa emailed Duchin about a worker at Century Link Field who had tested positive for COVID-19 two days before. County officials and local sports teams exchanged dozens of emails discussing how to announce the news to the public. An executive with the Seattle Seahawks complained that another team had drafted a hysteria-inducing statement. A CDC spokesman advised that the risk to attendees was low. The same day, the official Facebook page for King County Public Health shared an image encouraging people to avoid large crowds. The county published a press release about the infected worker at 3 p.m. on March 5th, writing that upcoming events at the stadium would continue. But just an hour later, the health department replied to a post on Facebook with a distinctly different message. Jeff Duchin sent the email about canceling all large group gatherings on March 6th. But that didn't happen. Instead, a meeting was scheduled for the next morning and another scheduled for the day after. The game continued as planned on March 7th. Four days later, after dozens of people had died in King County from the virus, the county banned all gatherings of more than 250 people. We expect a large-scale outbreak in weeks, and this will be a very difficult time. It's similar to what you might think of as an infectious disease equivalent of a major earthquake that's going to shake us for weeks and weeks. There's no way to know how many people could have been infected at the game. But cases of COVID-19 surged across the region in the weeks that followed.


White letters appear on a blue background. Broadening participation in engineering to include people with disabilities. Engineers design, create and innovate. From airplanes and cars to robots and electronics, engineers design products we use every day. The aisles have a store. There's a great demand for skilled engineers with a strong academic background and work experience. Increasing the participation of people with disabilities in engineering can help to meet this demand. Neils Hackinsen. People with disabilities are problem solvers. And engineering is about solving problems and improving quality of life and designing environments and structures and devices to help people. And we're experts at that because we do it every day in our lives. Cynthia, student. So a lot of society isn't really built to be accessible for a blind person. And so throughout my life, you know, I either talk to role models about how they have solved a problem or I have to figure it out myself. And I think the problem solving fits really naturally into an engineering discipline. Leif Starling, North Carolina State University. So just increasing when you're thinking about putting together the best possible team to work on an engineering problem, you want as many different ideas coming to the table as possible. Constance Thompson. You will find a lot of individuals with varying levels of disability. American society. Think differently about solving problems because they have to. Civil engineers. And just by inserting that into the conversation, inserting that into the way that you practice engineering is going to change the game. It's a game changer. And we need that type of game-changing attitude in the U.S. to meet those innovation challenges that we're going to face. Grace, a student, signs. It's important for people with disabilities to go into engineering field because they've experienced problems themselves. And they probably have ideas on how to fix that and what to do. Human ability varies across a wide spectrum, including individuals with visual impairments. Words appear. Hearing impairments. Learning disabilities. Autism spectrum disorders. Attention deficits. And mobility impairments. Daniel, student. I have a physical disability ride a wheelchair. I have a high functioning autism spectrum disorder. I'm profoundly deaf. I grew up with two hearing aids. And then last year, when I was 17, I got a cochlear implant on my right side because I wouldn't hear anything do my right ear. Billy Price, mechanical engineer. Yes, I'm in a wheelchair, but being in a wheelchair shouldn't have any impact whatsoever on my ability to do my job. So in that sense, I'm just the same as everybody else. So I don't think I should have any sort of... I don't think I should be treated any different. I mean, there's a job that has to be done. Yes, I have an engineering background and I can do it just successfully as anyone else. Kent Steele. I think one of the challenges for individuals with disabilities is low expectation. Mechanical engineering. We all have different levels of ability. Faculty. But often I think people make assumptions based upon whether you move a certain way or if you use assistive technology during your daily life. I don't meet enough engineers with disabilities. For example, on my campus, I am usually kind of the one person that people go to, oh, we need your feedback about this. Is it accessible? But I think that people with disabilities still have to make a concerted effort to find role models who are engineers. Students read large text on a screen. Assistive technology and reasonable accommodations can make it possible for individuals with disabilities to successfully pursue education and careers in engineering. A young man switches screens on a computer. I was able to get more time on examinations, which was extremely helpful. Which gave me time to think on the problem, not, you know, be compressed. In a very short time span to complete a problem. I have a very dough distraction environment. I was in a room all by myself. In school, I use an interpreter, a sign language interpreter. And I also have a note taker for each of my classes. Whenever I request one. So it's talking calculator. It's a great tool, not just for someone with a visual impairment, but for someone with dyscalculia who has trouble flipping numbers around. I was even able to attend a machine shop class, working with a lathe and an end mill. You know, non-computer controlled, hand controlled. Largely because the faculty who taught that class were open-minded and really allowed me to dictate my limits. A professor addresses a large classroom. Instructors can make their classes accessible to all students by applying universal design. Designing their classes and lessons so all students have equal access to the information. His presentation is on the students' laptops. Brianna Blazer. Captioning on videos, not only is that great for students who might have hearing loss or are deaf, but access engineering. Students who are not native speakers of English often use the captions when they're watching a video. So, you know, that's a great example of universal design that's benefiting all kinds of people. So for a student with learning disability and reading, for example, if they have the opportunity to gain the information from an engineering design perspective instead of just reading a textbook, they're going to excel more and they're going to feel more successful in that area. So many of the new educational techniques that incorporate active learning and involving many different types of educational material really not only help individuals with disabilities but all students. Each year, as you teach a class, you can introduce some of these changes, hear how students respond, and over time create a more accessible environment within your department and in your classroom. Students work together at long tables. Many engineering assignments involve group projects and faculty can encourage classmates to be welcoming. I think traditionally people with disabilities are sometimes marginalized to, for example, write the lab report rather than pouring liquids or using machinery, and that's where asserting one's self can really come in handy to say, no, it's just as important for me to learn how to use the shop equipment as you, and so I might need to touch the equipment or be instructed on how to use it, but I still need to take part in that process. I don't want a group member to make an assumption about what I may or may not be able to do or in what ways that I could use some help, so I have to be able to communicate my skills and say, well, this is what I can offer the group and here maybe formatting the PowerPoint slides, maybe that's something that someone else in the group could do. Gerald Bergstahler. The key there is to make sure that every team member has a role and I suggest the first thing that they should do is ask the student with a disability how they'd like to contribute to the group work and often they'll come up with something. University of Washington. That maybe the faculty member and the other students wouldn't have even thought of. Many of our new tools that we use on an everyday basis, such as CNC machines, which are computer numerically controlled machines, where we use them for mills and laves and drills. A lot of them are controlled by computers now and so that actually increases access and makes it so that more people can easily build the products that they're wanting to create. Words up here. Engineering educators who want to make their classrooms more welcoming and accessible to students with disabilities can use multiple methods to present material. Invite all students to discuss their needs and accommodations. Ensure all members of a team are engaged in group work. Set clear expectations for assignments and tests. Michelle McCombs. The Ohio State University. These are great students. They have a lot to offer. You will learn as much from them as they learn from you, if not more. And just the more you work with them, it just really moves the field forward in ways that you're not going to expect. To learn more about how you can encourage and support students with disabilities in engineering courses, visit the Access Engineering website hosted by the University of Washington. U-W-dot-e-d-u-slash-d-o-i-t-slash-programs-slash-access-engineering. Access Engineering is supported by National Science Foundation grant number EEC-1444961. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this video are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. Described by Audio Eyes. Copyright 2016. Permission is granted to copy these materials for educational, non-commercial purposes provided the source is acknowledged. Thank you.