So, I'm really excited that you're now going to get to hear from Dr. Michael Baime. He's the director of the Penn program for mindfulness and the director of the mind/body programs for the Abramson Cancer Center at the University of Pennsylvania Health Systems. Dr. Baime is a leader in mindfulness-based stress reduction. He's developed a program that's been delivered to over 17,000 people in Philadelphia since about, you know, early 1990's and he's gonna share with us his views and experiences on mindfulness and he's gonna talk to us about the effects of anxiety on our bodies. I'm Michael Baime. I'm the director of the Penn Program for Mindfulness which has been in existence since the end of 1989. We offer a pretty typical mindfulness-based stress reduction program in the Greater Philadelphia area and that program has trained more than 17,000 people in a pretty immersive 27-hour eight-week course. But, we also teach throughout the university in lots of different schools. We teach health care professionals and more and more we do a lot of consulting for groups that have a more specific interest, people who are working in business, people who have a particular health problem, people who want to learn a particular way or accomplish some specific goal like an athletic goal, for instance. When stress activates the body, the physical aspect of stress, it's really another way of saying that our body is reacting to a threat. So, the biology isn't that smart. It doesn't make that many distinctions. It doesn't really know if the stresses that you've been insulted by somebody whose opinion you care about or if you're running as fast as you can to escape a saber-tooth tiger. Your body responds and the biological response is really pretty primitive. Your body releases a lot of hormones that affect every system through the body. So, your adrenal glands release adrenaline which makes the heart beat faster, dilates the pupils, letting in more light, channels blood in certain ways so that it's shunted to muscles that will help you perform a brute physical action like fighting or running and away from the digestive tract and other systems that would help you to heal and renew. So, it has a real cost. The adrenal glands secrete cortisol which is one of the primary stress-related hormones which helps you to utilize your stored energy to act but over the long run impairs healing and the immune system, affects the whole body. It's associated with diabetes and so on. Our nervous system is built to help us adapt to the situation that we're in. So, when we're threatened, one part of our nervous system, it's like actually half of the autonomic nervous system, the sympathetic part of our autonomic nervous system, is activated. This is the system that gears us up for action, that makes our heart pound, that prepares us to fight or run. So, those activities, those behaviors are primed by that part of the nervous system when we are threatened. The other part of the nervous system is managed by the parasympathetic autonomic nervous system, and that system is involved with digestion, taking in food and using it to heal or restore the body, building the body with it, with healing, with regeneration, with sleep, with repair. So, in life, in reality, these two systems are really running in parallel all the time, but how you activate it in the context that you're in kind of determines where you are in that balance.