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Speaker 5Hello and welcome to the how. Not. Just grow up your kids podcast. So pour yourself a cuppa, find a comfy seat and enjoy the conversation. Today's episode, we are talking all things children and emotions and arousal and stress levels and rhythms and all things related to our emotions and our children's regulation from the perspective and the lens of neuroscience. This is an absolute corker of an episode. This is an episode where I am joined by Professor Sam Woss. He's a developmental cognitive neuroscientist, a child psychologist, and also you may recognize him from The Secret Life of Four-Year-Olds. He's known for his research on early childhood stress, attention and learning, and he leads the Institute for the Science of Early Years at the University of East London. So you may. You may well have seen him on The Secret Life of Four-Year-Olds, where he appears as the sort of the onscreen scientist and expert that is able to translate some of the sort of the complex neuroscience that is happening within that, for the rest of us lay people, to be able to understand. And his work pretty much uses neuroscience in able to understand how environments shape children's brains and focuses very much on how we as parents, interact and influence our child's developing attention and their emotional regulation. So you are going to want to tune into this episode. So with no further ado, here's Sam.
Speaker 6Hi, thanks, Miriam. So I run an institute called Institute for the Science of Early Years based out in East London. And we do mainly taxpayer funded research. So funded by the Medical Research Council UK and various other research councils UK. And also the European Union, European Research Council and basically what we do a lot of which is very different to what a lot of other people do. So most research, particularly most research into brain development is very much lab based. Yeah. So if you're interested in emotion regulation, you're giving tasks to a child, like a frustration task where you give them a clear box with an interesting toy inside, but the box can't be opened and you're looking at how children kind of manage the frustration of doing this. And it's kind of short doses in a very controlled kind of way. So we're going to talk a little bit about that. And then we're going to talk a little bit about emotional regulation. And then we're going to talk about emotional regulation in a very controlled kind of lab setting. And you look at emotional regulation that way. And what we do is we take a very different approach. So we do very much long form recordings, you know, up to kind of three week long recordings in home settings and in educational settings. And we develop a lot of, you know, child worn microphones, child worn cameras, child worn stress monitors that are worn by children in home settings, but also by members of their family in home settings. So this lets us look at loads and loads of different aspects of emotional regulation that you don't. often see very much covered in science, things like the larger order rhythms that we're going to be talking a lot about today, you know, how your mood, how your kind of stress state changes naturally during the course of the day, and then how different settings, different environments kind of influence it differently. But also how we pick up on each other's moods, you know, so if I've got kind of a little stress monitor and my mum's got a little stress monitor too, you know, how do we echo each other in our moods? Do we match each other's moods? Do we go in different directions? And kind of things like stress contagion. And that type of stuff. So, so there's loads and loads and loads to be talking about that hopefully will be interesting to listen to.
Speaker 5Oh my God. Yes. And I actually, I did have a sneaky peek at some of your talks and I could see the vests as such and what they looked like in terms of what the children wore and also what the parents wore and the data output, you know, those patterns and things. And we often talk about this idea about arousal and stress. What do we mean by it? Because I think sometimes it has this negative connotation. But actually, from a research perspective, that's not the case.
Speaker 6Yeah, definitely. So, I mean, basically what we're measuring is activity in an area right at the bottom of the brain known as the brainstem, which is basically where the spinal cord comes in and it meets the bottom of the brain. And this is a part of the brain that basically controls how awake or how alert you are. And it happens on a continuum. So when I've got very low brainstem activity, I'm what we call hypo aroused, which means. I'm very droopy, you know, drifting off to sleep during the middle of the day when you're in a good state where you can concentrate and focus on tasks. Your brainstem activities are kind of a mid-level arousal. And then when I'm overexcited, very distractible, very problems engaging, that type of stuff. That's when we're in what we call hyper arousal, where you have kind of excessive levels of activity in your brainstem. So that's what we call arousal. So basically mid-level is optimal when we have hypo and hyper. And we know lots of different things. You know, we naturally move between different arousal states during the course of the day. You know, you tend to be less. Obviously, during the night is when your brainstem activity is lowest. You know, middle of the day is when you're highest. And then kind of times, different times. We also know that it changes in response to changes in our environment. Yeah. So if I'm walking down the street and someone kind of pulls an eye from me, then I have a sudden surge in activity in my brainstem. And then we also know, which is something we're going to be talking a lot about today, which is that different people have different set points. So different average levels. Different levels of kind of brainstem activity. The reason that I'm interested in this, and you can probably tell just from hearing me talk, is that me and all of my family are very much to the hyper end of the continuum. You know, we were just talking just before we started recording, you know, my children, you know, I try and model it for my children. You know, they struggle with their emotion regulation. I try and model it. But, you know, I was behind the shed, you know, the other day trying to fix a nail for the wall and I couldn't get it. And my children just heard this torrent of swear words coming out with me trying to bang this nail in. You know, my wife's the same, you know, you end up kind of marrying people that are quite similar. And all of the children in my family have been very much to that, you know, hyper, you know, average levels of activity is high. You know, my sister, you know, very much kind of very similar, which has got definite benefits. You know, we get a lot done in my family. Yeah, everyone's all very, you know, productive. You know, you get stuff done. We definitely, you know, collapse into dysregulation more often. So, yeah, we're going to be talking about differences between different people. Yeah. In that average levels of set point. And, you know, different ways you can tell that, you know, it's not just how much you like to get done, but also, you know, what types of things you do for fun. You know, I spend my weekends teaching my six-year-old to use power tools. You know, I like stuff that makes me a bit scared. You know, I like the kind of thrill-seeking kind of activity. But also other things like kind of what types of environment you learn best in. You know, when I'm lecturing on this for students, I always ask a question, you know, who works best in a coffee shop versus at home. You know, I'm someone that I can't get any work done at all, you know, in public, you know, in a coffee shop, that type of stuff. And it's because I'm naturally hyper-aroused, yeah? So I need my, everyone concentrates best when they're at kind of mid-level arousal, yeah? So for me, I need a calming environment, yeah? I need absolutely no distractions, nothing going on, because then my environment is helping me to calm down to get to my mid-level of arousal, yeah? Whereas someone who's naturally much calmer would find the opposite, that when they're at home, they tend to find it much calmer. themselves dropping off to sleep or getting easily distracted and they're down the low lower end they're on the more hypo ends of the arousal and so for them they often work better in a coffee shop because it kind of kind of wakes them up and it kind of keeps them active so so there are lots and lots of different ways that we can that's
Speaker 5so interesting isn't it i love if i've got to write something i have to be in absolute silence just even hearing just so that's super interesting can i just ask before you go on sam with the height you know with our just general tendencies is this genetic or is this a predisposition that you know the whole environment pulls the trigger but we're we've got a genetic predisposition or is it hardwired into us
Speaker 6yeah so that's a really really good question and that i don't actually 100 know the answer to so i know that for adhd uh for example so um adhd you generally tends to be associated with hyperactivity of the brain stem you know it's in the name you know hyperactivity and we know that that is very genetic and so it's about we know that from things like twin studies so um if um we've got identical twins um versus non-identical twins and identical twins share the same genetic information and non-identical twins don't and there's a much higher rate of what we call concordance which is if one twin's got it then the other um has also got it the concordance rate is much higher in identical twins than non-identical twins so it's a much higher rate of what we call concordance so if one twin's got it the concordance rate is much higher in identical twins than non-identical twins all twins experience the same environment but only identical twins also have the same genetics yeah so from that we can tell that there is quite a high genetic component so we know that adhd does have quite a quite genetic component that's pretty much everything does but it's also definitely the case that you know environments influence it and i couldn't give you a you know citation for that but definitely you know just from my own life you know we've just moved to lewis a small town in a countryside from east london and you know my wife and i still work in london so we're still as wired as we ever were um but for my kids you know it's so different as schools down there you know you go to school in london and all the kids are just you know constantly fidgeting and bouncing and just the silence you get these schools down in sussex it just freaks me out i don't like it but anyway my kids love it because they're naturally quite wired kids and you know and it's definitely the case for my kids that during the course of the week when they're spending time in their schools surrounded by all their really calm kids that have grown up in the countryside get more and more calm during the course of the week and then during the weekends when they're with me and my wife they're quite wired they're getting more and more hyper and you can definitely see that as a weekly pattern so yeah it's definitely the case that you know environments influence it as well so so my rough guess it's quite hard to give a citation but my rough guess yeah that's that
Speaker 5yep so we've got these arousal systems we've got these arousal states yeah and
Speaker 6then because i think i was going to talk about just a little bit before uh we go and was a little bit more about um neurodivergentism so yeah so as i say overall adhd tends to be associated with hyperactivity but that's not the only route to get an adhd diagnosis so um so there are conditions um so there are subtypes of adhd so so the what we call the externalizing subtype which is you know i'm not paying attention and i'm elbowing my mate and i'm you know creating quite a visible fuss or an argument with someone or that type of stuff that's the subtype that associates with you know hyperactivity of the brainstem but there is another subtype that is associated with hyperactivity of the brainstem and that's the subtype that is associated with you know hyperactivity of the brainstem but there is another subtype which tends to be much more undiagnosed underdiagnosed because it's much harder for teachers to spot which is associated with the other extreme so hyperarousal yeah and that tends to be characterized by a child might sit still you know they're looking like they're paying attention but internally they're disengaged you know internally they're daydreaming or thinking about something else that subtype of adhd is much more common in girls and we think it's one of the reasons why adhd is very underdiagnosed in girls because obviously that type is very hard for a teacher to spot yeah so there are definitely kind of different pathways yeah hyperarousal and hyperarousal yeah similarly for autism and there's evidence that you know hyperarousal of the brainstem and hyperarousal are different subtypes and that there are both different categories things like anxiety and is more reliably associated with hyperarousal so you know when you get into that you know hypervigilant you know always on the lookout for threat and you know hypervigilant you know hypervigilant you know excessive rumination you know preparing yourself for something you know these are kind of associations with with that and then the other thing which is you know true and anyone who's got you know particularly young kids at home will readily agree with this which is you know our average levels of brainstem arousal tend to be higher in kids than in grown-ups you know your average level of awakeness and that's one of the big things that contributes to uh you know mood dysregulation and emotional dysregulation in kids yeah it's exactly the same type of thing that we have as adults there's not a structural thing it's just that kids on average tend to be higher in terms of the average levels of kind of brainstem arousal and we know that a couple of things um are important um uh that happen you know when i'm in that high state yeah so we know that we pay attention very differently we tend to be very much more distractible you know this is a lot of this is evolutionary reasons that you know when i'm in a high stress state i need that my brain is telling my body i need to be ready to react at a moment's notice i'm more sensitive to movement if there's movement anywhere in my body i'm more sensitive to movement if there's movement anywhere in my visual field you know my threat detection mechanisms go off so i find it harder to focus yeah but we're also more likely to collapse into you know a dysregulation so a kind of a chain reaction dysregulation cascade and these can happen in in two ways so firstly we can think about things like panic disorder in adults yeah so panic disorder basically um happens when you know something can trigger it it can be anything you know i was with a friend who was having a heart attack and he was having a heart attack and he was having a heart attack and he was having a nicotine gum to give up smoking which had the side effect of making his heart go faster yeah but we only got that out afterwards but then you notice that your heart's going faster in your body and your brain kind of misinterprets that as thinking i'm about to have a panic attack or i'm about to have a heart attack or i'm about to black out yeah which makes you worried which makes your heart go faster yeah and that in turn makes you more worried and you basically get this chain reaction cascade between you know your mind and your body where they're basically kind of winding each other up basically yeah and then you've got this chain reaction cascade between and we see that in adults we also see that type of thing in children often it's much harder to get them to articulate what's happening yeah but you definitely get this type of you know like we call it an internalizing yeah an internalizing meltdown where a child will you know shutter themselves off from the outside world but you know inside they're getting the same chain reaction cascade yeah and you get the same type of thing um but in what we call an externalizing and that's often something called tantruming yeah so you know we get this a lot in my family yeah so you know i've inherited my parents this idea that every time before we go on holiday i have to you know pull an all-nighter to get all my work done because every single time we're in the car going holiday i'm absolutely knackered i'm reliably in a filthy mood yeah and my kids in the back seat will pick up on the fact that i'm in a filthy mood you know and rather than asking you know could you mind if i have a go with that toy once you're finished you know they'll reach over and snatch it off yeah so i then being in a filthy mood rather than saying well do you have any other options for getting that toy yeah rather than doing that which is what i do if i was calm i'll just yeah i love my shoulders i just stop doing that i'm trying to drive like this which obviously been yelled at then increases their stress still further yeah so you get what we call an externalizing cascade yeah it's a chain reaction in the same way but rather than you know my mind reacting to something that happens in my body in a way to make you know this the chain reaction get worse over time this is a chain reaction that's happening between me and someone else yeah i'm stressed i'm stressed i'm stressed so i shout at my kids which makes them more stressed which makes them more oppositional which makes me more stressed and it's that type of thing yeah it's the same idea of a runaway chain reaction uh but rather than happening between within me it's happening between me and someone else yeah so those types of chain reaction cascades are more likely to happen when we're naturally in a high arousal state yeah so that's one thing that's that's important and we you know we're going to be getting into in a second into uh you know things that we can do about this um you know some tips for helping to cope yeah but the last thing i wanted to talk about and and this is something that i think is really really important i know we're not going to be talking a lot about screens i know i know you have a lot of chat on your podcast about um about screens really important topic but one of the things that i'm doing a lot of work on at the moment is this idea of kind of screens kind of increasing our our general levels of kind of brainstem around yeah i'm spending a lot of time in a you know very fast-paced environment where stuff's going to be very fast-paced and i'm going to be very fast-paced and i'm going to be very fast-paced very fast yeah and again we have this inbuilt kind of brain mechanism that says you know if i'm in an unpredictable fast-paced situation then my brain is readying my body to respond at a moment's notice because you know my brain expects that i'm actually experiencing this unpredictable situation myself so my body needs to be able to run at a moment's notice so we go into you know fight or flight um stress mode where my heart starts to beat faster and that type of stuff yeah and one of the things i think is really important is the long-term consequences of i'm spending a lot of time on screens yeah not actually moving but my body is preparing itself to move the whole time yeah so my heart is going faster you know you might have noticed with kids on screens that you know they're sweating at a time it's not yeah and that's their fight or flight system so it's an inbuilt mechanism yeah i'm expecting to respond at the moment's notice so i'm doing all these preparatory things as if i might actually have to run for my life yeah so what are the long-term effects uh for children of spending a lot of time in this high stress state at a time when they're not actually you know doing anything they're not doing what the stress system has evolved for which is to help us run for our life and it's all this kind of virtual stress but you know our bodies can't tell the difference they respond to virtual stress as if it's as if it's actual stress yeah so we're doing some research i think it's really important yeah if i'm in what what the long-term effects of being in this high stress state for sustained periods of time and one of the things i think is happening is our bodies are learning a different idling set point yeah so i'm learning to you know i spend a lot of time in this hyper awake hyper vigilant hyper aroused mode which means i kind of get used to being in that mode and you know i do a lot of work working with you know early years practitioners and that type of stuff and they see they say you know they see a lot of children coming through that you know are almost uncomfortable when they're not in that high stress high alert so you know you'll see a kid and you know it's quite quiet in the nursery um and you know other children are playing well but this child who's used to being in this high stress state will you know go up and you know snatch a toy off another kid and then look at them like okay what are you going to do about it or they'll very deliberately break a rule that they know has been very clearly set up for them and they'll be able to do that and they'll be able to set for them by the practitioners you know in order to engender you know more of a high state more of a stress situation because it's what they're used to so so that's another thing you know to think about i think it's a really big issue that you know we get used to you know our early life experiences determine our kind of set point and then we spend the rest of our lives you know um trying to get back to that set point you know whether it's you know as children or you know as adults you know seeking out kind of stressful situations you know seeking out kind of challenges seeking out conflict that type of stuff so yeah loads of interesting stuff to talk about
Speaker 5it oh my god do you think sam that that's the sort of it almost sounds like we've it's like i don't know whether desensitizing or priming is the right is the right terminology but do we do we find that what then happens is does that speak to what i often hear in schools and from teachers and things about children really struggling to sit either in silence or with any element of discomfort is that because they're used to a certain level of arousal that anything below that level is uncomfortable
Speaker 6yeah definitely it becomes kind of aversive in a lot of ways and then yeah you kind of find yourself kind of trying to get out of that situation in in lots of different ways i'm just thinking back to conversations i've had my six-year-old son about this i'm always psychoanalyzing him he's always like oh shut up dad and i've often made that point that you're actually we had all this conflict yeah and it wasn't actually about that yeah you were seeking out some conflict because you wanted to be in this conflict state yeah or you're not angry at me you're not angry at me or just feeling angry so you know rather than getting you know shouting at me for something to do you know just take this cushion and you know punch punch the anger out on this cushion yeah and he's always like no no no it's not just about the emotion it's specifically about you therapy's biggest impact
Speaker 1doesn't show up in some dramatic breakthrough it shows up in the smallest moments you bite your tongue instead of escalating you put your phone down instead of firing off that text you say what you actually need instead of what would hurt someone else the most nobody applauds those moments but they quietly change your life that's what growing feels like and that's exactly what grow therapy is here for grow is therapy that works covered by insurance sessions average 21 with insurance and some pay as little as zero dollars depending on their plan there are no subscriptions no long-term commitments you just pay per session grow connects you with thousands of high quality licensed services across the u.s offering both virtual and in-person sessions nights and weekends you can search by what matters like insurance specialty identity or availability and you can book a therapy session in minutes and begin in as little as two days not the national 48 day average see if you could pay as little as zero dollars for therapy in seconds at grow therapy.com slash a cast that's grow therapy.com slash a cast grow therapy.com slash a cast availability and coverage vary by state and insurance plan but that's quite
Speaker 5interesting isn't it because of course you're approaching it in lots of ways in that sort of regard the way that we would as parenting experts we'd encourage parents to try and tackle the issue in terms of helping them understand what mechanisms might be playing out so that they understand it's actually not there's nothing there's not a fault with me there's nothing wrong with me this is just the way that my brain is operating in this particular situation and of course as we know sometimes they're ready to receive that information and sometimes they are absolutely not yeah
Speaker 6yeah yeah yeah yeah and it is sensible you know all the stuff is you know don't talk about it in a moment talk about it afterwards and you know i was just doing i was just ignoring that so yeah it is sensible but yeah you're absolutely
Speaker 5right brilliant okay so we've got these various different arousal states we've got this this understanding that aspects of our environment will play into what will develop as that set point there's probably a bit of an interaction i think we're sort of saying genetically but also in terms of that environment and would you say and i might have missed this sam is it that generally speaking that that environmental that that arousal set point can be set within a family and so tends to be more uniform across the family or do we get individual differences within a family see that's a really
Speaker 6good question mary and again i don't think i've got a really good answer to i'm afraid there's actually very little research you know comparing kind of long-term differences you know even this idea that i mentioned you know my money is that you know with screens and other ways in which you know the modern world is getting more fast-paced you know urbanization and that type of stuff my money is on the fact that our general you know brainstem arousal levels are going up over time as a species yeah which is why you know there's plenty of evidence that you know anxiety and depression symptoms are going on over time you know we're also diagnosing it more regularly which is great but there's also really good evidence that symptoms are going up you know there's some you know site you know my money would be on you know behavioral dysregulation is going up over time but the idea that kind of brainstem arousal is the root cause of this is going up over time there's not really evidence for that because it's very hard to just measure because as i say you know our arousal levels are continually changing over the course of the day anyway so you don't have just a single set point to measure so it's very hard to look at these types of historical trends but you know my money would be quite strongly on the fact that you know our money is going up over time and but similarly there's no research that i know and i i'm pretty sure i would know if there were research in this you know i've read a lot of this literature on you know set points in families you know definitely from my everyday experience i would say that it's quite tightly matched in families yeah so you know everybody in a family tends to have quite similar a set point you know i'm thinking through my friends now which is obviously very unscientific but i can't really think of you know any of my friends where there are big you know there are big differences obviously you know between me and my mates you know the level you know i'm happy managing a busy lab with like 30 people and you know i've got academic colleagues like they've got two phd students they have one project on at a time and you know that's what they're happy with yeah whereas i'm i've got 15 projects in the time and i'm always writing for more projects and that type of stuff yeah and that's just the level that i'm happy at because i'm very you know i'm happy at a high level so you definitely get big differences between people but you know just my my anecdotal experience would be families tend to cluster quite tightly together but yeah it's a really good question actually someone should do some research on this but there isn't any
Speaker 5research yeah brilliant okay all right so we know that the about the arousal levels what are we then able to do with that knowledge yeah so i've got kind of
Speaker 6three kind of areas of um uh kind of tips where we can uh think about ways you know particularly around this idea that you know as i say my money would be that arousal levels tend to cluster together in families but children do definitely tend to be more aroused on average than you know adults yeah so you know this is why so many parents are interested in helping their children to cope with behavioral dysregulation yeah because children have more behavioral dysregulation than adults because you know their set point is isn't every child yeah so for a family like most families so thinking about that i've got kind of three sets of tips so i don't really mind what order we do them is one is about rhythms and body rhythms and you know tuning each other's rhythms to each other but also tuning the rhythms of the day to our rhythms uh one's about co-regulation so how you change your state you know around a child when they're getting dysregulated and another is this idea of you know exploring kind of all four different quadrants and the idea that you know children are comfortable in high arousal and you know thinking well maybe one of the ways to think about this is rather than telling children all to calm down the whole time we can be thinking about you know matching our state to theirs and you know exploring this state of being highly aroused and having a nice time at the same time yeah it's not just about calming down
Speaker 5let's start with the rhythms because i think that that sort of almost sort of sets the tone and then we can move into the sort of the the quadrant of emotions and the co-regulation piece
Speaker 6yeah so this basically comes down to the idea that as adults we prize this idea of stillness you know we we want to you know you listen to endless you know podcasts about you know it's still in your mind but that type of stuff but you know the idea of stillness you know from an adult's point of view and definitely from a children's point of view is that we want to is an illusion yeah we're biological organisms yeah biological organisms achieve stability through constant continuous movement yeah the only time you're still is when you're dead yeah we have within us a symphony of rhythms at different time scales yeah so you know as you're listening to me speak you know or even if you were to you know shut your eyes in a darkened room and i measured your brain activity we'd find these patterns of electrical brain activity that are strongest in an adult at about seven cycles per second yeah through to you know obviously our heartbeat and through to our breathing, through to periodic fluctuations in our blood pressure that about one every 10 seconds through to appetite rhythms through to sleep-wake cycles through to daily rhythms and there's some um sorry through to yearly rhythms and then there's also some really interesting stuff on like multi-year rhythms that you can look at you know bipolar they get all these interesting kind of multi-year rhythms so so we have all of these different symphony of rhythms going within it yeah from a sub-second through to kind of multiple years yeah and it's these rhythms that help us achieve stability yeah like all living organisms from a tree to any type of animal yeah we achieve stability through movement yeah and we also know that you know mental ill health in a lot of ways is associated with disrupted rhythms yeah so now i used to do samaritans and you know very often you'd get you'd have to sometimes you have to go through the night shift yeah so you'll be manning the phone from uh you know like three o'clock in the morning or five o'clock in the morning and very often you get calls from people with mental health disorders and they just start talking at three o'clock in the morning as if it's the middle of the day yeah and there's some really good research that you know disrupted sleep-wake rhythms are a very common feature of a lot of um psychiatric disorders but also as we've been talking about things like you know anxiety and lots of other different things are about getting stuck in a state yeah so you're not continuously moving yeah you'd rather you go into these spirals that we were talking about afterwards these kind of chain reaction cascades but we know that mental health yeah good mental health yeah is associated with these strong and stable rhythms so one of the things that we do a lot of research on is kind of daily routines yeah so i had a lovely conversation with this great primary school teacher in a wirral um just south of liverpool in quite a deprived part of the wirral and and she was saying she really feels for her kids because a lot of her kids basically they go home for the holidays and they just sat with an ipad in front of them no structure at all to any of the day yeah and and then you know mom and dad has to go out and they just unpredictably get picked up and put in a pram with the ipad propped in front of them they've got no idea where they're going they're no idea how long they're going to be out they're just watching the ipad just getting wheeled around and then suddenly they're home again they get put back in the room and that's it just no structure to the day completely flat yeah and she says with those kids you know they're coming through the school dates at the start of the start of the term and she can just feel this craving for some type of predictability yeah there's no structure to the day yeah and she says with those kids you know same thing happening at the same time every day yeah and there's tons of evidence that you know these routines you know the same thing happening at the same time each day help us with kind of mood regulation help us with mood stability and we've done some research looking at kind of heart rate changes during the day and one of the things that you really see when you look at you know how a child's heart rate changing is during the course of the days when they're in a situation where they know what's coming next their body is always preparing themselves to move from one state to another yeah so you know i'll start to be preparing myself for you know school break yeah so i know i'm going to be doing a lot of running so my heart rate starts to accelerate and my body starts to prepare myself uh for this change that i know is about to happen in anticipation of it's happening yeah this is another thing that you know our stress systems do they anticipate future change yeah when we know it's coming and they get us into the state that we need to be in uh before we need before we're actually there yeah and it's this process that if i know what's about to happen from one state to a next yeah and i'm doing something that's regular and anticipated yeah i can get myself into the state i need to be in before i'm actually in it yeah which means obviously that i'm much better able to cope with something when it happens yeah compared to the bad way that stress happens which is you know bam suddenly something happens yeah and then bam i suddenly have to react to something you know in a really kind of unprepared way when i haven't you know metabolically kind of inefficient yeah so they it takes much more energy to do that sudden oh my god i'm having to react to that now compared to that you know i know what's coming and it also helps the state that we get into you know so you know for example bedtime routines yeah so that so that helps me because i can get much much deeper into the state of wakefulness into the state of sleepfulness yeah if my body's had you know a 40 minute long really predictable bath time yeah compared to my routine to get myself into it yeah but that associates with all types of stuff yeah and one of the reasons i think why you know a lot of parents will notice that you know their kids are much more dysregulated you know my kids you know that there are a lot of dysregulation at home but you know the teachers always say that you know they're good at school you know they don't lose their stuff at school yeah and one of the things i always think with that you know i really hate the school holidays because you just don't have the rhythms yeah so they're so structured the school day term time weekday it's so structured yeah and they always they are on that journey yeah and then suddenly during the school school holidays it just goes yeah and it's really we'd really try to keep structure to the school but it's impossible as a parent when you've got three kids like we do too yeah
Speaker 5things as well and sam do you think that there are some children that are more susceptible to the lack of predictability and routine than others because obviously all children are going to kind of experience that we all we've all been there as parents where it's the school holidays and then you know sometimes they've gone completely sterile and emotions are all over the shop so for example i know that with autistic children that they that that that routine is really a crucial part of them being able to emotionally regulate so it would i guess for them but is that is there a temperament as well or is it actually that all
Speaker 6fit from predictability so that's another really good question marianne that i don't i'm afraid have a very good answer to it's something i've often wondered you know what is it about different kids that you know and i also know this as adults you know like who likes novelty and who really doesn't but i don't know part of it is you know there's a whole other topic i'm doing lots of research which is about like our brains predicting what's going to happen next and you know some people learn best you know one of the things with autism is you know so for example with like all children start to learn best from predictable interactions yeah and then over time as our brains get better at making predictions we naturally seek out more unpredictable situations yeah and so that's why babies like to start doing very simple repetitive things like banging a spoon on the table it's super simple super predictable and for most children that rapidly gets too predictable so they don't learn from it so well so they naturally move on to more complex things yeah again i always present this for early years because um early as practitioners if i'm working in a nursery this is terrifying how much websites there are out there about how to stop babies banging spoons on the table and it's actually the learning mechanism it's part of their learning yeah so we naturally move from seeking out predictability to seeking unpredictability yeah with food too for example so that's why again lots of effort gets put into encouraging young children to try different foods yeah but from my point of view it's a learning mechanism yeah so there's a reason why almost every child not just likes to eat the same food again but they like to eat specific types of food that are very predictable in how they teach and then like you know a slice of processed cheese two slices of white bread a slice of ham always tastes exactly the same that's why kids like it if i cook it for like 20 seconds more it tastes completely different yeah that's a reason and it's very unpredictable yeah so there's a reason why almost all children like to you know eat predictable food because we learn best our brains are prediction machines when we're starting to learn we seek out predictability and then as we get older we seek out more unpredictability but then different children learn at different rates yeah right so um one of the things that you know you can tell a lot about where a child is on their learning journey just simply by watching you know how long does it take them to keep banging a spoon on the table before they naturally start seeking out different things and one of the things for children with autism is definitely that you know they would that process of kind of doing something over and over again till it gets too predictable and then i seek out something else happens more slowly in a lot of children not all children with autism it's a very you know mixed thing but a lot of children they they like that predictability for much longer yeah that i was reading this great thing about from an adult with autism talking exactly about that predictability with food yeah so he liked doritos because every time he pops over the packet of doritos it tastes exactly the same yeah which is whereas he hates fruit because every time no pieces two pieces of fruit tastes absolutely identical yeah which is exactly why i like fruit because you know doritos are too predictable for me whereas fruits are always interesting yeah but it's exactly why he doesn't like it it's just about that thing so so that's the only thing i'd say about this idea but that's not quite answer to your question mary hannah why do some children have a very big excessive reaction to something unexpected happening but i don't know that's the best i can do shall we yeah but that no that's super helpful good so then i mean the next thing on rhythms yeah so we were talking about rhythms and we were talking about no has as adults as well as as parents yeah we often have this you know illusion which is is good to keep still we can't keep still with biological organisms we achieve stability through movement yeah that's how how we achieve but then the other thing that i just wanted to talk about was because basically the same idea which is just at a more fine-grained um scale so thinking more about the second scale like second to minute scale yeah and one of the things that you know again early as practitioners will often find is you know you can have a child who's really really dysregulated really struggles to stay in one state for kind of a sustained period of time but you give them a something like we're going on a bear hunt yeah and that is the time when you have a group activity yeah that is the time when they can get in one state and stay in that state for sustained periods of time yeah tibetan monks do this too that you start being a monk as a little kid and they do these massive long poojas for you know hours and hours and hours and when they're old it's all just mental yeah but for the children they make it easy by giving them these like rhythms and repetitions in their body as well as their mind it's exactly the same idea as bear hunt yeah and this is the same idea of setting rhythms but it's setting more fine-grained rhythms yeah so no naturally when we're anxious or when we're dysregulated we take these sharp fast shallow breaths in and out yeah and whereas naturally when we're singing or we're reciting text out loud we breathe very differently we breathe kind of we take slower breaths and we we take more infrequent breaths and we let them out more slowly yeah and this is kind of forcing some kind of regularity onto our physiology uh it's the same with music so you know if you look at you know i spend a lot of time looking at children's heart rate patterns you know when they're in their lab trying to do some concentration tests or something like that yeah and you see that a lot of children you know their heart rate will go down really high one moment then go down and then it really kind of yo-yos yeah and you know music by definition has a regular beat yeah and we know that you know music kind of external beats entrain our heart rate it's why we listen to fast-paced music when we're working out and you know why we play lullabies to babies when we're trying to get them to sleep yeah and just simple the regularity of music the fact that a beat is happening at a certain time and we're trying to stay in the same place yeah so this is this idea of you know imposing a rhythm whether it's through you know breathing slowly or you know listening to music with a regular beat that makes our helps our heart to beat faster yeah it's also the same in terms of brain rhythm so we do a lot of research where we're measuring these fine-grained brain rhythms i measured i mentioned earlier in adults they're strongest about seven cycles per second and when we're listening to speech our brain rhythms tune in to the rhythms of the speech that we're listening to and one of the reasons that so much content we've exaggerated some so much content for for young children yeah i got interested in this when i was trying to look for books for you know my kids when they're about two and you know i just felt physically nauseous at the idea of reading another you know a mouse took a stroll through the deep dark wood a fox saw a mouse and the mouse looked good like everything on the bookshelf was just these exaggerated numbers i was like i just can't do it it's gonna make me sick and it got me interested in it and you know there's a really good reason why and it's exactly the same reason that for me it's a really good reason why i'm imposing extreme rhythms on children helps their naturally irregular brain rhythms just to tune into something yeah so naturally brains tune into the rhythms in language yeah so these are all reasons why they're doing something like bear hunt helps children to stay in one state for a sustained period of time yeah it's rhythms it's the rhythms um are kind of in the text that they're that they're talking about yeah brain brain rhythms it's breathing yeah and obviously it's movement too yeah and and you know regular rhythmic movements you know whether it's bear hunt or as i mentioned all these boy monks were learning to do all these pooches yeah doing the regular physical movement is also something that just helps to you know because obviously that creates rhythms in your brain and it helps them to stay regular yeah so it's exactly the same idea in terms of daily rhythms yeah just expose imposing a structure helps us to ability through movement and but it's exactly the same at this kind of fine grade scale for songs so lots and lots of different ways to you know use this idea of kind of rhythms and predictability and anticipation uh you know as a really kind of helpful way to build expectation build predictability and to help a child from from these moments when you spin out so that's where those
Speaker 5rhythms and that and we can do that through predictability in terms of the day so our children are prepared i guess in the really crucial routines as you say like the bedtime routine maybe in the preparation routine to then be going to go to school and then to go to school or to nursery just all of those things that where we i'm guessing anticipate potential stressors but we're building in that predictability
Speaker 6yeah knowing what's coming in advance yeah yeah so that's really good yeah and then the other aspect of this i've only started to get interested in recently i was reading some like most of the good ideas that have come from neuroscience it was something like buddhist or something about this idea that again i try it a lot and i've been thinking about this for a long time i've been thinking about this for a long time and i've been thinking about this for a long time and i've been thinking about this for a long time but not now we're going to come back to this idea yeah and this idea that you know you can controledly discuss you know conflict points yeah but with a rhythm to them yeah i'll talk about yeah but we're not going to talk about it now we're going to talk about it here yeah and it's it's partly that same idea mary hannah that you know you prepare yourself for something you know in advance yeah it's not just this takes over and now we've got to talk about yeah i'm going to you know think about what i'm going to talk about i'm going to get my body into a right state to discuss this and then we're going to discuss it yeah but it's also partly this you know this mindfulness idea that you know emotions are transient emotions aren't us feels like my emotion what i'm feeling is me but that's an illusion you know my identity is permanent but emotions are transient and you know this idea that we can you know step away from an emotion and then we can step back to it and and that can be a controlled periodic thing which is you know there's lots of reasons why that makes sense and it does link to this idea of you know you set an external rhythm uh but it's about you know you set an external rhythm and how you deal with like conflict points in relationships and that type of stuff but yeah i just need to work on how to say that to my kids you just
Speaker 5need someone else to say it sam that's probably it that's certainly a certain point where actually anything that you say is sort of like absolutely not but your next door neighbor could say it or their teacher say it says it and then suddenly it's like dad did you know that sometimes we don't need to discuss something straight away we can talk about it later you're like it's steady but
Speaker 6we don't have to talk about it now yeah um i'll try that one i'll plant it i love
Speaker 5that so the rhythms one feels like something that's really tangible and something that we can all sort of come away from this and and begin to start implementing with that what i'm interested in kind of can we do this one next is about the the different quadrants because before you and i started to have this conversation you kind of revealed something to me that i thought was super interesting in terms of adults and when we talk about these quadrants which i think some parents may well be familiar um from the perspective of zones of regulation but i'll let you kind of explain it yeah it's
Speaker 6kind of a popular idea within the idea of zones of regulation although that's slightly well i don't know you say whether you think it's different or not but you know the way i used to think about it so there's lots of people that have tried to dimensionalize emotions you know so science is like to dimensionalize things like what lies in one dimension what lies in another you know lots of people have come up with different solutions but one of the things that is popular and ongoing and there is quite a lot of evidence for is this idea that i've been talking about we started with this idea of brain stem arousal yeah so am i very very like awake and alert or am i you know very kind of sleepy and disengaged yeah that is kind of one emotion one dimension which we often call the intensity yeah am i experiencing this you know very intensely or not very intensely and then there's another dimension that i think most people would say a second dimension which is is this kind of a positive emotion or a negative emotion yeah am i feeling happy or sad i really really of course yeah so and then we've got kind of four quadrants yeah so i can either be feeling you know intensely happy or mildly happy or intensely sad or mildly sad yeah and one of the things i think is quite interesting and again this is i noticed this a lot in terms of how i'm different to a lot of other parents yeah is this idea of kind of high intensity happiness is something that most kids experience yeah as i say you know most kids are generally you know are more kind of aroused more awake alert than most adults yeah but as a lot of adults we kind of completely lose this ability to feel you know high intensely happiness we basically only exist in three quadrants yeah i'm either calm and happy or i'm intensely sad or i'm mildly sad yeah or i'm calmly sad yeah and you know i've been reading a bit for something i've been writing about the history of this yeah and and you know throughout history you know the romans the dying ices the whirling dervishes you know all these kind of medieval fairs where you know people would get very very dysregulated in a controlled way so i go to yeah i know i'm gonna you know let myself lose control at this thing and then i do it and then i come back to my to my adult life yeah and this has always been part of our culture numerous ideas of numerous examples of things where we would controllably you know let go yeah and it was only really i was reading one book on this which was talking about it was only really during the victorian age funny enough with urbanization so and and this book in particular was linking it to the idea that uh when we're living very close to other people we suddenly get this idea that we have to inhibit our emotions all the time yeah and we can't ever feel these uh you know intense positive emotions yeah we just need to come up calm ourselves down and this idea kind of really took hold during the victorian age that you know adults shouldn't feel their high intensity pleasure yeah other than you know particular times yeah obviously sporting a case you know some types of religious ceremony you know 20 year olds when they go out to nightclubs that type of stuff would be a high intensity pleasure but you know certainly by the time you get to my age middle age a lot of adults you know as i say kind of really really lose lose lose contact with that therapy's
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Speaker 6Visit discoversouthcarolina.com. So one of the things I wanted to talk about was, we spend a lot of time as adults telling our children to calm down. And if I'm, you know, I've definitely seen this with parents, this mum, has had this thing, I have to give all these parenting things, and this 80-month-old kid, who's just like, she was, he was just, he was sitting there smiling, just bouncing up and down with me. And she was like, how do I get him to calm down like that? And I'm like, he's all quite happy for me, he's just bouncing up and down. But obviously, you know, all types of kind of, lots of different settings that we place a lot of emphasis on the idea of, you know, I'm calm and therefore my children have to be in the same state as me, yeah? And particularly, as I say, when it's a positive mood high arousal state, one of the things that I definitely do, and I do it very, very deliberately, is I let myself experience, you know, high intensity arousal with my kids, so we do a lot of, you know, they're climbing all over. For me, I'm some kind of, you know, we've got a game where I covered myself with the sofas, and then, so the sofa cushions, and then I rise, I'm Man Mountain, and they're all trying to cling on to me. And then I get to the point where I'm standing up, and then they basically fall off, yeah? And it's all, you know, quite uncontrolled, in a controlled way, yeah? And it's controlled, and I make sure, you know, the kids are very clear that if we accidentally hurt each other, which we do regularly, by accident, we immediately stop, and we immediately apologize, whether it's me hurting them, or they're hurting me, yeah? At that moment, we're letting ourselves let go of control, yeah? And I think, certainly, for my kids, who, as I say, are naturally quite wired, I feel it's good that they have that, I'm out of control, but I can stop myself at a moment's notice, yeah? And, you know, certainly, my son has got friends at school, and he's got quite a rough and tumble, you know, set of friends, and the other friends will quite often get in trouble at school for, you know, hurting each other, but my son, he's always in control, yeah? Even when he's making this really, really high, exciting move. So, I don't know, I don't know what your thoughts are on that, but I just thought it was worth, kind of, knocking out that as an idea.
Speaker 5But that's, in lots of ways, then, the way that the example that you give about your son, and the rough and tumble, is that he's learned, at home, to kind of experience that high-intensity emotion, but also to be able to control it, and to manage it, because of what happened. And I think there's a couple of things that I would, I think, parents listening to this, it might speak to. It's this idea that I suspect, probably societally, it's not, like, just not seen as the thing that we do. And I would possibly, I don't, I've got no evidence to support this, but it's just a gut instinct, is that we're probably more inhibited as mothers than we are as fathers. I think a lot of mothers would be listening to this saying, oh yeah, and the fun dad comes in, and he does all of this great stuff, and they think he's amazing. But I think that's probably because fathers are more likely, and I know there's, there is some research evidence, isn't there, in terms of how fathers are more likely to be inhibited. And I think that's probably because fathers are more likely, mothers play differently with their children.
Speaker 6Yeah, yeah, there's a few papers on this. There's not actually loads, but there's a few papers that I've read that, you know, you tend to spend more of the, like, mid-arousal times with your mother, and more, you have kind of short bursts of peak arousal with your dad. I'm not actually sure why that is. It's an interesting question. You know, I always take that as a challenge in the moments when, you know, I spend a long period of mid-arousal time with my kids. I'm always quite proud that, you know, my kids can do that. With me as well, they can do that. No, nothing spectacular is happening, you know, we're just having this kind of mid-level arousal. Yeah. I don't know why that is. It's interesting, because I always think about that when I was talking about doing a rough and tumble play with the kids, and my wife just doesn't, I've tried to talk to her about this, and she just says it just feels too much. It just feels uncomfortable for her, you know, doing that kind of part. I don't know if
Speaker 5it's a societal sort of pressure or, you know, that girls need to conform to this sort of tempering down. Their enthusiasm, that, you know, I don't know if that would be instinctive or what I would sort of think.
Speaker 6Yeah, yeah. And if it is that, I think that's why I mentioned earlier this idea that, you know, we weren't always that way, you know. And, you know, it's quite actually relative a new idea in our development as a species that, you know, we need to be tempering down our enthusiasm. So, yeah. But I don't know, I don't have enough insight into that, because, you know, as I say, it's a state that I feel quite comfortable in, and I'm aware, you know, a lot of other people don't feel comfortable, such as my wife just doesn't feel comfortable in. But, yeah, it's an interesting one, that. No, but I certainly, you know, certainly, even if you're not comfortable going there yourself, yeah, you know, sometimes, you know, it happened this morning, you know, we were getting the kids ready for school, and, you know, they were completely dysregulated. And I just knew that, like, they were just about to open the door, they were in all their school uniform, you know, all dressed up. And, you know, my son was just, like, whacking like that. And I just know that the minute he goes through that door, he'll say, okay, change the situation, now, it's fine. But just that idea of letting yourself let go, you know, there's this other book, The Art of Losing Control. So, even if you're not going there with them as a parent, this idea that, you know, I shouldn't just be keeping a lid on all the time, yeah? There are times when it's okay to let go, and times when it's not okay, and I can just be conscious about that. And I can say, now is the time when it's okay to let go, rather than just, I have to keep the lid on. All the time. I don't have really good evidence for this. It's just, you know, something I think about a lot.
Speaker 5Yeah. Yeah, yeah. But I think that's, and that, you know, that speaks to the fact that, you know, we are by, you know, having different rhythms and different patterns. So, it's important that we don't always be sort of like, you know, calming it down. Because I guess, I don't know, I sort of tend to think of it as an energy that just needs to be released. You can't keep saying no, at some point, it's got to come out.
Speaker 6Yeah, yeah, yeah. And there's a lot of benefits, you know, as I was saying earlier, I feel strongly, you know, again, this is my, my, my phenotype. So, but I do feel strongly that there's a lot of benefits to letting yourself be in that state. And it's a very productive, you know, if you learn to channel it, it's a very productive state. And, you know, you, you know, my, like, you know, desire to get stuff done. And, you know, it's productivity at work. And, you know, a lot of people just like, they find it hard to motivate themselves to do stuff. So, so one of the things just on the brain stem is this idea of, we call it activation. So, it's quite a big idea in neuroscience, the idea to, you know, to generate, my behavior towards a far off goal. Yeah. And someone, someone who has, like, naturally a child who has naturally high levels of activity in this brainstem, so naturally high levels of arousal. Yeah. If you manage to keep that going in a controlled way, as an adult, they will find it easy to do this thing that I know a lot of adults struggle to do, which is, I want to achieve this goal, which is quite far in the future. And in order to do that, I need to motivate myself to start behaving in this way now. And a lot of adults, you know, it's procrastination. Yeah, so they have problems. And that is associated with too low levels of activity in the brainstem, which is why I think this phenotype of, I've got high levels of activity. Yeah. If I learn to be comfortable in it and to exist in it, rather than always trying to dampen it down, that's the type of thing that you can find easier as an adult. You're just getting stuff done, like your appetite for, you know, applying for something new or, you know, doing that thing that, you know, you want to do longer, but it's not immediately in front of you. It's not something you have to do. You reactively. It's something you're having to do proactively. So that's why I think there are benefits to it.
Speaker 5I love that. Okay, that's a really positive way to sort of take that away. And then let's look at the last one that you were talking about in terms of this idea about co-regulating and this idea about matching maybe our states to theirs.
Speaker 6Yeah. So again, I guess in a way, what our research kind of shows is, you know, kind of, I don't know, builds quite a lot on what we've just been talking about. So again, naturally, as parents, you know, and again, I present this a lot to early years practitioners, because, you know, if a child in a nursery setting or a school setting starts to get dysregulated or overexcited, then naturally, your first instinct is to keep yourself very, very calm. Yeah. But we've done a lot of research, as I said, where we're measuring this kind of arousal, brainstem activity level in parents and children at the same time. And what we find is, in fact, to a degree, the opposite of that, which is, you know, if I'm looking after a baby, that baby has a peak in their arousal, what I do as a parent is I naturally have a peak of my arousal to match it and bringing about this transient period of synchrony yeah so for a short period of time i increase my arousal and to match the arousal state of my child and we've actually shown repeatedly and other people have shown too that the more i do that so the more i match my state to the child to create this you know transient moment of synchrony the faster my child calms down so we're measuring this in terms of physiology yeah so that you know how fast your heart's beating how how aroused your brainstem arousal yeah but other people have shown this in terms of you know that over behavior as well so if i match my child's uh kind of emotional state yeah so if i mimic their face back to them or if i you know mimic you know so with the toddlers you know for example it's quite well evidenced now that pretty much every parent when they've got a tantruming toddler i certainly did it you know just as a quick detail there's a the reason that tantruming toddlers really freaks you out is that there's this great researcher in america that i've just been visiting and she looks at a lot of these day-long audio recordings and she says that if you look at a day-long audio recording with a baby what happens is the baby cries and then you go in and you help them to calm down whereas if you look at the moment where crying happens the toddler it almost all happens the other way around yeah rather than the interaction starting with the cry and then you coming in you have a conversation and then you say something to the toddler the toddler doesn't like and then the toddler starts to cry so the cry comes in the middle of the conversation rather than at the beginning and this obviously if you think about it it's quite obvious yeah but it's the reason why toddler tantrums freak parents out because you go from being the solution to the problem yeah my baby's crying it's okay mommy daddy here i'm gonna help you calm down to being the cause of the problem i'm crying because of something that you said which freaks everyone out as a parent quite understanding and i remember it freaking me out you know my kids would like so naturally your reaction as a parent is to say okay i'm gonna be very calm i'm gonna be very reasonable about this yeah we're gonna be very calm and i'm gonna be very reasonable about this yeah we're gonna be gonna use logic yeah and we're gonna talk this out yeah which obviously annoys the hell out of any time because they don't do logic they don't do language yeah that type of stuff so it's exactly what they can't do so there's really good evidence that um uh lots of people have shown now that in fact this process that i've been describing of matching your state to theirs is you know the best way to cope with toddler tantrums yeah so rather than using logic and staying very calm you get a bit upset with them you commentate on what they're saying yeah you really want to pour almond juice to the cat on the cat don't you yeah um you know you you match your state you match the words they're saying you match the sentence structure and something about that feeling of kind of matching helps them to feel understood so this is basically this idea that something about you know matching so so in in some ways it's this idea of you know name it to tame it yeah it's this idea that you know describing a child how they're feeling helps them to calm down you know which in turn obviously links to the idea of mindfulness yeah there's some really nice kind of brain studies that why does mindfulness you know work it's this odd process of you know not trying to control the emotion all you do is you try to get a verbal label for it you describe it you analyze it a bit and then you leave it yeah so why on earth does that help us to control emotions and there's this nice brain studies that show that the kind of emotions happen you know in a quite low down time and then you're down in the brain you know a bit just on top of the brainstem kind of the limbic system but this process of describing an emotion through mind it physically spreads out the emotion in the brain so you know when i think about that emotion rather than just having you know a nodule of activation in the limbic system i get activation in the language and the analysis centers and something about spreading the emotion out in the brain helps me to control it it becomes kind of bigger in my brain which somehow kind of helps me to get control yeah so it's probably this idea to agree with children yeah so if i'm having my parent mirror my emotion back to me yeah either by you know with a toddler tantruming you know repeating back to me what i'm saying yeah matching their state to me as a baby yeah i'm just seeing the same emotions that are on my face in your face yeah and then even you know more counterintuitively my parent is matching their own physiological state matching their stress state to mine something about that you know helps to you know make this feel bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger in my brain which helps me to calm down so again you know this is an idea which you know is quite counterintuitive to parents because a lot of parents are very focused on this idea that you know i need to set a good example and the way to set a good example is to keep myself calm all the time but you can see how it ties into what we were talking about earlier that idea of you know letting yourself go rather than just getting them to your state letting yourself go to their state sometimes can help yeah
Speaker 5and i don't know whether there's a conscious mechanism that happens there but there must be a certain element of empathy
Speaker 6yeah yeah definitely it's a way of showing that um uh yeah my parent gets how i'm feeling yeah which is which is i mean actually maybe that's a separate idea to that idea of you know mindfulness and putting verbal labels and spreading it out on my on my mind but yeah it's definitely related part of it yeah um so yeah but then obviously the area where this is tricky is when we link this idea to what we were talking about earlier where we were talking about these externalizing chain reaction cascades yeah why i was describing you know we're stressed we're going on holiday i start um you know shouting at my kids in the back which makes them more stressed which makes them more oppositional yeah which basically gives us a chain reaction cascade yeah because this idea of sharing emotions in a family in a you know controlled way yeah i i controlledly match my emotion to yours yeah is is as i say quite well evidenced in lots of different ways is a good thing but you if it goes wrong then that can also lead to what we call stress contagion emotion spreading in a family in a bad way whether it's you know having a big row or you know we also do some research into anxiety contagion so you know you're helping your children to pay attention to threat which makes them more worried which makes them more likely to point out threats to you yeah and you get this kind of you know anxiety contagion from spreading through families and i don't think there's a simple right or wrong here but there are two ideas that are you know one's good and one's definitely not good but they're very very closely related yeah i i was just talking about this to a clinician friend and um she was saying that this is actually an idea that you think about in therapy as well so they talk about having one foot in the boat with a client yeah so you're empathizing with them but the other foot on the riverbank yeah so you're not empathizing with them too much yeah you're doing it in a controlled way there's there's this person um celia hayes who talks about kind of two different empathy brain systems yeah one empathy one which is controlled and deliberate yeah so i'm controllably going to imagine what this situation feels like from your point of view and describe back to you how you're feeling yeah and the other which is empathy too which is involuntary yeah which is i'm picking up on your emotions so i'm picking up on how you're feeling you know your tense and that's making me feel tense yeah which is you know obviously the stuff that leads to the bad uh stress so i i don't think there's a real answer that goes beyond that yeah so you know sometimes this idea of matching your child's emotion your emotion to your child's is a good thing when you do it deliberately and in a controlled way yeah but sometimes it's a good thing when you do it deliberately and in a controlled way it's a bad thing when they're ratty which makes you ratty and you're not
Speaker 5yeah but i'm guessing if that comes from a place of you know we often talk about this co-regulation in terms of if we ensure as an adult that we are in as as good a state as we can possibly be so we've taken care of ourselves then in those moments when our children become dysregulated we can potentially tune in to that and mirror that more in a more controlled way than actually you know what i am absolutely on my last word but i think that's a really good point and i think that's a really good point and i think that's
Speaker 6a really good point and i think that's a really good point and i think that's a really good point yeah yeah this is something i think about a lot you know my family we all tend to be quite on the anxious end and you know i notice there's a lot with anxiety which is you know when i'm feeling calm i'm able to say imagine what this feels like from your point of view yeah whereas when i'm not feeling calm i interpret everything from my point of view yeah so you're screaming in a shop this is bad from my point of view because i'm in a hurry yeah so it's exactly that difference yeah so so if my child is in a hurry i'm able to say imagine what this feels like from your point of view yeah if i'm calm i can say what does this situation feel like from my child's point of view yeah and i can respond matching you know describing back to them how they're feeling yeah if i'm not calm i interpret that from my point of view this is inconvenient to me i'm in a hurry whatever and then i react very differently yeah and that's exactly the difference you put your finger on it
Speaker 5right right there oh i love the way that you explained it as well sam sam you have been incredible i could talk to you for hours but thank you so much that was all super super helpful and we will put links in the show notes so that you can have a look at sam's research and potentially i don't know whether you've got a baby lab as such where you might where people can be participants if they're able to engage so thank you so much great it's been
Speaker 6really real pleasure really enjoyed it nice talking to you so you're not worried about hosting the whole family for the holidays why would i be wayfair had everything i needed to get the house holiday ready what if mike brings his
Speaker 7cheerful dogs my tree has tons of five-star reviews telling me how sturdy it is
Speaker 8but what if everyone's plus one brings a plus one we'll
Speaker 7see how extendable this extendable table really is and extra chairs are
Speaker 8on the way okay what if there's a blizzard and everyone has to sleep over
Speaker 7ready to go with extra bedding and towels from guest ready essentials to holiday decor you can trust wayfair delivers you
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