Self-Regulation and Your Brain: How to Bounce Back Towards Resiliency

Welcome to EPISODE #53 “Self-Regulation and Your Brain: Strategies to Bounce Back Towards Resilience.” During these strange and different times that we are all living these days, we need to have strategies that we are using on a daily basis to navigate through these challenging times, where we are all feeling the pressure, so we can stay focused on regulating ourselves first, and then in turn,  help others around us to stay regulated. You might have had strategies in place before the corona virus pandemic changed our world, but might be noticing that as each day passes, and we recognize more and more stressors and unpredictability facing us, that our baseline is changing, and our resilience levels are not the same.  Since we all have a brain, we will all be experiencing this in some way and I’m sure that like me, you will find this information helpful to build your own resilience levels back up to where we are used to having them, so we can resume our day to day life with a feeling of accomplishment, instead of letting the pressures get the best of us. But First, what is Self-Regulation and Why is it So Important? I do recommend going back to EPSIODE 14[i] where we covered self-regulation (one the 6 social and emotional learning competencies that we launched this podcast with) as “the foundational learning skill for future success.” This episode covers self-regulation strategies to help our children as well as for ourselves in the workplace. Just a quick review. Self-regulation is “the ability to manage your emotions and behavior in accordance with the demands of the situation. It includes being able to resist highly emotional reactions to upsetting stimuli, to calm yourself down when you get upset, adjust to a change in expectations and (the ability) to handle frustration”[ii] In other words, it’s the ability to bounce back after a setback or disappointment, and the ability to stay in congruence with your inner value system.  These days, this skill takes practice from all of us, and is one of those crucial life skills that I thought was important to cover on a deeper level. The ability to control one's behavior, emotions, and thoughts is an integral skill to be taught to young children as well, so they can form and maintain healthy relationships and connections later in life.[iii] As an adult, self-regulation is crucial to develop as we all know that life is full of ups and downs (and it seems like more so these days than usual) but we must be able to make our way through challenging situations before we can reach any level of achievement and success. It’s these challenging times that give us our future strength. We all know people who seem to bounce back after adversity. A calm, regulated leader can make others feel safer but it’s not by chance –it’s because they have learned how to self-regulate and intentionally get themselves back on course. This is a learned skill and if we are modeling and teaching this skill well, it will strengthen our students/children/workplace organizations, communities, culture and world, putting us all on the pathway of resilience where we can handle challenge and adversity.  What does self-regulation look like in the brain? This episode will dive deeper into what’s actually happening in our brain when we become dysregulated, so we can learn how to recognize when we are in this place, and get ourselves back to a regulated, calm state.    Image: Dr. Bruce Perry's Neurosequential Network Covid-19 “Stress, Distress and Trauma Series” VIDEO 3 on Emotion Contagion https://www.neurosequential.com/covid-19-resources If you have listened to the last episode[iv], you will know that I have been learning from Dr. Bruce Perry (who is an American psychiatrist and senior fellow of the Child Trauma Academy in Houston, Texas) and his online resources that he has created to help everyone (parents, educators, counselors) to navigate these challenging times with more understanding and he ties the brain