Seeking self, dropping anchor

I’ve been on holidays this week with my family before we go from 3 to 4. It’s been a brilliant opportunity for me to zoom out & do some self-observation. We have a 2 year old who is giving us a great stage for practising the commonly experienced parenting dance of ‘what the heck am I doing?’ & ‘how on earth do I manage this?’ - which produces a great deal of anxious reactivity (from everyone involved!) Something I’ve been reflecting on is how for me this lack of confidence in relation to responding to toddler meltdowns, stems from the challenge of having been given TOO MUCH information. I’ve been working in children & family mental health now for 8+ years, so you’d think surely I have it all together right? Wrong. What all this input has done has actually muddied the waters & prevented me from developing my very own thinking. Anxiety causes us to often borrow thinking from others… which feels easier than doing our own. We reach for all the parenting books, Instagram...

The third factor impacting our capacity to regulate is our environment. I find this one really interesting because we can’t always change our environment & we can’t control what happens throughout the day! And nor should we… unfamiliar environments (e.g. a new school, new job etc) & unpredictability (e.g. changes to routine, cancellations etc) can reduce our capacity to regulate (stay calm) but this is not to say they should be avoided! It’s healthy to place ourselves in new spaces with new people & learn how to tolerate the discomfort. It’s also important for us to be equipped to cope with unpredictable changes without falling apart. I think there are two helpful ways to look at this one:  If there are new & unfamiliar places/people occurring throughout our week (inevitable!) then how can we increase familiarity & predictability in other areas of our (or our child’s) day/week to provide some space for grounding ourselves and/or recovering/resting. Becoming more...

In my last post I talked about how our bodies play a big part in our ability to regulate. A really helpful way to increase our ability to regulate is to become more in tune with what our body is feeling & then being able to use strategies to help counteract that.  For example, when some people begin to feel anxious their bodies are aware of this even before they are! It can start causing us to feel hot & sweaty, or need frequent trips to the toilet, or get an awful headache, or pins & needles in our hands, or tight sore neck muscles… these are all really helpful alerts to tell us that we need to pause before it spirals out of control & we find ourselves in deep panic. I am a big fan of practising very simple mindfulness to help with this - especially body scans, deep breathing exercises & progressive muscle relaxation. If that’s not your thing then something as simple as pausing to take a sip of water, changing your body position, taking a shower, laying on...

I talk a lot about being able to stay calm in the face of distress. That’s good and all… but how do we practically do this? A good place to start is to understand ‘regulation’ - this simply refers to the ability to remain in a calm & alert state without flipping into hyperarousal (e.g. fight/flight) or hypoarousal (e.g. freeze). I’m going to offer some more info on this & ways we can more effectively regulate ourselves over the next few weeks. When we are well regulated we feel ‘within our window of tolerance’ - in other words we can cope with whatever stressful situation pops up in that moment, without throwing us off balance or in a state of disarray. There are many factors that contribute towards our window becoming smaller & therefore more likely for us to respond to stress with overwhelm, including something as simple as the time of day the stress occurs! Some core areas impacting our ability to regulate are: how our body feels, our emotions, our environment & of c...