CALM PARENTS — RESILIENT CHILDREN – ENJOABLE LIFE!

These are some inspiring and insightful passages in “Calm Parents and Children: A Guidebook” by Gayle Kimball

 

— “It's not the load that breaks you down, It's the way you carry it.”  Lena Horne

— “I want to be improbable, beautiful, and afraid of nothing, as though I had wings.”  Mary Oliver

 

We live in challenging and stressful times with the pace of change speeding up in the increasingly globalized world. This section addresses how we can raise centered children with calm parents who know how to manage stress. Eva Detko, Ph.D. created an Emotional Toxicity Questionnaire to check out your state of mind.  A stress test identifies the most difficult life changes, with the death of a spouse and divorce at the top of the list.  The Greater Good Science Center offers a stress and anxiety quiz, along with many other self-studies such as describing your happiness level or your social capital.

Our brain changes according to our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors, which can be measured in changing brain waves, such as gamma waves are associated with being relaxed and happy while highly alert. Therefore, “what we focus on matters” as we create new neuronal pathways.  This is not new knowledge: Proverbs 23:7 stated, “For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he,” and the Buddha said, “The mind is everything. What we think, we become.”

A simple technique is when an unhealthy craving or habit surfaces, focus on something else like counting backward and tapping on the forehead. You might keep a diary to track your triggers to be aware of what situations to avoid or change.

Stress overload underlies the large majority of health problems, according to Laurel Mellin, Ph.D. author of What’s My Number? and other books. She reports that our stress level can impact others around us and underlies up to 90% of health problems.  She advocates treating stress overload by learning how to rewire the brain by activating emotions, rather than with cognitive changes or treating symptoms with medications. She finds that positive thinking and cognitive restructuring don’t erase the problematic brain circuits but activating emotions and clearing them does the job. Hence her method is called Emotional Brain Training--research about EBT is available online.

Dr. Mellin explains that since our emotions are “psychobiological,”  the key to coping with stressors is to train the brain’s neuronal circuits. She explains that when the brain receives a stimulus it responds with either the stress-resilient or stress-reactive circuits, depending on which is the most imprinted by habits that usually began in childhood. The reactive circuit triggers emotions that can inhibit the brain’s rational processes so that we over-eat or over-drink, get anxious and depressed and so on. New habits can change the brain so that the resilient mode kicks in instead of the emotionally-reactive mode.

Dr. Mellin explains the clearing process according to five different levels of stress with five tools to feel joy--associated with dopamine and endorphins--in her book What’s My Number? She suggests starting your day with the statement “I am creating joy in my life.”

Scientist Candace Pert, Ph.D. also advocates clearing emotions in The Molecules of Emotion, but using meditation to counter ongoing stress that impacts our physiology in this manner:

. . . the largely autonomic processes that are regulated by peptide flow, such as breathing, immunity, digestion, and elimination, collapse down to a few simple feedback loops and upset the normal healing response. Meditation, by allowing long-buried thoughts and feelings to surface, is a way of getting the peptides flowing again, returning the body, and the emotions, to health.

Meditation rewires the brain. A Harvard study of beginner participants in an eight-week meditation course found changes in their brains, as with more emotional control of the amygdala.   Focused attention shrinks the amygdala which is responsible for processing sadness, anxiety, and negative emotions and can overact. Scientists discovered that regular meditation increases tissue mass and density in the area of the prefrontal cortex that controls impulses and maintains attention, and increases thickness in the regions of the brain responsible for body awareness and stress management.         

Q: How do we raise resilient children rather than fragile anxious ones?

A: Educators teach resilience skills (such as at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence), the study of how to not be defeated by challenges, but rather to adapt to them and use them to grow stronger. Harvard professor of psychiatry Robert Brooks explained in The Power of Resilience, “Resilient people are like trees bending in the wind. They bounce back.”  They get support from and help other people, they think of the glass as half full rather than half empty, they’re spiritual, they’re playful, and they take good care of themselves….