 manager for high-risk teens for about 11 years doing that. I got really turned on to this particular information when I became a part of the Alberta Family Wellness Initiative Symposia here in Alberta where we kind of began to examine brain architecture and look at addiction and how it was connected to brain architecture in a different way. From that I really kind of amalgamated what that taught me with the teachings of gurus in the field like Dr. Bruce Perry, Dr. Claudia Black, Dr. Gabor Maté who is certainly our North American Canadian expert on addiction and on child development and connectedness and all of that stuff that we'll be reviewing tonight. So the title of this webinar is Self-Regulation for the Stressed Brain and we're definitely going to discuss some strategies around that and what that can look like for a stressed brain. But first and foremost we don't know how to teach regulation until we understand how a stressed brain pardon me is formed and why that happens. So when we look at a stressed brain and we look at even the word stress we tend to think of a heavy load or something that is too burdensome to carry. Stress is used also to describe overwhelming amount of things to do, maybe expectations that exceed anybody's capability or perceived capability or it could be an avalanche of adverse conditions or events that create stress. And when I say that what I mean specifically is trauma, either massive traumas, major traumas or a series of micro traumas and all of those things are kind of what we're going to dive into tonight. But no matter what it is in order to understand what a stressed brain is we even have to go further back than that and we need to decide what is a healthy brain and what makes a healthy brain. And so there are many components that feed into what create healthy brain architecture. But the top three that I have chosen to discuss tonight first and foremost is stimulation. When babies are born then well there's two times let me back up just a second there are two times in our life when we experience extraordinary brain growth when we have the capacity to learn to a greater density than we will ever see at any other time in our life and one is from the age of zero to five. The second time is during the teenage years. Okay so when we're looking at having a tiny little one from zero to five and we're looking at what goes on with brain architecture when that particular little individual is being stimulated what we see is that the pathways that are being stimulated are the pathways that grow and and build themselves. The pathways however that are not being stimulated are experience what we call pruning. And pruning occurs I'll give you a couple of examples and they're very exaggerated examples but I like to use them simply because they illustrate the point really really well. Pruning occurs when you simply don't use the potential that is that is currently there waiting for you. So for example if we have a little person age zero to five who is exposed to several different languages or even two different languages that little individual will have the capacity to learn both of those languages with extreme proficiency and they will be absolutely fluent. Why does that happen? Because the brain has a ready-made pathway that is just rare and to go for that kind of stimulation and it says okay you want to learn English and you also want to learn Romanian. Absolutely I've got pathways available for you for that to be stimulated and for us to learn those things and to file it away so that you have it for the future. On the flip side when those same pathways are not lit up and they are not stimulated the number one thing and you're gonna hear me repeat this so many times tonight that you're going to get tired of it is that the brain is an efficient machine and so with its efficiency it will see that for example oh you're only learning English not a problem and for after the age of five it will take a look at all of those pathways to all of those other languages and it will prune them away. Now does that mean that that individual will never ever be capable of picking up a second language of course not. At any time because the brain is elastic and there's elasto plasticity there's oodles of time in in the lifetime to learn different things. However it will never ever learn those languages to the degree of fluency that it could have learned them when that optimal time when that potential was readily and rightly available and it's because the brain being efficient has said we don't need these we can cut these roadways off and we do not need to travel down those pathways. Instead we're going to go directly to the English language and we're going to learn it with extraordinary proficiency. Okay same concept pruning different example and this is a more extreme example and a very sad example actually. If you have a little child again zero to five and you lock that child away in a room with no windows and you never turn a light on that child despite the fact that its ocular system will be working perfectly fine and there will be nothing amiss there nonetheless will develop but will go blind and that's again the idea of pruning because the brain will say I am not getting stimulated along this particular neural pathway I must not need it I am not going to pour energy into that direction I am going to cut that pathway off and I'm going to get rid of it all together. Why is that important in terms of what we do in terms of building a healthy brain? Well obviously the more stimulation a child receives in terms of what we call serve and return interaction meaning communication between caregiver or caregivers plural and that child the more pathways will remain intact and the more potential will remain intact for that particular individual to learn skills over their lifetime okay so they are never going to be necessarily in the position where they will have to develop a pathway later on in life they won't have to learn Romanian later on in life if we want to keep on with that particular example because they will have learned it from when they are very very small and it would have been carried forward the same type of concept pruning goes along with the whole idea around self-regulation when children do not learn the self- regulation skills when they are little or when they are in their teen years in those optimal years of brain development that doesn't mean they can't ever learn how to self-regulate but what it does mean is that they're going to have to put more time more effort and more learning into those particular skills in order for them to stick because the brain being efficient has seen that those pathways and said yeah they're not getting stimulated I don't need those okay so that's the concept of pruning and how it relates to stimulation or lack thereof okay servant return we talked about that just briefly and I touched on it and said this is the communication that occurs between caregiver or caregivers plural and a young person or a child and the optimally the more servant return that's occurring the better obviously that means having conversations that means singing songs reading stories and it also means eye contact with your youth with your tiny person okay so looking into the eyes being present being accounted for and not just physically present but emotionally present in terms of engaging servant return means essentially communicating slash engaging the third thing that we find builds a healthy brain is tolerable stress and yes I said stress now what do we mean when we say tolerable stress because there's a really market difference between tolerable stress and toxic stress which we'll get into tolerable stress we're talking about things like failing a test we're talking about things like not getting not being the only kid not getting invited to the birthday party we're talking about things like not making the team we're talking about things like having to repeat a certain grade or a certain subject in school because they just didn't get the knack of it the first time this can be tricky for parents and I admit I am as a parent I'm one of these people that find can find it tricky because our tendency as loving parents is to get in there and somehow rescue or fix it and sometimes and I can take this bullet because I've done it sometimes we can bubble wrap bubble wrapping is never a good plan because essentially again what happens is that whole concept of pruning comes into play and if these kids never have to learn how to sort through those really difficult or hurtful emotions and sit in those feelings and sort through them and feel them and put them into some kind of perspective if they're if they're bailed out of those particular incident incidents they're not going to retain the skills and abilities to deal with the big gut punches that come later in life and so as a result of that we see that depriving them of those moments of tolerable stress essentially ends up creating one of the many components that can create the whole concept of a stressed brain okay so rescuing kids does the opposite of what you want it to do because it deprives the opportunity to build skills and capacity and it can also make a tremendously big impact on whether or not these kids build empathy and I'm thinking in particular of when we have the child or the youth who engages in an activity which has perhaps hurt somebody else and our tendency or maybe somebody wades in and wants to rescue them from the consequence of that act that action not a good plan simply because you're depriving them of that moment of developing compassion and developing empathy or from refining their compassion and their empathy okay moving on so with all that being said about what builds a healthy brain what is it what exactly is the stressed brain so a stressed brain is a brain that is chronically exposed to toxic stress it leaves it in a state of high alert and it has what we can sometimes it has what we can call a high aces score had high adverse childhood experiences score and so toxic stress what are the big bads well things like death divorce chronic illness perhaps an accident house fire those major life events that were extremely traumatic can create components that lead toward a stressed brain however those same big events can also fall under the category that we call tolerable stress if they are dealt with and addressed appropriately for that particular child or youth however when those big deals are not rolled through in a way that is understandable or helps the child process those then they can lend into the the architecture that we call a stressed brain okay now other stressed brain sorts of micro traumas if you will we can lump poverty abuse in all of its forms neglect parental addiction and the other thing to remember when we talk about kids who have experienced these extraordinary circumstances whether they're on a micro level or a macro level or a combination of both we need to also understand that even within one particular family this can very much vary so what I mean by that is that one child in the same family can have a radically different experience in terms of the toxic stress that they're exposed to then another child in the same exact family it can depend on a lot of things it can depend on birth order it can depend on financial station of parents where with the first child versus the second child versus the fifth child it can depend on whether or not perhaps there was domestic disharmony or divorce something like that occurring in the midst of the kids being at different developmental stages and ages remembering again that those optimal times of zero to five versus the teenage years when that brain development is really exploding and has more potential than at any other time so lots of different things lots of different variables can actually change the level of toxic stress that children even in the same family experience and we'll talk in a few slides we'll talk about how that can look extraordinarily different in terms of how siblings interact with each other and how they can sometimes rely on each other skills or their their skills in terms of dealing with the chronic stress and how that can play one off against the other and kind of set up a stage for a lifetime in terms of family roles kind of repeating themselves over and over again throughout their adult lifetime so what do I mean when we say we're in a state of high alert it means that the brain that has a tremendous amount of stress going on micro traumas big traumas or a combination thereof is always on a state of high alert and it is because again back to that concept of the brain being a really efficient machine when the brain determines that it is needing to be protecting of the organism at all times what will happen is it will remain in a state of fight flight or freeze for a great deal of the time and it will go it will pour all of its energy that direction okay and other areas of the brain will get less attention because the brain's number one goal from birth is survival okay so that's the number one goal of any single human being on the planet the number one goal of the brain is to figure out a way to survive and so if it perceives that it is under threat more than it is not then the energy is going to be poured in that direction of being on alert all of the time because it knows that it basically has to keep its head on a swivel and looking around to gauge this the environment and the circumstance for any kind of danger okay a stressed brain will also have what we call a high aces score now what are high aces well in 1997 the Kaiser Permanente came upon the concept of the adverse childhood experiences scale almost by accident they discovered it in a really funky way they were working with an obesity clinic of all things and what they were noticing was that there was a pattern of these persons that were taking part in this obesity clinic and they do well do well do well and then they backslide and they'd be back to square one so to speak and the folks that were administering this obesity clinic were quite confounded by what was going on here and so they decided to look at it not harder but differently and they began to put some questions to the participants in this particular study for obesity and one of the questions that they put to them ended up delivering quite a startling answer and the question was this have you ever in your lifetime been sexually abused and what they discovered was that close to a hundred percent of the participants in this particular study answered why yes I have and from that there was some compassionate curiosity going on in terms of is there some sort of link between what has happened emotionally to these people and what is occurring physically for these people and what what was Kaiser Permanente going to do to explore that link well Dr. Robert Anda who would many years later go on to be one of the chief consultants for the Alberta family wellness initiative of which I was a part and of which I first was introduced to this information began to develop a battery of questions and the questions that he put together captured those major life events of micro traumas and major traumas and wove them together in such a way that they were able to develop a 10-point scale that captured with some amazing accuracy a predictive ability in terms of how we can look at somebody's lifetime and do some forecasting about what will occur for them even on a physical health basis if they have what we call a high aces score okay so what is what are how what sorry what high aces I'm going to read you and I'm going to go through this very quickly the 10-point scale you can along at home you can keep track if you'd like to score your own or you could score it for somebody that you know or you could score it for several people at the same time or you could score it for no one at all and you can just take a listen to the 10 points that were developed by Kaiser Permanente Dr. Robert Anda back in 97 and the first one is did a parent or other adult in the household often or very often swear at you and sell you put you down or humiliate you or did they act in a way that made you feel afraid that you might be physically hurt if so if for every one of these by the way you scored one number two did a parent or other adult in the household often or very often push grab slap or throw something at you or ever hit you so hard that you left that it left marks or you were injured number three did an adult or person at least five years older than you ever touch your fondle you or have you touched their body in a sexual way or attempt or actually have oral vaginal or anal intercourse with you number four did you often or very often feel that no one in your family loved you or thought you were important or special or that your family did not look out for each other and did not show allegiance or support to each other five did you often or very often feel that you didn't have enough to eat had to wear dirty clothes and had no one to protect you or were your parents too drunk or high to take care of you to or take you to the doctor if you needed it six were your parents ever separated or divorced number seven was your mother or stepmother or other guardian ever pushed grabbed slapped or had something thrown at them or sometimes often or very often kicked bitten hit with a fist or hit with something hard or ever repeatedly hit for at least a few minutes or at least a few minutes or threatened with a gun or a knife number eight did you live with anyone who was a problem drinker alcoholic or used street drugs nine was a household member depressed or mentally ill or did a household member ever attempt suicide and the last one number ten did a household member ever go to prison out of the ten point adverse childhood experiences scale what we see for our participants who take the scale and then relay what is happening for them in their lives we find that anybody with a score of four or more will experience significant changes or a ability to cope with self-regulating as we're talking about tonight they will to experience difficulty developing or in maintaining relationships they will absolutely experience difficulty and that the development of different diseases that make a significant impact on their health and well-being and we'll discuss those a little bit more in detail as we move forward but first and foremost the most important thing to remember and back to that whole idea of the brain's energy going to where it believes it needs to be the most because the brain is a an efficient machine and be something that is geared to ensure our survival an over activated fear center equals a stressed brain and it is because like I just said the brains number one priority is survival and in its efficiency if it perceives it is under threat and whether it is or it isn't right if that brain if that person perceives some sort of threat it will react in one of three different ways okay so when I look at analogy I like to give in terms of this is a couple different things first and foremost if we imagine the brain as being a guy who goes to the gym okay so here's our guy who goes to the gym our brain and it's always exposed to a lot of fear a lot of stress a lot of adverse experiences that make it feel like it needs to be on high alert all the time it's the same as the dude that goes to the gym and all he ever does is works his upper body and his arms so here he is he's all buff he's all built from from the waist up his torso is a torso of the gods and yet he's got these little tiny stick legs because that part of him has never been developed when we compare the fear center of the brain to the executive functioning part of the brain which is where the logic is which is where the pleasure is which is where the ability to do critical thinking lives all of those things when we compare them we find the same kind of thing for somebody who has a lot of adversity in their life a lot of micro traumas macro traumas high aces score we find that the fear center is the bulky guy and the executive functioning he's the little skinny dude okay so the other way to look at that a different analogy is if we imagine a neural pathway being like cement with your finger being dragged through it over and over and over again every time we have this brain who is that is exposed to perceived threat if every single time that that brain is exposed to perceived threat it is like somebody dragging their finger through cement and that crevice in the cement gets deeper and deeper and deeper okay so it becomes the QE to whereas the pathway to the rational thinking the logical thinking the critical thinking the relaxation the self-pleasure the self-regulation that's like a goat path if you want to compare them so we've got the QE to that goes to the fear center as opposed to the little tiny goat path that you got to wind your way through the weeds to get to the executive functioning part that's a good comparison for those two things how one can be buffed up and the other one can can really really be underdeveloped and as a result that ability to self-regulate becomes really stunted doesn't mean that the brain doesn't crave it doesn't mean that the brain does not absolutely need it and yet the ability to access that part of the brain that could be proficient in that arena is really really limited because this is a brain who has been exposed to a tremendous amount of fear all of the time okay so when we're talking about fight flight or freeze what are we looking at well the person who fights is a person who perceives chronic danger and they're going to be highly physically reactive or verbally reactive or both and that is going to be how they have learned how to deal with this particular circumstance that they have been exposed to over and over and over again the second thing they may do is they may flight and when we talk flight we're saying that the person that is facing chronic danger will literally flee so they will run away or maybe they'll go hide or maybe they'll get you know the old cliche make themselves scarce that may be their choice in terms of what they do okay the third example is freeze and a person who perceives chronic danger might experience what we call involuntary immobility and this is doesn't even necessarily the freeze option that the brain will and the brain is like a little Rolodex when it is in that fear center and it knows it needs to react it is flipping through this Rolodex of three things very very quickly and deciding what am I going to do and what is my best option here now I want to talk about these just for a couple of moments because some of them are there are nuanced and they're very very important to to explore in a tiny bit of detail first and foremost when we're looking at for example sexual assault victims many times I have heard over the years in my practice sexual assault victims ridiculed or called into question because you just laid there you did not fight back so was it really rape well I'm here to tell you that the brain is an efficient machine and when it is faced with that kind of danger that level of danger like I said it is flipping through that little Rolodex of fight flight or freeze very very quickly and it is brilliant in terms of which one of those three options it is going to pull forward and say I am doing this and so when we have somebody who is a sexual assault victim believe me when I tell you their brain has thought should I fight but then the brain has gauged the size of the perpetrator and it's weighted against the size of itself and it said nope I can't fight because I'm not going to win and so then it goes to flight and it says should I flee should I run away well again it is perceiving that the person the perpetrator is much bigger and larger and perhaps is even pinning them down they therefore flight is also not an option for this particular person who is in this incredibly stressful situation and so the last option on the Rolodex is freeze and the brain says freeze is the only option I have and freeze harkens back to the cave mandays when we were out there trying to hunt for our food and bust open a pterodactyl egg and a saber-tooth tiger came running along through the bush and we see it and all of a sudden we freeze and we get right uptight against the tree and we hope hope hope hope that as we're expending all of that energy to be as still as possible that the perpetrator will just pass us by and leave us alone okay I mentioned a little bit earlier how this kind of mechanism the fight flight freeze mechanism the experience of a stressed brain can vary even within siblings and a family so I'm going to give you guys an example of a family that I am aware of this is a family of three boys and they're all very much growing men now this is a family where the adverse childhood experiences scale scores for all of them would have been extremely high one member had been to jail there was a tremendous amount of domestic violence physical punishment extreme physical a punishment was used within the home there was rarely enough to eat poverty was a tremendous issue in this particular household ridicule humiliation embarrassment all of those things occurred on a regular basis I think I mentioned domestic violence already if I didn't that was also playing a whole role and so we have these three boys we have an oldest boy a middle boy and the youngest boy the oldest boy in this particular scenario learned very quickly that if he would fight his father his father would back down okay so whenever the scenario rolled out that he was actually his fear center was lit up and his head was on that swivel and things were going down in the home he would step in and he would fight okay the second brother however would literally go and hide under the bed he disappear so his flight mechanism kicked in and the littlest guy well the littlest guy mentored after oldest brother and he would let oldest brother look after things while he simply stayed very very still and hoped he would not be seen okay let's fast forward this to adulthood that's what occurred when they were back at home now they're all adults and what has happened well my first guy my fighter he has a tremendous habit of getting into 50 cuffs with not just anybody but with police officers and why does he get into 50 cuffs with police officers because he perceives them as an authority who is an authority in his life well his father was an authority in his life and so on an unconscious level he is often in combat with anybody who he perceives to be authority because he perceives them to be out to get him okay second brother second brother who used to flee sadly developed quite a lifestyle of addiction because he was self-medicating because that hit was his chosen method of self-regulation if you will but because that created a cascade of other issues for him and because he had a very difficult time coming to terms with the issues that had happened at home he actually ended up completing suicide and so that is a very dramatic and an incredibly tragic example of flight to the extreme last brother well last brother let's harken back to our just our previous example of what happens to somebody who sexually assaulted sometimes oftentimes they will freeze this particular gentleman was actually receiving medical treatment from a medical professional who assaulted him and in the throes of that assault that particular gentleman reverted back because again the the brain that is stressed will react on emotion not logic okay doesn't mean the person is not intelligent it means that in that moment their emotions are running the show and as he flipped through his rolodex of the things that used to work for him whenever he was under threat what he did was he froze he froze during that incident and then experienced a tremendously long time of self-blame self-doubt and self-radicule until he was able to come to terms with the fact that wait a minute this is just the way my brain learned how to deal with any threat and that it used it as a template and it used it as a template over and over and over again because he never learned a different way to deal with it okay so fight, flight and freeze. Ani can I stop you first like you do have a few comments in the chat okay they're both from Amanda the first one says how can we help a child student who is stressed if their parents aren't there as a support or don't think there is anything wrong we have them in our care for a certain amount of time she would like some suggestions for that so that's comment one awesome okay okay I'm gonna hop ahead then and I'm gonna answer that right now but we're when we get into strategies we'll talk about that in particular oftentimes yeah you know these kids who are coming from these backgrounds they're often more often than not they're generational and so it is not necessarily unusual to see these kids that are that are coming out of these really turbulent backgrounds whose parents you know truly aren't aware that this is really corrosive for this particular child or children they don't know it because this is their quote normal and maybe even better than what they experience because one of the things we do and we're working with parents is we run through their aces score and then we say how can we make sure that your children's aces score is at least marginally lower than yours and certainly never at the same or higher than where yours is at what what can we do to mitigate some of that stuff but in terms of Amanda's question what can they do at school because you're right she they have them for such a limited amount of time and yet these kids more than other kids need to see pardon me that there is there are safe adults whom with whom they can connect and with whom they can feel like they are consistent people in their lives all of the time and and I don't mean consistent in terms of you're there every single day and you never have a sub come into your classroom what I mean by that is that you are you don't waiver in terms of your reaction to them meaning if they do something where they deserve a consequence you deliver that consequence and you deliver it can sit with consistency every single time by the same token when they do something well you react to that the same way every single time and I know that that sounds like such a small thing and yet for these kids who have this incredible level of turbulence all of the time and this unpredictability going on in their lives all of the time where like I said their head needs to kind of be on a swivel constantly because they never know when the next spate of chaos is going to occur that regular patterning scheduling this person who reacts in a consistent way every single time is far more comforting than you can possibly imagine the a few weeks ago I had the privilege of teaching on the six sick a nation I also teach violent threat risk assessment and I was down there on the six sick an ancient nation teaching the trap and one of the elders who was part of the crowd shared in the most gentle compassionate way with her female teachers or pardon me with her white teachers that were there and she said you know what you guys when you make excuses for our kids because of and this was a quote directly from her because if your own white guilt and shame and you let them off the hook for things that they need consequences for you're not doing them a favor you're not doing them a favor because you're just lending into the chaos that they're already experiencing all of the time and so they need that consistent reaction and interaction with the adults who care for them because that is exactly how they're going to interpret it is this is care for me that this is the same every time that this doesn't change because remember even if we're talking and I'm using an example here we're talking about a kid who comes from an alcoholic home what gets them belted across the room one day could give them a get them a hug and a kiss the next day same exact behavior radically different reaction and that's one example of many in terms of the turbulence and the inconsistency that these kids experience on a regular basis so if school can be somewhere a safe haven even if it is only for those six hours of the day that is the same and consistent every single time that all by itself can be tremendously soothing now along with the other strategies that we'll talk about in a little bit but that is the first thing that comes to mind when Amanda poses that question is exactly that next comment the next one while we are helping these kids who have a stressed brain throughout the day how can we how can we help the other kids in the class who will see or hear these outbursts who may not be dealing with anything stressful but now hearing or seeing another child go through it some suggestions would be helpful okay so again you know it is important that when there are inappropriate outbursts that these these inappropriate behaviors absolutely need to be consequenced otherwise I hope I'm reading that comment right that that otherwise the kids are going to say hey wait a second how come there's one set of rules for for Jack and a whole other set for Jill here like what is going on is that kind of what what the gist of that is I think I think so again back to that whole concept of consistency acknowledging and that whole idea of compassion being modeled both ways because it's not just the kids who are not experiencing the adversity at home or not having that whole concept of a stressed brain going on for them at home who need to possibly execute compassion for those who are it is also the kids who do have the adversity going on for them that sometimes are so locked into that reaction mode that their ability of executing compassion and empathy that also lives in that whole executive functioning area of their of their brain is far less developed and so to give that you know kind of gentle feedback in terms of saying you know this is this is how other people experience you and to the other kids and this is you know like it's creating that fine balance between interacting with them but still holding accountability where accountability needs to be held because virtually all of the kids need to see that that the rules are the same regardless regardless and I think that can be executed quite compassionately I hope that I'm answering that I hope I'm understanding that comment or question I hope I'm at Amanda added yes but also those other kids might be now scared to come to school because they see these other kids having outbursts right right and you know and again you know this is this is waiting a little bit into what the water that I that I teach from when I do violent threat risk assessment and in terms of the kids who are exhibiting these really worrisome behaviors and that and or even threatening behaviors and it is crucial to address the safety needs and to be aware of the safety needs of other kids because the the sag reality of this entire circumstance is that yes these kids are coming from a home where there's a tremendous amount of adversity but by virtue of their acting out behavior they may in fact be raising an aces score for other kids in the classroom who aren't experiencing adversity in at home but they're experiencing at school and so you know I Amanda's point is not lost on me is that how do you strike a balance between those children so that nobody's needs are falling through the cracks especially if we've got kids who are literally afraid to come to school because we've got one kid who's got outburst after outburst after outburst and possibly even it sounds like some threats of violence or at least implications of violence going on that are making the other kids unsafe and for that I say again there needs absolutely to be consequences and some kind of a safety plan for that child and that should not be left up to the teacher alone in my opinion that needs to be more of an approach where maybe you're pulling admin in maybe if you do have a violent threat risk assessment team you can pull them in your FSL your family school liaison worker counselor and say you know what are we going to do in terms of addressing the fact that we see that this particular child appears to be on a pathway to violence simply because we've got kids who are now afraid of him or her and that is a very significant and serious issue that needs to be addressed can we can we go to this why or good or okay a stress brain is sending corrosive signals to the body the heart rate increases the blood pressure rises breathing is rapid metabolically these are folks who shut down whose metabolism literally shuts down why because when they are locked in that fight flight freeze the cortisol is flowing and when cortisol is flowing it jacks the heart rate and it'll send the blood pressure through the ceiling because this is the fuel that we need in order to fight flight or freeze it will increase your breathing it will constrict your blood vessels so that less blood flow is occurring in the body it will absolutely shut down the metabolism because it's not going to burn any calories if it thinks that it needs to retain those calories in order to run or in order to to to hide or in order to freeze and to expend that energy and being very very still what we see over a course of a lifetime because cortisol has a very long shelf life here's an example if you're in a near-miss car accident first thing in the morning so it is seven o'clock in the morning and you're on the hand in somebody cuts you off you're in near-miss car accident and your heart rate jacks your breathing gets shallow you begin to shake um this is cortisol flowing through your body now again back to the idea brain's an efficient machine and it's saying holy we were under threat just now i better make sure that i keep cortisol flowing in my system for the next 12 hours because i don't know if this guy's going to come back and cut me off again or run into my car or what have you so anytime cortisol is kicked out in the fight flight freeze it has a long shelf life and it stays in the system for a long long time what does that mean over the long haul for these people who are experiencing these micro traumas all of the time well it essentially means that there is constantly cortisol flowing in their body and so we find that over the course of a lifetime these are the people who develop illnesses much much earlier in life than we would expect them to these are the people who struggle tremendously with obesity back to that whole first initial Kaiser Permanente exploration with adverse childhood experiences it was born out of an obesity clinic well tada it's not hard to understand why these folks struggle with obesity when all this cortisol is rolling through their body all the time and their metabolism shuts down their blood sugar stays high so that they could fight flight freeze and they have literally created the perfect storm for for their body to not burn fat these are the people who maybe you know them that as adults they have tried every diet coming down the pipes they go to the gym for like six hours out of the day they're running 10 miles every second day and yet their body stays the same all of the time and weight loss becomes an extraordinary extraordinary struggle for them part of the reason for these folks who are coming from this tremendous amount of stress is that the cortisol is just having a stranglehold on their system and it's creating all sorts of upheaval in terms of how their body can function to its optimum because it believes it needs to be in the ready position all of the time when really you know that's not necessarily the case okay so when aces are high and toxic stress is chronic we have think we can think of the brain as a canvas and anxiety as the paint now let's turn up the volume on this just a little bit and let's toss into the mix the fact that we have kids whether they're from a high aces background or not that are using um pardon me that are using tech all of the time and so what are they what are they exposed to or what are they doing when they're using tech all the time well the other thing that's being pruned away when when they're doing that is patience and here's why when you are on your snapchat all the time when you're on your facebook when you're on whatever the case may be especially the really high voltage social utilities that most kids use like instagram and snapchat they're very very very rapid and so the brain gets trained to have instant gratification from these things all of the time and back that i back to that idea of pruning what occurs for these particular youth is that their brain says oh you mean i don't have to wait to get what i need awesome i'm going to prune away those capabilities of patience and waiting and i am i don't need them because whatever i am looking for i get it immediately and so sometimes that can trans that too can translate into a tremendous amount of difficulty with these kids because they literally do not they can come across very entitled because they literally don't seem like they have that capability of being able to wait it out and have some patience okay are there questions christine or comments right now nope not at the moment okay okay so when we have this enlarged fear center and this shrunken executive function we can literally see this on an MRI when we look at these folks with an MRI and we can see that their amygdala is very very big their fear center is very very big their executive function the place where all of that self-regulation should live is very very small and the end again it's back to that idea of energy flowing to the place of priority so the fear center becoming the muscle man and executive functioning becoming the weakling and i don't think i don't know if you guys can my little slide is covered over here but this old-fashioned cartoon of the the little skinny guy being on the beach and the big muscle man coming in kick and sand in his face and then he needs to go and bulk himself up in order to do combat if you will and essentially that's what we're looking at doing when we are trying to teach self-regulation to these youths and to these little people is that we're trying to bulk up that area of executive function so that it can not do battle with their fight flight freeze mechanism but at least go toe to toe with it in such a way that instead of that emotional mind reacting all of the time and the intellectual or the logic mind kind of being in the background going yeah man i got nothing because i'm really weak we want to at least be able to bring them together and this is kind of what we'd like it to look like and i hope you guys can see this this is a venn diagram oh no you guys can't see it at all i don't think i'm holding up this venn diagram one of the circles is emotional mind the other circle is intellectual mind and where they cross over what is written there is wise mind and so our goal is always to try to beef those areas up in order so that they can experience some of the wisdom and the logic and the capability and the relaxation that would come normally to other kids without that adversity or without all of that stress that's going on for them but it takes time and it takes effort and it takes certain skills and strategies to do that and in the interim we have these special considerations that also ring our bell as social workers as educators as whomever are dealing with these kids because here's the other sad reality of the stressed brain and one of those things is we're going to be left with a lap full of attention deficit with or without hyperactivity disorder now why does this happen well it's because again that executive function part of the brain has never ever had the it's it's got the goat paths instead of the qe2 so the goat paths are going there and as a result that little air traffic controller who lives in all of our heads who is able to make us sit still when we need to sit still who helps us prioritize things who helps us get our proverbial duck's in a row and helps us slow down and think things through that little guy in our head is sleeping because he's always been incredibly under stimulated so he's got no get up and go which is why when kids are prescribed Adderall or Ritalin it can seem counterintuitive to be giving a stimulant to a kid who has hyperactivity disorder and you're like well what are you doing here and the hyper the the stimulant isn't being delivered to the part of the brain that is scattered what where the stimulant is being delivered to the brain is to that sleeping air traffic controller who has never had the amount of stimulation he needs in order to stay awake and do his job and but again the additional complication you guys will know this being educators is that sometimes dosing can be a real nightmare in terms of what that looks like for kids because they're little flyweights and so the doc who's working with whomever whomever the guardian is and the child can sometimes feel like it's a little bit of a crapshoot in terms of the dosage for the Ritalin or the Adderall for the youth in order to hit just the right note so that the kid does not quote feel like a zombie because a lot of kids I at least a lot of kids I've worked with who have been medicated and some adults too although adults seem to be more appreciative of their stimulant medication for their attention deficit than kids do but some will relay that concern that they that it makes them feel like kind of a zombie because it blunts the edges off of all of that high voltage stuff that's going on for them because the other reality and you guys as educators are going to be absolutely seeing this with these kids is that because the adrenaline is rocking and rolling so much of the time because that fear center is on high alert all of the time in terms of stress these are the kids who paradoxically can get addicted to their own adrenaline too and so you will watch them operate and you will see that they create chaos and you'll be going what is going on here this kid is coming from a home that's incredibly turbulent they've got some rock solid stability and consistency here at the school and yet here they are stirring the pot all the time what in the heck is that about well the brain will go where it feels most comfortable and the sad reality for these kids is that they feel most in control when they're totally out of control and that fear center is having to be on garden on on in and on high alert all the time and so sometimes in that whole schema they can create the chaos themselves and that whole concept of becoming Gabor vete calls it becoming addicted to their own adrenaline and they will they will stir the pot stir the pot stir the pot to kind of create the chaos and so you know having said that that doesn't make it easier to deal with them but it can maybe help flesh out and hammer down some of the reasons why they do that the other thing that we need to consider with these particular individuals who are coming from this high stress high aces background is that they have severe self soothing impairments obviously that's what we're talking about tonight so there is an impulse there the link between their impulse control and online gaming or addiction is extremely high the and then there that there's a few reasons for that regardless of the fact that our brains number one priority is survival the other thing that is running in the background all of the time is that our brain is always looking away to feel pleasure we are hardwired to feel pleasure and when we do not or have not have the ability to learn that on our own those self soothing those pleasurable things on our own we will look externally in order to have that need met for us and what does that externally very very well alcohol and drugs work very good for that because again there's no waiting and for these kids where patience has been an issue because they've always had to react in the moment very very quickly that can be that can set a bit of a stage in terms of what we're looking at for addiction and of course the other thing back to that whole idea of tech and these are kids and all kids unfortunately are exposed to a tremendous amount of tech all of the time and there's a real strong instant gratification piece to that that you know again sets that whole stage for that pattern that neural pathway to to be right geared up to want that instant gratification all of the time an additional component to that is when we have a brain that has been stimulated in the fear center for more often of the time than it has not and again the brain being the efficient machine has said oh i'm supposed to be really really alert all the time well that must mean i need to be very very sensitive all the time and what it will do it it will literally build more sensitivity neurons than a brain that has not faced the same level of adversity that these particular people have and as a result of that i mean sensitivity literally as in all of five senses will be more finely honed than they would be otherwise and what that means is that food tastes better and drinks taste better too and so alongside the the need to self-soothe with an agent that does that very efficiently being alcohol for example or food if there's a food addiction or an obesity problem the additional complicating factor is for these particular folks it's also going to taste better than it normally would okay um because they have all of that extra sensitivity going on and it can also explain you know a part and parcel not only are these kids pardon me extremely reactive all the time but they're also really really really sensitive to all of the information and the the stimuli that are going on all of the time so they get rattled a little more easily or they get hurt feelings a little more easily and these are the kids who you can think oh my gosh you know how come Tommy is such a little tit all the time well they literally do feel it a little deeper than other kids do not saying that to excuse build i'm saying that to build context in terms of this literally happens in their brain architecture so then with all of that being said what soothes the stressed brain the first thing i look at in terms of neurologically where we go to soothe some of this um overly heightened fear center is to a place where we can experience for the or these kids or these people can experience repetition and rhythm the brain is soothed by patterns and predictability so giving tasks and some of this is going to sound exactly you guys are going to have done this intuitively as educators my husband's an educator he's he's been a principal for several years now so intuitively you guys will have have done this with these particular kids tasks like repetitive stapling papers stapling a stack of papers uh accompanying the ta down to the laminating room to do the laminating and then to do the cutting organizing colored sheets for our adults some of our adults we gear them and we say you know what you want to soothe you want to slow yourself down when you're having a panic attack i want you to grab a big basket of laundry and i want you to fold that thing up and they're going to look at you like you've got 10 heads and are you going to be kidding me and it's like yet you know what don't knock it till you try it try it come back and tell to me about it and they will say oh my gosh you know every time fold it and put it down fold it and put it down it's patterning it's repetition it is mimicking of a soothing heartbeat to engage in some kind of repetitive behavior that has a rhythm to it okay and the added bonus is when they are finished those particular tasks they will also see a finished product and the finished product no matter how small will set off or light up pardon me the reward pathway in their brain because it will be a successful completion of something and so not only will they have been engaging in the repetition and the rhythm but they will also have a finished product at the end that gives them a tiny little burst of satisfaction and we why is this important because literally we need to rebuild those neural pathways that are goat paths that have never ever been fully developed so for the kids who don't come from this kind of a background or adversity again this kind of activity may or may not be helpful for them but for the kids who need that settling this repetition and rhythm can sometimes be extremely soothing for them to engage in and now i'm gonna with the next bullet i'm going to contradict myself completely and i'm going to say games like search a word or if we have to introduce some kind of screen time then a game like candy crushed or be jeweled again a game where you're looking for patterns where you're you're able to have tiny little bursts of success going on those can be incredibly soothing and the other piece that it does is while people are looking for these patterns and they're they're squaring up all the things they've stapled or they're piling up all the things they've cut out and laminated or they're looping those words in the search word or candy crushed be jeweled what have you while they are engaged in doing that they have to be all in meaning their focus has to be on that particular task and so when they're doing that it becomes a very very much a mindfulness activity for them too in that they literally have to slow down and turn down the white noise that may be going on in their brain because of that overdeveloped amygdala and they are reaching into that underdeveloped executive function and concentrating very hard these folks by the way too will take a longer time sometimes to do these very rudimentary repetitive sorts of activities simply because they are not used to doing that and we want them to get used to doing stuff like that so are there questions and comments from that right now uh you did have a comment from Amanda it says thank you Bonnie all of this information is very informative and the suggestions you mentioned are great okay awesome awesome just another note on repetition and rhythm this is more a geared toward adults who are struggling with these sorts of issues because of course you know adversity doesn't just you know we don't turn off the button to our past just because we become adults there's a reason why adult coloring books are an incredible market and and have been for the last few years in my side life I am a fiction writer and the last writers conference I was at agents were crying for people to submit to them adult coloring books because they are such a hotseller and again this whole idea of being very very mindful in an activity and picking colors and choosing colors and all of these things and I know it sounds like the simplest thing in the world and it sounds like a you know no pun intended and no brainer and yet it is incredibly soothing to engage in that particular activity under the umbrella of repetition and rhythm again we got a also slot exercise in that physical activity the reason why there's a couple first and foremost when we engage in some kind of exercise typically if it's cardiovascular in particular there is again a rhythm to that if you're running there's a rhythm of footfalls on the pavement or if you're running down the basketball court there's that rhythm that that comes along with that weightlifting is another excellent one because there's lots of repetition there obviously they call them reps as a matter of fact now for little tiny kids that's not an option but exercise certainly is and the other thing that exercise does is that it releases endorphins in the brain and essentially when somebody says oh you've got the runners high that is not actually a cliche that is a literal thing when these particular individuals and especially because they have a heightened sensitivity remember so when they engage in some kind of really strenuous physical activity it's going to light their reward pathway up even more so than it lights the reward pathway up for somebody else and what that does is that retrains that whole executive function to say hey wait a second this is a good place to put my energy this feels really good this makes me feel better than I feel when I'm not doing this and so it makes that shift between being in that alert state to being in a place where they can learn how to do something that is self-soothing now clearly this is all happening on an unconscious level but why does physical activity help for these particular kids who are acting out all over in the in the classroom and can't seem to settle themselves down that's why it's the endorphin connection it is the repetition and rhythm connection of it too okay scheduling and few surprises we talked about this a tiny bit earlier when Amanda posed your question about you know what do i do for this particular kid being that consistent person remember for the brain that is on high alert nothing reinforces its sense of instability like unanticipated activity on the flip side predictability builds that neural pathway and allows that person to realize that there are places on this planet where serenity and safety exist there are places in this world where the same thing happens every single time there are places in this world where i'm a little turkey and i get disciplined the same exact way every single time and lo and behold the discipline my teacher gives me actually makes sense to me too huh go figure um what's that about and yeah over time because again we're talking about something we're talking about a pathway that looks like a like a weed infested leap footpath as opposed to a highway over time when this happens over and over again all of a sudden we're slapping pavement down on that pathway all of a sudden the shift is happening and behavior might not change at home because home is no different but school with the consistency stays the same and you guys as educators you have seen these kids who don't want to leave school and sometimes this is one of the many components as to why because school is a place of a lot of serenity there's a reason why again harkening back to my work with violent threat risk assessment there's a reason why we say the month before school holidays for any school that's been traumatized the month before school holidays you're going to see a lot of turbulence and as teachers i'm sure that you can concur with that because there's a lot of upheaval going on in those weeks um if you're an adult add a pardon me add an elementary school chances are your schedule is disrupted all over the map because you got to practice for christmas concert all of that good stuff and then for these particular kids for whom school is their safe haven of consistency and predictability they're aware that in a couple weeks they've got to go home and they've got to be home for 14 long days of a whole lot of inconsistency and a whole lot of turbulence so again this is preaching to the choir i totally know that because i have educators here in the room but again warning these kids in advance about things like fire drills assemblies other deviations it doesn't change the fact that they're probably not going to make those transitions well because again anything that's turbulent to them their brain is automatically going to interpret it as some kind of upheaval and at some kind of at least a low-grade threat but at least warning them in advance again slowly over time they're going to develop a sense of comfort when that hand lands on their shoulder and says you know what there's going to be a fire drill today and it's going to be around this time or what have you right because that they can trust in that because bearing in mind these are the kids coming from all of this adversity one of the things that they have not been able to develop to any capacity because it simply hasn't presented itself to itself to them is a sense of being able to trust and school is often a place where they can develop a tremendous amount of trust okay now eliciting positive memories now what's that about okay making journals online photo albums real photo albums drawing or making posters of favorite memories is powerfully soothing and here is why when we do this so when we have cortisol in our system cortisol is our stress hormone cortisol is the one i touched on that creates all those long-term health difficulties cortisol keeps our fear on the ceiling and keeps our head on that swivel well dhea pardon me is another hormone but it's cortisol is polar opposite and here's why it is so incredibly powerful and important dha is a hormone that is released when we are feeling extremely happy and the cool thing about it is our head our brain will bank it so when we experience the first time we hike maline canyon maybe and we're amazed and awed by the beauty there okay our head will bank that experience so when somebody says to me i'm having my panic attack or i'm fresh out of a panic attack and somebody says okay barney you know what we're going to do a mindfulness activity right now and i want you to do a guided imagery and i want you to walk me through that time you are at maline canyon and i want you to employ all five of your senses i want i want you to tell me what did it look like what did it smell like what did it feel like when you reached out and maybe touched some of the ice there all of your five senses and as i immerse myself into that memory and relaying that memory whether i'm doing it verbally whether i'm drawing or whether you've given your student a journal exercise that they have to do this here's what's going on in their brain the dha is being re-released from its bank and as the dha is flowing in their brain they are elevated in terms of their mood and their sense of well-being the other thing that is incredibly important that's going on is that the human brain cannot release dha and cortisol at the same time it's either one or the other so when the dha is flowing even out of the bank the faucet for the cortisol has no has no choice but to be cranked off and so the cortisol stops flowing that doesn't change that it will still have its shelf life but that means no more will be rolling in the system at that particular period of time and more importantly the dha will be flowing and it will be present so it's going to elevate that student's state of mind and their sense of well-being so these are a few tiny little strategies to maybe get them to engage in or to have in your back pocket or your ta's back pocket for those times for those really high-risk kids when maybe you can reframe some of the mood that is happening for them or you see them come in that day and you can just tell that little storm clouds hanging over their head and today is going to be one of those days well this may be something for them to engage in in some way shape or form and i would suspect there would be ways to make it fold into curricula somehow in terms of language arts or what have you but these are these are different strategies to pull forth that dha by eliciting positive memories okay um woo woo words like gratitude interest and hope now uh gratitude way back in the day when i was a brand new social worker i i firmly believed i was 23 years old and very idealistic but nonetheless i very much believed that there was a mind-body-spirit connection and i always used to say what you do to one will affect the other two and sometimes i would be called a flake or worse but then when this aces stuff came to the surface and it kind of buttressed some of what i had believed for my entire career it felt really good so hearing these woo woo words and understanding why things like gratitude interest and hope truly do make a neurological difference was really very cool for me but then again i'm a bit of a geek so here we go the neurological merit of tapping into gratitude so again sitting down with that student or having some kind of activity for them to reflect on what are you grateful for it does not have to be a big thing okay if you were to ask you know me on my crummiest day what are you grateful for i might say gee you know maybe the coffee tasted good this morning but here is what happens when we feel gratitude it does a couple things to our system first and foremost it releases oxytocin in our brain oxytocin there's our love hormone okay so what that essentially does is reminds us in that moment of gratitude it reminds us why we're why we love our life or why we love components of our life the other thing that it does in the human brain is that it boosts the neurotransmitter serotonin and that is identical to what the drug prozac does the anti-depressant drug prozac does and other SSRIs also boost the neurotransmitter serotonin so reflecting on gratitude will literally change the brain chemistry for the individual who is engaged in that particular activity okay so extremely powerful stuff going on there and like i said it can be as simple as starting out with the smallest tiniest thing because you're going to find and you guys know this far better than me because you work with these kids these are the kids who can be extraordinarily pessimistic so you know you can do some gentle inquiry or compassionate inquiry on around what you're grateful for and you may get nothing but if you probe and prod even for the smallest smallest thing that they can feel gratitude for let me picture that what did that sound like what did that look like what it also does as it's releasing the serotonin as it is releasing the oxytocin is that it is also lighting up that reward pathway and when we light up our reward pathway by reflecting on gratitude we essentially will crave more it's kind of like an addict craving more and so they will say oh and then there's this I feel grateful for two and this and this and this and so that engagement in that activity of feeling gratitude is incredibly powerful for these folks who are really really struggling without a self-regulate on their own and building that in as a habit and maybe fostering some kind of idea like you have your job is to do a gratitude journal or what have you for these particular youth interest showing interest allows us to feel like we have potential and these are kids who either consciously or unconsciously can feel very much like they don't necessarily have potential and so probing and again doing that compassionate inquiry in terms of what are you interested in what really what really makes you think about things or makes you want to know more or what subject would you like to research or what it doesn't matter what it is it does not matter what it is it could be skateboard wheels it doesn't matter if they are feeling interested in something internally they are building hope and they are reminding themselves that they have potential hope also teaches the stressed brain that there is more than just the moment the brain that is stressed is very much what we call a prisoner of the present okay so it is locked in that sense of fight flight or freeze and it's feeling like I've got to react in the moment when you can re-engage somebody into thinking about something like hope hope is a future concept and getting them to think about a future concept literally pulls them out of that trap that of the present and gets them thinking about something in the distance and again it reawakens that whole concept of there is potential here there is potential here again either consciously or unconsciously and of course dependent on the age of the child that you're executing this kind of a strategy with you know something it's going to be very simplified for an elementary student it could be extremely complex for somebody who's in high school or junior or middle school they can they can tackle these kinds of concepts with a lot more acuity when they're a little bit older but they're going to have the same exact effect on them and ps all of these states also release more dha meaning that they are queuing into times that feel good and they're pulling that hormone forward and when we're pulling that hormone forward we have no choice in the brain but to turn the quarters all off okay creativity in the brain's reward circuitry an understimulated pleasure center needs to learn how to be lit creating art writing music photography any or all of these will light up the brain's reward center why because these are these are times when the individual is creating something that regardless of how it looks to somebody else or sounds to somebody else of its music it feels good and looks good and sounds good to them and that whole idea of allowing them to execute or create something beautiful for their eye again goes back to that whole idea of the brain's reward pathway learning how to be lit by something that is very life-giving in terms of an activity and so creativity of any stripe is extraordinarily powerful in teaching these particular students and youth self-regulation there is a reason why there are so many musicians when you research them and I'm talking famous musicians who will report having had an extraordinarily turbulent childhood and part of their musical acuity has come from the fact that they have learned somewhere along the way that this is an incredibly excellent self-soothing slash self-regulating sort of engagement of behavior that they can they can really enjoy this and that this can reroute things and pull things out of that whole emotional place and put it into the logical the pleasure feeling place okay the most soothing strategy for the stressed brain embedded in each of the aforementioned strategy is the implicit indication that the person in question is not engaging in them all alone that they are being cued or guided to do these things or that these things are being suggested to them without question connection and a loving relationship and Amanda back to your comment earlier about you know what can i do for these particular kids when i have them for such a short amount of time you will be shocked at how much of an impact you are making in that short amount of time and you know what i'm not saying that to put sunshine where sunshine has no business being i am saying that not only from from a place of loving and understanding this particular information but also from a place where i have lived with an educator for 25 years and i have seen the kids who he taught 20 years ago contact him on facebook and tell him you know thank you mr randall or what have you to mr randall and he doesn't know who they are like he's taught a lot of them but they only had one of him and he has made an extraordinarily extraordinary pardon me difference in their life and it's because like every teacher you guys as well he loves kids and he wanted to be with these kids and he wanted to help make a difference for these kids and by virtue of you being here and taking part in the seminar that's clearly the case for you too so even though it sounds maybe corny or maybe trite i do not mean it that way i'd sincerely mean relationships are what make the difference um and and with that i i see that we're at 757 christine so i was i was speed wrapping through a lot of that stuff but if we have any any questions or comments uh i guess we have a couple minutes to field any of those yes please feel free to pop your questions in the chat or unmute your microphone and you can save them to bonnie a ruth is saying thank you very much bonnie this has been a highly informative session super i'm glad that you enjoyed it ruth thank you for being taking part i've always been in childcare my whole career and then three months or so i've been with the school board so um i've been learning lots and it's been a challenge but it's also been really rewarding so this this seminar has helped a lot so i will remember all the things that you've talked about tonight for when we have some you know near the end of the school year and things are changing and stuff like that so i will remember a lot of this and this is really a really good seminar awesome awesome thank you i'm glad that you got a lot out of it uh d is also saying i'm not sure you're you're full first name but she says or he says yes i agree thank you so much lots of great pointers i teach grade one with a few very stressed out with a few very stressed out kiddos so this gave me a few tips to try out this week nice life is a lot more turbulent for some of these little people than we would ever want it to be not as sure too well just say before everybody leaves thank you so much again for joining us this webinar has been recorded so i will upload it and um send you all the links so you can view it later if you like and we did send you the link to the slides so you can always come back to the information that bonnie shared with us later on so thank you so much bonnie thank you so much and looking forward to tomorrow to do a full day sounds good everyone have a great night night