Promoting resilience and wellbeing

  Who were you when you were little – were you the clever one, the sporty one, the quiet one, the anxious one ….? We are all the recipients of a unique narrative in childhood and this narrative, often lovingly bestowed, can have powerful consequences. Quite often the stories that we receive as children can perpetuate what we feel we can and can’t do. We often internalise the idea that we are too anxious to go for a part in the school play or too clumsy to try out for the school football team.   This also works the other way - when children are given labels like bright or naturally gifted what the research now tells us is that these kids can often shy away from challenges because of the fear of failure and not living up to everyone’s expectations.   When our children are repeatedly described in a particular way, they will start to believe these messages about themselves, and these beliefs can hold a strong influence across their social and academic functioning. Once children start a

  If you have more then one child the chances are you often feel like a referee in your own home.   We know that even the most loving siblings still have moments of intense feelings with one another.   Our children fight for all sorts of reasons – not enough hot water left in the shower, someone has eaten the last slice of bread, someone has to sit in the middle seat of the car – pretty much as soon as you move from a one child family all families experience this to a greater or lesser degree. One way to look at this is around scarcity and survival.   Instinctual competition is hardwired into human survival and when there are more children than adults around (and even when there isn’t) this can create competition for attention and resources and leave our children less able to experience empathy - we are all so much better at empathy when we are not worried about getting our own needs met.   But whether it’s fighting over the shower, or maybe the attention of mum and dad this consta

  All children (and all adults!) experience big feelings.  And these big feelings can take on all sorts of different guises.  Sometimes the feelings show up as very loud and noisy tantrums and sometimes they are so quiet that we need to look much more closely not to miss them, like sadness that hangs around for much longer than it should. The thing about these big feelings is that they are perfectly normal to feel and actually the main reason these feelings end up bursting out in all sorts of tricky behaviours is because our little people don’t know how to manage them yet .  Emotional regulation is not something any of us are born with, it is something that we develop and this is where we come in.  One of the most important jobs as a parent or carer is to support our children to manage these big normal feelings in ways that are healthy and adaptive.  Understanding the science (Dan Siegel)   Ok here is where I need you to use your imagination a little bit.  Imagine there is a house in y

  Adam Grant, an inspiring American psychologist wrote a very interesting article recently in the New York Times.   He called the article “There’s a name for the blah you're feeling: It’s called languishing”.   In the article Grant defines languishing as “ a sense of stagnation and emptiness - it feels like you’re muddling through your days, looking at your life through a foggy windshield”. In football terms people often talk about teams languishing in mid table mediocrity where despite their best efforts they can’t seem to move themselves to the flourishing heights of the next league.   And actually, this feels really familiar.   How many of you are feeling fed up and although you are managing on a day-to-day basis there is a distinct lack of joy and progress. Grant suggests that many of us are not only struggling with long COVID but also the emotional long haul of the pandemic.   In psychology we often talk about the mental health curve which was originally conceived by Huppe

  So how much do you know about your brain? I am guessing probably not a lot and actually none of us knew very much about the teenage brain until about 20 years ago.  We used to think that all of our brain development happened in our early years but now we know this is not the case.  In actual fact your brain goes through some pretty phenomenal changes that start when you begin puberty and actually don’t finish until you get to your mid-twenties.  That’s right your brain is not fully developed until 25 at the earliest, maybe even a little bit later. The first thing to know is that different parts of our brain develop at different speeds.  One of the first parts of your brain to develop is called the limbic system where the amygdala lives.  This is the part of your brain that is responsible for all of your emotional reactions – anger, sadness, excitement and is also the part that is responsible for keeping you safe by activating your flight, flight, freeze response.  This is a brill

  When our children are young, we all understand that their brains are still developing and this knowledge allows us to tolerate and even delight in the amount of support they need to achieve their developmental milestones. Remember the joy you felt when your little person took their first step or managed to say their first word.   When our children reach adolescence, we can suddenly find our privileged position in their lives replaced by their peers and their behaviour can leave us feeling perplexed and confused.    We often attribute these changes to a surge in hormones and while this is definitely one of the things that is happening in adolescence, we now know that it is not the main event.   What we are beginning to understand from the science is that when our young people reach adolescence the brain starts a remodelling project specifically designed to support them to make the transition into adulthood.   This is a process that continues until our young people are in their mid

  You know those morning when you can’t be bothered getting out of bed and everything, even getting dressed, feels like a massive effort.   This is normal and it’s probably something we have all experienced more over the past year.   It’s something that most of us move in and out of and while it feels pretty miserable at the time, we know it will pass.   For some of us, however, this low mood can hang around for longer and start influencing lots of things like our energy levels, our interest and motivation, how irritable we are and our ability to sleep… to name just a few.   And if that’s not enough, low mood can also start giving us some really bad advice- telling us to stay away from other people and not to bother doing the things that we used to enjoy because there is no point.   When this happens it probably means that we need to start doing some of the things we know will help us to boss the low mood back to a more manageable place.   So how do we do that …. Rewards matter

  Do you ever get the feeling that we live in a “fix it” world? I do.   If someone is sad, we try to make them happy, if someone is angry, we try and calm them down.   In a world that values relentless positivity we want to fix everything, especially when it comes to emotions that make us feel uncomfortable.   But sometimes it’s important to recognise that worried and uncomfortable is precisely where we need to be. A psychologist called Susan David talks about a concept called emotional agility.   When we are emotionally agile, we are able to experience our thoughts and emotions in a way that doesn’t allow them to hijack our plans.   What this means is that we can experience big feelings like sadness, anger or frustration and we are still able to do the things that are important to us.   There are four key parts to developing emotional agility 1.        Showing up This is about being curious when emotions show up.   It’s pausing and asking ourselves the question “ why do I feel