Promoting resilience and wellbeing

  “Of all the experiences we need to survive and thrive, it is the experience of relating to others that is most meaningful and important” Louis Conzolino professor of Psychology at Pepperdine University.  This is a truth that is now universally acknowledged - our relationships are the single most important predictor for wellbeing across the life span.  For the past 80 years researchers at Harvard have been trying to answer the question “what makes a good life?”.  They have followed hundreds of people through their lives asking questions, collecting data, and taking extensive physiological measurements.  The results are fascinating but the single most important thing that has emerged from this study is summed up by George Valliant “the only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people”.  The study found that strong positive relationships were the strongest predictor of life satisfaction, out weighing social class, wealth, IQ or ...

  Are any of these statements familiar to you? “I used to love ...... but I just don’t have time anymore” “I really enjoyed…... but then we had children” “I used to spend hours doing ……. I can’t remember why I stopped” These statements are very familiar to me but interestingly not very familiar for my children.   Our children are innately good at finding what psychologists call ‘FLOW’.   This elusive state of engagement where our sense of time fades away and we are totally absorbed in whatever we are doing.   Susan Perry, a sociologist defines flow as “the word most often used to describe the state of mind that occurs when we are so deeply engaged in some activity that time seems to stop”, to embody this state we need to feel challenged enough but not so challenged that we experience frustration and ultimately want to stop.   It is essentially the sweet spot between too easy and too difficult.    With children you can observe this phenome...

  Now it will be no surprise to anyone that experiencing positive emotions lead to a happier life with greater wellbeing.   But this is only half the story. Barbara Fredrickson, an eminent researcher in this field, has discovered something amazing.   Essentially when we experience positive emotions our brains literally start working in a different gear.    We can take in more information, we become more sociable and our capacity to learn increases.   This is why some days learning is so much easier than others and why our little and big people are so much more receptive to new ideas or information when they are in a positive emotional state.  Barbara calls this the broaden and build theory, positive emotions broaden our thinking ability and we can use this ability to build new skills.  So how do we support more positive emotion in our households? One simple way is gratitude - paying attention to the things we are grateful for. For more than a...

  The other day someone described themselves army crawling through their life - they were without question surviving – they went to work every day, they got their children on the school bus, they filed their taxes and they managed to keep their household up and running.   This is a familiar circumstance for many of us, we get so consumed with just getting through the day we almost forget to look up and take stock of how we are living out lives. In psychology we often talk about the mental health curve which was originally developed by Huppert in 2005 and beautifully illustrated here by Emma Hepburn.      This curve helps us to appreciate that our mental health exists on a continuum, sometimes we are ahead and sometimes we are just trying to stay afloat. For a very long time the field of psychology was primarily interested in the in the left-hand side of this curve, researching, classifying and treating those who were struggling with significant mental ...

  EVERY ACTION YOU TAKE IS A VOTE FOR THE TYPE OF PERSON YOU WISH TO BECOME James Clear James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits, defines habits as small decisions we make and actions we perform every day.   He suggests that we are in fact the sum of our habits.   What we do over and over again influences everything about us – what we believe, how we behave, what we achieve or don’t achieve. So, how do we get better at creating good habits? Most people’s initial instinct is to turn to willpower - I am sure we have all had the experience of looking at other people’s habits and wishing we had half of their willpower, I know I certainly have.   But actually, what the research tells us is that willpower is not the answer.   What we now know is that willpower is like a muscle, the more we use it throughout the day (avoiding the cake tin, not binge watching Breaking Bad) the less willpower we have at the end of the day.   This means that relying on wi...

  You know the drill – you have come back from the beach; everyone is tired and your youngest child refuses to get her pyjamas on.   She is shouting and screaming and kicking her little legs at anything she can reach.   She is experiencing a moment of complete dysregulation – a moment where she no longer has access to the rational thinking part of her brain.   It’s her emotions in the driving seat and they have their foot to the floor. So, what do we do? Once we know our child is safe the single most important question we can ask ourselves in this situation is “am I regulated” - do I have access to the rational thinking part of my own brain.   If we do, we are in a strong position to take a deep breath (or 20!) and support our little person to get their own rational brain back online.   We generally do this by connecting with where they are.   This might look something like “ I can see that you are really struggling right now, it’s hard to put ...

  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 ch...

  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...

  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 b...