Promoting resilience and wellbeing

  Through the summer months we often wonder how best to support our young people.   How can we use this unstructured time to build up their life skills and resilience?   Should we book summer camps? Should we travel and let them experience different cultures and different climates? Should we leave them at home, allow them to get bored and sit back and watch their creativity emerge? Of course, our children will benefit from all the above, structured and unstructured time is important as is exposure to different people and places.   BUT what really matters for all our children is their relationships with the people who really care about them – their family, their cousins, their uncles, their aunties, their grandparents, their community, close family friends…. these are the people who contribute to their relational wealth.   Relational wealth is a relatively new concept from Dr Bruce Perry, an American Psychiatrist who writes extensively on resilience and traum...

Stress is so ubiquitous in our society that we often don’t give it much thought beyond describing ourselves as being stressed.   But having a good understanding of the stress cycle can make a significant difference to how we manage it. In their book, Burnout, Emily and Amelia Nagoski describe the stress cycle as another biological process in our bodies that has a beginning, a middle and an end.  They emphasise the fact that dealing with your stress response is a separate process to dealing with the things that cause your stress, the stressors. Stressors are the innumerate number of things that cause us stress every day.  The work project, the job interview, our commute to work, being a parent…  All of these things have the capacity to activate the threat response in our bodies. Stress, on the other hand, is the physiological response that happens in our bodies when our threat response is activated.  This response gets a lot of bad press but it is fundamental...

  Once I move into a better house and get that promotion at work, I will be happy. Sound familiar? If it does you are not alone. Despite the privilege of life in the UK and in many other countries across the world a huge proportion of us report feeling like our life is missing something.  The positive psychologist David Myers suggests in this book, The American Paradox, that “our becoming much better off over the last four decades has not been accompanied by one iota of increased subjective wellbeing”.  This is a puzzle.  In the developed world our lives are much more comfortable, we are better off financially, we have access to better health care, we can travel to anywhere in the world and we have the technology to make our lives much easier.  And yet we often feel a high level of dissatisfaction. Why does this happen? So much of our life is focused on trying to reach our goals - getting good exam results, getting in to a good university, gaining a qualificatio...

  I work with many teenagers and when I mention breathing it often elicits eye rolls and yawning.   And I get it, we breath all day every day and most of the young people I see are tired of people telling them to take some deep breaths.   The beauty of deep steady breathing is that we don’t have to believe it will work in order for it to work. When we get overwhelmed by our big feelings, we automatically start to breath more quickly and this activates the stress response in our bodies.   Our heart starts to beat super-fast in order to pump blood into our arms and legs and our breathing speeds up to increase the level of oxygen in our bodies.   This often feels really uncomfortable and many people describe feeling out of control in these moments.      This is where breathing becomes our superpower.   It is something that we always have with us, we never leave it at home and even if we don’t believe for one tiny second it will help …. it wi...

  One of the most exciting discoveries in the past 20 years is the fact that our brains are constantly changing.    Psychologists call this neuroplasticity and essentially what this means is that our remarkable brains can continue to grow and evolve in response to the experiences that it is exposed to. And this can happen all the way through our lives. Understanding and believing that our brains can get better with time and effort is possibly one of the most important pieces of information both for ourselves and for our children.   Carol Dweck has carried out extensive research in this area and identified two types of mindsets:   Growth mindset - a belief that our intelligence and our general ability can be improved with support and hard work Fixed mindset – a belief that our intelligence and ability can’t change regardless of what we do As you can probably imagine the first one creates high levels of motivation while the second one can generate feelin...

  When I talk to people in my clinic, they will often say something like “I just want to be happy”. And why not, we all want to feel more happiness in our lives.   But maybe chasing happiness is not the best way to actually achieve more happiness….   we now have so much research which tells us that putting our efforts into pursuing meaning and purpose rather than happiness contributes much more to our wellbeing.   Martin Seligman defines meaning as being part of or belonging to something bigger than ourselves. His research suggests that being able to contribute and belong to something meaningful creates a sense of purpose in our lives.   And it is this sense of purpose that nudges us closer to a flourishing wellbeing.   Viktor Frankl, author of Man’s Search for Meaning proposes that there are two different kinds of meaning.   The big M meaning which is about the meaning of life .   This meaning is about finding a grand purpose in life – this m...

  “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...