dr Dan Siegel – Page 3 – Inspired New Horizons

A Tipping Point for Our Lifestyle

There was a time when physical fitness wasn’t such a compelling component of our daily lives. Many of us were “weekend workout warriors”. That’s when we would carve out the time to go for a run, take a long bike ride or hike through the local woods. It was in the early 1980’s that a growing awareness of the importance of regular physical exercise intersected with the invention of the Nordic Track and commercial gym memberships expanding to a broader audience. The Nordic Track became a highly popular Christmas gift that held a prominent space in the living room or bedroom for a few glorious weeks. It wasn’t long til there was a lot of humor being shared about the Nordic Track becoming an ingenuous clothing rack by the end of January. While that Nordic Track might not have “fast-tracked” us to include physical fitness into our daily routines, there was in fact an upward trend in the growing awareness of the long term benefits of regular exercise.

Here we are decades later, and most of us have fully integrated some form of physical exercise into our daily routines. We wear fitness trackers to count our steps and measure our heart rate. We speak the lingo with ease – resistance training, VO2 max, zone 2 cardio, grip strength and core balance.

How did we get from weekend workout warriors and Nordic Tracks that morphed into clothes racks to this whole new lifestyle that includes consistent physical fitness? It was that upward trend catching big momentum – for all the right reasons.

And here we are now – at the tipping point of yet another upward trend — proactively attending to our mental and emotional health. It’s going to transform how we integrate tools and practices to support our mental and emotional health into our daily lifestyle. It’s going to dovetail with our commitment to our physical health because they go together like hand in glove.

Just a few short years ago, this would have seemed highly unlikely.

When it came to our mental health, the focus had always been on the pathology. No wonder we had so much stigma associated with mental health. We waited until there was a serious issue and then asked “what’s wrong?” or “who has some diagnosis of a mental health problem?” Treatments were often bandaid solutions to ease anxiety, but not uncover the root cause of the anxiety and fear. Health professionals were treating the symptoms and not the core problems. Because of the stigma associated with mental health, many people tried to power through their emotional and mental health struggles on their own.

We wouldn’t ignore a concerning physical health problem indefinitely. The same is now true for our emotional and mental health. Early intervention, paying attention to the warning signs and getting the support we need is now viewed as normal, healthy and empowering.

We are normalizing what we once kept hidden and that is shifting us to investigate why we react to life as we do. We are beginning to understand how our brains work and what they need to function optimally. We took our brains for granted – and yet they are running our daily lives. With all this groundbreaking knowledge, we now have an invested interest in being proactive about brain health.

We are learning why sleep is key for optimal brain function and health. We are also learning the importance of hydration throughout the day for our brains; and the effects of caffeine, sugar and alcohol on our brains and sleep cycles. We are getting morning sunlight to set our circadian rhythm and dimming our lights an hour before bed.

This upward trend of weaving mental health into our lifestyle is already showing up in our daily lives. Our fitness devices track our sleep cycles and we are now sleeping in darker, cooler bedrooms. Mattresses and comforters are featuring temperature controls to cool our bodies down to proper sleeping temperature and then warm us up just before waking. We take “sleep stack” supplements before bed just as we take probiotics and vitamin supplements in the morning.

There’s nothing like a few new products to really nudge us along on that upward trend; that’s how the momentum builds for our new integrated approach to mental health. Our children will be learning about their brains in this brand new way, all while also implementing healthy brain hygiene. This is how our human evolution advances us – one generation at a time, adapting and adopting what we are learning.

Knowledge is empowerment.

Where we once believed we had no agency over how we were “wired”, we are now learning that the neuroplasticity of our brains allows us to proactively create new neural pathways to help us build — and maintain — positive, meaningful changes in our mental and emotional health.

Just like the previous upward trend that spurred us on to take our physical health seriously and to be proactive in maintaining healthy physical bodies throughout our lifetime, we are now at a tipping point for positive brain health integration.

In a recent Huberman Lab podcast, Dr. Paul Conti (Stanford University graduate, psychiatrist and author), pointed out that most of us know an incredible amount of information about our physical body and anatomy. It is also very complex, with many moving parts that integrate rather seamlessly. We can readily self-diagnose when something about our physical body hurts, is not working well, has a bug or virus. Dr. Conti believes that we can also learn about our brains and mental health in the same way.

We can start by taking better care of our brains through sleep, hydration, self-awareness, healthy coping skills and improved emotional regulation. as the foundational building blocks for proactive positive brain health.

Once we have laid this foundation, we will be more receptive to taking the next transformation steps. It is analogous to taking better care of our physical bodies with rest and proper nutrition — and then easing into a diverse, and sometimes challenging fitness regimen. Just like we build muscle strength and endurance in our bodies, we can be building better neural networks and muscle memory for our emotional and mental health.

Mental and emotional health has taken a giant step forward.

Although our brains and emotions drive much of how we show up in life, they were often relegated to the back seat. Think about that — our premier operating system was a back seat driver that we usually ignored.

Now we know more and we know better how to care for children’s developing brains and how to take care of our own adult brains and install valuable upgrades. We are realizing that emotions are a feature not a bug and we need them to help us make decisions about what is most important to us. In fact, emotions are are core ingredient to our overall happiness and fulfillment in life. All those emotions that we stuffed and suppressed were roadmaps for life. Is it any wonder we got so lost and misdirected?

We have been operating on a very outdated autopilot for far too long. We have ignored the lessons and guidance from our back seat drivers. Our unconscious mind is a like a five year old in the driver’s seat, stretching up to see out the windshield while straining to reach the gas pedal.

Over the next few weeks, Andrew Huberman and his guest, Dr. Paul Conti, will be offering a four part podcast series entitled “How to Understand and Assess Your Mental Health.” I have found Dr. Cont’s insights to be revelational and eye-opening.

I will be distilling this four-part series into blog posts over the coming weeks with great enthusiasm. If you are also fascinated by this upward trend that is rapidly gaining a lot of momentum, take some time to listen to the podcast series and check back for future posts about the healthier trajectory of our mental and emotional lifestyle.

Just imagine how incredible it will be to know as much about your amazing brain and mind as you do about your physical body!

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES:

September 6, 2023 Episode: How to Understand & Assess Your Mental Health with guest, Dr. Paul Conti https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/huberman-lab/id1545953110?i=100062692001

Here are the show notes for the first episode in this series

https://podcastnotes.org/huberman-lab/guest-series-dr-paul-conti-how-to-understand-assess-your-mental-health-huberman-lab/

Growing Forward

I found a fascinating article the other day that intrigued me so much I spent an entire day making lists and creating graphs, pie charts and collages. Are you wondering what captivated me? It was about the person we will all be in 5 years.

Consider this: The person we will become in 5 years has a lot to do with the decisions we are making as the person we are today (and tomorrow….and so on). What shapes us? The books we read, the foods we eat, the workouts we do, the friends we meet, the sacrifices we make, the habits we build.

Those prompts really got me to thinking about who I am today for those very reasons. I thought about family and friends, and how the last five years have shaped them as well. Even if we would have had a crystal ball then, I doubt very much that any of us could have guessed how much we’ve changed; much of it intentionally and some of it due to things not in our control.

What if we could plot all this change, so we would have a visual for who we were 5 years ago, who we are today, and to project who we might be 5 years into the future. Wouldn’t it be amazing to have a chart of our self discovery and personal growth trajectory? I’d call it the “Growing Forward” chart.

It makes sense to step back and take a look at who we were in 2018. Nothing like a rear view mirror to help us see just how far we’ve come.

What books have you read over these past five years? What genres or subjects were you drawn to and what knowledge did you gain? How did you apply it to your life? Reading books, both fiction and non-fiction, deepens our empathy for others and helps us see ourselves in other’s stories. What did you discover about yourself and others through the books you read.

Think about new friendships you have formed and what drew you to these new people. How have they shaped who you are today? Did they introduce you to a new hobby or interest? What have you learned as you listened to their life stories? What did you learn about yourself that was reflected back to you in their experiences? How do these friends make you feel?

Are those habits that were so hard to implement in the beginning now a part of your normal daily routine? How have those improved habits changed your life? What is working so much better now?Are you more conscious of the choices you make that might derail your goals?

Have you discovered any new interests, taken up a new hobby or resumed an old one with a renewed passion? Are you spending less time on social media and more time being present with family and friends? Have you shifted your perspective on self care and recognize that you need to take good care of yourself so that you can be your best for others?

Are you amazed to discover just how much you really have changed over the past 5 years? Since so much of our change happens incrementally and definitely not in a linear way, it is quite surprising to take stock of these transformations, especially in 5 year increments. That’s when the real changes we’ve made become so apparent. That is where we see our “growing forward” trajectory.

I decided to look back on my blog posts from 2018 as part of this reflective exercise and while the topics are still relevant, the research and resources that have advanced our understanding about them have exploded into mainstream conversations. Back then, we still thought of meditation and mindfulness as something done on a cushion. Today many of us are more familiar with how our brains actually work than we ever did before thanks to neuroscience — and the podcasters and authors who break it down into layman’s terms for us and weave its value into our daily lives.

In 2018, there was still a major stigma associated with mental health and no one was talking about emotional health. We may have known there was a growing mental health crisis underfoot but all the pieces of the complex puzzle were not yet coming together. Personal growth was gaining a little more traction and life coaches were in high demand.

We could feel a sense that we were searching for something, but there wasn’t a lot of clarity and we were swimming in a sea of so many tempting distractions. Social media and the news cycles were addictive.

No matter what we were all individually doing that was shaping who we would be in five years, none of us could have predicted the major impact of a global pandemic. This would create changes we did not anticipate and yes, it would also shape who we’d become. The pandemic disrupted our “normal”. We’d been operating in our “normal” for so long that we had become unaware of how we were just going along with the pace and societal influences.

Change happens when our normal routines are disrupted. It is a basic principle for helping us stick to new habits or goals. Disruptions are the catalyst for reflection and redirection. Suddenly, we were all sent home to “think about it”. A collective disruption and a serious re-thinking of what matters most.

It is not at all surprising that the pandemic expedited the integration of modern medicine, neuroscience, psychology, cognitive and emotional health. There was no denying just how interconnected they all were. We started to pay attention to compromised immune systems. We could no longer deny the impacts of high levels of anxiety and extended periods of uncertainty. As humans, we just aren’t built for these long durations of stress and volatility. We need to return to baseline to rebuild our tolerance and resilience. We need breaks, we need quality sleep, we need to feel safe.

As we were washing our groceries, we started to think more consciously about what we were eating. We were learning to bake sourdough and create home-cooked meals.

Isolation and loneliness were amplified which proved just how much we need human connection for our health and well-being. Families needed each other to help with childcare and schooling. Grandparents moved from retirement communities to live closer to their adult children and grandchildren. We began to see the reality that we had missed before. How important safe and healthy childcare is, what needs to change in how we educate our children, What we miss when we cannot be together – to celebrate, to grieve, to scaffold, to comfort, to encourage, to challenge.

The perfect storm became the impetus for breakthroughs.

Our learning curve trajectory was on a rapid ascent. It was integrating with medical and science advancements that would deliver many missing pieces to our human puzzle.

We may not have realized that as we were accepting changes that we had no control over, we were in turn making changes of our own – based on meeting our needs and what mattered most to us. We were micro-dosing change as we found new ways to support ourselves and our families through the pandemic. It was definitely not linear, and we back-tracked more than a few times, but our trajectory has become evident.

It takes a lot of commitment, practice, dedication and perseverance to become an overnight sensation.

We think that rock stars and celebrities, inventors and AI blow onto the scene and create seismic shifts in an instant. But this is not the case. And it certainly has not been the case for medicine and science when it comes to the recent explosion of knowledge, tools and teachers for emotional health. It just feels like an aha moment. It has been a long time coming — and it arrived when we were most ready to soak it up.

As I looked through the past five years of my blog posts, I re-discovered the moments where I was seeing the integration of so many modalities for personal growth and self discovery. As a neuroscience geek, I was so excited. I had long wondered if there wasn’t a better, more enticing way to draw people into doing their own inner work. Why did we have to hit rock bottom or have our world fall apart to begin engaging in self improvement?

To be candid, if not for the pandemic, I may have thought my own personal growth work was done. I had a solid “starter kit” of improved self awareness and better life skills. I was handling myself much better than ever before.

But the real test and the real growth happens when we take our individual work into our relationships. The pandemic delivered a plethora of opportunities to put the new skills and practices to the test. Suddenly, there were a lot more people coming onboard with a keen interest in emotional health and personal growth.

As parents realized how their own childhoods had impacted them in unhealthy ways, they embraced the new parenting models that integrated emotions into the developing brains of their children. Again, there were so many emotions welling up in all of us that it was crystal clear we needed better skills so as not to compound an already complex problem.

We had poked holes in our awareness, seeds had been planted, some had sprouted and there was a growing demand for education, support and counseling. A huge pivot had occurred – the veil around mental health was lifted. Seeking therapy and counseling became normalized, just like hiring a fitness trainer or life coach. The demand for counseling was so high that there simply were not enough professionals to meet it. Just a few years prior, BetterHelp online therapy was only promoted on personal growth and wellness platforms. Today, BetterHelp is a sponsor for business and news podcasts, influencers and fitness gurus.

When neuroscience handed us the missing piece of our human puzzle — emotional health — all the other pieces that had been discarded or misunderstood, fell into place. Are you aware that we had tunnel vision for a very long time – and believed that all our troubles were lodged in psychology? Breakthroughs in neuroscience changed everything – and now we are treating PTSD and childhood trauma in much more beneficial ways, with remarkable lasting results.

The pandemic’s one major positive contribution is the shift from “treating” problems to “preventing” them. After all that we have been through both individually and collectively in the past five years, many people are embracing the truth that we can take better care of ourselves and each other.

The conversations that we are having today and the growing trends in preventative practices to improve our quality of life and our healthy longevity came about because of change. Today we understand that we need to take care of our brains first and foremost. We having a better working knowledge of how our brains operate, what they are capable of and how we can maximize the full capacities.

We are no longer ignoring the warning signs, no longer numbing the pain or putting a bandaid on it, no longer believing that suffering is the way we get to the path of healing. We are enthusiastically proactive.

Here is what I find so exciting about what might transpire for all of us in the next 5 years. As we begin to take better care of our brains and bodies, we will in turn take better care of our children. Our children will grow up with healthy attitudes, resilience and an overflowing toolkit of life and relationship skills. We will be leading by example.

Did you know that when we are overstressed, we are full of cortisol that keeps us in a heightened state of fight, flight or freeze….and when we are with others, they can sense that (especially kids). We end up pushing people away because of all that negative energy.

But when we are calm, emotionally regulated and resilient, we are full of oxytocin (the feel good hormone) and yes, others can sense that too — and guess what — it is like a magnet drawing people to us because it feels good.

As we are making these discoveries for ourselves, we are integrating it into our lives. We start making better choices and in turn those healthier decisions shape who we are becoming. In 5 years, just imagine the books being written right now that we will read in the future. Just imagine the friends you will be making – the ones that make you feel good and inspire you to discover all kinds of new things. Just imagine how your body will feel with 5 years of really good sleep, consistent hydration, regular exercise, healthy eating habits.

If you believe that all these positive, proactive and preventative measures will have a profound impact on your “growing forward” trajectory, you are right.

Take some time to reflect on what you have learned about yourself over the past five years and want you want for yourself and your family in the next five years. There has never been a better time to tap into incredible resources, education and mentors to help you achieve your goals.

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES:

Ryan Dusick, founding drummer of Maroon 5, talks with Doug Boost about losing everything, finding recovery and rebuilding his life https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-adversity-advantage-with-doug-bopst/id1496406333?i=1000624725432

Metabolism, Brain Energy & Mental Health with Dr. Chris Palmer. Discover how we are evolving in our treatments for mental health issues that can negatively impact our quality of life.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/being-well-with-forrest-hanson-and-dr-rick-hanson/id1120885936?i=1000625115529

Dr. Martin Seligman is often referred to as the father of Positive Psychology. He wrote about post traumatic growth in his book Flourish in 2012.. Now 11 years later, he offers his insights with both psychology and neuroscience to help us prepare to live in a new normal of rapid change

Dr Peter Attia is leading the charge for a long overdue pivot in modern medicine. It is time to become proactive turning our attention to presentation rather than just treatment. Have a longer health span, and better quality of life. Emotional health is the cornerstone.

Authentic Self

It dawned on me recently that the truest test of being our “authentic self” is when we can move through our various roles and interactions without a costume change, an edited script, or adjusting the dial.

Give it some thought. Do you find yourself making personal adjustments to accommodate others, a situation, or to feel like you belong?

We’ve all done this. We know when we are walking into a situation that feels like eggshells and landmines, so we shape-shift a bit to stay in our comfort zone. Or, we sugar coat our truth and hope that we will get the desired result. We might even put up with some bad behavior and decide not to call it out just to keep the peace. We say yes to things that we really don’t want to do. We stay silent when we know in our hearts we should speak up.

One of the compelling reasons it is so hard to disengage from all the costume changes we put ourselves through is because we have multiple identities. And before you freak you, just know that this is really good thing.

Take a moment to think about your own multiple identities. It is a fun exercise and admittedly a little mind blowing. You can be a child, a sibling, a parent, a spouse, a grandparent, an employee, a boss, an entrepreneur, a friend, a gym rat, a yoga student, a writer, a musician, an artist, a volunteer, a birdwatcher, nature enthusiast, a mentor or coach, a member of a pickle ball, golf or bowling team. Are you surprised at all the hats you wear, the interests you have and the variety of people with whom you interact?

It is only natural that we would make some adjustments as we move in and out of our roles throughout the day. We may shift from being a sole decision maker as a parent to a team member at work, a student in a class or a caregiver for an aging parent.

As we are working on our personal growth, we may discover that we are more cognizant of the situations where we do “make adjustments.”

This is a very positive sign that we are gaining traction with the changes we are making – the very changes that get us showing up as our true “authentic self” in every one of our multiple identities.

Think of your authentic self as the “mothership”. You will step into all those other identities grounded in your core identity.

Our core identity is shaped by personal attributes we value. These core values are the touchstones for our words, our actions and behaviors. When we are clear about our values, we cultivate the skills and tools we need to show up more consistently as the person we want to be. We also hold ourselves accountable and make amends when we make mistakes.

A sign that we might be making adjustments that are not in alignment with our authentic self is when we feel discomfort. Think of discomfort as the warning signal that our values and our actions aren’t matching up.

If we are trying to fit in with a group and we go along with something that conflicts with our core values, it’s going to feel uncomfortable. If we have to dial back our natural effervescence, we are going to feel flat. If we bite our tongue instead of speaking up for ourselves or others, we will feel disempowered.

It takes courage to show up authentically in our various roles when we are making changes, but once we get over that initial discomfort, we will discover that we are moving with greater ease and more self confidence. It honestly takes less energy and brain power to tap into consistent behaviors and actions than to be adjusting constantly. In fact, our neural networks will be rewiring to support our better habits and the desired consistency.

Some of the places that may be hardest to step into our authenticity is with our family members. It is pretty commonplace for us to get stuck in old paradigms. Once the baby of the family, always the baby of the family — even if that baby is now 45. Or on the flip side, the eldest child may be the one everyone turns to when health care decisions need to be made for aging parents. Family members can inadvertently keep each other trapped in a long ago past.

Complex family dynamics are often the most challenging places to practice showing up authentically. It may also be the place where some of our most surprising changes take place. Just one family member showing up authentically and shifting the old paradigms can set off a cascade of positive improvements.

The reality is that none of us really stays the same. We are all impacted and changing by our life experiences. Some people will embrace change and work hard to evolve through their trials and tribulations. They will be the ones who will be the cycle breakers, the ones who offer insight and wisdom, the ones that hold space without judgment, the ones that show up as their true selves.

I’ve read books by people who have evolved into their authentic self and they write so eloquently about how freeing it is, how much joy they get out of each day and how much younger they feel. These same sentiments are echoed by the diverse guests of the podcasts I enjoy. Best of all, I see it emerging in my family and friends. It is so evident that they are moving with fluidity and grace through all their roles and experiences.

Authenticity comes from a strong sense of self identity, with clarity about our core values. Those values become the touchstones for decision making, emotional regulation, setting boundaries, being self compassionate, leaning into vulnerability and not getting attached to the outcome. When we can show up consistently with these attributes and skill sets regardless of the role we are in, we will feel a major positive change.

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES:

Nedra Glover Tawwab has become the “go to” expert for understanding how boundaries help us take better care of ourselves and our relationships.

These conversations with some of our favorite icons will lift your spirits and motivate you to be your most authentic self. Check out this podcast on your favorite platform.

Dr. Maya Shankar hosts this podcast about real life events that dramatically changed people’s lives. Talk about moving into authenticity due to a major change of plans…these conversations will touch your heart. Check out this August 1st episode with author Dan Pink on the Science of Regret https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a-slight-change-of-plans/id1561860622?i=1000623007434

Any Brene Brown book will support your efforts to become your authentic self. Sometimes it is just super comforting to know we are not alone and this one nails it.

A Wholehearted Emotion Revolution

My last blog post was all about the importance of unpacking our family and emotional baggage — and the remarkable opportunity we have to involve four living generations in doing just that. This post is going to start by unpacking how we got here.

It is all about this moment in time where there is a growing, diverse community of people who are committed to personal growth and emotional health. Some are far along on their journey, others are just beginning and there are many smack dab in the middle. No matter where we are in our journey, we are all reaching both forward and backward – asking for more help and guidance AND offering encouragement and resources.

We did not get here by accident or all at once. We got here because of collective yearning and learning.

Over the past two decades social sciences handed off the baton to neuroscience to help us better understand what was really happening in our brains, in our nervous systems and neurobiology, and through epigenetics. Incredible discoveries were made that brought us tremendous breakthroughs in our understanding and treatment of trauma, cognitive and mental health disorders, the connection between stress and physical health and so much more. So many fields merged together to reverse engineer what we got wrong.

Ironically it was about this same time that Brene Brown started her deep diving research into shame and vulnerability. Imagine how serendipitous this was?

Of course, no one wanted to talk about shame and vulnerability – those subjects were taboo and cloaked in secrecy. That should have been our first clue she was really on to something. Brene told a hilarious story of how she could shut down a conversation with a seat mate on a plane in under 30 seconds by revealing she was a researcher – of shame and vulnerability.

Flash forward to today and those very topics open up a two hour stimulating conversation between three strangers on a plane, who share vulnerabilities as readily as Biscoff cookies, and become fast friends by the end of the flight, swapping contact information and favorite personal growth resources. (Read my recent blog post Leapfrog for that story)

That is just one shining example of how far we’ve come….and how long it has actually taken. Two decades, multidisciplines and a growing longing we were all feeling but couldn’t quite put our finger on.

Brene started her shame and vulnerability research in 2001, right before 9-11. As devastating as that massive tragedy was, there was an also a collective unity that emerged from it, at least for a while.

A decade later, in 2010, Dr. Bruce Perry published his book, Born for Love, where he warned us about our growing empathy poverty. He was shedding a light in the correlation between an infant’s environment in the first year of life and their ability to emotionally regulate in adulthood. He was sounding the alarm for where we were headed if we did not offer safety, comfort and stability for our children. If you were to go back and read that book today, you would be amazed at the amplified realities of his dire predictions for all of us, and especially for our youth. Back in 2010, we had no clue the negative impacts social media and our political polarization would be having on our mental health and empathy poverty.

Also in 2010, Brene Brown’s infamous Ted Talk on vulnerability went viral. It still stands as one of the most viewed Ted Talks in history. It turns out vulnerability wasn’t such a taboo subject after all. It just took Brene’s courage to put it all out there for us. We may not have recognized that this was a massive “me too” movement as well. It was evident that at a very grassroots level, we were longing for answers to questions no one was asking.

In August of 2010, Brene released her book “Gifts of Imperfection” and invited us to join that grassroots “wholehearted” revolution by finding the courage to tell our truth stories. Mostly she was encouraging us to stop saying (and believing) we were OK when in fact, we were not. She grounded her research in the truth that we were born worthy of love, connection and belonging.

The very same message that Dr. Bruce Perry was also telling us.

Over the coming years, Brene would publish more books including Rising Strong, Braving the Wilderness, Dare to Lead, and Atlas of the Heart. Dr. Bruce Perry co-authored What Happened to You? with Oprah Winfrey. Dr. Dan Siegel published Whole Brain Child, No Drama Discipline, Brainstorm: The Power and Purpose of the Teenage Brain and the Power of Showing Up(with Tina Payne Bryson and most recently he released Interconnected. Dr. Mark Brackett published Permission to Feel: Unlocking the Power of Emotions to Help Our kids, Ourselves and Our Society Thrive.

Rick Rubin, the renowned music producer and author of The Creative Act: A Way of Being, has a compelling way to make us stand up and take notice of what was happening in this grassroots wholehearted revolution. When an idea’s time has come, it will find a way to make itself known.

The seeds of this wholehearted, emotion revolution were scattered far and wide. They began to take hold not only in the research but within us. The self-help section of our favorite bookstores began to swell – from psychology and neuroscience, to the enneagram, to Untamed by Glennon Doyle and Clarity & Connection by yung pueblo (just to name a few).

Brene’s Netflix documentary, Call to Courage was released in April, 2019, where she invited us to choose courage over comfort in a present day culture that had us divided and disconnected. We should have buckled our seatbelts.

Less than a year later, just as Brene launched her two dynamic podcasts, Dare to Lead and Unlocking Us, the global pandemic was unfolding — and isolating us even more. Perhaps we were listening more intentionally to Brene’s guests and the deeper conversations because they were resonating on many levels.

What we had all been feeling individually for decades, was now also being felt collectively. It was becoming crystal clear that we are not only hard-wired for connection, we are inextricably inter-connected through school, the workplace, grocery store, supply chains etc.

Suddenly the topic of our emotional health was popping up everywhere. What once had only been discussed in the self-help and psychological arenas, was being mainstreamed into business podcasts, education, physical and cognitive medical fields. A magnifying glass was handed to us to see the impacts of emotional health on our children and teenagers; on all of us. Brene Brown confided in her sister series of her podcast that the pandemic puts strains on marriages and parenting we’d never experienced before. We were never meant to withstand long stretches of uncertainty without revealing our vulnerability and need for connection.

The wholehearted revolution that was afoot back win 2010, had been growing slowly. All revolutions take time to build momentum. Surely the global pandemic accelerated the swiftness of of this “wholehearted, emotion revolution.”

Dr. Mark Brackett, author of Permission to Feel, was one of Brene’s podcast guests and he shared so honestly what many already knew to be true: “The mental well being of our children and adults is shockingly poor. We have a crisis on our hands and its victims are our children.”

The warnings that Dr. Bruce Perry had offered in his 2010 book, Born for Love, stressed the importance of our community and relational scaffolding for our children. This wisdom could no longer be lost on us.

There has been a giant step forward and a big pivot in the right direction as we step back out into our new normal and begin reinventing ourselves from the inside out. The books and podcasts that are emerging now are speaking directly to the corrective actions we must take.

We must integrate our emotions in our brains and our experiences. We must unpack family and emotional baggage to stop the trauma cycles and give us space for better quality lives and health. We need to scaffold each other, especially our children, and cultivate growth mindsets. We need to shed the armor that we believed protected our vulnerability and discard outgrown behavioral patterns. We can build life skills, resource ourselves better, and rediscover our empathy and common humanity.

Brene Brown published Atlas of the Heart which helps us expand our understanding of 87 emotions and experiences. It is a family reference guide that supports us in helping our children and partners integrate their emotions.

Kristin Neff released Fierce Self Compassion (How Women can Harness Kindness to Speak Up, Claim Their Power and Thrive) which encourages us to treat ourselves as kindly and compassionately as we would a dear friend; and to break free from limiting gender stereotypes that has us all suppressing our emotions in harmful ways.

Dr. Gabor Mate published his phenomenal book, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture (a groundbreaking investigation into the causes of illness and a pathway to healing and better emotional health). His insights into how generational trauma get passed down through our family systems point directly to the need for us to unpack family and emotional baggage.

Dr. Peter Attia very recently released his incredible book Outlive, where he drives home the point that our emotional health is the most integral component of our lives. We can be physically health and emotionally unhealthy and we will be miserable. And in turn, we will make our families miserable. He unpacks the reasons why we’ve long heard the phrase “hurting people hurt people.”

Dacher Keltner, a renowned expert in emotional science, just released his book, Awe: the New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life. It is the final chapter of his book, aptly entitled Epiphany, that really brings home the lessons that we have been learning over these past two decades. Dacher Keltner reflects on the work of Charles Darwin whose thinking about the evolutionary science of emotion was shaped as he cared for his 10-year old daughter Annie until her death. Dacher offers that we mimic nature as we move through our evolution (and emotional revolution); there is a decaying (shedding the old that no longer serves us), a composting (extracting the lessons and nutrients we need) and then a regrowth (which is where we are now).

We now possess better insights, research, tools and collective commitment than we have ever had before in this emotion revolution. Young people are hungry for mentors and author Arthur Brooks encourages the older generation to rediscover their purpose by stepping into that role. It is an exciting time to be alive — and be an active participant in such a healthy change.

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES:

The Baggage We Should Be Unpacking

It’s no surprise that we all have family and emotional baggage that has never been unpacked – mostly because it feels like opening Pandora’s box. Who would ever want to do that?

What if we were to reframe it as exploring a treasure chest instead? The clues to unanswered questions; the keys to unlock some of our hidden assets; a mystery solved; a weathered, yellowing journal of unknown and revelational history.

We are fearful of what we might discover in our family and emotional baggage. Many of us don’t care to relive the painful memories we stashed in there decades ago. But we are not the same as we were then – we are older, have had more life experiences under our belt and have more nuanced perspectives. Maybe we can unpack the baggage and clear up much needed space for a lighter way of being.

We are not alone when it comes to complex family histories and generational patterns. We are all in the midst of a big unraveling of old societal conditioning, gender stereotyping and poor parenting models. As Maya Angelou espouses “when you know better, you do better.” Thanks to the major breakthroughs in neuroscience, psychology and emotional science, we now have much better resources and tools available to us for personal growth, self-awareness, relationships and parenting.

In fact, it is these very breakthroughs that provide an entirely different framework for hard conversations and more productive dialogue about the elephant in the room –debilitating family dynamics.

If we wait until parents or grandparents pass away, we miss asking the questions we would like answered. Have you ever sifted through cardboard boxes of old photos and had no idea who the relatives were or the stories that went with each photographic memory? It is just like that with family baggage. So many secrets boxed up and sealed tight. If family members are courageous enough to enter into these challenging conversations with honesty and a desire to learn, it will jettison that cumbersome family baggage.

Just look around at all the complex family dynamics the next time you attend a graduation, wedding, family reunion or holiday gathering. You can readily spot familiar family patterns, passed down from one generation to the next, taking its toll on our younger generations; families dealing with the same adversities, just a different cast of characters.

The baggage may be invisible, but its impacts are as apparent as blue eyes, tall stature, the shape of a mouth or nose and even personality traits.

No generation is immune from common life events including genetic health issues, divorce, co-parenting, behavioral issues, co-dependency, estrangements, blended families, addiction, mental health issues and trauma. Hard things happen in life. We can, and must, stop making them harder than they need to be.

Today, we have the rare opportunity to involve four living generations — grandparents, parents, siblings and grandchildren — to do the work necessary to break generational trauma and address dysfunctional behavioral patterns. It may be the first time ever that we also have evidence and impetus to come together to do this multi-generational unpacking of emotional and behavioral baggage.

A good starting point would be to collectively acknowledge that the old ways of parenting and dealing with emotions are primary root causes of ongoing family dysfunction and our growing emotional health crisis. We got it wrong and now we need to be actively involved in turning the tide on that old paradigm. Just acknowledging this truth can lift the fog of shame, guilt and blame. These conversations are long overdue and we don’t want our grandchildren being burdened by the weight of unhealthy, unproductive family secrets. We can stop spreading harmful patterns and limiting beliefs from one generation to the next.

When we can overlay the new template for parenting and emotional health onto our past experiences, we gain clarity where once there was only murky confusion. There are a lot of stories embedded in our family history that are horribly inaccurate. Imagine discovering this and realizing that we’d been making incorrect assumptions and judging others when we really could have been showing up and offering each other support and emotional scaffolding.

Yes we are afraid to have those hard conversations, mostly because we are feeling very strong negative emotions arise in us each time we even think about it. It would be analogous to refusing to go to the doctor for a suspicious lump. We can no longer afford to let our fear and anxiety prevent us from learning and discovery.

The biggest challenge in having these hard conversations and unpacking family baggage together is the massive entanglement of old, unprocessed emotions, traumas and false narratives about each other. The only way we can do this work is to become very skillful in interpersonal and emotional skills.

If we are going to do a deep dive into the dark, deep waters of our generational family history, we want a seasoned, skillful dive master and tools to help us see clearly, cut those falsehoods that keep us tethered, and avoid getting re-snagged on past trauma. Emotional triggers, limiting beliefs, fixed mindsets and jagged remains of adversities are hard to navigate without compassion, empathy and powerful listening skills.

For the record, we may have attempted to do this in the past, but all we really had to guide us was “hindsight”. While hindsight can shine a light on our regrets and help us own the consequences and outcomes of our choices, it often leaves us at a dead end. Problem identified, but no meaningful path to healing and prevention.

In 2009, Dr. Dan Siegel introduced a new concept for personal growth and self-awareness. He was planting the seed of what would become “other awareness”. But there was no way for us to get to “other awarenesss” without knowing ourselves deeply. Dr. Siegel called his revolutionary personal transformation concept “mindsight”. Mindsight picks up where hindsight stopped. No more dead ends.

Dr. Siegel framed “mindsight” this way: It is a powerful lens through which we can understand our inner emotional lives with more clarity, integrate our brain and our emotions, and enhance our relationships with others.

Mindsight is how we put our own oxygen mask on first. There is no way that we can be of meaningful value in helping others on their emotional health journey if we ourselves haven’t done our own work. Full stop.

In my previous blog post, “Learning What We Need to Teach”, I shared the steps and the benefits of Dr. Siegel’s concept of mindsight and whole brain parenting. Doing the hard work and committing to a lifetime of personal growth is not for the faint of heart. But as we often say with physical fitness, “no pain, no gain”.

Dr. Siegel encourages us to use this “mindsight” lens to go back and look at our own childhood to discover how our experiences and our caregivers shaped us. Imagine being able to do this – AND have conversations with siblings, parents and grandparents about those experiences that would provide context and nuance, not to mention long overdue accountability and the possibility of repair.

Do you know what your emotional triggers are? Are you aware of the limiting beliefs that were baked into your inner critic when you were a child? Are you still having meltdowns like a two year old when big emotions consume you? Do you expect more emotional regulation and better coping skills from your partner, kids or friends than you can muster in stressful situations?

These are the warning signs of compromised emotional health. If we do not attend to our emotional health, two things will happen — (1) our physical health and quality of life will also be compromised and may even go into serious decline; (2) we will pass down to our children similar unhealthy emotional patterns. Ignoring our emotional health has perpetuated the multigenerational family dysfunction since the dawn of time.

When Dr. Dan Siegel introduced mindsight in 2009, he was an advance scout for what has now broken wide open into the mainstream of our lives. Over the past two decades, multi disciplines have merged and reverse engineered what we need to do in order to address our growing mental health crises.

We need to undo and unlearn all the things we got wrong about parenting, about emotions and about relationships.

It has taken several decades, a ton of research, and more family heartaches and brokenness than we can imagine to bring us to this moment in our collective evolution. We are now able to visibly see and feel why we need to commit to this work when we look at our children and grandchildren. Not only do they deserve better, we are motivated by our hearts to take this work seriously.

In the past, each generation entered adulthood and parenthood with a strong desire to do better than the prior generation. Good intentions, but faulty information and poor diagnostic tools. We labeled kids, rather than naming emotions. We unplugged their first love language (emotions) as soon as they learned to talk and express themselves. We had blindspots and blurred life maps. We unconsciously repeated the same old patterns and reactions from which we recoiled or hid from as kids. We numbed our pain rather than extracting it and healing.

The reverse engineering that neuroscience, psychology, epigenetics, neurobiology, emotional science and social sciences have done is now extending a call to action that cannot be ignored. This call to action is meant for all of us — all 4 generations to become involved. We need to do some serious excavation work on generational baggage.

We each need to make our own emotional health a priority. We need to plug it back into the core foundation of a meaningful, satisfying and rewarding life. We need to upgrade our default systems that were never integrated in childhood. Plug those emotions into our operating systems and get more skillful at regulating them, learning from them and growing because of them. We need to unpack emotional and family baggage that is putting more obstacles in our way than we realize.

We do not have to wait until we are at the master class level to dive into teaching our kids and helping our partners. We can learn together. In fact, our children and grandchildren are the best teachers in the world. If we can step back and ask ourselves, “what did I need when I was their age?” we will instinctively know how to meet the moment. Instead of asking “what’s the matter?” we can pivot and learn by asking them “What matters most?”

This blog post is the first of a new series I’ll be sharing about the life-changing benefits of personal growth and self-awareness not only for our own quality of life, but for all of our relationships. Let’s explore how we got here, what is fresh and new for our emotional health, what we are discovering about the connection between fixed mindsets and limiting beliefs, better ways to help kids through divorce and blended families how we can improve the education system from preschool to college and so much more.

There is an “emotion revolution” rising from the ashes of old parenting models, lack of emotional regulation into our human operating system, and the hard lessons learned through a global pandemic. Are you in?

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES:

**DR. PETER ATTIA is the renowned resource on Longevity — and now he is the front-running** **force for this emotion** revolution. Watch his relatable reels on Instagram, listen to his interviews on YouTube for his book launch. Read his book, Outlive to learn why our emotional health is the most integral component for our quality of life. **Listen to his podcast, the Drive.**

Gummies of Wisdom – Playing LeapFrog

It is truly remarkable how much we can learn about others and ourselves through storytelling. When we share our life stories with each other, we often find unexpected common threads — and we make discoveries that support our own learning and growth.

This is like playing leapfrog — where some part of our story or experience connects with someone else’s and our shared understanding gets ignited and amplified in the most enlightening ways.

We can each unpack the details of our experiences, the lessons learned, resources we found helpful, what our biggest challenges were and how we faced them.

Storytelling can turn strangers into friends in just one conversation or deepen a decades old relationship with revelational new insights. We come to understand that common, similar life events unfold for each of us and yet it is our personal experiences, resources, and interpretations that create the textured, contextualized unique stories of our lives.

The script doesn’t really change that much. What changes are our stories.

I recently sat with two strangers on a flight from Houston to Phoenix; an energetic, engaging young man probably in his late 30’s who is a husband, a father and an entrepreneur; and a soulful, inspiring woman in her 50’s who is an integral part of PacificHelps.org (a non profit organization founded by her husband to provide education and renewable energy to the Pacific Islands) Over the course of that flight, we talked and listened to each other’s stories with a sense of wonder and awe. So many similarities in our stories yet the backdrop, the cast of characters and the obstacles were vividly different. We connected through a working knowledge of the basic life plot — growing up, finding jobs, getting married, having children, marriage difficulties, divorce, remarriage, life threatening illnesses and financial challenges. So much common ground. We laughed, we empathized, we marveled. The human spirit really is undaunting.

The script and the plot doesn’t change much. But each of our stories were uniquely different at the same time. I viewed our stories through the lens of a 71 year old, excited for what the future holds for both of them because of what they have learned from their personal experiences and how they are proactively embracing their continual self discovery and personal growth.

In that young man, I can see my own grown children who are now in the throes of parenthood but so much better prepared and skillful than all the generations before them. At 71, I can look both ways now — I can look back at what we got wrong in old parenting models and I can also look forward to what is possible with vastly improved parenting and emotional skills.

The conversations and insights that the three of us shared about parenting and emotions would have never happened when I was in my late 30’s or early 40’s.

The ease with which we shared things about our own childhoods that shaped us and then later dropped us into our own self-discovery journey was nothing short of incredible. My generation stuffed our skeletons into closets. Today’s younger generation of enlightened parents are doing their personal growth work early to break generational chains of dysfunction and hand-me-down behavioral patterns.

We’ve come a long way since Dr. Spock. These parents are leaning on Brene Brown, neuroscience, whole brain parenting, the enneagram, Drs. Dan Siegel, Andrew Huberman and Peter Attia. Yes, I was in seventh heaven – both my seat mates were quite familiar with the same resources that I have discovered in the last decade. They are proactively putting into practice what they are learning — for themselves and for their children.

Moreover, they are incorporating greater relationship skills into their marriages, parenting and co-parenting. There has been a huge paradigm shift from unhealthy, contentious fallouts from divorce that often caused a lot of trauma for children, to an intentional focus on providing children of divorce the relational scaffolding they need and deserve. Joint custody is being anchored in healthy, respectful, cooperative co-parenting.

A few years ago, I had started to connect the dots about the intersecting of so many of my favorite resources for personal growth and self discovery — I blogged about it. Researchers, authors and podcasters began to reference each other in their books, and invited each other as guests on their podcasts. I noticed that the topics of the human need for connection, emotional regulation, parenting and relationship skills were being discussed even on tech, business and news platforms. I could feel that the very subjects I was passionate about were becoming mainstreamed.

And now, here I was, on a plane with two strangers and we were talking, laughing, sharing about all of it as easily as we once might have discussed the latest movie or hottest trend. It was one of those compelling “aha” moments that Dacher Keltner describes in his newest book, Awe. I got goosebumps – often. There were just so many similarities in parts of vastly different stories.

Do you know how it feels when you have a really great customer service experience? When you feel like someone has paid attention, gone the extra mile, and earnestly appreciated your business? Well that is exactly what this conversation felt like to me — it was a standout. The positive impact that personal growth work has on our ability to make meaningful connections was not lost on me.

I thought a lot about LeapFrog when I got off that plane. That remarkable two hour conversation had made lasting impressions on each of us. We each left with new resources to check out and inspiring stories to reflect on.

What struck me most was how much space we had created to really hear and engage with others by learning from our experiences. We were not so mired in our problems (and phones) that we missed this golden opportunity. Rich conversations like this are some of the best educational experiences we can get. We gain new perspectives and insights, are reinforced and encouraged about the path we are on, and we build good connections on common ground.

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES:

THE MAN WHO INVENTED HAPPINESS SCIENCE: MARTIN SELIGMAN https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-happiness-lab-with-dr-laurie-santos/id1474245040?i=1000609532345

Who Really Pulls the Emotional Trigger?

I’m guessing that you know exactly how it feels when you’re emotionally triggered by something — it seemingly comes out of nowhere, sparks intense negative feelings and abruptly makes you defensive.

We get flooded with adrenaline and cortisol when we are triggered which only amplifies what we are feeling. The conundrum with emotional triggers is that they pull us back into the past while we are also experiencing the very present moment. It’s no wonder we are completely off-kilter when we are emotionally triggered.

It’s human nature to blame someone else for pulling our emotional trigger but the truth of the matter is that our emotional triggers are internal; they are ours alone. No one else is pulling that trigger. Most of the time, no one else even knows that we have a strong emotional trigger that has just been engaged. What they do imagine is that we are over-reacting, have lost control or lost our minds.

Many of our emotional triggers are rooted in our childhood, when we had very little agency. Unbeknownst to us, those strong negative emotions that we felt as kids (but were not acknowledged by our parents and caregivers) got lodged into our brains and imprinted with readily accessible information. So when we “feel” a similar experience even as an adult, our brain pulls out that file and reminds us we aren’t feeling safe. An emotional trigger is a red alert warning.

Give some thought to experiences that cause you to become emotionally triggered. What are you really feeling when a strong, uncomfortable, emotional reaction grabs you? Are you feeling misunderstood, abandoned, unwanted, unloveable, or treated unfairly?

These are all very common feelings for young children, especially if we were punished or banished for expressing them. Those experiences got bookmarked in our brains and we developed a sensitivity to be on the lookout for repeated events like this in the future. We were our most vulnerable when we imprinted these experiences. So it stands to reason, that we will become emotionally triggered when we are feeling vulnerable, insecure or irrelevant as adults.

An emotional trigger is defined as having a strong, uncomfortable reaction to a stimulus that wouldn’t ordinarily cause that response. With this framework, it is easy to see that when we are feeling emotionally balanced, a snarky comment or a misunderstanding doesn’t cause us a problem. We aren’t triggered because we have our emotional act together; we can remain flexible and resilient.

Now give some thought to past adult experiences where you were emotionally triggered — and see if you can recognize that you were feeling pretty vulnerable in those moments. Were you overly tired, consumed by anxiety or overwhelm; were you feeling invisible, under-appreciated? We are most prone to getting triggered when our emotional reserves are low. It’s really no different than our being more susceptible to catching a cold when we are physically run down.

The best defense is a good offense. This is a very good strategy to employ for both handling and overcoming emotional triggers. In his book, Permission to Feel, Dr. Mark Brackett explains that when it comes to being triggered by our emotions, we have to “take responsibility for our actions rather than shift the blame elsewhere. ”

“It may not feel like a choice, but it surely is — we decide how we will respond to life’s provocations. Don’t want to explode in rage when your child is disrespectful? Come up with a better way to respond. Clearly the old way, matching nastiness for nastiness, doesn’t work.” –Dr. Mark Brackett, author of Permission to Feel

We don’t judge ourselves when we are physically run down and know we might be more likely to catch a cold. We make a mental note to get more sleep, stay hydrated and wash our hands more often. The best defense is a good offense.

We can take this same approach when we are emotionally depleted. We can make a mental note that we will be more susceptible to knee jerk reactions than skillful responses. We might even make an announcement to our family members that we just don’t have the emotional bandwidth to deal with unnecessary drama. Again, the best defense is a good offense.

We should be normalizing the fact that regardless of our age, we are all humans with similar emotional needs and changing emotional capacities. This is really invaluable to be teaching our children. Dr. Brackett shares that when we try to shield our children from this reality, it has an unintended result. Children will have a hard time acknowledging adults’ feelings, let alone respecting them.

Emotional triggers are an integral part of our self discovery process. They help us identify what is most important to us and what our current needs are. Once identified, we can free ourselves from the “strong, uncomfortable emotional reaction” to something that really shouldn’t set us off. Instead, we can be more skillful with our emotional regulation and more clear about our needs.

If we are on overload because we have been caregiving on steroids all day, one unintended disrespectful remark from a friend or family member is likely to cause us a twitching trigger finger. Dr. Brackett reminds us that we can take preventive measures for moments like this.

When we offer ourselves some self-compassion, we are acknowledging that we are on overload and are susceptible to losing our cool. We can remind ourselves that if we weren’t so physically and emotionally drained, we would not overreact to an insensitive comment. If we weren’t so worried out, we might even have the dexterity to banter about it.

Does the comment hurt? Of course it does. Let’s not dismiss that either.

But here’s the pivot. An emotional trigger never really addresses our true needs. It gets in the way of expressing ourselves in a way that can be heard and taken to heart. Others just react to our “overreaction” and our basic need is lost in the smokescreen. It’s hard to hear a whispered “I could use a little help here” when there’s a lot of yelling or threatening going on.

Have you ever noticed that emotional triggers can also set off a chain reaction? It is not unusual to hear phrases like “you never listen” or “you always do this”. A lot of baggage is often attached to our emotional triggers, so it’s easy to tap into all those previous experiences and dredge up old grievances. Whatever small incident has set off the emotional trigger now cascades into something much bigger.

Instead of being able to focus and attend to one small and manageable issue, we are now knee deep in triage for a major emotional pileup. It’s hard to assess which issue was the catalyst and which one requires immediate attention. All too often, the one small incident that set off an emotional trigger gets lost and never addressed. But it does get baked into that old imprint of the childhood emotional trigger; logged as yet another example in the bulging file.

In a recent blog post entitled Learning What We Need to Teach, I shared how important it is for us parents and grandparents to be the emotional “training wheels” for our children. The best preventative measures for our children is to integrate their emotions into their experiences; to help them name and process them as they are unfolding. The more we are able to do this in real time with our children, the less likely it is that they will enter adulthood with a lot of challenging emotional triggers of their own.

By now, you probably don’t really need a bigger impetus to get serious about attending to your own emotional triggers, but there is something important that you should bear in mind. Our children’s developing brains take a long time to fully develop and integrate. We protect those little noggins with helmets, but we often overlook the impact our emotional reactions are having. Dr. Mark Brackett writes extensively about this in his book Permission to Feel. In the chapter entitled “Emotions at Home” he devotes a lot of time to emotional triggers; and especially how parents get triggered by their kids’ reactions and behaviors.

He reminds us that when we get “triggered” by our kids, our compassion switch gets turned off. We’ve all experienced this – and we’ve often quickly regretted how we did not show up so great in those moments. We can take comfort in Dr. Dan Siegel’s teachings that “rupture and repair” is normal in human relationships and can actually strengthen our bonds with our children, as long as we apologize quickly and sincerely; with a promise to do better in the future.

Which is why Dr. Mark Brackett urges us to get serious about attending to our emotional triggers before they become a chronic reality. Extreme emotional reactions, over the course of time, can actually alter the brain structure of our children. The effects of frequent extreme emotional reactions can cause our children to have emotional regulation issues of their own and a lot of complexities in their adult relationships and quality of life.

“A child’s brain is still plastic, meaning that the structure is always changing. The minute parents start regulating their emotions better, their children’s brains will change to reflect that. If parents start regulating their emotions now, and help their children to regulate theirs, then there’s hope.” — Dr. Mark Brackett, Author of Permission to Feel.

Emotional triggers are a by-product of the old parenting models that did not integrate our emotions into our developing brains when we were kids. When we do our own self-discovery work and identify why and how we get triggered, we are detangling ourselves from the past and owning our agency as adults. We accept that we have choices in how we respond to the things in life that provoke us.

The stuff that initially provokes us is usually pretty minor in the bigger scheme of things. But we can make a mountain out of a molehill with our over-sized reactions. We can meet these moments with greater emotional regulation and dexterity. It will be so much healthier for all our brains — and so much more beneficial for our families.

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES:

My “Starfish on the Beach” Moments

As many of you already know, I recently launched my Daily Gummy of Wisdom email program and it has been met with so much interest, encouragement and compelling conversations. I wanted to take this time today to highlight a few of the gummies that have really landed with people and the stories they have shared with me. This is exactly what I had hoped would come from the creation of my Daily Gummy of Wisdom. Together, we are all getting better at self awareness and “each other” awareness; we are finding new approaches to old, familiar problems; becoming more skillful in our own emotional regulation and in turn, we are supporting others with their own emotional health — especially children.

I launched the Daily Gummy email program to help those who were dialing back their social media consumption. The Gummy gets popped into your inbox at 6:45 a.m. each day. You can start your morning with this engaging food for thought and find that you just might tap into it for an interaction at home or work. Some are using the Daily Gummy as a mindful break mid-morning or mid-afternoon. A little pick me up and that “refresh” that music producer Rick Rubin says is so invaluable to keep us attentive and engaged with our daily life. Others find it a great way to wind down at day’s end. That’s the beauty of the Daily Gummy — you can use it when it best works for you. Our emotional health can benefit from a supplement morning, noon or night.

Think of the Daily Gummy that lands in your inbox as the physical health supplements you store in your bathroom or kitchen cabinet. It’s on the shelf, readily available, and you can take it when it best works for you. No need to wade through a barrage of social media content.

What has so pleasantly surprised me is how the Daily Gummy is being shared with others. Some of my subscribers have created their own expanded email list of family and friends — and they forward the day’s gummy with some thoughts of their own. A few like to print them out and discuss them with the family at dinner or over coffee with friends. Sometimes they get printed out, tucked in an envelope with a personal note and placed in a teen’s backpack or sent to a family member across the country. They are used to seal a yoga practice, as a prompt for writing classes, to open discussions in support groups, and even incorporated into a pastor’s Sunday sermons.

Sometimes I am the recipient of a Daily Gummy.

A subscriber will write to me and share how a certain gummy landed at just the right time to help them reflect on something that is weighing heavy on their heart. My friend, Diane Brandt, has often said that when we support others, the blessings go both ways and this is exactly how I feel when I hear the stories and learn more about what people are navigating. A mother reached out to me when one gummy was particularly helpful for her in supporting her 10 year old son and his emotional triggers. My photo really spoke to his heart; the image has become a touchstone for him.

When I was in my twenties, the starfish story really resonated with me; that image of a little boy walking on the beach tossing stranded, parched starfish back into the sea. An old man passed by him and questioned why he bothered. There was no way that he could possibly save them all. “Why does it matter?” he asked. The little boy responded, “It matters to this one.”

And that is exactly how I feel about my Daily Gummy of Wisdom. If just one person’s life is touched in a meaningful way by a photo and some insight, it matters. If, in turn, that person can reach out and support someone they love in a tender, compassionate and more skillful way, just imagine the impact it will have — the ripple effect.

Not every Daily Gummy lands at just the right time, but some will.

We are most definitely at the tipping point of remarkable breakthroughs for our emotional health. Quite a few of us are those proverbial stranded, dehydrating starfish on the beach. The more we know, the more we notice. This is how attending to our own emotional health not only helps us improve our quality of life, it raises our awareness of how we can support others in truly beneficial, impactful positive ways.

Here are a few of the Daily Gummies that have landed in recent weeks:

Asking “what the matter” limits our ability to gain real understanding of what another person is feeling — and it often ignites a strong desire in us to fix things right away.

Let’s be honest, how often do we utter “What’s the matter?” with a tone of voice that feels judgmental? Yes — a lot.

Think of asking “what matters to you?” as a much more skillful diagnostic tool. A way to probe a little deeper into discovery and be truly helpful in a meaningful way.

So often, we stay on the surface level of an issue, stating frustration or disappointment, but the real problem causing those emotions is tangled up in misunderstandings, miscommunication, differing opinions or scales of importance. Real problem solving is only possible when we drill down into core issues.

If you want to discover how powerful this diagnostic skill really is, try it for yourself. Next time you are feeling frustrated or annoyed – ask yourself “What matters to me?” Your honest answer will reveal a lot.

One of my close friends reached out to me about this Daily Gummy. She is very active in her community as a leader, a volunteer and a musician. Like me, she is a born helper. She confessed that she often rushes in to fix things, clean up a mess or solve a problem — and quite often without even asking out loud “what’s the matter.” She can see what’s the matter very clearly. (She just described me to a “T”). It dawned on her that quite often she was jumping in before she really understood what was really going on. She often found herself overcommitted, slightly resentful and puzzled why nothing was really changing.

My friend shared that re-arranging words and asking an important question differently, shifted everything. When she enters a situation now, she asks “What matters to you” and listens to learn. As a result, she is accomplishing a few things on her personal growth to do list. She is catching herself before she rescues others; she is becoming a good story steward and listening without judgment and pre-conceived ideas; she is able to set healthy boundaries for her time, energy and interests. And most importantly, those people she loves to help are feeling a deeper and more supported connection with her. Just look at how much positive emotional and relational change occurred by one dynamic question: “What matters most to you?”

Have you noticed how your mood changes throughout the day? It is truly astonishing how much our mood swings around and how little we pay attention to it. Why does it matter? Because our mood influences everything.

When we are in a good mood, we tap into our best natural resources. We are resilient, flexible, creative problem solvers. It’s like sporting a Teflon jacket — nothing negative sticks — not the traffic jam, the spilled milk or someone’s snarky comments. In fact, most events seem less like “problems” and more like “opportunities”.

But a bad mood — yikes! We trade the Teflon jacket for a magnetic catcher’s mitt. Our brain’s default negativity bias looks for — and finds — everything that’s going wrong. That same traffic jam was created just to make us late; the spilled milk is evidence we are doomed for a bad day; the snarky comment sets off a chain reaction critical self talk.

Mood swings can take us on a wild ride. And our mood impacts others. We rarely get the response and support we want when we are surly.

A new subscriber sent me an email with some adorable emojis to thank me for this image and the gummy which she is using in her conversations with her kids. She is helping them to see how a bad mood in one child can take the joy out of something her other child is having in the moment. Evidently they have had some hilarious discussions about being on the “mood swing”. She is so grateful for this image which really resonated for her young children; and how it gave them a way to openly express what they are feeling in the moment with both levity and honesty.

We are in a continuous flow of emotions throughout the day. Just like a whitewater rafting adventure, we never know what lies ahead in our emotional river.

As if it isn’t enough to navigate our own emotional flow, we are often in the same boat with others — each having their own unique experience. It’s a miracle that we can stay afloat!

That is why it’s so important to not “rock the boat” with unnecessary drama and out of control emotions. Every person’s experience is unique. Someone may be lamenting the adventure is coming to an end; and another relieved that it is over. One may be in awe of the expansive view; and another is reading a troubling text. One is tense, another is so relaxed.

The guide plays a key role. He is grounded, calm and has a deep rudder (i.e. skillful emotional navigation). Can you be that guide for others when emotions run high? Staying calm, being skillful with your own emotional flow and helping others with theirs — now that’s earning your emotional fitness badge.

This Daily Gummy reminded me of my life in my mid-40’s, when I was juggling a career change, two teenagers and a five year old, health issues and life in general. Bills to pay, meals to make, vacations to plan, holidays, boo-boos and the many overlapping needs of family members. I used to tell my friends that I was in the white water rapids of life without a paddle. I didn’t know much about emotional health at that time, so I would push through a lot of hard stuff without processing it. I made everyone else my priority firmly believing that if I took care of them, I too would be just fine. But I began to notice a pattern. I could push through for about three months and then I would be in a state of exhaustion that would land me in bed for a few days trying to recover from bronchitis or the flu. I’d recover and jump right back into the white water rapids, powering through and making up for that lost time by overcommitting. A few months later, I’d be tossed out of the raft into the level 5 white water rapids and I’d be sick again. My own version of rinse, repeat.

Besser van der Kolk tells us that the “body keeps the score” – and that is just one of the big lessons I learned the hard way. My body was trying to tell me that I could not stay afloat if I did not attend to myself. A big pivot for me was taking this to heart — both physically and emotionally. Busy parents can struggle a lot with self-care, emotional regulation and work-life balance.

The metaphor for me is that we cannot be skillful guides if we aren’t taking care of ourselves. We are not only better for our partners and children when we take care of our own needs, we are role modeling for our children and grandchildren the importance of physical, cognitive and emotional health for their own.

The white water rapids of life will be ever present. The change occurs when we become skillful life guides, with a bouyant flexible raft and a deep rudder.

I hope you have enjoyed discovering a few new things about my Daily Gummy of Wisdom and that you will sign up for the email program. Click this link to be added to the growing group of folks who are making their emotional fitness an integral part of their well being:

https://inspired-new-horizons.ck.page/3381cf137f

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES:

Emotional Fitness

I admit it — I stole the title of this blog post from Simon Sinek. He believes that we should change the nomenclature from “mental health” to “emotional fitness” and I couldn’t agree more.

We have been using the phrasing “mental health” mostly as a catch-all for anything and everything that offers a shoulder shrug explanation for someone’s problems or society’s crisis. There is such a debilitating stigma that is associated with the label of mental health that it less uncomfortable to just ignore it. It reminds me a lot of the stigma we had around breast cancer just a few decades ago. There is a correlation from what we have learned about breast cancer and what we are now learning about mental health. Early detection and preventative measures are game-changers.

The solid truth is our mental health is of integral importance to our quality of life and to our physical and cognitive health. It is time we normalize that. It just might start with a more acceptable and accurate descriptor — emotional fitness.

As we are coming to realize, many of us struggle more than we should with attending to our emotional fitness because we were not taught how to integrate our emotions with our developing brains when we were kids. As a result, we can have a very confusing and unskillful relationship with our emotions.

And it is not only our own emotions that we wrestle with, it is the emotions of all those we are in relationship with as well — most significantly our family members.

Here are some compelling reasons why we need to push emotional fitness to the top of our list for achieving our best overall health:

Poor emotional health contributes to inflammation, increased anxiety, depression, suppressed immune systems, cardiac and cognitive problems (just to name a few)
Poor emotional health negatively impacts our quality of sleep; sleep is one of the most beneficial factors for our overall brain and body health.
Poor emotional regulation negatively impacts the quality and deep connectedness of our most treasured personal relationships (i.e. secure attachment styles)
Poor emotional health taxes our energy, our ability to be clear-headed, and limits our capacity for resilience, problem solving and empathy
Poor emotional health is a carrier — we simply perpetuate dysfunctional patterns of behavior and hand them down to our children.

In other words, emotional fitness is the giant umbrella that arches over every other aspect of our quality of life. We can be incredibly physically fit and be emotionally miserable. We can be sleepwalking through our present moments causing collateral damage left and right and be oblivious to the harm we are causing to others with our unchecked emotional reactions. We may be prone to frequent colds and viruses, have chronic asthma, insomnia, indigestion, aching backs and migraines. We can numb our pain and simultaneously numb our joy.

The reality of how our emotional fitness impacts our daily lives and our families is undeniable. Take stock of how each member in your family handles their daily mood swings. If you created a graph and plotted each family member’s emotional highs and lows throughout the day, what correlations might you find?

There is no standardized way that we human beings respond to our emotions and experiences. Even shared family experiences will land slightly differently on each member. We each respond in a variety of different ways to very similar circumstances — and here’s the plot twist: how we respond changes in direct correlation to our emotional tides.

Our emotional states play a huge role in how we respond to unfolding events in our daily lives. One day we are resilient and can let things roll off our back; the next we are unmoored and have no bandwidth to handle even minor skirmishes.

Lots of things contribute to our mood swings. Some of those are external factors. Many are our own internal factors such as coping strategies, flexibility or rigidity, self compassion or harsh inner criticism, emotional triggers and personal preferences.

What is often invisible to us is that we are all contributing in some way to the emotional well being and level of emotional fitness for those we love the most. Yes, we know that our lives are inextricably connected but we are often not consciously aware that our nervous systems and emotions are equally intertwined. We get plugged in to each other’s emotional energies and it happens incredibly fast.

Just witness for yourself how the energy shifts and emotions rise or fall when one member of your family loses their cool, or breaks into spontaneous laughter, or sulks out of the room.

Have you ever held your breath as an emotionally intense situation unfolds and your mind immediately conjures up what the most probable reaction will be? You brace yourself for the worst, your body tenses and you get ready for the impact of strong harsh emotions. And then the unexpected happens, there is no anger — there is laughter. It takes more than a hot minute for your body to register this phenomenon and slowly you begin to feel the tension leaving your body. Now think about all those emotional gyrations you just experienced in under a minute. Not to mention the chemicals and hormones that were released and are still being processed in your body and brain.

In the above scenario, when you found yourself bracing for a bad outcome fueled by anger, that is what “conditioning” feels like in your body and brain. If you had a lot of those types of anger fueled, high intensity emotional events in your childhood, you are “conditioned” to prepare for the worst. Your body and brain braces for a negative emotional impact.

Think about how many times that conditioning is reinforced over our lifetime. Not only are we well-practiced in a reflective response intended to protect us, we get taught at the very same time that it is normal for adults to react this way. And the next thing we know, we are in fact mimicking that reactive behavioral pattern in our marriages and in our parenting. The childhood conditioned response and the adult unchecked behavioral pattern go hand in hand.

When we lack the ability to ground ourselves before we respond to present day situations, we only reinforce bad emotional fitness habits. Those unhealthy emotional fitness habits are costly; to ourselves and to our family members.

We have a lot of devices these days that help us monitor our physical activity, our heart rates, how much and the quality of our sleep, keep track of our caloric intake and remind us to hydrate or move our bodies. But we have not devoted as much time, awareness and discipline to our emotional fitness.

Dr. Peter Attia often uses the image of a pyramid with a broad, solid base at the bottom to stress the importance of a core foundation for our physical strength. The top of that pyramid is the peak, where we can really distinguish ourselves often in short bursts or for competitive events. Perhaps we can use that same pyramid image to help us develop healthy emotional fitness.

That broad solid base at the bottom of our emotional fitness pyramid constitutes how we ground ourselves, in the present moment, in alignment with our core values, our family values and our goals for our emotional health. It only takes one or two deep cleansing breaths to anchor ourselves there in that foundation. It is that pause between stimulus and response that serves as a potent reminder of the goal for our emotional fitness. Choose responsibly.

The more we commit to building a strong emotional fitness base, the easier it will become to implement better responses on a daily basis. We will smooth out a lot of emotional bumps and turbulence for ourselves and our family members. An added bonus is that we will be much more emotionally skillful in those “peak” moments too — those times when something really adverse occurs and we are emotionally challenged in a very big way. We can become the rock that our family needs in those highly intense emotional adversities.

Just like any physical fitness regimen we have, it is the practice that brings results. We have to stay committed to attending to our emotional fitness. Yes, we do skip the gym from time to time and we do overindulge in comfort food occasionally.

We are going to slip up and we will show up with some unhealthy emotional fitness — that’s life. Let’s turn to Dr. Peter Attia once more for some advice on damage control. Dr. Attia has become one of the biggest advocates for emotional fitness and he stresses the importance of “repair”. Let’s be honest, we know when we haven’t shown up as our best selves; we know when we have lashed out too harshly or lost our patience without forewarning. Owning it and apologizing swiftly is the key. That’s emotional damage control.

Dr. Dan Siegel, author of Whole Brain Parenting, reinforces the value embedded in those times of emotional “rupture and repair”. It becomes the superglue of trust and respect for our most valued relationships. It is how we demonstrate a true commitment to our emotional fitness to ourselves and our family members.

The Wrap Up:

There is no doubt that our emotional health and emotional fitness is fast becoming a mainstream subject. One that is long overdue. We are witnessing a coalescence of neuroscience, psychology, epigenetics, modern medicine; along with mindfulness, meditation, self compassion, gratitude and self-awareness.

The tap roots for so many of the mental and emotional health issues we face today are integration and connection. We need to integrate our emotions with our amazing, complex brains and we need to attend to our hard-wired basic need for human connection.

For far too long, we humans have been operating without that emotional integration. As a result, we became disconnected from some of the most integral parts of our core operating system. However our emotions did not relegate themselves to the back seat no matter how much we tried to ignore or override them.

Our emotions hopped right into the driver’s seat and took us off on a wild ride, sometimes going full throttle and other times slamming on the brakes. Our emotions can barely see through the windshield and occasionally love the chaotic slapping of the wipers on high. They play tug of war with the steering wheel, beep the horn wildly and push all the knobs and buttons on the console.

How is that working out?

The answer is — not well. Our emotions have a vital role to play but they are not skillful drivers and seasoned life navigators. They are invaluable warning lights and the occasional alarm system.

We can take back control, put ourselves in the driver’s seat for our quality of life and the direction and places we wish to go. Rather than ignore, dismiss and override our emotional signals, we can pay attention and address important operating issues with preventive maintenance and early detection.

Let’s turn this whole well being concept on its head. Let’s start with our emotional health and ramp up our emotional fitness.

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES:

THE IMPACT OF STRESS ON PHYSICAL & EMOTIONAL HEALTH with ROBERT SAPOLSKY, Ph.D – This conversation is rich with insights from birth to old age…a very worthwhile listen
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-peter-attia-drive/id1400828889?i=1000610372028

CHECK OUT THE EPISODE WITH GRETCHEN RUBIN AND HER NEW BOOK ON THE 5 SENSES TO REDUCE ANXIETY, INCREASE CREATIVITY AND IMPROVE YOUR RELATIONSHIPS https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ten-percent-happier-with-dan-harris/id1087147821?i=1000608994488

LISTEN TO THE LATEST EPISODE WITH DR. SUE JOHNSON ON EMOTIONALLY FOCUSED THERAPY & ATTACHMENT THEORY
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/being-well-with-forrest-hanson-and-dr-rick-hanson/id1120885936?i=1000613051052

Pop a Daily Gummy of Wisdom Supplement

I am so excited to announce the launch of a brand new initiative to support our emotional health and overall wellbeing. My Daily Gummy of Wisdom is intended to be an awareness supplement to help us all maintain our emotional fitness.

We take vitamins and supplements to support our physical and cognitive health, so why not have a little daily boost for our emotional health and overall quality of life?

If you are a regular follower of my blog, Inspired New Horizons, then you might really enjoy getting these small, and potent, daily supplements to help you stay in shape as you develop better life skills and emotional regulation.

My Daily Gummies of Wisdom incorporate my love of photography with my passion for sharing information about personal growth, awareness, parenting, life skills and emotional health.

Here’s a sample of today’s Daily Gummy of Wisdom:

Daily Gummy of Wisdom – Monday, May 8, 2023

Create a little buffer zone between you and your different roles and varied experiences throughout your day. It is a simple little practice that can make a big difference.

Think about all the hats your wear in a day – parent, spouse, child, co-worker, friend, customer, neighbor — the list is endless.

We often just jump from one role to the other without a reset or refresh. When this happens, we drag some residue from each role or experience into the new one. That residue might be sticky — like a strong unsettling emotion that adheres to everyone and everything we touch.

We wouldn’t let our child run around the house, into the car or out into the neighborhood with sticky hands. We’d take a minute or two to wash those little hands that are capable of leaving gooey fingerprints all over the place.

This is what a brief buffer zone can do for you — it’s a little hand washing for your emotional and experiential residue as you transition from one role to another, or from one task to a new one.

It doesn’t take much time to do this — and the benefits are enormous.

Before you leave the house in the morning, as you close the front door, take a deep breath and let go. You’ve done as much as you could and how you are off to work, taking the kids to school, or heading to an appointment. Let go and look forward. Howe do you want to enter the new experience and greet those you meet there?

When you return home, as you close your car door and make your way to the front door, repeat that process. Let go. You’ve done all you could out and about today. You are home now. You may have pressing things you want to share with your family, but pause before barging in. You have no idea how their own day unfolded. Mentally wash your sticky residue so can listen with good intention and focus when you are reunited with your family.

If your emotional or experiential residue hacks some of your attention, you. may miss the smallest yet most rewarding moments of your day. That absolute delight on your child’s face to see you, that “there’s no place like home” feeling that washes over you.

When we give ourselves a little transition “hand washing”, we are more attentive and less reactionary. We treat ourselves to being more fully present and organically take in more of the good we often miss in life.

HERE’S THE CALL TO ACTION: Sign up below to get my Daily Gummy of Wisdom popped right into your inbox each morning. It only takes a minute or two to read….is great food for thought and has a lovely slow release factor all day long. The Daily Gummy will increase your awareness, help you stay in alignment with your core values and foster all those better life skills you are honing.

We read a lot of worthless brain junk food in our social media feeds throughout the day. Why not trade a little of that mindless scrolling for one high quality daily supplement for your emotional fitness and overall wellbeing?

Sign up right here: Click this link: https://inspired-nehorizons.ck.page/3381cf137f