- If you look into secular mindfulness
for calming strategies, for stress reduction,
for these largely therapeutic reasons
that we were talking about before,
it's very important
that you have a basic simple understanding
of the nervous system.
So one of the things that we like to do is talk about
our mindful watchdog, our nervous system,
as a watchdog with kids,
it's helpful to give kids different animals,
to think of different qualities,
and watchdog is a good one for our nervous system.
I like watchdog because you've got watching as an attention
as an awareness, so we're integrating that idea of awareness
being center focusing,
being center of all of these different life skills.
So very generally speaking,
and I bet Shawn has brought in other people to talk to you
about nervous system, but generally speaking,
our nervous systems are like watchdogs
and their eyes is in there.
Their goal is to keep an eye out for danger.
And when they sense danger,
they protect us by activating the sympathetic nervous system
sometimes called the SNS, sympathetic nervous system.
And when they do that,
they shift into a mode
that's called fight, flight or freeze.
I bet this is some sort of review for many of you,
but I'm gonna go through it anyway quickly.
Fight, flight or freeze is a survival mechanism
that we're all born with.
It's not a bad thing at all.
It's a very good thing.
It gives us the energy we need to fight or to run away from
a dangerous situation.
It releases hormones like adrenaline,
and it makes our hearts beat faster.
It increases the speed of our breathing
and it increases the blood flow to our muscles.
So this is terrific if you need to run from something
or if you need to fight.
It's taking all that energy and moving it into your body,
it's taking, it has to take that energy away from someplace
and where it's taking it from
is your capacity to do critical thinking.
So energy is moving in the way that's most important for you
for survival,
but it doesn't leave much room and much energy
to be able to reflect and to be able to critically think.
Now this makes a lot of sense.
I mean, if you are at the stove and you're cooking
and your hand is in the fire,
you don't want your mind to go on like say,
"Should I take my hand out of the fire?
Should I leave it in?"
You manage all of your energy resources
to be going to the body just to bring it out.
And so that is what's happening here
and all in all, it's a very good thing.
But what has happened in the modern world
is we are often reacting as if we're in physical danger.
Our nervous system feels like we're in physical danger
when we really aren't.
So the fight, flight or freeze reaction
is intended to be a life-saving reaction
to sudden physical danger.
It's like a fire, like a car crash,
but sometimes everyday stress leads us to respond
as if we're in physical danger when we really aren't.
And this becomes a problem when our trust stress response
is triggered over and over and over again
by these tiny stressors, and worrisome thoughts or
just things that bother us.
And when that stress response gets triggered
with these bothersome thoughts for too long,
what can happen is it's kind of an energy drain.
We've ended up feeling emotionally,
physically drained and exhausted.
So what do we do about it?
Well, this is the Yerkes-Dodson law.
Maybe you're familiar with the Yerkes-Dodson law,
and it gives us an idea that for some times,
we need a little intensity, we need a little pressure,
we need a little stress to be able to get to the top
of that curve.
You see the guy in the yellow there like this,
he is at his optimal, he has just enough pressure,
just enough intensity so that he's alert
and so that he can think clearly,
and that he's functioning well.
But when that intensity gets too high,
what happens is that you slip off to one or the other side,
you either go into freeze mode,
that's the guy in the blue there
where you just start to withdraw,
or you go into the fight, flight mode
which is when we're very used to seeing
where somebody gets activated.
Now we know what to do pretty much with kids
when they get activated, or at least we recognize,
he's a little overwhelmed, he's a little activated.
What we have to really watch out for especially with kids
is the other side when kids are withdrawing,
because very frequently people miss that.
They see a child who's withdrawing
and they don't make the connection that the withdrawal
is because he or she is a little bit overwhelmed too,
that the pressure's just a little bit too much.
So this is this idea of trying
to find the just right level of stress.
It's kind of like the Goldilocks, you know,
not too hot, not too cold, but just right
as far as the porridge
when the Goldilocks came into the bear's house
and saw the porridge.
So you want enough intensity to get you to the top there
so that you're functioning well,
but not so much that it pushes you over
into the fight or flight mode or the freeze mode.
So it's really important
to remember that this stress response,
it's not like a light switch,
it's not an on and off switch with just two settings.
It's more like a dimmer switch or a fader,
teenage kids often get the fader analogy
more than the dimmer switch,
on a music.
My son is a musician.
He would kill me for not remembering the name of this board,
but the board that,
it's the slide up and down, the slider,
the fader is big, the volume control.
And so the kids really, these kinds of things help them
think it's more of a dimmer, it's more of a fader.
The stress response can go,
can get really high or it can get really low
and that's where mindfulness again is very helpful.
That mindful watchdog, that watching your body state,
watching your mind state gives us a sense
of where that fader or that dimmer switch is set.
If it's set high, if it's set very loud,
we have mindfulness-based strategies
that help us quiet it down.
If that fader switch is very low,
we have mindfulness based strategies
that help us dial that up.
So this is why mindfulness is so incredibly helpful
in the area of stress reduction.
That combination of awareness,
we become awareness of our mind and body.
I'm sorry, we become aware of our mind and body state,
coupled with there are specific practices and activities
that help us dial it up or dial it down
if we're out of balance.
So we've been talking about mindfulness,
like an inner watchdog and how it can help us find balance.
And just remember that the inner watchdog is important
because it does still warn us when we are in real danger.
So we do wanna stay in touch with it.
We wanna be in tune with that watchdog
and pay attention to its signals,
but the mindful watchdog, when the watchdog becomes mindful,
it can also warn us or let us know
when we're a little bit out of balance.
And so when the reaction we're having to the input
may not be completely in line with what's actually going on
in the world, when we might feel that we're in real danger
when we really aren't.