Hi, I'm Nicholeen Peck, I teach all about self-government, communication,
family relationships and parenting and in this video, I'm going to be answering the question
what is the difference between self-regulation and self-control?
So, what do you think? Is there a difference between self-regulation and self-control?
Well, the answer is yes. There absolutely is a difference between those 2 terms.
In fact, if you live in the zone of self-regulation, that is going to make self-control so much easier.
In fact, in many cases a person doesn't even have to have tons of self-control because they're so
good at self-regulation. So, what is the difference? In this video, we're going to be talking about
self-regulation, what that looks like, self-control, what that looks like and then what we can do to
have more self-regulation in our lives. First, let's talk about self-control. Self-control is inhibiting
the impulses that are going to get you in trouble. Sometimes we get these strong impulses
that push us in a direction we know we shouldn't go and it takes everything within us to pull
back and say no, don't go there. Don't do that, that is when you are employing
self-control. This can be very difficult but it is possible to do but a person is better off if they
don't have to use their self-control as often but instead they use self-regulation. Self-regulation
makes self-control easier. Sometimes it even makes it so that a person doesn't have to even practice
self-control that often because they're just so good at regulating themselves in the first place.
Self-regulation is all about reducing the frequency and intensity of strong impulses.
The way that a person does this is they learn to manage their stress load and they develop
a better recovery time when things happen. So, if for instance someone says to me you're so rude
or you don't care about me or someone attacks me verbally in some way, what I'm going to do because
I've worked on my own self-regulation for a really long time is I'm going to go, "Oh, they're attacking
me. Well, I don't need to worry about that let's see what is it that they're really doing and how can
I help them get understood." So then I might say something like, "Right now, you don't have a calm
face or voice, I know you want to tell me something, I want to know what that is but we need to choose
to be calm first and then we can actually talk about this and I can better understand you." So, in
my mind, I go through this little process of quick recovery they attacked me, oh well, I don't need
to take that personally. Let's see what's really happening and if I can help them. This means that
I don't even allow stress to come upon me during that time. I don't engage in the power struggle. The
reason I don't engage isn't because I'm holding back it's because I've decided I can recover from
that quickly. I don't have to take it personally. Remember that statement. Don't take it personally,
it's just an action, it's just words, it's just a person who's displaying some sort of emotion
and it might be a non-productive emotion. Don't take it personally. They're a work in progress
just like you are so the best thing you can do to help them and you is to stay in the zone where you
do quick recoveries. Before I get to the tips on what you can do to increase your self-regulation
which I often call your self-government, I would like to invite you to subscribe to this channel.
So, on this channel, there are so many videos that will help you learn the skills and principles that
you and your family need to self regulate, to have self-government and mastery of those things that
seem to be disconnecting you and possibly causing power struggles in your life. So, subscribe now. So,
in order for a person to have good self-regulation, they have to decrease their stressors. So, we need
to remember where the stressors originate from. The limbic system of your brain is where most
of your stresses originate from so what you have to do is you have to decide how you are going to
handle those stressors when they come. In fact, it's super important for a person to analyze
what are some of the things the triggers what do I feel when stress is coming down the line and
for each person's stress looks differently. For some people stress looks like a power struggle
or somebody not agreeing with them. Maybe it could feel like I'm not understood maybe a stress could
be the general like I have a lot to do and I can't think about it it's so much or whatever it happens
to be we all stress over different things for different reasons. So, how do we decrease the
stress load? Well, we move ourselves into the front brain. We move ourselves into the forward brain
and we need to have a plan for how to do this so that our brain can start to do it automatically
without us pushing it there as hard. So, for years I did treatment foster care for troubled teens,
the majority of those teens had things like anger control issues, anxiety, depression, suicide ideation,
ODD, OCD, ADHD, RAD, FAS, bipolar, you name it they had all the things that you could label a person with
who processes differently than your regular run-of-the-mill person. So, I had to help them
conquer sometimes anxieties and stresses that were more deeply rooted than just your run-of-the-mill
stresses might be this meant that they had habits that had been formed over probably the course
of the majority of their lives. This was very difficult it meant that I had to proactively
train them on skills that they could use to replace the old habits. So, if a person has a skill,
a set of words or actions that they can do in a specific order, if they've practiced them ahead of
time, they know consciously that those things work to help them be understood, be more calm,
have more happiness in their relationships, then what happens is they're more apt to use
those at a time when they really need to. Now, I knew because my foster children had such habits
that had been ingrained for so long that they were going to need additional help with self-regulation
so we developed systems for correcting them that would help bring them to the prefrontal
cortex so that they could calm themselves, decrease that stress load, recover and then
reset, that's what a person needs to do if they're going to overcome these strong stressors that they
usually are falling victim to. So, some of the things that we used to help our youth was we
used a corrective teaching style which I called effective corrections. This would describe what
was happening, appeal to the front, describe what should have happened, appeal to the front, give a
small rationale, appeal to the front and the heart and then explain to them what they earned and we
would practice doing it the right way appeal to the front, appeal to the front, appeal to the front.
Every time we would do our cued practices, again it was back to problem solving again. This allowed
them the freedom to pull out of that midbrain or sometimes even back brain and fix themselves and
they knew it was completely safe because it was done with calmness. If a child goes completely
out of control, which means they won't listen to anything, they won't be corrected, they're having
a tantrum or they're very angry, then we would do something that we called the rule of 3. This
rule of 3 was 3 things that we did 3 times that helped bring them from the emotional
part of the brain forward so that they could decrease the stress load recover and reset. So,
remember when you are focusing on self-regulation, which I usually call self-government, then what
that means is you are recognizing what's going on, choosing to decrease stress load, recover
and reset. You're telling yourself truths instead of lies, that's also super important. When a person
chooses to self-regulate, they're focusing on the truth in the situation instead of the lie which
is usually wrapped in a lot of emotional wrapping paper. Have you enjoyed this video? If so, I'm pretty
sure you're gonna like my next video which is a class that I'm giving for free. It's called "The
Expectation Trap versus The Cycle for Success." This class literally could change your happiness level
on a daily basis. It's all about setting yourself up to decrease the stress load recover and reset.
It's all about self-regulation and deciding where to invest our emotions and where not to.
So, go ahead and click on the link to the expectation trap class, I'll see you there.