Ann Sherman, Nederland. Life is full of stressors and our brains are designed to automatically react to them in an intense way. If you’re a parent, in between the wonderful moments with your children, there are many times that your role can feel frustrating, stressful and exhausting. When you’re feeling flooded and your amygdala is keeping your thoughtful upstairs brain from functioning as it should, it can seem impossible to respond to your child’s major meltdowns and defiance with anything but exasperation.  

During a typical stress response, an extra surge of energy pours into our bodies. The flood of chemicals is preparing us to fight or run. Without knowing how to first soothe our amygdalas, we are more likely to react inconsistently and disproportionately to even small irritations triggered by our children.  

During the first Mountain Strong Families presentation hosted at NES this year, local counselors Carrie Evans and Eileen Purdy helped parents begin to examine how we address the stress in our lives and learn nurturing ways to balance our nervous system before responding to our child’s behavior. Evans, from tameyourrhino.com, first helped us stop and notice where chronic stress is housed in our bodies -- zeroing in on where our muscles were constricted. Stress causes our muscles to tighten up and this can create serious health problems if we are not moving that tension out of our bodies on a regular basis. We were then encouraged to consciously “open up” the constricted area (chest, head, jaw, stomach, shoulders) by focusing our thoughts and breathing into that spot until we felt more relaxed.  

Too often in our culture, we are paralyzed by the stressors in our life and choose to numb ourselves with a little wine, weed, or endless Wi-Fi instead of moving the cortisol and tension out of our bodies. Substance use that numbs us doesn’t actually remove the tension from our bodies. As parents, we need a go-to list of nurturing tools that will move our brains from a reactive state to a more responsive one. Evans proposed finding lots of quick self-care ideas performed for one minute here, one minute there, instead of bottling up our tension and waiting for a “spa day” to release it all. “Self-care is like brushing your teeth, you have to do it several times each day,” Evans reminded us.  “Try shaking it off, going for a walk in nature, doing a vigorous workout,” so that your body isn’t holding onto your stress hormones indefinitely. 

Other simple stress-reducers included bringing more laughter and lightness into our serious, anxious lives. “Have family members share a funny joke at dinner time,” said Purdy. This can be a fun tradition that helps shift the focus temporarily away from a child who can’t sit still, won’t eat their vegetables, or who is drumming on the table and annoying his sister.   

Evans also helped parents find a way to use all their senses to lower their stress levels. Parents made a list of the pleasant things we like to touch, smell, see, taste, and listen to. By taking a moment to merely access these images in our brain (think chocolate chip cookies and ocean breezes!), our amygdala is soothed and we can respond to our children from a calmer state.  

Eileen Purdy, another local counselor, then helped parents change their thinking and language when it comes to stress in our lives. Our brain’s default mode is for negative thinking. For instance, we might catch ourselves thinking -- “my daughter always makes us late!”  versus reframing that thought into --“Currently, she is having challenges getting ready on time.” We were encouraged to reframe, “My son never helps with chores” into “Right now, Skylar would rather hang with his peers than assist the family.” Or when we catch ourselves thinking “I’m a horrible parent,” can we change the conversation in our head to, “I didn’t handle that situation very well yesterday?”  

Stress is a natural result of hard things, but the language we use to narrate our situation can either increase or decrease our stress levels. When we think about our child’s challenging behaviors, it helps to reframe it as temporary and specific instead of permanent and universal in nature. We have some control over our body’s stress response if we intentionally shift our thinking about our children, ourselves, and the situation.  

When we choose healthy ways to lower our stress, it gives us the creative capacity to actually work on and fix the problem at hand. If you’d like more ideas about parenting skills to use with children at all stages of life, join us for the entire Mountain Strong Families Series. RSVP for a free dinner, childcare, and the ReThinking Discipline presentation on Tuesday, Sept 10. Contact ann@teensinc.org. Please bring $18 to receive your own copy of Dan Siegel’s No-Drama Discipline Workbook which will guide you through the entire Series.  

The takeaway for one dad was-- “We can deal with our stress in healthy ways and intentionally release it on a daily basis.” And together, we can raise mountain-strong kids!

(Originally published in the September 12, 2019, print edition of The Mountain-Ear.)