FATHERLY STRESS #4

Here is the framework of stressor vs human stress response that we’ve been working with.

FD44 is dedicated mostly to psychological resilience – the mental game – the lower green box titled “MIND”.

RESILIENCE

What is it?
(It might not be what you think…)

Resilience is a word used to describe the collective internal resources that help us quickly and fully recover from physical and emotional stress and trauma. It’s a measure of “bouncing back” from difficult experiences. It’s positive adaptation. Being resilient does not mean that a person doesn’t experience difficulty or distress. Emotional pain and sadness are part of human life, and learning to spring back may involve considerable distress in it’s own right.

Resilience is about how you recharge, not how you endure. Low resilience is what makes it hard to get back to our physical and emotional baselines – sometimes requiring long intervals between stressors to fully recover – which is often unrealistic and compounds stress loads. Stress, for some, becomes a habit.

There are many ways to approach building more capabilities and capacity. First, resilience has both mind and body characteristics – psychological and physiological. As a reminder of the underpinnings but said another way, James Hewitt, performance coach, wrote this article on allostasis/allostatic load and ways to move toward being more “anti-fragile”.

Next, there are two main strategies. Things that reduce the load or things that aid recovery. If the stress load is reduced in intensity or duration, then less recovery is needed. If the load is high, then we need more ways to recover. Despite nuance, all aspects of building resilience fall into those main categories. Below is a mixed bag of things that help define and build resilience.

Self Awareness
This starts with noting and accepting but also includes taking responsibility/accountability for things. Those with higher self awareness are able to detect the cause of your problems. This helps to shift the “Why me?” feeling toward learning from experience and wondering what could be done differently next time for a better/different result. Building more self awareness tends to revolve around understanding the sensations and causes/triggers around changes in thinking, feeling, doing, wanting, and sensing – and there are many ways to build this. Self awareness also includes the ability to realize and accept that we are all different, from brain wiring to personality and temperament – and that this has an impact on perceptions and behaviors in ourselves and others (and all these things fluctuate).

Flexibility
Psychological flexibility or adaptability has a lot of bang for the buck and is considered by many as one of the fundamental aspects of health. More adaptable people tend to prioritize what’s important in the moment and can often navigate over or around obstacles that cross their path. With this flexible/adaptable mindset there often comes a sense of optimism* and opportunity when faced with a challenge. Less adaptable mindsets often have a harder time adapting to unexpected obstacles in life, feeling frustrated and often making excuses when challenges are overwhelming, rather than remaining in control of the situation. Flexibility isn’t focused specifically on problem solving thought – it’s more of a mental recalibration that helps with moving ahead without getting as frustrated. It can help to keep a realistic perspective and learn to manage expectations, knowing that everyone faces challenges from time to time. These mindset shifts are trainable and help people better roll with the punches as well as the nut shots. Knowing one’s values, and being able to accept and commit to what’s important plays a large role in this.

*Optimism is an attitude that enables people to view the world, other people and events in a favorable/positive light – and is best served with a healthy dose of realism. Optimism is a skill that can be built. This can help with seeing the bigger picture that clouds pass and sunny days will be back soon – a valuable skill in fatherhood.

Fun/Joy/Delight
Positive moods are recovery states for the nervous system. They protect wellbeing. Outlets to express emotions and release tension are going to be different for everyone. For some it’s cooking, sipping coffee, finding a micro-moment of stillness – and for others it’s chatting with a friend, lol’in a dank meme, sitting in the sun, meditation, or martial arts. Short or long, these moments give space to recover. This is meant to take things a bit beyond the soundbites of “practice self-care”. Note that creative endeavors (doing something you feel is creative/creates) are a holy grail of delight to the nervous system. Underpinning creativity is often a curiosity, wonder, and openness to engage or explore. Curiosity itself has powerful circuits in the brain (covered below), but curiosity about self and others is also a key to teaching/learning empathy, which is curiosity about WHY something is happening in another person – which strengthens the mentalizing system in the brain. For kids, there is a major block of building this system from around 15 months to 24 months of age.

Two other areas that help build resilience are 1) having a sense of purpose, having some clarity and ability to do things that bring meaning to your life – things that make the hair on your arm stand up and 2) having a couple people to turn to in both good and bad times helps bolster social connection – especially if built on shared meaning/purpose/goals. Just like co-regulation, social connections take off some of the load. These will be different for everyone, but anchoring on values is a helpful place to start.

Following that, here’s the nuanced difference in some terms that get tossed around with resilience:

Resilience = the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties.

Hardiness = the ability to endure difficult conditions (helps reach higher levels of resilience). It’s resilience plus ability to effectively cope with stress. Hardiness training is actually what aims to specifically enhance the capacity to reframe stressors more positively as challenges and opportunities for growth.

Grit = “stick-with-it-ness”, as developed by Angela Duckworth, but there may be challenges with having too much grit and not knowing when to swap/pivot to a different approach, strategy, or goal.

Mental Toughness = confidence based strategies, stacked on hardiness and resilience, for consistently coping better than others. The term, unfortunately, is used very loosely and the meaning is often associated with a masculine “ability to suffer”, which creates more damage than benefit, depending on how it is used.

All of these things are nuanced and as such we must remember that 1) science is a continuum of understanding, and 2) that these are all words that researchers coined in order to try to understand various aspects of the nature of humanity – especially pertaining to why some people can push through adversity in pursuit of goals, while others struggle. They are all imperfect names for imperfect understanding of how the world works – but they are very useful to have. The broader view, when pieced together, is what helps to best find fit into individual lives in the real world.

HARDINESS

From experiences with athletes and people who have developed a strong edge, I’ve found that hardiness is a powerful construct worth its own discussion. Hardy people have built beneficial beliefs and attitudes, on top of their personality tendencies, in the areas of Challenge, Control, and Commitment, as shown below.

What is interesting in studies and with practitioner work is they have found that people are often, on average, the weakest in the Challenge area. As an example, the work of Sandy Loder, a performance and leadership coach that runs experiential adventures/experiences that build hardiness via being in the thick of it – he found that the lack of ability to see the opportunity and to learn from change is lacking in most people. Often this appears to be caused by less cognitive flexibility, but also underlying fear (seeing change as a threat), such as the fear of trying new things or the fear of being emotionally vulnerable.

As covered previously, this can be tackled via developing a mindset of welcoming challenge vs being threatened by challenge. Michael Gervais, a leader in sports psychology working with athletes/professionals in “high stakes, consequential environments”, often writes about moving from distress (bad kinds of stress) to eustress (the beneficial kind) by focusing on how a person’s perception shapes their response (Event + Response = Outcome). This gets back to the attitudes and beliefs one has about themselves and the world around them. But how do we actually make change…

ON REWIRING THE BRAIN

FD33 introduced the RAIN awareness building technique developed by Dr. Judson Brewer, of the University of Massachusetts and Yale University. RAIN stands for…

Recognize what is happening.
Accept/Allow that it’s happening.
Investigate what is going on in your body.
Note what is going on (the sensations).

What turns this into a powerful brain rewiring tool comes from a discovery made by Brewer. It turns out there’s a particular brain state which is essentially the opposite neurologically to a stress or negative emotional reaction. It’s a state of curiosity.

Ever seen a kid having a tantrum? That’s basically a stress/emotional reaction where they are in a fight (vs flight/freeze) mode. You may have heard that young children are difficult to “talk” out of a tantrum, but often react to a distraction. Seeing a curiously shiny new thing while in a tantrum detunes the reaction. As Brewer found, the areas of the brain that are active in curiosity are opposite those active during regulation gone awry. The brain can’t provide energy to both circuits, so it turns one down to turn up the other. Curiosity creates a relaxed mental state. It fires up the part of the brain that helps regulate our attention. Brewer then discovered that if you induce a state of curiosity in yourself in the midst of a stress reaction or tough situation, you can change the reaction, because this reroutes the stress response. You can also do this as a simulation/visualization outside of having to remember this technique mid event. It’s been shown to work in people with chronic anxiety, in people with food addictions, helping people stop smoking, and many more situations.

The advanced RAIN process is to become curious about yourself. It creates an INTERRUPT in the wired response. With that sense of wonder, that interrupt, you can begin to rewire the stress response – we can replace the response with something else.

Here are two implementations:

1) In the Moment: When you find yourself in a crying baby situation, if you can manage holding the screaming kiddo for 30 extra seconds – try to envision the most wonderful memory you can of your bundle of joy. A smile that was given, a look, a touch – the more wonder and curiosity about self/baby the more powerful. This helps to retrain your brain from one event response to a new one over time.

2) Visualization: In your mind – when in a neutral/positive mental state – identify an annoyance or trigger and evoke the trigger by thinking about it. When the stress comes, become aware of it, and then get curious about it – really wonder about why you are responding this way. This quick return to a relaxed state helps shift the brain’s response wiring in a different direction. It may take a couple hundred cycles to fully rewire that one circuit, but years of scientific research has proven that this gives the brain a cue to make change with.

Getting curious also applies to others – instead of asking “why” questions about unwanted behavior in others, a more useful way may often be to ask “Why am I responding this way?”, especially when annoyed or frustrated by something. Again, having curiosity about others is a component of empathy.

In the end, growth and discomfort are two sides of the same time. Take both or leave it – but humans are very adaptable regardless of our genetic starting places and our experiences to date.

I’ve yet to witness a more universal opportunity, for those that want it, to grow, build hardiness, and resilience more than raising another human. Everything from lifestyle changes, to the mirror of your own shortcomings, to fatigue, wider decision making, worry, and a million ways that things can go awry – there isn’t a club on the earth that gives you the regular chance to build these skills more than being a dad.

So what about the kids…

FOR THE KIDS

Bruce McEwan was often called the gentle giant of neuroscience and father of stress research. He coined the term allostatic load. He also moved the field of resilience from theories of buffering and stress adaptation to proving that exposure to controllable stressors is a major contributor to building resilience.

Specifically in terms of child development, just one of his many focus areas, he believed that healthy caregiver–child interactions were “structured in such a way that the child is supported (re: scaffolding) in confronting increasingly challenging tasks while learning how to adapt to such challenges on the way to becoming an independent adult”.

His work also supported that as parents build healthy coping skills, these in turn, increase the capacities of children to grow and flourish more successfully. He found this to be especially critical in disadvantaged families.

But it is important to cover that resilience is actually different in terms of kids vs adults vs older adults. Different phases of growth, development, and decline have different spheres of what make up resilience. As of 2018, there is still much to explore about the developing mind, however there is wide agreement that “A parent’s resilience serves as a template for a child to see how to deal with challenges, how to understand their own emotions,” says Dr. Dan Siegel, co-author of “The Yes Brain,” a book that focuses on cultivating children’s resilience from the lens of neuroscience.

While all kids fall within a range of pre-wired “biological resistance to adversity” (shaped by genetics), resilience is something that must be built and can be strengthened at any age, regardless of the starting place. Research in kids has shown the following to be the common factors in children who build sufficient resources and capabilities as they develop:

• Supportive relationship with at least one adult (the social brain) – but more is better (teachers, coaches, friends, etc)
• Opportunities to build a sense of self-efficacy and perceived control (Having some agency/control and competence. When adults take over, kids persist less.)
• Opportunities to strengthen adaptive skills and self-regulatory capacities (skills and tools)
• Use of sources of faith, hope, cultural tradition, and/or routine to get through challenge (purpose/meaning) *for kids this might initially be the rituals of the family, that bring family meaning and values to the day to day routines

The base wiring is similar for all humans, but the sophistication of this changes through development – as the brain changes. Much of the above will kick into higher gear around 15 months. Again – resilience is the ability to recover quickly and completely from stress and/or trauma, returning to a healthy baseline. It’s how we recover when life issues a nutshot. We all handle stressors differently – so while science understands a lot about building resilience – there is no one-size fits all – and individual change will be personal. Think of building it as a snowball effect – a little practice everyday will create an unstoppable force at some point in the future.

Why is this important?

Mental health trends in America are looking fairly grim. Most people tend to underreport their stress levels and over report their ability to manage stress. There is a disconnect. Children model their parents’ behaviors, including those related to managing stress. Resilience in kids comes from caregiver skill and competence in resilience.

Everyone starts from a different place genetically and within their life experiences, but science continues to show that resilience and hardiness can be trained and built at any age, though the most benefit is in “earlier is better”.

This section has tidbits from around the web that are typically on Dads minds.

Book: The Confidence Gap

It’s not exactly titled well, but Dr. Russ Harris is a bit of a badass in the therapy world (strange thing to say, yes). Oftentimes what lurks beneath things that hold us back is fear. This book presents a useful structure for navigating and breaking through.

The Reality of Nature

If you want to see resilience in the animal kingdom, @natureismetal [instagram] is a wild account where “Life eats Life”. Some people may find the content graphic – but this is nature – and an awareness of it can be helpful in perspective taking.

Postpartum Depression in Men

Studies indicate that somewhere between 10% to 25% of new dads go through some form of depressive episode in the first year of having kids. It’s more common yet discussed less, and happens later in the year. If feeling more irritable or anxious – Postpartum Men is one of the better online resources, as a place to start. Feeling overwhelmed happens. There is no harm in asking for help from a health professional.