Latest / INSPIRE STORY / Podcast Episode 2 – Self-Regulation

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Podcast Episode 2 – Self-Regulation · INSPIRE STORY

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Speaker 1: You're listening to another episode of the Inspire Health podcast.
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Thank you for joining us. This episode features another great
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mentor of mind, doctor Stuart Shanker of the Merit Center.
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If you or your child is dealing with overwhelming stress
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and tension, this could be at the root of your
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struggles with behavior, mood, attention, and physical well being. This
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is a rare opportunity to learn from one of the
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world experts in self regulation. The key takeaway is that
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when in individual stress levels are too high, various brain
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body regulatory systems that support thinking, emotion, regulation, social engagement,
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and even metabolic recovery are compromised. Doctor Shanker's patented Self
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Ragged mindset, which focuses on the five key domains of
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self regulation biological, emotion, cognitive, social, and pro social, has
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revolutionized the way that we view our children and youth.
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Welcome to the Inspire Health Podcast. Your life is about
1:00
to get a whole lot better. Have you ever felt
1:02
like you tried everything and yet still couldn't find the
1:05
answers or the solutions that you were seeking. Whether you're
1:07
dealing with chronic illness, physical or emotional pain, I want
1:11
you to know that your body is the most sophisticated
1:14
machine on planet Earth. Your body holds unfathomable wisdom. Trust
1:19
in it and learn from it. Know that there are
1:22
answers and there are solutions to your specific health challenges,
1:26
and we will be uncovering all of them here on
1:29
the Inspire Health Podcast. I'm so excited to be a
1:32
part of your healing journey. Your transformation starts out. Hi, everybody,
1:40
Welcome back to another episode of the Inspire Health Podcast,
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with us today as a special guest. His name is
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doctor Stuart Shanker. He is a Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus
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of Philosophy and Psychology at York University, and he's the
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CEO of the Merit Center. His book Self rig How
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to Help Your Child and You Break the Stress Cycle
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and six Ccessfully Engaged with Life was written in twenty sixteen.
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It has garnered enthusiastic reviews and media attention throughout North
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America and has also been published in the US, the UK,
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South Korea, the Netherlands, Germany, as well as many other
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foreign editions. Doctor Shanker's five step self Ragged model, known
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as the Shanker Method, is a powerful process for understanding
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and managing stress in children, youth and adults. In twenty twelve,
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doctor Shanker founded the Merit Center as a self ragged
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learning and information center. Since then, the Merit Center has
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worked with educators, parents, and mental health professionals to bring
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the research and science of self regulation to homes and
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classrooms across Canada and other countries. Doctor Shanker, thank you
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so much for joining us today.
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Speaker 2: Thank you very much, Jason.
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Speaker 1: So this is exciting. I've been looking forward to chatting
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with you for a while and picking your brain on
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some of these topics. But wait for those that aren't.
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I mean, in general, I think I've heard self regulation
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is has come up a lot more. I think over
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the last five years or so, at least in my world,
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I hear it a lot more, and from different fields,
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all kind of talk, from different perspectives. Can you explain
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a little bit, just break it down for people what
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exactly self regulation is from your perspective and how you
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came about it that it was, You recognize it as
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being such an important piece of things, you decided to
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dedicate most of your professional life to this area.
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Speaker 2: So that one question alone is going to use up
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our entire podcast. It's a very good question. So let's
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let's start at the beginning. I went to Oxford, and
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at Oxford I studied self regulation as it was originally understood.
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So this is an idea that goes back to the
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beginning of the twentieth century, and it was really, you know,
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the simplest way of explaining it was it was about
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how we manage stress. And I looked at that issue
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from a number of different angles. We looked at it
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as philosophers, we looked at as psychologists, but also physiologists,
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and at the end of my time in the UK,
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I was looking at it in terms of artificial intelligence. Now,
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when I got back here, I discovered that there was
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a very different understanding of self regulation, and they thought
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of self regulation as really some kind of self control.
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And in fact, we ended up we did a big
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study on this and we found there are four hundred
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and forty seven different definitions of self regulation. I should
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add that we did that study about five years ago,
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so we're probably up to over five hundred now.
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Speaker 1: That would take the whole interview.
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Speaker 2: Then we did so Jason, we did a cluster analysis,
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so basically we broke her down into the most common
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uses and the way it's standardly used is about self
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monitoring or self control. And this was kind of surprising
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for me because that's not at all the way I
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had been taught. It wasn't at all what we were
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looking at. What we were looking at is how a
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person deals with stress, and we have to explain what
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that means in one second. And there are good ways
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and bad ways, and that's a really important point for
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what you and I are going to talk about today.
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We distinguish between maladaptive and adaptive or mindful ways of
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self regulating. So let me give you an example of
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what this means. The original definition of stress is anything
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that requires us to burn energy. That's what a stress
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as this was defined by an American physiologists at the
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beginning of the twentieth century, and his example that he
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gave was cold temperatures, so cold weather. So what cold
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weather does is it triggers a system deep inside the
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brain in the olympic system to engage in a number
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of physiological reactions that generate heat. And the idea here
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is very simple. The body has to stay around thirty
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seven degrees So if our body temperature drops below a
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set point, then what happens is we'll start to shiver
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our teeth chatter. Chattering is actually a form of shivering.
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What this does is it generates heat body heat as
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a byproduct. So we have all these things that are
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going on inside the body to keep our internal temperature
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as close as we can to thirty seven. But now
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there's things that we can do that reduce the amount
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of energy we burn trying to stay at thirty seven.
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So for example, we can wear a warm coat, we
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can wear a hat, we can build special kinds of shelters.
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If you live in the very far north of Canada,
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you'll have a special diet which is very rich in
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slow release forms of energy. That's what luktack is, it's
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slow release energy. So what we're doing is we are
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self regulating in order to reduce the amount of work
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that our body has to do. We are managing the
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stress of the cold by things that we've learned from
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our parents and our culture. So that's a very adaptive,
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a beneficial way of self regulating of managing a stress.
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But we can do it other ways. We can do
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it stupid ways. So I'll give you the classic example
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of stupid ways. One time, my PhD was on an
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Austrian so we spent a lot of time in Austria
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and I was with all my Austrian friends and we
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were skiing at the top of the mountain. I was
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bloody cold. So they said to me, well, what you
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do when you're cold is you drink yogurt tea. I'm
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not a drinker. Do you know what yogurt tee is?
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Is incredibly strong, But I don't drink at all. So
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I had a glass of the yogurt tee and boy
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did I ever get warm fast. It is a very
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quick way. But then the next thing I knew, I
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was skiing down the mountain on one ski finding all
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this hilarious. And then when we got I managed to
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get down to the bottom, and then when we got
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into the when we got back to the lodge, I
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shivered for about three or four hours. Because what alcohol
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does is it provides that momentary feeling, that momentary body
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of heat because you know it's a sugar and that
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releases energy. Consequence this, within fifteen twenty minutes, are your
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even colder. That's what we call a maladaptive mode of
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self regulation. A maladaptive mode of self regulating is doing
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something which may reduce your stress in the moment, but
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creates more stress down the road. So we were running
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a clinic at York and what we found with every
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one of the kids that we were working with, these
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were children that were having a lot of stressroblems, stress
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related problems, being overstressed. What we found was they all
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had maladaptive modes of self regulating. So our job was
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to try to shift them from maladaptive to adapt to
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mindfulk So, can I give you one last example and
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then I'll share us. So in our clinic, uh, we
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worked primarily with children on the spectrum. And one of
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the common features of a not universal, but common of
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a child with autism is that they find social interaction
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very stressful. It's a big stress just like the cold weather.
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And they manage that stress by say, gaze aversion, so
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they turn their eyes away and they won't look at
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you in your eyes because it's very it's very, very
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stressful for them, it's painful. But now you have a problem,
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and the problem is we need shared gaze as a
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child to learn language, to learn the meaning of facial expressions.
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So this is a classic example of maladaptive self regulation.
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What they were doing was they were reducing the stress
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of the moment, but creating tons more stress down the
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road when they needed language, when they needed to social
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inter interaction or mind reading. So that's the first part
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of answering you. It's understanding that we all do self regulate,
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we self regulate in ways that may be maladaptive, and
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we are looking now at a culture where children and
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teens are really self regulating in very maladaptive ways, like
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spending too much time on a smartphone. So that's what
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this is all about, and that's why your question was important,
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getting clear on what we mean, what scientists mean when
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they talk about self regulation. Yeah.
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Speaker 1: I actually I love the way that you broke that down,
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and it makes me think that almost epidemic proportions everybody
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is doing maladaptive forms of spress management.
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Speaker 3: I think that's exactly that, including the parents and managing
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their kids, which I'm sure we'll talk about in a
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moment too, But I think.
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Speaker 2: That's I think that's great, that's exactly the point.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, And I mean I say it in just different ways.
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So like, for example, say someone's feeling stressed and they
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it changes what their cravings are to eat, which maybe
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you feel momentarily okay, that sets you on a cascade
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of events that is going to ultimately perpetuate the hole
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that you're going into.
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Speaker 2: So I hope that maybe down the road you'll do
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a podcast on what you just said, because that's huge. Right.
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So we're seeing we're seeing an explosion, an epidemic of obesity,
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and so eating high energy foods is a classic example
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of a maladaptive mode because it creates these problems down
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the road. So what we really want to figure out,
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and the reason why we do self frank, is why
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am I so stressed? And what are the ways I
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can manage this stress in a healthy way.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, Well, when you're talking about stress, let's break down
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stress a little bit, because I feel like that's really misunderstood.
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I agree, and a lot of people think, particularly with kids,
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it's like, well, what do kids have to be stressed about?
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Maybe a little bit school or maybe bullying. But it's
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like what a lot of people don't understand is like
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stress is a very big picture and there's so many
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layers to it. So maybe from your perspective, break down
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what you look at from stress and what are some
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of the things that parents might be able to identify
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with when we talk about stress and how those what
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those might be first.
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Speaker 2: One of the one of the things we find over
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and over. We used to do this exercise when I
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was doing large group talks, where I'd have them right
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down there are examples of what stresses are, and over
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and over you'd get psychosocial stresses, so you know, money,
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not having enough time in the day, whatever, and those
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are stresses, right, those are emotional stresses. But in fact,
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if you go back to what I said at the outset,
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Walter Cannon's definition is a stress is anything that requires
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us to burn energy in order to maintain our furnace,
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as it were, and it's working range. So what we
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started to do was we broke stress down. We got
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as many examples as we could, and we had hundreds
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of examples of stresses, and we broke them down, and
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we found is they can pretty much all go into
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five basic categories. So one category is easy. That's what
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you just mentioned, emotional stress. So the stresses of modern life.
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You know, I had my daughter about an hour ago
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explaining to me who I've forgotten the name already. It's
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one of the Kardashians. I didn't know who Dave were either,
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But it creates a lot of stress for kids. Right.
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But then we have so we have emotional stress, and
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we have social stress, and I think that your listeners
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will be pretty good at figuring out what those are
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in their lives. But we also have physical stress, cognitive stress,
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and what we call pro social stress. So let me
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just I'll spend two seconds on physical and cognitive because
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those are big for your listeners. Pro social stress that's
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for another time. That's the stress of dealing with someone
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else's distress, and so that's pretty expensive for us. Physical
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stress are things like now, what everyone needs to understand
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is no to children are the same. And not only that,
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not only is every kid different, but the little buggers
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are changing on you all the time. So what was
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a stress last week isn't this week? And you know
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what they were easily dealing with suddenly becomes a stress.
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So you're constantly learning how to read the signs of
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what my kid finds stressful. So the easy examples is
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you'll start off with noise is noise of stress? Is
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lighting a stress? Too much lighting or not enough? Is
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that a stress smells smells are a big stress for
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kids that are often ignored. And I get asked this
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all the time. What's a cognitive stress? And there's a
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real simple answer. Math. Math is a math is a
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cognitive stress.
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Speaker 1: So why.
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Speaker 2: So? Well, what we're finding now is of forty percent
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of all children seven to nine. So it's interesting what
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you just said. It was a big cognitive stress for you.
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But yet here you are a clinical psych so I
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know exactly what that means, and I know exactly how
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much how much math you had to conquer all the
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stats you had to do in order to become a psychologist,
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a clinical psychologist. So somehow you learned how to deal
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with that stress and turn it into I suspect, something
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that you actually enjoy. But we're seeing kids with what's
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called high math anxiety, and when that happens, they actually
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go into fight your flight. They actually see maths as
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a threat. How do we know this, Well, we know
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it because some really cool scientists out at Western did
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brain scans on them and found that they were going
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into fight or flight just at the thought of doing math.
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So this is a big topic. Why is this a
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cognitive stress for kids? And we can explain it now,
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and what do we do so it stops being a
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cognitive stress? How did we cause this to become a
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cognitive stress in the first place? These are but basically
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what it means is that the cognitive challenge makes the
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kid anxious. And what anxiety does is it lowers your
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threshold for us stress response in all five domains. So now,
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all of a sudden, if I'm finding math a stress,
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I'm also finding the kid the noise from the kids
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around me as stress. I'm finding the chure I'm sitting
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on a stress, I'm trying. I'm finding sitting still as stress.
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So they get caught in a stress cycle. The biggest
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finding that we've made is that it starts with mom
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and dad themselves. It starts with our stress because one
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of the things that happens when we are overstressed, we
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as adults are overstressed, is we can't see when our
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child is overstressed, whether it's with parents, whether it's with teachers,
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whether it's with clinicians. We start with your own self regulation.
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How are you managing stress? Do you know when you
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are overstressed? Do you know when you are becoming overstressed?
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Do you know why?
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Speaker 1: Yeah, that's I think that's such a big take home
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one for parents to just in my clinics. Sometimes what
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I'll even find is one of the areas of my
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clinic that we look at as we do some specific
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biochemical testing that can be related to how people think,
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feel an.
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Speaker 2: Act interesting and interesting.
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Speaker 1: And what I'll find is I've had sometimes where I've
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had parents bring in their children for ADHD or anxiety
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and their testing shows up okay, and then I actually
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run the parents and the parents testing is the one
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without of balance.
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Speaker 2: Okay, Well, that's absolutely fascinating.
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Speaker 1: Or what most of them are?
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Speaker 2: What are you looking at? Are you looking at cortisol?
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Speaker 1: You'll be interested. You'll love one of the podcasts I
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did earlier. So I'm a naturopathic doctor in an osteopath
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and so one of the trains that I did was
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with doctor William Walsh, who's one of the world experts
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in sort of nutrition about chemicsry and looking at the
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relationships between that and most mental health conditions. So I'll
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see a lot of people coming in. He's got a
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huge research database in autism and ADHD and whatnot, and
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so there's certain imbalances that can happen in the biochemistry
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that can basically perpetrate the cycles where you might have
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higher levels of adrenaline natural that are just sort of
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pushing that cycle. You can have conversions in some of
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the enzymes that move dopamine into neuropin ephron. There could
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be ones that cause you to basically drain out your
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levels of serotonin and dopamine at times. And so if
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those things are going on, then in my mind, it's
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like that's one of the biochemical physical stresses that that
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child's when you were talking about like their threshos, it's
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like they just don't even know what their normal range
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could actually be. And a lot of this is epigenetic
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that's passed down the down from the family tree. That
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what's really interesting is you'll see the whole families and
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then you'll see patterns in the parents that have also
21:45
now seen patterns in the children, or there's sometimes where
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I only see the pattern and the parents, and so
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then it's they are picking up directly from you. And
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when I came across your work and you talked a
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little bit about the inter brain connection, that's was really fast.
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Speaker 2: That's the point.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, that's because when I saw that, I'm like, oh
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my gosh, and then I'll explain that to parents so
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that they helps them just sort of step into the
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role that they need to be into to ultimately support
22:13
their child because they A lot of people don't realize
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how much of an impact we as children pick up
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from our parents for for our lifetime.
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Speaker 2: Let's take the example you gave. Either there's too much
22:25
nouroropinephrin or too much epinephrin. So what will you then do?
22:31
Speaker 1: So I'll give you an example. One of the primary
22:34
tests that we would look for would be looking at,
22:36
say a zinc and copper balance. So when you look
22:40
at the enzymes when you are converting, say Sarah, when
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you're converting dopamine into nouropin effrin, which is a natural
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physiological pathway that always happens, but one of the primary
22:53
cofactors that catalyzes the hydroxylase enzyme in that is copper.
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And what we'll often see with chill them with ADHD
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for example, is they classically have quite substantially higher copper levels.
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And what it does is it sort of drives that
23:09
reaction where now they're over converting dopamine, so they classically
23:12
get that low dopamine high nor penofron, which is the
23:16
low ability to focus.
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Speaker 2: It's very interesting.
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Speaker 1: And the hyperactivity that goes with it.
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Speaker 2: How do you do how are you doing the tests?
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What do you use?
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Speaker 1: They're run through Gamma, Dina Care or Life labs.
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Speaker 2: But I mean is it blood or is it saliva?
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Speaker 1: No, those ones are specifically. We would do a serum copper,
23:34
a plasma, zinc, and a ceruloplasma. And when we see
23:37
that we can then make calculations based on not to
23:40
figure out what their percent free copper is and what
23:43
the zinc copper ratio is. I'll give you one other
23:46
example with it when we check for something called urine pyals.
23:52
So pirals is sort of a building block to making
23:54
red blood cells. Everybody makes them, but some people have
23:57
an epigenetic in balance where they either make too much
24:00
of them or they can't keep them long enough. And
24:03
are they orry they keep them too long and and
24:06
they can't get rid of them as easily. And when
24:08
pirals first they donate iron to make chemoglobin. And once
24:12
they've donated iron, they have a really strong affinity for aldehydes,
24:16
particularly B six, and they also bind zinc. So what
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happens is you end up with a severe deficiency in
24:22
B six and zinc. Why those are so important, But
24:26
when you look at again at the at the last
24:29
step from say making serotonin, dopamine and gabbas when you
24:33
go from like five HDP to serotonin, the primary it's
24:38
a decarbox lase enzyme and it's a similar enzyme in
24:42
both conversion for serotonin, dopamine and GABA, and it's dependent
24:46
on B six and zinc. So if you don't have
24:49
enough of those cofactors, you get a rate limiting steps.
24:52
You know, with a production issue, you can't make enough
24:55
of the of the neurochemistry that really sets you up
24:58
to be able to regulate your behavior.
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Speaker 2: So your treatment is going to be you're going to
25:03
be working behavioral and you're going to be working nutritionally.
25:07
Speaker 1: Well, this is what I found really fascinating and why
25:10
I think there's multi and well, this is why I
25:12
wanted to do this series because there's so many pieces
25:15
to it. So what I've found is that when people
25:18
have some sick and say, for example, I'll give you
25:21
an example. I had a patient who was diagnosed with
25:24
anxiety disorder and ADHD pyro level should normally be between
25:29
about zero and ten. It's a simple urine test that's done.
25:33
His levels were about one hundred. Now he was having
25:37
complete meltdowns. He was under the table, biting himself when
25:40
he'd have a meltdown, like anything, to try to just
25:44
you know, finding his own way to try to regulate
25:47
what he was feeling inside that. I can honestly say
25:50
that child's probably never known what it feels like to
25:53
be able to regulate naturally because of that imbalance. And
25:57
when that imbalance comes back down, you offer and find
26:00
that they're able to start to regulate their behavior better.
26:03
But what I found is that if they've had it
26:05
for a longer time, they then developed the neural networks
26:10
that become patterns. So then they're still being triggered by stuff,
26:14
but the intensity is down enough that they can work
26:17
with it more effectively. But there's still often now patterns
26:19
that need to be resolved.
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Speaker 2: What you're just all the work we do what we find.
26:30
So we use the language of dynamic systems theory and
26:33
we talk about a tractor being formed, and basically what
26:36
happens is when you get locked into a when you
26:40
get locked into a maladet We'll go back to my language.
26:43
So you get locked into a maladabtive motive self regulating.
26:48
So now what's happened is you have there's a complex
26:52
neural net that has to be shifted. Yeah, the only
26:56
way we can shift it is by lowering the overall stressload.
27:01
So what we do is we we start with the
27:06
stresses that we can reduce, which are generally very easy.
27:10
Now I should just tell you that at the Big
27:13
Mary study, we did in fact use both osteopathy and
27:19
a natural path over and over again, so we found
27:23
exactly what you're describing. So that sort of multi pronged
27:28
way of shifting a pattern that is deeply entrenched at
27:32
the level of how the brain processes stimulate, but it
27:36
is doable. But it is doable.
27:38
Speaker 1: Yeah, well yeah, I find that all really fascinating, and
27:43
ultimately I just want to know all the different pieces
27:46
and how they really play together. And the thing I
27:49
find is like for a lot of the children, it's
27:50
hard to know what percentages just this physical, what percentages biochemical,
27:56
what percenter of whattage of this, So it's you kind
27:59
of have to look at all of it and ultimately
28:01
just pull the different pieces together for them.
28:04
Speaker 2: So the one thing that we found repeatedly is that
28:07
any treatment that we've done has to be through the
28:10
inter brain. So what that means is that there is
28:16
this brain to brain hookup and this is a reality
28:22
of throughout the lifespan. Throughout the lifespan, if we don't
28:27
have these positive inter brain hookups, whether we're a child
28:32
zero to three or a teenager or someone or an elderly,
28:38
that our first step is always to re establish inter brain.
28:44
And I'll tell you something really really interesting. We had
28:48
a lot of kids that came to us diagnosed as
28:52
having insecure attachment. So that's very interesting, right, And I
28:58
don't know, can we use that term or.
29:00
Speaker 1: Does that need to be that's fine, Yeah, that's good.
29:03
Speaker 2: Okay. So so we looked at the kids interacting with
29:10
their parents and we'd spend a long time on this,
29:14
and we thought, oh my goodness, this is a wonderful attachment.
29:18
And what we realize is there's a fundamental distinction between
29:24
secure attachment and fragile Okay, so what does that mean. Well,
29:32
in that case of fragile attachment, it means that the
29:35
child has all kinds of sensitivities. Maybe they're they're they
29:40
find let's say, noise more stressful, or they find certain
29:46
foods flavors more stressful. But mom or our dad or
29:50
whoever have been really good. They've been what we call
29:54
sensitive caregivers. They've been really good at figuring out what
29:59
their child's sensitivities are and adjusting how they deal with
30:04
the child accordingly. Then the child goes off to preschool
30:09
or school and everything falls apart. So what happened? And
30:15
now all of a sudden, you've got a child who
30:18
is presenting as insecurely attached, and we have all those
30:23
behavioral measures of that right even though we can see
30:26
that this is a wonderfully warm, interactive relationship with mom
30:30
and dad, and so we lost sight of the fact
30:33
that the child goes through a series of interbrain relationships
30:39
beginning with that kindergarten teacher or the daycare provider. And
30:46
where these kids got into trouble is when and so
30:51
now I want to introduce a fundamental distinction. When they
30:55
were they left the home where they felt safe and secure,
30:59
and they're in a environment with an adult that confuses
31:06
misbehavior with stress behavior. They think that the child is
31:13
acting up because he's misbehaving. Okay, so let's take as
31:16
an example, the kid who you know. He starts to
31:19
shout or kick whatever. These are stress behaviors. The adult
31:24
doesn't understand what you and I are doing, and so
31:27
what happens is they respond, They get angry, they punish,
31:32
they rationalize their behavior with the kid as he has
31:39
to learn how to take responsibility for his actions. He
31:43
has to learn that if he doesn't control these outbursts
31:47
or these impulses, he'll have no one else to blame.
31:51
So they are in fact worsening a situation of fragile
31:58
secure attachment because if they don't understand the difference between
32:02
misbehavior and stress behavior, they don't know what the signs
32:06
are of what a child is uh. When a child's
32:10
over stressed, and they don't recognize that, they themselves are
32:15
dramatically adding to that child's overall stress load. I can't
32:22
tell you how many times we've had to deal with this.
32:24
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I think that's it's a huge part, and
32:27
that's that's really in a nutshell I think where parents
32:30
run into their troubles, and I agree it's a mix
32:33
of that. Also, what I think is really important is
32:38
that what they what they need to understand too, is
32:40
that when your child is in a stressed behavior, they're
32:44
not acting completely from their conscious mind. They're not making
32:49
conscious choices to do that per se. They are in
32:52
a very reactive state.
32:54
Speaker 2: Okay, So a huge part of our work is we
32:58
use a maw which is called the triune brain model,
33:04
and the trying brain was invented by an American neuroscientist
33:09
and he publicly called Paul Maclin. He published a book
33:12
on this, and again parents can download a picture of
33:15
the triune brain from our website for free. So what
33:21
McLain's argument was that we have three brains in one.
33:27
We have a very old brain, an ancient brain, what
33:30
he called the reptilian brain. This is a brain that
33:33
evolved for reptiles hundreds and hundreds of millions of years ago.
33:38
And reptiles are solitary creatures. They are what are called singletons.
33:45
And so you know, there the mom lays her eggs
33:49
and then she disappears, and the baby hatches two hundred
33:52
and forty five days later and makes its way on
33:55
its own down to the water whatever and feeds itself.
34:00
When it is threatened, it has a very limited repertoire
34:05
of defensive behaviors. So you mentioned the two of the
34:11
neural hormones that we study very carefully, nor epeneffrin and epinephyron,
34:15
And so what happens is with epinephyrin the reptile has
34:20
a fight response, and with nor epineffrin and withdrawal response
34:24
fight or flight.
34:25
Speaker 1: Interesting, yep.
34:27
Speaker 2: If that fails, they go into freeze, which is essentially
34:32
another neural hormones, parasympathetic flooding. And if that fails, they
34:36
go into a quasi death experience. It's called tonic immobility. Now,
34:41
McLain's hypothesis was that around two hundred million years ago,
34:47
social creatures evolved. Reptiles are non social, they're solitary. Social
34:53
creatures are mammals. So with mammals you get. With mammals
34:59
you get mothers raising their children, their babies, licking and
35:05
all that stuff, all the epigenetic stuff you were talking about.
35:09
You also get a system for monitoring other mammals of
35:14
your group, which is called neuroception. Neuroception this is important
35:20
for all the work you do. If you remind me,
35:22
I'll come back to it later. So the idea behind
35:25
neuroception is that the mammal is constantly scanning its environment.
35:30
Is this is this stranger a threat or safety? So
35:36
you're constantly you're constantly making these neuroceptive perceptions. And if
35:44
it registers danger, so the way it's moving, facial expression,
35:49
whatever it sounds it's making, then we have an alarm
35:54
in this primitive mammal brain called the amygdala, which sends
36:01
a signal down to the down to the reptile brain
36:04
that's still in us and says I need fight or flight.
36:08
I need it now, give me a shot of epidephy
36:10
right now. But what's happening here is when it goes
36:13
into that reptile brain, it has regressed to a pre social,
36:21
non cognitive state. Okay, last one on top of that
36:25
mammal brain. So McLain's argument is is about three million
36:29
years ago, we got a prefrontal cortex, and this is
36:33
wonderful for us. It thinks, it has language, it plans,
36:39
it's self aware, all these really cool things that human
36:42
beings can do. So there is this tension between that
36:48
top brain, that prefrontal cortex, and the middle brain, the
36:54
limbic brain. Now I want to get to what you said.
36:59
The prefrontal cortex is the part of the brain that
37:02
we do things for reasons. We choose. We are conscious,
37:13
we're conscious of the choices we're making. That brain underneath
37:18
the olympic brain, what we call red brain in self rank.
37:21
The red brain does not choose. It's an mammalian brain.
37:25
It's caused. It has primitive mechanisms that cause its reactions.
37:33
So you can't so tell me if this is clear,
37:36
Jason cannot use the terms that apply to that top
37:41
brain than prefrontal brain, to that middle brain. The middle
37:44
brain doesn't choose anything. The middle brain doesn't It doesn't
37:49
form judgments. It's just a primitive brain. Now here's the problem.
37:54
When a kid has stress behaviors, those are behaviors coming
38:00
from the middle brain. The child's not choosing, the child's
38:05
You cannot hold the child responsible because he didn't he
38:10
didn't make a bad choice. He didn't choose at all.
38:14
His actions were caused by ancient systems. So what's the
38:20
basic cause here? What's so we call these limbic behaviors.
38:23
What's causing them? Stress? Too much stress? So the kid
38:28
needs some stress. We know we thrive on stress. But
38:30
if the stress is too great. We need stress to
38:34
wake up, we need challenges in life. But if the
38:37
child is overstressed, you get limbic behaviors. Limp these And
38:43
then what was happening to these children was they were
38:45
in a situation like in early early years, where they
38:51
were being treated as if they were making bad choices,
38:56
but they weren't choosing. These are cause and they were
38:59
caused by too much stress. So to help mom and dad,
39:01
what we had to do was go into the school
39:03
and we had to teach the teachers about self rank,
39:06
starting with their own self rank. That's a long exclination,
39:09
but that's that's basically what's what's going on here. Yeah.
39:12
Speaker 1: No, that was beautiful and and I find when it
39:16
gets explained to parents like that, there's a softening that.
39:19
Speaker 3: Happens with that agreed. Because agreed, they sort of like,
39:23
oh my gosh, I love it.
39:26
Speaker 1: And I mean, in some ways, I can't remember if
39:28
this was in one of your books that I'd read
39:30
it in. But even when we talk about the cerebral cortex,
39:36
it's like even from I'll explain it, sometimes with the parent,
39:39
I'm like, you got to remember too, Like even as
39:42
as a child is like this, that that part of
39:44
the brain that that dials in and integrates and milinates
39:48
to the prefrontal parts doesn't even get finished until you're
39:51
in your early twenties. So I kind of said, if
39:54
you got to think of it this way, if you're
39:56
having a hard time trying to self regulate, you got
39:59
to remember that. And it's probably a hundred times harder
40:03
for your child to do because we've got access to
40:06
it properly. They don't even have that completely.
40:09
Speaker 2: So there's an American psychologists called Laurence Sternberg, and he's
40:12
got this wonderful line, and he says, tell if you've
40:16
got if you're working with parents that have a teenager,
40:18
tell them this. Your teenager's got a brain where it's
40:21
like he's driving a Ferrari and there's no driver at
40:24
the wheel. Yeah.
40:27
Speaker 1: I think I heard it one time where it said
40:29
it's getting wired, but it's not milinated. So they think
40:32
everything's connected, but it's still not totally totally usable in
40:37
the way.
40:37
Speaker 2: You're right, it's around mid twenties when it finally and
40:41
it's around it's around the mid twenties when it's finally
40:44
finally finished milinating and the connections are forged. So but
40:51
you know, on top of all that, I would come
40:55
back to what you said at the very beginning. You
40:56
made it very What I think is like the number
40:59
one remark, and that is that we are seeing a
41:04
generation of children now going back to really young ones
41:08
that are not just overstressed, but hugely over stressed. And
41:13
parents come and say, well, how can that be? How
41:17
can my child be over stressed? Why do you say that? Well,
41:20
first of all, look at the behaviors. These are stress behaviors.
41:24
You can read it in your You can hear it
41:26
in your child's voice. Your child's voice will go up
41:30
and pitch just like other mammals. The pitch goes up,
41:34
the frequency changes, the rhythm changes, you can hear. And
41:38
parents will then sort of say, oh, yeah, you know what,
41:41
I can always tell when she's over stressed and I'm
41:43
not even in the same room, just from her voice.
41:46
So then they want to know, well, well why, And
41:51
it's a complicated why, right, So there's tons of stresses
41:55
that these kids are subjected to across all five of domains,
42:00
plus a decline in those mindful ways of self regulating
42:06
the things that we use that children used to do,
42:09
like being together or playing outside or or whatever. So
42:16
it's a combination of lots. But even something as seemingly
42:20
benign as that breakfast cereal that you're giving them could
42:24
in fact be a physiological stressor.
42:27
Speaker 1: Yeah, one thing I'd love to get your feedback on,
42:31
just because when you had mentioned self control and self
42:34
regulation very different, because one thing I will find in
42:37
this goes hand in hand with the fact that I
42:39
think most times just parents are overwhelmed and they're just trying,
42:42
you know, they carry themselves. So there's a multi factorial
42:46
piece around this and work. I agree, kids. But one
42:50
thing that I've seen, and I'm sure you've come across
42:52
a lot too, is screens become a very potent babysitter.
42:58
And in the perspective sometimes from the parents is oh,
43:03
it's amazing. It calms them down, they're quiet, they seem
43:07
to be in better behavior when they're sitting there and
43:10
when they're with their screen. But this reminds me a
43:14
lot of when you were talking about self control versus
43:16
self regulation. It's like what they see maybe in that moment,
43:20
that's like eating when you're feeling bad. But it so
43:25
maybe you can just mention a little bit around your
43:27
perspective from screens and even what you found, you know,
43:32
when that should even be brought in from your perspective,
43:36
how much is too much? I know it's all individual,
43:39
but just some perspective around this because it I mean,
43:43
the other day they had brought in for my steps on,
43:48
they had brought in chromebooks across the board for the school,
43:51
and my wife and I phoned in because I wasn't
43:54
really comfortable with that idea that all of the education
43:57
was going to be done on these computer chromebooks now
44:00
and like, and so they were kind of astounded because
44:05
my wife and I were the only ones that phoned
44:07
in questioning whether that was really a good idea or not.
44:10
And so I and I thought, really we need to
44:13
move out, I think.
44:15
Speaker 2: But how old? How old are we talking about?
44:19
Speaker 1: He's fourteen. But what I would find was that he'd
44:25
come back and there'd be video games on it, he'd
44:28
have the YouTube videos downloaded on it. So it's it's
44:30
not an easy thing for this for the even the
44:33
teachers to totally control. But outside of that is just
44:36
more around the idea of from a perspective of screens, computers, games,
44:41
video games. I mean, gosh, Fortnite is this crazy addictive
44:45
game that's going on. Now, what's going on? Just so
44:48
parents get an idea of how that can affect them
44:51
from from a down the road kind of a perspective,
44:56
even if they seem to be quiet and behaving while
44:59
they're doing it.
45:00
Speaker 2: So again, you realize that you're asking, I mean, this
45:04
is a big, big topic, right. So the very first
45:10
question we always ask parents when we have this conversation is, so,
45:17
how was he when you turned it off? Turned it
45:21
off himself? Did in and he was he was all,
45:24
did you happen? Okay, so you're laughing and we know
45:27
the answer. So what's going on here? Let me take
45:31
it two steps. The second step will be, you know,
45:35
how do we how do we work our way around
45:38
this as parents? We now know there's a very interesting
45:45
book out there by a guy called near y'all eyall,
45:50
called the Hook Model. And so what these guys have
45:54
done is they went back and studied psychology from sixties
46:00
and seventies where behaviorists we're trying to figure out how
46:05
they could program or train habits in rats and mice,
46:14
and what they learned and so These were very meticulous scientists.
46:19
These are the behaviorists. And what they learned was how
46:23
to trigger dopamine. So we call dopamine hijacking. And it
46:31
turns out it's not actually very hard to trigger dopamine.
46:38
It's not hard to train a habit. So these guys
46:44
went back and read all this stuff and they thought, geez,
46:48
if you can do that to a rat, So you
46:50
can get a rat to press this lever, or you
46:53
can get a rat to basically do behaviors that are
46:58
very self harmful, very self destructive. Maybe I could use
47:01
these ideas and design a game. So how can I
47:05
design a I'll just use the game as an example.
47:07
How can I design a game where what keeps the
47:12
kid going is trying to get a shot of dopamine?
47:15
And it turns out that the old tricks that the
47:18
behaviors discovered are equally good here. So you do something
47:23
like what's called a variable reward schedule. So that means
47:29
sometimes you're gonna get twenty points and sometimes you're gonna
47:32
get two hundred points, and you never sometimes you won't
47:34
get any and that's very addictive in itself. We use colors,
47:39
we use sounds, All these things. Now there's a problem,
47:43
and the problem is that you get used to dopamine.
47:50
So I got to keep on figuring out how can
47:53
I keep the dopamine pumping. So what they do is
47:57
they will I don't know about Fortnite, but I sort
48:01
of think I know. So that's going to be a
48:04
classic example of The example we give is Candy Crush.
48:08
So Candy Candy Crush is just it's it's a brilliant
48:15
exploitation of dopamine hijacking. There's another book I'll mention by
48:20
a guy called Chris Nodder. The book is called Evil
48:22
by Design, and it's not meant facetiously. He's he's saying,
48:29
he's literally trying to tell programmers how you can use
48:33
these tricks to hook a kid's brain. And they don't
48:38
think there's anything wrong with that. So here's the problem.
48:41
So now the kid plays Candy Crush because each new level,
48:45
what it does is it gets the dopamine going again.
48:49
And it turns out that the child is playing only
48:53
to get dopamine, not that the the whatever, the goals
48:56
of the game are stupid, they don't mean anything. Okay,
49:00
So when we try to analyze, you know, like what's
49:06
the problem here. So we drew this distinction today between
49:12
misbehavior and stress behavior, and now I want to draw
49:18
another one, and there's a fundamental distinction between calmness and dissociation.
49:27
So what happens is you mentioned now when the kid
49:31
goes into this kind of olympic state. What's happening is
49:34
it has this dopamine has it gives you a nice
49:36
little buzz, a little bit of energy, but also you're
49:40
having this sedating effect. So if the kid is feeling
49:46
a little bit anxious, I can't remember all the ways
49:49
you said it, but the kid's a little bit anxious,
49:52
a little bit stressed because of other kids, whatever is
49:55
going on. And so they find that if they played
49:59
the game that they don't feel they don't notice the tension,
50:04
they don't notice the anxiety. Now there's the key between
50:07
calmness and dissociation. In calmness, you aren't you don't have
50:12
the tension, you don't have the intrusive thoughts. In dissociation,
50:16
you just don't notice them. Our problem now is when
50:21
the child begins to self regulate with the game. So
50:29
basically what we're saying here is they're feeling very stressed,
50:33
so they play candy Crush for two hours, three hours,
50:37
whatever in order to manage their stress. But it is maladaptive.
50:44
It's maladaptive because when they get off the game, they're
50:51
even more tense. They haven't done anything to rebalance, they
50:57
haven't done anything to replenish their energy, and in fact,
51:01
they've gone deeper into a high energy, a high tension,
51:05
low energy state. That's a classic example where you and
51:08
I started today of maladaptive self regulation. Okay, so how
51:12
do we help parents? Now? So what we help parents
51:15
is we want to look at understanding. First of all,
51:21
this distinction. You know, there's one thing to talk about
51:25
a child being quiet. It's another thing to talk about
51:27
a child being actually restoring. They are not restoring from
51:32
these games. A little is not going to hurt anybody.
51:35
But what they have to ask themselves is has this
51:40
become a maladaptive mode of self regulation? Not just for
51:46
the child, but for me? Is this my own maladaptive
51:51
mode of self regulation? So yeah, there's going to have
51:55
to be a big change around this one. This is
51:56
a serious problem. This isn't a minor problem. It's a
51:58
big problem.
52:00
Speaker 1: And when you were talking about dopamine and whatnot. It
52:04
almost reminds me a little bit about how I think
52:06
about diabetics a little bit.
52:07
Speaker 2: Yeah good.
52:08
Speaker 1: A lot of times what happens is, you know, they're
52:10
they're used to such a high level of insulin that
52:13
I mentioned, the receptors don't register it the same way anymore.
52:16
You can resistance. You almost get this same dopamine.
52:20
Speaker 2: Greed agreed, And Jason, we've used that example ourselves. And
52:27
one of the interesting things about someone who's in a
52:29
pre diabetic condition is that so they've gone to sleep, okay,
52:35
and they're sleeping, and you say, well, they're restoring, But
52:37
if they're pre diabetic, it turns out that in fact
52:41
that physiologically they are burning an enormous amount of energy
52:46
because the pancreas has to create all this sextual insulin.
52:49
And a group of Swedish scientists found exactly the same
52:55
result with kids who played violent video games and then
52:58
went to sleep, exactly the same It's not just not
53:01
just an analogy, it's the same reaction.
53:05
Speaker 1: That's neat. Yeah, I hadn't heard that study, but that's
53:07
that's exactly what it makes me think about when Okay,
53:13
so we'll finish it up here just one second, I
53:15
just wanted to ask you one last question from your
53:20
perspective for the first things that parents top couple things
53:26
that parents could start to do or be aware of
53:29
that you think would give them steps right off the
53:31
bat to to learn a little bit more about this,
53:34
to how they can start to the process of assisting
53:37
their child with self regulating a couple of key ones,
53:40
and maybe where they can be directed to to find
53:43
some more of that information.
53:45
Speaker 2: Okay, so let's give them five steps that they can
53:48
go through. Number one, ask themselves this misbehavior is it
53:53
stress behavior? When they ask that question, they will have
53:59
what you just described to about twenty minutes ago. That
54:01
feeling of just seeing that it's stressed behavior is an
54:05
enormous relief. Number two, identify the stresses. Go through all
54:10
five domains. I'm beginning to see that my kid is
54:12
over stressed. I have no idea why. I'm going to
54:15
start with physical. I'm going to look at everything going
54:18
on and try to figure it out. There are some
54:20
very useful stress inventories they can download when I believe
54:24
off our website again for free. Number three reduce the stress.
54:28
So how do I reduce the stress? Well, if I
54:31
know that, Let's say my child is sensitive to odors,
54:36
then get non odor soap, get non oder floor polish
54:40
if he's sensitive. If she's sensitive to noise, then you
54:43
can experiment with noise canceling headphones in the classroom. There's
54:47
all kinds of ways to reduce number four. The child
54:52
has to become aware of when he or she is
54:56
becoming overstressed. They have all kinds when they're young. They
55:02
have all kinds of physical signs. So you have to
55:05
help them identify those physical signs. Mean you need to
55:09
take a break, you need to whatever it is that's
55:12
going to work, And that's step five. What's going to
55:15
work for your child to get them back in the balance.
55:18
Every kid is different. So I've got two kids from
55:22
my son when he was a little guy and meant
55:25
shooting pucks at the garage door. Not so good for mom,
55:30
really good for him. For my daughter, it was building
55:34
lego stuff. So whatever it is for cooking, walking, whatever something.
55:41
But and here's the big button, none of this works
55:46
until you've done it on yourself. So now you've got
55:50
to go back and you've got to look at those
55:52
five steps, and you've got to ask yourselves go through
55:55
one by one. How does it apply to me? Because
55:58
our children are overstressed. But you you said this right
56:01
at the top. We are all over stressed. Okay, now
56:05
where can they get all this? So? Our website is
56:09
www dot self dash reg dot ca a self reg
56:15
c A and we run all kinds of online online
56:20
courses for educators and parents. And and then my last
56:26
book which I wrote four parents, which is just called
56:28
self reg And that's that's it.
56:31
Speaker 1: The last book that you had. What was the name
56:32
of your recent book?
56:34
Speaker 2: The last one is self reg The one before that
56:37
is Calm a Learn and Learning. And then the new
56:40
book which will be out in probably about a year.
56:43
It's going to be called uh Potentiating Human Potential.
56:47
Speaker 1: Wonderful, Doctor Jenker, thank you so much for your time.
56:53
I would love to pick your brain again at another time.
56:55
Speaker 2: But okay, well keep it up in the meantime and
56:58
send us your podcast.
57:00
Speaker 1: We will for sure. Thanks so much, Doctor Shanker.
57:02
Speaker 2: You're welcome. Jason.
57:05
Speaker 1: Well, that was awesome. Thank you so much for taking
57:08
the time to invest in your health and well being.
57:10
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57:34
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