Self-Reg: How to Help Your Child (And You) Break the Stress Cycle and Successfully Engage with Life by Dr Stuart Shanker and Teresa Barker

Self-control is about inhibiting impulses; self-regulation is about identifying the causes and reducing the intensity of impulses and, when necessary, having the energy to resist.

Digestion takes anywhere from four hours to a couple of days and is "energy expensive" because it takes a lot to produce the right chemical balance in the stomach and digest food and to produce the enzymes that will break down and distribute the nutrients throughout the body. 

If a child is in a depleted state, he is going to find it much harder to resist an impulse.

The more stress, the greater the energy drain.

The greater the emotional, physical, or psychological stress, the harder it is for us to delay gratification.

Social engagement is not simply a learned coping strategy to add to our repertoire of self-soothing reflexes.  We are designed to draw energy from one another and to restore energy through one another.

Our limbic systems are hardwired to respond in kind when confronted with someone else's aroused limbic system, positive or negative.




When our child behaves in a way that we find troubling, or even irritating, we need to ask: What's the source of stress that's triggering this behavior?

Heightened stress also dampens or reduces sensory awareness.

Astronauts have described how painful it is to return to earth:  how re-experiencing the pull of gravity is like donning a heavy backpack or pushing a bike up a steep hill.

Much more is involved in true empathy than just responding sympathetically when a child is upset.  It involves a deeper understanding, which has to be embodied and not just cerebral.  The adult has to tap into her own experience of what it feels like to be in that state of upset and then try to figure out why the child is upset and how to help.  The child herself will rarely know that she is being outrageously self-centered, let alone able to describe the reasons why she is behaving this way.  That is our job.

Being exposed to someone else's stress or being expected to put someone else's needs ahead of one's own is a stressor.

"Boredom" involves a distinctive and uncomfortable physical feeling that comes from having too much cortisol in the bloodstream.

The limbic system serves not just as an alarm but as an "emergency response system" -- ERS for short -- for when your tank is empty.  The ERS searches its memory to identify what served in the past to soothe and provide rapid energy.