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Session 3 of 6
Time To Regulate: Importance Of Creativity
Harnessing Our Energy Cycles
This is the most pivotal lesson in building resilience. While skillful self-awareness is a prerequisite, self-regulation is the linchpin to unlocking the fullness of your resilience. This is more than staying calm when the seas get rough. It's learning to utilize your natural reactions more effectively.
Self-regulation allows you to sustain focus for long periods of time yet also allows you to down-shift in a stressful moment.
Primary takeaway: You are in constant cycles of activating and settling throughout every day. You need to learn how to utilize this natural balancing act to keep within your range of resiliency. This primes the rebound of resiliency.
This can be vital to helping get through a highly emotional day at school or helping deal with the tough situations, moments, and environments encountered throughout the day.
Self-regulation
Self-regulation is being able to change your thoughts, emotions, behaviors, and physiology. Self-regulation helps you understand in what ways and how to transition yourself. Developing a strong autonomic nervous system is the most crucial element to this.
Download and Print the Session Three pages of the Workbook.
Read pg. 12 in the Workbook.
Understanding Your Stress Response
Our body naturally alerts us to stress daily; that's a good thing. However, sometimes these alerts become problematic when chronic in nature.
Identify three of the following stress responses that you most connect to and wish to shift. Some options are:
- Increased heart rate
- Shaky hands
- Feeling distracted
- Shallow breathing
- Rapid breathing
- Muscle tension
- Decreased hunger
- Increased urination
- Restlessness
During these moments, it is often helpful to return to the self-awareness techniques from the previous lesson, paying attention to what opposing sensations might be.
TIP: Using the Better 30-second Break method is a great way to begin to transition these stress responses.
Self-regulation is your ability to transition the stress responses you notice through self-awareness. This is important to:
- Better manage change
- Reduce chronic stress
- Engage in healthy relationships
This transition is the body and brain working together to shift between the sympathetic and parasympathetic sides of your autonomic nervous system. We clearly need both of these and, most importantly, is the ability to know when to activate or deactivate and when to do each. Too often we artificially keep our sympathetic side engaged, through such things as caffeine and technology, when our bodies are craving rest through engaging the parasympathetic. You need to train yourself to rest and recover (parasympathetic), which allows you to better trust your activation (sympathetic) response when you need it.
Complete the first activity on pg. 13 in the Workbook.
Taking a Better 30-second Break
We all need breaks. We also need to evaluate the breaks that we do take.
The goal is to take less time away while increasing your awareness of:
- Your surroundings
- How you feel in your body
- What emotions you may be experiencing
Watch the next video and then complete the final activity on pg. 13 of the Workbook.
Take a deeper dive
Flow is often also called "Being in the Zone". Author Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi coined the term Flow and his follow-up book, Finding Flow, brings this concept into work, leisure, and relationships.