Strengthen Connected and Calming Responses 

As we turn to each other and build our relational capacities we are able to practice collective self-care. Let’s start with how we can create connected and calming responses to each other, especially during stressful times.

Think of a time when someone you didn’t know, smiled at you and you instinctively smiled back. There is a theory that actions of mirror neurons (that are located in our brain) also create a sensation in our own mind of the feeling associated with smiling.1

Mirror neurons can be triggered by:

  • Observing actions or experiences
  • Hearing stories
  • Reading the description of experiences2

We can reflect each other’s positive or negative emotions.

Understanding about mirror neurons and emotional co-regulation is important:  

  1. For our own health and well-being,

  2. To break the continued cycle of physiologically mirroring (and re-enacting) each other’s responses to trauma and toxic stress, and 

  3. To support emotional co-regulation or calming our stress response systems.

Mirror neurons and emotional co-regulation reinforce the experience of ‘what fires together wires together’. When we perform actions the neurons involved will fire. These neurons when fired repeatedly become excitable both when we perform the action and when we see or hear someone else perform a similar action.3

What is exciting about this is the possibility that we can work to choose what kind of wiring we want to reinforce in our own reactions and in our interactions with others.

 

Sources:

  1. Keysers, C., & Gazzola, V. (2006). Towards a unifying neural theory of social cognition. In Anders et al. (Eds.), Understanding Emotions (Vol. 156, pp. 379–401). Elsevier. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/S0079-6123(06)56021-2

  2. American Immigration Lawyers Association August 2018

  3. Keysers, C., & Gazzola, V. (2010). Social Neuroscience: Mirror Neurons Recorded in Humans. Current Biology, 20(8), R353–R354. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2010.03.013