Check Our Stress Responses and Practice Self-Care

We can also start with ourselves by checking our own stress responses and collectively practicing self-care in order to strengthen relationships that promote resilience.

Sometimes, we may not be aware when we are responding from a self-protective place in response to stress. A good place for us to raise our awareness is to learn about our brains and what can happen when we experience stress.

Daniel Siegel (he/him) created this ‘handy’ model that uses our hands to represent these various parts of our brain and provides a tool to understand what happens when we experience challenges in managing our stress response and ‘flip our lid’ (1).

brain

Make a fist with your own hand and see if you can identify the parts of the brain from the “handy model” and how it connects to the illustration to the right.

When we feel high levels of stress or feel “triggered”, we can remember this model to better understand what is happening in our physiology.

When we develop a practice of checking (and managing) our own stress responses, we can work to prevent flipping our lid. 

  • Noticing and naming the emotion we’re experiencing is the first step to bringing our upper part of our brain back online. “Name it to tame it!”

Checking our stress responses helps promote healthy relationships

Healthy relationships are the most important protective factor for promoting resilience. Checking our own stress responses and self-regulating promotes healthy relationships and resilience through:

  1. Providing social buffering and helping another person’s brain regulate their stress response (2).

  2. Fostering safety and support through building trust and physical and emotional safety.

  3. Supporting positive interactions by offering calming strategies when people are triggered.  

Reflection: Think of a time that happened when working with another person who was upset, and they were able to calm themselves down and re-engage.

  1. What happened between you and this other person - when they were able to calm themselves down when they were upset? 

  2. What role did your own stress response play in helping them to calm themselves? 

  3. What might it look like (feel like) if this happened more often? What is possible? 

  4. What is the smallest thing that we can do to build on what worked in this story?

hrt2.png

Tool: The Trauma Resource Institute offers an online and android/IOS app called iChill for practicing skills to help our nervous system stay in what Elaine Miller-Karas calls the resilience zone. http://www.ichillapp.com/

Practicing self-care helps care for ourselves and each other

We are supported in this practice by also collectively taking care of ourselves and each other, which is a critical aspect of resilience. You can dig into this topic more in the Collectively Taking Care module. 

Illustration by Lia Kantrowitz

Illustration by Lia Kantrowitz

Click here to read Angie Jaime (she/her) story in which she shares her journey to self-care:

“Many western notions of good health are not reflected— mentally or physically—in Indigenous communities, or by people who see their own health as inextricable from that of a community. Caring for myself was built on caring for others, for all living things, in an interdependent relationship that our communities had maintained for generations.”

 

Sources:

  1. Daniel J. Siegel (2015). The Whole-Brain Child. Mind Your Brain, Inc.

  2. Bezdek & Telzer (2017. Have No Fear, the Brain is Here! How the Brain Responds to Stress. Frontiers for Young Minds. https://kids.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/frym.2017.00071#KC7