Real Ways to Stay Regulated When Parenting Feels Overwhelming w/ Dr. Elisha Goldstein

0:00The following podcast is a Dear Media production.

0:10Aliza Pressman:So I know it can get hard to think about self-regulation and mindful approaches to things when you're just exhausted and busy, which is why I wanted Elisha Goldstein to talk about the tiny shifts. That's the name of his book, by the way, How Emotional Health Transforms Stress Relationships and Longevity. But I wanted Elisha to first walk us through a couple of the actual concrete, tiny shifts that we can make in our day-to-day so that we have that kind of nervous system that we want to lend to our kids. I'm Dr. Liza Pressman, and this is Raising Good Humans podcast. I'm starting this episode in a different way than I start most episodes because I'm not going to not take advantage of having you here.

0:58Aliza Pressman:So will you please start us off with a meditation? We'll do something really short together, something that's doable, a small lift in some way. Thank you. So take a moment to just be aware of your body here and notice maybe the positioning of your body, how you're holding your body. and do a gentle scan, noticing if you're holding or tensing anywhere. It's the first thing we want to kind of play with, including your face, your shoulders, your back, your hips, legs or feet. And if you are, see if you can take a moment to soften just a little bit, just a little bit.

1:55And then breathe in. And as you breathe in, see if you can breathe in for the count of four. As you breathe out, just a little bit longer of an exhale, allowing your shoulders to drop a little bit more.

2:20And then be aware of how you feel now.

2:24Aliza Pressman:I tell you, I feel great. Okay. All right, good. How does everybody else feel? I am mesmerized at how quickly just taking a moment can completely just readjust things. And it's in an ordinary moment. It could be in any moment. It could be the moment. A lot of people wake up. A lot of parents in particular wake up. And there's so much to do. already in the morning. We have to get our kids ready. We've got to prepare their lunches. We have to make sure they're out of bed on time, depending on their ages. Some kids wake up early. Once they get the teenage years, you got to like, just really kind of wrangle them out of bed.

3:07And so, you know, there's its own kind of stress in the morning. Yeah. And just that pause in the ordinary moments and the ability to realize how like our nervous system is typically in a state of overwhelm. We're riding this low grade chronic stress that we're living in. Oftentimes people kind of oftentimes say they're, they're, they're coping or they're fine, but that's not typically living. And so we, you know, we can, we can, there's, there's simple ways and ordinary moments to begin to make these tiny shifts so that we can take back control of our minds and our lives and how we're working with our kids.

3:46Aliza Pressman:I mean, this kind of thing is, this is what I love is, and you have, since I've known you, that's been such a beautiful skill of like, mindfulness and meditation is incredibly overwhelming. It's incredibly intimidating. And it feels like you have to put it to the side to get to it later. Like, I think we, most of us agree at this point, it's probably good for us, but it just feels like I'm going to put that on the back burner. And I think you have always been wonderful about letting go of all of this perfect behavior that we have in mind when it comes to meditation in particular, or at least for me and finding these tiny moments.

4:38So of course, Tiny Shifts is a fantastic title for your book, because I think

4:44Aliza Pressman:of you as someone who has acknowledged how hard this is to do and not made it so that we just can put it on the back burner. So given all of that, I want to just quickly give you an opportunity to pitch why we need this. A lot of us try and be a perfect parent. Our kids don't need perfect parents. They need parents that can catch their reactivity a little bit sooner. They need regulated parents because so many people on your show have already said, and you speak about quite a bit, how we're modeling for our kids all the time. It's not so much about what we're teaching them with our words. It's how we're, how we are in the world.

5:31And so our kids need that. And, and so I'll, I'll just kind of say that I'll also say this because, and this is a personal thing that people, nobody here has heard before for sure. There was years ago where I was starting a program because I was really interested in how do we kind of like integrate this work into people's lives and how can I kind of do this outside of my private practice? And so I interviewed you. I interviewed you because I wanted to, I was interviewing a number of people just to kind of see like, what, what does everyone need right now? Like, and you've generously volunteered to say, yeah, we could talk about it.

6:08And one of the things you said that you saw out there quite a bit is like, we all know so much. Like we have read a ton of books. We have listened to a ton of workshops. We've listened to a lot of podcasts. We've been to therapy. And then the question is like, well, how come I can't, I know all this stuff. How come I can't integrate it into my life with some level of regularity. And that was, when I heard you say that, I was like, yeah, that's it. I think that's what a lot of people are experiencing because it kind of creates insight, right? And insight with the differences, what's interesting is insight wakes us up, but practice actually is what makes the difference.

6:50When we talk about our brain changing, all the neuroscience, that kind of stuff, positive neuroplasticity, that all happens with practice, not with insight. And there was this guy you might've heard of named David Foster Wallace, he did this like speak at Kenyon College. And it's a funny story of two fish kind of swimming in the sea and the young fish and they and an older fish kind of comes to them and says like, hey, boys, how's the water? And they look at each other a little confused and they continue on and they go, what the hell is water? And so, you know, right now we're we're living in this water of low-grade chronic stress that's happening.

7:28And parents, I think, feel it the most because it's not just the news that's coming in from, you know, and as we're recording this, there's a whole lot going on in the world right now. It's not just that. It's the moment I had when I was sitting, standing in my kitchen, and we have this area within our kitchen. I think everyone has something like this, which is called the corner of crap. And it's just kind of like where everything lands. And it's also where I plug in my phone. And so I was sitting there and I was, you know, plugging away at returning some Amazon returns and also like figuring out how to transfer points for my credit card to my airline miles because we're going on this trip or whatever, that kind of thing.

8:07And I was sitting there just like overwhelmed with like juggling all this stuff. And my youngest son, who, you know, tugged at my shirt and he's like, Dad, you know, hey, I want to show you something. And I'm like, hold on a second. I'm in the middle of something. And I was just kind of like I was locked in. And if I would have been aware of my body in that moment, you would have seen me like this. I'm probably something like this. And by the time I kind of woke up to it and I turned, he was gone. And so I missed out on a moment that was far more important than whatever I was doing right then and there.

8:43And this is the thing about this, what I call this overwhelm loop that a lot of us live in right now. And I open up the tiny shifts with this chapter called the culture of overwhelm, explaining it to all of us, normalizing it, that it usurps our attention and our awareness about like really what matters in the moment. And when we do that with repetition, and everyone here knows because people who are listening are parents or have been parents and you know time kind of goes by. Time comes and goes. Kids come and go. I mean, Aliza knows this. Personally right now. Yeah.

9:22Aliza Pressman:And so I'm making a sad face because I sent one off to college. Yep. Yep. For those who are listening. And so when you weave those together, those missed moments, it's substantial. And when we catch ourselves in this overwhelm loop, and I want everyone to listen to this right now because it's very important. And this has to do with how we are with our kids. And it also has to do with how we are with ourselves as adults. When we allow ourselves to live in this low-grade chronic stress, we're not in an acute stress moment where like we get hijacked just in that moment. What happens is we're kind of like hijacked over time.

10:03And we have this kind of cortisol that kicks in and we're kind of living with it. And when we hear about like long life and health and longevity, and we want that as parents because we want to be there when our kids have kids and, you know, we want to be able to be active and play with them, you know, and this type of stuff. And if you think that you're just going to rely on your genes, if you have really good genes, that only accounts for like a quarter of our longevity and health span, except for people who have like are way outliers, live like super long. Their genes count for a little bit more, but still what really accounts is our environment, which includes our relationships, our behaviors that we are engaging in in life and our stress and how we work with our stress.

10:50And so parenting is stressful and part of it, right? It's also beautiful and wonderful. And if we can interrupt, we can learn to interrupt that overwhelm loop a little bit more often and recover from that chronic stress, we'll be more available for these beautiful sacred moments. We'll have more memories around them and we'll be protecting our health span for years to come. And I think that's the argument here. And we can do that in the ordinary moments of our everyday lives. We don't have to take a whole bunch of time out and do some big practice or anything like that. This is just like in our everyday moments.

11:32And that's the idea behind Tiny Shifts is that we can learn to make emotional pivots, to support our stress resilience, to help us show up better in our relationships, and also to improve our long-term health and well-being.

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14:45Aliza Pressman:So get started with the Experian app now. Results will vary. Not all bills or subscriptions are eligible. Savings is not guaranteed. Paid membership with connected payment account is required. See experian.com for details. So given that, can you give us a few? Because I think a lot of people, just last night, I was at a school and a parent said, if you could pick one skill to help grow in our kids, what would that be? Which is a hard question to answer, except that I was like self-regulation. like that's and and how did but then how do they get that skill parents co-regulation so can you talk to us about some concrete ways that we can integrate into our daily lives like just a few concrete practices they can sort of change our nervous systems and part two of it is you just mentioned emotional pivoting in the so the first part is the tiny practices in our everyday lives when we're doing great you know like it's just a normal part of the day but then I also want a couple of the practices for when we were like not doing great and we don't want We want to change that.

16:14Aliza Pressman:We don't want to react the way we're reacting. So practice and then in the moment. Okay. So first of all, if you're doing great, have it and enjoy it. I think it's certainly worth recognizing like, okay, hey, this is a good moment. And in life, there's good moments. I'm going to take a moment and take a moment to savor that. And I have actually a little acronym around savor. Savor is a common word that we use about like savor the moment, but savor, from an emotional perspective, I kind of play with the acronym around that. And the S stands for spot. Spot the emotion. Is there a moment of relief?

16:54Is there a moment of ease? Is there a moment of joy? Is there a moment of connection? Is there a moment of humor? Is there, you know, what's spot that moment? Because those moments get, you know, peeled over or looked over by our brain. Everyone here knows because of the negativity bias, but we don't, we don't spot them quite as often. And our brain works off memory. So, I mean, perceiving the moment of An immediate precipitating event will influence how you perceive the next moment. Perception aren't facts, but our mood influences that. So we spot it to support the memory. We acknowledge the feeling.

17:30Spotting is like, hey, there's a good moment. We acknowledge the feeling. We get a little more granular. There's like relief here. There's ease here. There's enjoyment here. So I'm just kind of touching on this one first since you mentioned it because I'm sort of a fan of that. Then we do V is to vitalize the moment. What does vitalize the moment mean? I mean, take a breath in and allow it to like expand a little bit. Like take a breath in, vitalize the moment, bring like some aliveness into the moment. Like say you're spotting, you're spotting, you're acknowledging the feeling, making a little more granular if you can.

18:03You're vitalizing it with a taking a breath in, kind of like there it is. And you're owning it as part of your identity. In my life too, I also have these really wonderful moments. It's not all like... stress and hard, you know, difficulty and, you know, this, there's like good things that are, I can feel this right now. So you're owning it as part of your identity and that reinforces the memory. That's the R. So spot, acknowledge, vitalize, own, reinforce, and that spells saver. And so, so we, we take an opportunity to embed that sort of tag the memory of it. So it's more memorable for next time.

18:39And it like lives in us a little bit more. I'll just say this for parenting, why that's so important for parenting. I don't know if you've had the Gottmans on here or not, but the, but okay. So got John Gottman.

18:51Aliza Pressman:I haven't had the Gottmans on. I don't know why. There's always something to look forward to. Yeah. So, so here we are. So, so he had this great ratio that he came with through his, his research years ago, that five to one ratio of, you know, five kind of positive emotional experiences to one negative emotional experience to kind of balance things out. That's because of the negativity bias, but he found that in his research, um, there's also correlational stuff with other research that shows something similar in the corporate world. I sometimes think about my teenagers and think about, hmm, am I having that five to one ratio?

19:26Wake me up to kind of figure out, like, is there a way we can kind of play together? What's our mutual sense of play? And so it opens me up to kind of thinking about that. For those who don't know I have three spirited boys uh and and so yeah and so we we want to kind of we want to we want to kind of play with savoring to increase that okay so with the difficult moments this is this is where we get really practical your your kid dysregulates in some way they don't want to go to bed at night or it's a teenager who's not you've asked 30 times download the dishwasher and they keep saying, yeah, I'll get to it.

20:02And, and so you get frustrated because you know, you're nagging, you know, you're wanting in the first scenario, you know, you're just kind of wanting to rest because you've been at it all day and you want your child to go to sleep. And the second scenario, it's, you know, if you, how many times can you follow up? I know, I know both of these scenarios intimately. And, and so you, the first thing that we know from the world's wisdom traditions for thousands of years, by the way, as well as current modern psychology, as well as neuroscience is very simple. Something that everyone here is familiar with.

20:38But again, I want to remind you as you're hearing this, that insight, cognitive knowledge is different than practice. Practice is what creates change. So we want to make it simple, tiny shifts. And so the first thing is we just recognize it. Like we recognize the feeling that's there. We recognize the loop and you can make it humorous. Like this is the frustration loop. This is the, oh my God, I can't believe my kid won't empty the dishwasher loop. Or, oh my God, my kid won't go to bed again loop. Because the idea of naming and labeling and noticing gives you a little bit of space from it. That's the kind of classic mindfulness.

21:13But when you mix it with emotional intelligence, you're adding in the emotional piece, which is around being clear about how you're feeling. And then what we want to do, and this is what most people miss in this particular practice, is we have to realize that emotions are biology. So as parents, we have all kinds of parents and humans and our kids as well. We have all kinds of feelings that come up for us through the day in relationship with the work we're doing, the parenting we're doing. and our emotions are physiological. So we're having a physiological response in let's say both of those scenarios I just gave.

21:57Basically, to make it simple, it's really the fight, flight, freeze response. Our body starts to get tense and our heart rate goes up and cortisol starts flushing. And when we get that low grade cortisol over time, creates inflammation. We have other associations with that too. But in that moment, we have to redress that. So in order to have the cognitive capacity to make a decision on how we want to relate to our kids or even ask ourselves, how is my kid feeling right now? My kid's tantruming or having a difficult, you know, they're clearly hurting inside. Even to have that cognitive awareness, we have to release a little bit.

22:35So what does that mean? That means notice where your body's holding, like we did in the beginning of this practice. notice where your body's holding tension whether it's in your neck your shoulders your back your stomach and just like we did in the beginning of this episode and see if you can take a breath and in your mind as you exhale just kind of say release and one of my favorite practices for me and there's a you know something behind it is that when you breathe in i hold a lot of my shoulders I hold just, I don't know, my shoulders come up. And so when you breathe in, same, same, a lot of people, right?

23:15When you breathe in, your shoulders rise a little bit. Try it out for yourself. And when you breathe out, they fall, they yawn, yeah. That's because that just says like, hey, I'm a little tired. That's good. Good to be aware of. And so our shoulders fall. And when your shoulders fall, check out what happens. Your muscles elongate. a little bit, which sends a signal to your brain that I'm safe right now. And the reason we react, you know, let's say to our kids, we snap or we say things we wish we hadn't or these different things is our brain feels like there's a threat there. Maybe it's a threat to your self-worth.

23:54Maybe it's a threat to your identity as a parent of how you think you should be in some way, but we react. And so when we loosen our muscles, this is the release stage, recognize release. We send a signal to our brain that we're safe. We're safe enough even to exhale in the moment. And that's very important for doing this next thing because you wanted to get very practical here. So the model that I work with, that I've kind of been working with and kind of forming over the last couple decades, is just something simple because we want to be able to remember, right? because we're living in this state of overwhelm a lot of the time, even though we don't.

24:35It's the water we're swimming in. Recognize, release, refocus, reinforce. That's the model. Recognize, release, refocus, reinforce. Recognize helps us get that space. It's not enough typically. We need to release the somatic reaction that's happening. That allows us to send those safety signals to our brain. Also kind of allows us a little bit more space to do the next thing. the release piece is what most of us miss we think if we can name something and label it we can just redirect our attention and make a good decision or we can if we name something and label it we can ask ourselves like well how's my kid feeling right now i want to be able to co-regulate and connect with him or her or that kind of thing but if we don't release oftentimes we get hooked back into what i call a slippery loop the slippery loop is when we fall into let's say i'm frustrated I tried to work with my kid.