Did you know that your brain has two fundamental states that shape how you experience life in the moment?
In my educational workshops and presentations, I invite participants to learn about these two states directly. To do so, I have them close their eyes and simply become aware of the sensations that emerge when I say the word “no” harshly several times, and then I pause before calmly repeating the word “yes.”
What I call the “No-Brain” state is described by many as involving a sensation of tightness, constriction, anger, fear, sadness and a feeling of shutting down, along with heaviness in the chest and an urge to run away. This pattern is part of what can be called a reactive state, which researchers have found is created during conditions of threat.
Two branches of our autonomic nervous system — which regulates certain processes, like our blood pressure — can be activated as we react to a threat. One is an accelerating sympathetic branch that gets us ready to fight, flee or freeze as our bodies prepare for the potential harm. The other is a parasympathetic branch, which essentially puts on the brakes; this branch can also become activated if we feel completely helpless, having us collapse or faint in response to the overwhelming threat. With either of these activating or deactivating states, we are now reactive and no longer receptive to what is going on around us or inside us. This No-Brain reactivity shuts off our connections to others and ourselves.
[Read: Teaching Children to Be More in Tune With Their Minds.]
In contrast, what I call the “Yes-Brain” state balances our autonomic system. So instead of being in a reactive state, we now become receptive to our inner world and our interactions with those around us in a more balanced way. This receptive state turns on what researcher Stephen Porges has called the “social engagement system,” supporting an open, curious, connecting stance. That’s reflected in the feelings of being calm, seen, safe and activated that people describe when they finally hear the word “yes” in the experiential exercise I do.
When we learn to parent using a Yes-Brain strategy, we are offering structure and discipline along with sharing the wisdom needed to reinforce a child’s ability to live in this receptive state. Yes-Brain parenting is not about being permissive. It’s about knowing how to skillfully create structure and learning in your child’s life so that the child comes to their inner and outer experiences with a sense of robustness and optimism.
There are four components to this approach, each of which builds on the Yes-Brain’s state of integration in the nervous system. Integration is the linking of differentiated parts of something — such as a brain or a relationship — so that that system is well regulated. The ways we regulate our attention, emotion, mood, thought, memory, behavior and morality are each determined by the brain’s integrative regions, where areas link differentiated circuits. “Executive functions” that are part of emotional, cognitive and social skills come from this set of integrative regulatory capacities.
Our children can learn the four foundations of a Yes-Brain way of living by how we communicate with them. In our book on this topic — “The Yes Brain: How to Cultivate Courage, Curiosity, and Resilience in Your Child” — my co-author, Tina Payne Bryson, and I use a phrase that helps remind parents how this happens: “Where attention goes, neural firing flows, and neural connection grows.” In this way, parents can help foster the growth of integration in their child’s brain in how they communicate with their child and help the child focus his or her attention.
When that pattern of communication is integrative in our relationships, the child’s brain is activated to grow in an integrative way (differentiating and linking) so that regulatory capacities, which support executive functioning, can grow well. For example, if a parent has expectations that a child will be outgoing and love sports, but instead the child is more reflective and prefers quiet time, drawing or playing music, being able to see the child for who he or she really is would be embracing differentiation. Linking to the child’s interests in the expressive arts would be a way of then providing integrative communication that honors these differences and establishes compassionate care and connections that research shows allow a child to thrive and feel secure.
[Read: Secure Attachment: Parenting From the Inside Out.]
Here are the four foundations of a Yes-Brain approach (for acronym lovers like me, this spells the French cheese BRIE):
1. Balance. Our inner experience of feelings is what gives life vitality, meaning and fullness. Yet feelings can sometimes become chaotic and out of control, or rigid, imprisoning us in a rut of our mind’s own making. By helping kids learn about the nature of their emotional lives and how any of us can become lost in these non-integrative states of rigidity or chaos, we can teach them how to ride the waves of these inner feelings and not become reactive when experiencing them fully. As Louisa May Alcott writes in “Little Women,” “I’m not afraid of storms, for I’m learning how to sail my ship.”
2. Resilience. Sometimes, though, the ship of your life does indeed get tossed around in chaotic waves or stuck on a rigid shore. When we’ve entered the No-Brain state of reactivity — especially if this happens repeatedly and becomes a habit of our mind — we can become out of balance. We are no longer receptive to learning from others or even openly aware of what is happening inside of us.
Learning to detect when we’ve left the Yes-Brain state of receptivity and then altering our state to reenter this open, connecting way of being is a key part of being resilient. Facing challenges fully means monitoring our inner state and then modifying it to bring us back into balance.
3. Insight. Research reveals that children, adolescents and adults who are aware of their inner life of sensations, images, feelings and thoughts have better executive functioning and regulation and are even more compassionate and caring toward others.
Insight can be taught by building what I call mindsight skills — the capacities to sense the inner subjective lives of oneself and others, and then integrate these in your life. One aspect of mindsight is called mental time travel, the ways we link our past, present and future. Knowing the past means learning from our prior experiences. Being in the present involves having a receptive awareness to what is happening in the moment. When we anticipate and plan for the future, we’re able to become active authors of our own unfolding life story.
The research is clear: What we do as parents can shape our children’s capacities for insightful living.
4. Empathy. This fourth foundation of living with a Yes-Brain approach to life can also be taught to children by their parents. Empathy has at least five facets:
— Empathic resonance is how we tune into the emotional state of another and feel, to some degree, their feelings. That’s how we resonate with someone else, and how we join with others, but do not become the other — we remain differentiated even as we are linked.
— Empathic understanding is how we make sense of another’s inner thoughts and feelings.
— Perspective-taking is how we try to see from another’s point of view.
— Empathic joy is how we feel the joy, happiness and thrill in another’s success and well-being.
— Empathic concern is how we feel another’s suffering and consider how we might be able to compassionately help reduce that person’s pain.
[See: 10 Ways to Raise a Giving Child.]
By taking a Yes-Brain approach, a parent, teacher or anyone helping children and adolescents grow can support them in cultivating these learnable integrative skills of balance, resilience, insight and empathy. We can hone these same skills as adults as well. These skills are fun to acquire and fundamental to living a life of courage, curiosity and well-being. Let’s say yes to life, and enjoy the journey!
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The ?Yes-Brain? Approach to Parenting and Life originally appeared on usnews.com
