Kate McAllister | Nervous System Regulation: From Reaction to Response

Autogenerated Transcript

Jesper Conrad: 00:00
Today we are together again with Kate McAllister and our first episode were a little short as we had some technical difficulties with some Wi-Fi, but today is already a lot better. First of all, welcome Kate. Good to see you again.

Kate McAllister: 00:16
Thank you very much for having me back. It's nice to see you. And I have my fingers crossed that all of the technology is gonna work today.

Cecilie Conrad: 00:23
This feels better, doesn't it? I'm looking forward to that. I'm sure we're gonna have great conversations now.

Jesper Conrad: 00:30
One of the things we talked a little about the last time was recalibating. Recalibating, no? Yeah, let's just make up some words. Make up some words.

Cecilie Conrad: 00:44
Who cares?

Jesper Conrad: 00:45
Yeah. Thank you. One of the things we talked about last time was recalibrate. I now get nervous because my wife is teasing me. No, no. Okay, okay.

Cecilie Conrad: 00:59
We were talking about recalibrating what?

Jesper Conrad: 01:03
The nervous system.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:04
The nervous system.

Jesper Conrad: 01:05
Yeah. And this is something you have looked into. Why?

Kate McAllister: 01:10
Oh gosh. Um, because we are fundamentally animals, and our nervous systems drive many of our actions, whether they drive them consciously or not. And so if we understand what drives us, if we understand when we, our prefrontal cortex, our personality is in the driving seat, and when our limbic system, our defense mechanism, is in the driving seat of our behaviors, we we can make better sense of how we are in the world and how we relate to other people and how we relate to everything around us. So for me, it's fundamental when we think about ourselves as learners, as creatures who live in community, that we understand our nervous systems so that we understand who we are and why we do as we do. And the better we understand ourselves, the more quickly we can notice when things need recalibrating, and we can, you know, flip a few switches, twiddle a few internal dials, and get ourselves to the point where we're really making choices about how we show up in the world.

Jesper Conrad: 02:27
It reminds me a little of some of the thoughts I'm looking into these days from Gordon Newfield, who is making a big distinction between anxiety and alarm systems, where a lot of people are talking about anxiety, where our alarm system actually is a well-functioning machine if we knew how to listen to it.

Kate McAllister: 02:55
So he wrote a book with Gabo Mate, who is a big inspiration of mine. And so, yes, that's where we're kind of aligned in our thinking that if we don't if we don't address these fundamentals, then everything that we put on top is on, you know, is on shifting sand. And so if we want children to be self-directing with their learning when they're young and to grow into adults who can meet their own needs and move through the world responding as they need to to whatever's going on around them without having to be in a panic, without feeling like they're stuck, then it's really important to address the nervous system and to understand how it works.

Cecilie Conrad: 03:41
I think maybe Jasper is curious as to why it became important to you personally.

Kate McAllister: 03:47
My journey to understanding or to believing that nervous system regulation is at the heart of you know being a healthy, functioning human being who can learn effectively started in the classroom when I was a traditional teacher. I hadn't learned anything about nervous systems or why they needed to be regulated, or that one could co-regulate any of those things. Standing in a classroom, 30 children in front of me, some of them learning, some of them not, but all having the same experience of me in that room at that moment, speaking the same words, doing the same things. So it dawned on me that even though they were all having the same experience, they were all experiencing it very differently, depending on who they were, their background, and later on looking backwards, now understanding what was happening inside their bodies for them, whether they felt safe and able to connect, open up and receive, form new thoughts, learn, or whether they were in defense mode for some reason and therefore shut down and unable to learn new things because they were in defense mode. So I started thinking about how I could make my environment more safe for my children. That's where I started. And then I realized that it's not my choice. I don't get to decide whether a child is objectively psychologically safe. That's not my choice. I don't get to move the furniture around, put soft furnishings in, play music, and suddenly their whole life is fine because maybe it isn't. Maybe home is very difficult. Maybe they just had an argument with their best friend on the way into school. Maybe, maybe, maybe there's a million different things impacting on their ability to listen to me wax lyrical about French grammar. And so I just became increasingly more interested in this work. And then when I left teaching, I ended up working in a refugee camp for about six months in Calais, in Europe. And then it became really the most important thing because their nervous systems, the people that I met, their nervous systems were so dysregulated, they were genuinely in actual fight flight, really truly running away from lions and tigers and monsters that were trying to kill them. And so that's when it all really came together. The understanding that it's not an add-on, it's not something you can do as an extra lesson. This is a fundamental part of being a human. And if we address it early on, then people can grow up being able to always learn in a more effective way, whatever they choose, even when it's challenging, even when it feels scary, they know how to manage those feelings inside themselves and keep going.

Cecilie Conrad: 06:46
So my brain is going in two directions right now because we spend not a lot of time in Calais, but we regularly go to Calais because we go to England via the tunnel. And uh so I'm dead curious about your time there because it has such a weird vibe. It's such a horrifying reality hiding in the shadows and coming there with my all my privilege because I'm going somewhere where I want to go, and I can because I've got all the right papers and the right skin color. It just is very confronting every time we go, and we always become it sounds horrid to say curious, so the word is not exactly right, but in a way we are, but with a lot of empathy, with a lot of what is this? And yet we're not there to work, we're we're just passing through, but we do spend at least 24 hours because we travel with dogs, so we have to have them the worm pill, and then we have to spend 24 hours before we can go to England, and we just it's just we're talking about nervous system now, and we wanted to talk about gut feeling and intuition, feel it in your bones, yeah, and yet on the surface it's it's not there. They tore down the camps, you can't see it. We all pretend we don't see it. So maybe should we talk a little bit about that?

Jesper Conrad: 08:20
Yeah, how was it to work then?

Kate McAllister: 08:22
You want to? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm happy to. Uh, it's been a long time, it's like 10 years ago now. Um that can I ask, was that when there still was big permanent camps? It had just started. When I got there, there were around 2,000 people. When I left six months later, there were 10,000 people, so it really expanded quickly. Um real permanent camps. No, they were never real permanent camps, but it was only ever an unofficial camp. So there's a like wasteland just next door to the port that would have been a rubbish dump, like a municipal tip, toxic wasteland. And so people had started to gather there with a few tents and a few bits and pieces. There's nothing there, and then it just slowly grew as more and more people arrived. And so there were never any big NG, no Oxfam, no, no one was there. And so in that space, just humanitarians went. So I went because I was shouting at the television. So years previously, I had done what lots of school teachers do, got my children together, all their winter clothes, got my community together, winter clothes, and we sent them off to, I think, Afghanistan to internally displaced refugees for the winter. And then years later, like a couple of years later, I'm watching the news, and I just suddenly had this vision of these young people, three years later, now walking towards me in my children's clothes that I'd sent to Afghanistan, and that hadn't done that, they were still coming. And I just had this sense that there needed to be more. And I remember saying, like, why isn't anybody doing anything about this? Why hasn't something happened further down the pathway that means that people aren't having to send their children to do these terribly difficult journeys to Europe to look for safety? And I and it just suddenly dawned on me that I was a someone and maybe sending jumpers wasn't enough. Oh, she's just hating when that happens. Oh, right? Me doing it. Yeah. Like, who am I waiting for?

Jesper Conrad: 10:37
Yeah.

Kate McAllister: 10:37
Who am I waiting for? Like, and so with my just you know, logical mind that, well, I've got some time because I've left teaching to go into education consultancy, and that's like tumbleweed. Nobody wants to pay me for my thoughts. Um, and I'm a I'm a mom. I had a teenage son at that time, and I thought, if I had to send him, who would I want him to be received by? What's the energy that I would want him to meet? God, it still makes me feel emotional.

Cecilie Conrad: 11:08
Yeah.

Kate McAllister: 11:08
Um, and I I wanted somebody's mom to give him a hug and tell him that it would be okay. So I thought, well, I can do that. I can give mom hugs and I can speak French. So they're in France. I can give mom hugs, I can be practical, and I can help them learn to speak French. And it with my naive view of the world, that will be of benefit. And I got there to visit because I didn't want to just assume what people needed. I wanted to meet them and say, like, what can we do to be helpful? And that was when I don't know, I just I had this really life-changing moment. I'm a bit of an airhead, and I left my backpack behind in one of the camps, and it had my passport, it had everything. It had my passport, it had my money, had all my stuff in. And so I went back to look for it, and I got lost because the camp at dusk didn't like nothing made sense anymore. And I found one area that I recognized, and so I just stood in a place and I started calling for the people that I'd spoken to earlier that day, just calling a name into the void and thinking this could be where I like this could be it for me. This is like how stupid, how's this gonna play out in the Daily Mail? You know, like stupid blonde school teacher wanders into refugee camp in the middle of the night looking for her passport, or at in dark looking for her passport, gets murdered. And then this little person comes out, and then I came in and they brought me in, and it was cold then. It was like cold winter, you know what it's like on the north coast of Calais, it's like a bitter wind. And they brought me in and they've got a fire going and gave me a cup of sweet tea, and they've found my backpack for me, and everything was inside it. Everything. And so these terrible people that get described who would sooner, you know, all of those things that people say, there was enough money in there for them to probably get themselves to safety, and there were passports in there that could have gotten them to safety. And they just put my bag somewhere safe and figured they'd find me tomorrow, and then they got me back to where I'd left the others, and I just it was like something changed in my heart. Like I I felt it kind of crack open, and I understood that I don't know, people are people everywhere. I kind of knew that already, but I guess I didn't fully know that, and so we talked a lot about what what people needed, and they were looking for sort of safe spaces to feel human again. It was cold, it was wet, it was hard, and so we ended up. I bought a double decker bus on eBay, and we turned it into a into a school. I asked a couple of people first if they'd give me an old bus, and nobody would. So I thought, well, how hard can it be? And I went on eBay, and it turns out it's not that hard. They're like about £5,000. So I made a fundraiser, and it was just the right idea at the right time, you know, it just it was the right idea at the right time, and people got behind it, and we bought a book and we turned it into a mobile school, and it was all just volunteers, just people like me trying to do their bit, and then we trained volunteers, we designed a training course all based around self-regulation. So understanding that even if you have no shared language and no shared goal, necessarily that's a long way in the future, just spending time together and co-regulating is really supportive. So we did things like cooking together, making music together, any of those things that syncopate your heartbeat and your breath. And so you get into the same rhythm of doing. And so you would we would create a meal together and then eat together, and that would lead to us slowly learning one another's language a little bit and just re-humanizing, just feeling like people sharing a moment in time. So I look back on my time there very fondly. I still have friends who are some still in France, they never made it to the UK and they've made lives there now, and some who then moved on to the UK, and we're still in contact. So, yeah, it was a very, a very special moment in time. It was the, you know, what's that, the best of times and the worst of times. Yeah, yeah. Well, it's a crazy place.

Jesper Conrad: 15:52
And thank you for what you have done. Crazy and impressive.

Kate McAllister: 15:57
And it's it's so sad that it's still but at that point people weren't going across in boats. That was not happening, and now it is. Um, and that's just that's just a political decision to not open a open a safe passage. You they could just open a safe passage. They could. Choosing not to fly, just let them fly.

Cecilie Conrad: 16:21
All the refugees, just let them fly.

Kate McAllister: 16:23
I mean that the money, the amount of money. I mean, that was the crazy thing. I was meeting young men, mostly young men, obviously, because they're the first one you send, right? Yes, and they spoke four or five languages. Most of them had finished their schooling. I was like, hang on a minute, these are the most resourceful, multilingual, determined young men on the planet, and we're saying we don't need you. That never made sense to me.

Jesper Conrad: 16:49
How can we circle back to the regulation? Because you saw it there, you talked about how even cooking together, singing together, doing things together put you into this sink of your heartbeats and and your feelings that help you co-regulate as you described it. Where I want to go is I think a lot of people know how it is when their nervous system is in super defense mode. Many people most likely live a life where they are on some sort of stress level all the time. So, what do we do to bring it down where we can start relaxing and start finding ourselves again and relearning what the system is telling us? Because I think there's two major problems. One is we don't listen, and the other is if we listen, we put the fear upon something else than maybe what is actually wrong.

Kate McAllister: 17:58
Part of the issue is you have like the level of what's happening inside your nervous system, whether it's overactivated, under like it's switched off, or whether it's just ticking along nicely in the middle, you know, like a car, the engine's revving too hard, or it's conked out, or it's running smoothly, right? And then you have what you need to do today. And so there's this sweet spot where they meet, right? Where you're feeling really well regulated, open, you can look people in the eye, you can choose your words carefully, you're not in a rush, you don't feel sluggish, everything's really feeling good, and you have to do something that needs your brain power, but not too much of your physical energy, and it meets beautifully. This very rarely happens in life. And so what we tend to do is we have two choices. We can either try and change how we feel, change what's going on in our body. So we can move our energy up if we have to do something that's here, or we can bring our energy down if we have to do something that's here, or we can change what we're going to do. And that's the bit where people's brains often explode. They go, well, you can't change what you have to do because you have to do this. You have to get out of bed at seven and get on the bus at 7:30 and arrive to school by 8.30, and then you have to do math, followed by English, followed by PE, whether you want to or not. That's what's happening today. So then we have this that our nervous systems are constantly being jangled, pushed up, pulled down, tried to make to meet what's going to happen. And so we're nearly always not in balance. And so we feel that way. So there's two things that we can do to ourselves to make life feel better. One is be more flexible with what you plan to do as much as possible. Can you move things around to meet your mood? So if you wake up and you just feel agitated and you have all of this like energy in your body, right? You can either go for a long, mindful walk, you can meditate, you can sing, dance, shake it out of your body, or you can clean out the cupboard under the stairs, right? And take it out on the box of things that needs tidying up and you know, chop some wood in the garden. So we we do have the power to move these things around. I think we've just forgotten that we do, and we're not mindful enough of what we can do. So if you don't currently have the freedom to rearrange your whole life to fix your, to meet your mood, then you've got to look at how you change what's happening inside your body and how you feel. And the good news is that that's all of the levers for doing that are baked into your human body already. So you can use movement. So if you are feeling, so we have a model that's like a house. So in the attic is all of that fight-flight energy. So you feel frustrated and agitated and fizzy and constricted, and then down in the basement is the faint and freeze energy where you feel a bit hopeless or helpless, or you can't make a decision, you're kind of stuck and frozen. And so you can use your breath to move from one extreme to the other and back into the middle just by taking two inhales and one long out exhale. It's called a physiological sigh. So you breathe in twice. If you do that two or three times, it will bring your nervous system down really quickly. If you want to speed up your nervous system, you can breathe quickly through your nose. Like you're panting, but through your nose. And that will bring you, bring you up. And what it does is it connects your mind to your body quite quickly. Um, if you are feeling completely in the grip of a panic attack, you're about to have a panic attack, and you can't even, you don't even know that you're breathing, and that's too much to choose your breath. You can do something like a five, four, three, two, one technique. It's like five things I can see. Just name five things: a pillow, a thing, a weight, my computer, my legs. And then four things that you can hear. Three things that you can touch, two things that you can smell, and one thing that you can taste. And it just brings you back from the brink of sort of losing control and going into a panic attack and spiraling, and it brings you back into your body. It's like, I'm here, I'm alive, there are things around me, it's okay. And then you can take a big deep breath. And then you can slowly bring yourself, bring your body back into feeling regulated. And there are hundreds of techniques like this, and lots of them are woven into things like yoga, things like mindfulness, things like tai chi, like all of these things have been woven into practices over time to support human flourishing and feeling well. And now we have words to describe it. I think there is a need.

Cecilie Conrad: 23:17
I'm just wondering, even maybe we even need to talk about one step before that, the step where you realize, oh, I'm off, I'm working on fear, or I'm actually too overwhelmed to make good decisions, or I feel like that happens to me, it happens to people around me. Somehow it's just a role, it's just it's like a train, it just keeps going. And this whole I think it'd be nice to talk about the markers. How do we know to stop? Because it can also be a little bit too much if it's every three minutes you take deep breaths and start thinking about what you see, and you know, we also have to be flowy. Yeah. When is it? Let's say it's all good mostly, but sometimes we all some end up in some weird mindset. Where's the alarm?

Kate McAllister: 24:13
So I say there's kind of three three areas, three layers. So one is I've just yelled at someone in the street, right? That's not me. I don't want to do that. So there's that one, right? You've lost it. You've gone into defense mode, and the monster in you've come out. And so that's the point at which you need to take the big breath, go for a walk, take yourself away, calm down, go back and apologize. The next layer down is I feel like I could shout at someone really soon. Like you begin to feel, and so I taught when I do train, I do training on this. So it's everybody has what I call a tell. So you know, if you play poker with somebody or you spend a lot of time with somebody, you know if they're off or you know if they're not telling the truth. And so you can also read their nervous system when you start to get to know somebody. And when you start to really observe yourself, so I know that if I can't look people in the eye really comfortably, if I start talking at them over their left shoulder or something, that my nervous system is dysregulated. It doesn't necessarily mean that it's something happening right here, right now for me. It might be that I haven't done my tax return or there's a phone call that I've forgotten to return, or something on my mental dashboard that I am not aware of, and my nervous system knows it's going, Kate, there's something you've forgotten, but it's not loud enough for me to know what it is. It starts to play out in my body. So I then have to take that cue of not being able to look people in the eye and go home and go through my mental list of what it is that I haven't done or what I've forgotten. So everybody has a tell. When I'm feeling threatened by somebody or something, my language changes. So I know that if I'm using colourful language that's not very professional, if I'm swearing a lot more than I usually would, that is a clue to me that I am feeling, I'm j I'm feeling jangled. I'm feeling that's my that's my fight energy coming through. That's me saying, I'm scary, don't, don't mess with me, right? And I don't know why it does that, but that's what it does. And there's a book which is brilliant, which is called The Chimp Paradox. And it talks about exactly this. It's a fabulous model for describing your limbic system in your brain. And your limbic system has a personality, it has a whole way of behaving and being that you can't necessarily control. You don't get to choose what it does. But if you understand what it does, if you understand that it gets sweary, or it can't look you in the eye, or it needs to go and have a lay down all the time, or it starts wanting to eat sugar, or whatever it is, however it manifests in you, then you can start figuring out how to manage it. Like what does it need from you, the prefrontal cortex part of you, to make it kind of feel relaxed and calm again, which allows you back into the driving seat. It's very subtle as to who is in the driving seat. Like you said, you don't always know until you know. But the more you observe yourself, the more you can begin to see the behaviors creeping in. And then the bottom layer is how do I like you say, you can't always be going through life taking a deep breath. But actually, you can. You can start each day with two minutes of breath work. You can do so. It's like it's like a like um, you know, that boiling a frog. They not that this is actually true, but people say that if you put a frog in hot water, it will jump straight out. But if you put it in cold water and slowly turn up the heat, it will stay in the pot. Have you heard that before? Yeah, yeah.

Cecilie Conrad: 28:12
It's probably not true, but it's a good analogy.

Kate McAllister: 28:14
It's not, I don't think it is true, but I like it's a great analogy. So life slowly turns the heat up on us, and if we don't notice and turn it down, we end up boiling over. So there are things that you can do, like take your shoes off more often than you would think that you want to, take a mindful breath, things like practicing yoga, things like reading a book the hour before you go to bed, just all of these little things that bring your nervous system down and stop it from just slowly ramping up. They're all really helpful.

Cecilie Conrad: 28:54
Sorry that getting to know yourself really is the clue. And so, as in many other things, there's no quick fix. I'm still curious to I mean, you and I can easily agree, but maybe what if this is not your thing? You haven't really done it before, and you kind of just want to know. So, okay, there's no shared alarm button or lamp. For you, it could be language, for me it could be stomach ache, for him, it could be I don't know, something for me personally. My eyesight goes, I just can't see when I'm too overwhelmed. It's a very clear thing. I need to sit down now because I can't see. But anyway, it's different for everyone. And yeah, get to know the tell takes time. So you have to make your mistakes, shout at someone in the street, realize okay, but what went before that? What went before that? Could I have seen it coming? Could I have done something to prevent this? Yeah, that's a

Kate McAllister: 30:00
lot of introspection not everyone loves doing that so is there simpler it's really hard to do it to someone you have to do it to yourself yeah so you can co-regulate you can co-regulate with someone so the easiest way that you see this is parenting a toddler for example so a toddler is having a tantrum because they can't get something whatever it is and so there will be parents who try and squash the behavior so they force the child out of the attic down into the basement right they squash the behavior with fear if you carry on doing that something worse is coming for you and the fear of the something worse stops the behavior instantly because their nervous system drops into the basement right they drop into existential threat. I think parents don't realize that that's what they're doing. I'm going to be generous and say parents don't realize that's what they're doing. It's hope and that's what they're doing. And then you'll see a different parent who will drop down to the child's level and just be there in connection with the meltdown. And they'll hold the energy they'll hold safety around the child because the world feels unsafe because the thing that they thought they were going to get they didn't get and it feels like the world is collapsing. And they hold the space for them and then very quickly the child can collapse into the parent's arms you can have a big hug feel better the sobbing comes right and then the big breath comes that's they're doing it naturally they're regulating their own system naturally do you know what I mean when that the shudder sob and then the big breath and then when all of that is passed the parent can have a conversation about you know you can't always have chocolate but it's okay. Like it was a big feeling and it didn't feel good when we said no but you're going to be okay and another day in the future I will be able to say yes and there will be a day that that chocolate appears again. And that's co-regulation. They're sitting with the big feeling they're not trying to change it they're holding it and neutralizing it because they're you imagine like a lighthouse everybody's like a lighthouse and you're radiating something out. And so if the child is radiating out panic and fear and anger and the parent does the same then you're just filling up the world right between the two is this fight this energy. If the parent radiates out I've got all day let it come I can take it it will wash over me it takes the power out of it quite quickly and it can come down. In an ideal world you would want that relationship to evolve so that the child knows that when the big feeling passes and the sob goes they can manage themselves and then slowly slowly over time you don't get that far. But there's I don't I think you're right I don't think there if there were a quick fix somebody would have figured it out by now written a book on it and no one would ever have any trouble again.

Cecilie Conrad: 33:14
I think it's I my suspicion is that the Dalai Lama is is working away you know underneath underneath the robes and the and the peaceful exterior some days he probably wakes up a bit pissed off too and he has to do something about that like he has to take an internal action to not act upon what's happening inside his body I will though still say what about just paying attention that's something everyone can do I feel like I have a good handful of friends who would find it really annoying if I told them to do breath work and yoga and read a book before bedtime and have herbal tea and all the things they would be like yeah you do you you know and shut up which is fair you know I'm just thinking in my experience a lot comes from just paying attention just if taking away from listening to this podcast just is to put a sticky note on the fridge saying what's my tell and it will sit there until something come covers it because it's more important. But that will give that back of the mind maybe just attention to hmm what comes right before things go wrong. That's basically it what comes right before I feel like a swear word. Yeah maybe we don't all have to journal and do breath work in the morning and yoga at the beach and what maybe we can also I'm just there's a million different ways to do it.

Kate McAllister: 34:50
Really as many as you can think of so there's five keys in the model that I one of the models that I like to use and they spell the word mates. So it stands for mind. So anything that you do with your mind. So we do exercises in the training and one of them is you sit in a chair and you call to mind a challenging situation. So maybe somebody cut you up in traffic recently or you had an argument with somebody in your family that's not resolved, right? Something that and you call it to mind and it instantly for lots of people they can feel their heart rate change they can feel their body tense they can feel their jaw go tight they pull their feet closer into their body as if they're gonna be able to run away right they feel their body change and everybody goes around the circle and they all say all the things that happened in their body and then there's always one person who says didn't feel a thing I don't know what you're talking about. I could play that and I could play that difficult situation like a movie in my head it had zero impact on my body they are so dissociated they just live in their head and they've probably not got much awareness of any of the subtle cues in their body at all they're not tuned in the two are not connected and so that's really hard often you'll ask people who are like that where are your feet I know it sounds like a silly question but they have to look like they literally don't know where their body is in physical space. And so if that's who they are and they're very cerebral and they're like oh God yoga do I look like I could do yoga then they're going to need to use some kind of mental exercise to get themselves back into their body. So there aren't you can start in different places. So you've got mind air is the breath tea is for tree like rooting things like like pushing your body down into the ground like grounding express using your words so that can be journaling art but getting the feeling out of your body into words changes the form of it and you move it through your body and then stretch. So anything that makes you take up more physical space or get moving. And so everybody will have different things that they can use. So something like yoga is helpful just because it combines a few of them. So you get quite a lot for your buck. But if being really quiet and slow moving is the most painful thing in the universe then somebody else it might be something really physical like boxing running. That's why you see people who get almost addicted to severe physical exercise because they're on this constant loop of trying to get rid of energy and overwhelm sensations in their body that running is a really good way for them to get rid of but if you do it knowingly mindfully and as you are running as fast as you can say and this is for that idiot who cut me up at the thing and this is for that boss that never liked me and this is for the first boyfriend that dumped me right all of those feelings that are stuck in your body you're releasing them as you run.

Cecilie Conrad: 38:05
That's more helpful than just running I like him when I was really young I shared an apartment with two friends we had the system that we would go to the thrift store and get us a big stack of really cheap plates really cheap just the random half broken ones we had them in a pile right inside of the kitchen in the first cupboard and when we got really really annoyed with something which well I I can I I get easily annoyed I also get easily over it um more easily now that I'm 50 than back then when I was 17 or whatever we would go into the kitchen grab a plate and throw it to the other end of the kitchen just get the anger out and someone else one of the two others would clean it up. It was a standard rule okay we had that compassion for each other that you could get it out but you didn't have to go get broom after if someone had smashed a plate in the kitchen it was because it was serious and there was a serious annoying thing going on and you just needed it out and it was actually really great. Obviously it didn't happen all the time actually just knowing that you got that stack at home. Yeah go home and break a plate that would was even just imagining last time I did it would help me when I got really annoyed with something. Yeah then I didn't let it out in the moment because I had a fuse basically it was great.

Kate McAllister: 39:37
That's it that and that would be under M, right? It's like a helpful thought the helpful thought is I know that this is going to pass and if it doesn't and I still feel this angry in half an hour I can smash a plate when I get home and I don't have to clean it up I don't even have to clean it up yeah and that's enough that's enough for you to stay in the challenging moment being challenged by it knowing that you're challenged by it but not losing control. That's self-regulation having an awareness so we have a a framework and it starts with self-awareness self-regulation self-management right so noticing that something's impacting on you noticing that there's a feeling from that impact choosing how you respond to that impact rather than just swearing or smashing or doing whatever in the moment and then self-expression so talking it through understanding it understanding that pattern and then self-reflection what does it mean like where are the where are there regular patterns in my life that all look a bit like this and is there something that I can do about that and then self-direction what do I want to do next and then it goes round and round. So you just get used to being more aware taking more notice and going well not everybody behaves not everybody reacts in the way that I react so maybe there are more choices out there for me and I just need to learn a few more skills and then maybe I won't be the angry person or the sad person or the nervous person or the boring person or the whatever it is right because my behaviors are being dictated by my nervous system and not by my choices. Kate as people can hear your accent and I would like to tease the British a little then what you're describing is not my stereotypical crit no they're used to just shoving it below the carpet all of it okay what what made generalization going on there yes I love to generalize there's some there's some history with you know yeah but still yeah but what what led you to this path of working with these things and exploring them in your life my just watching all the things that get in the way of human beings being able to have joyful peaceful connected relationships and whether that's two four-year-olds in a playground or two 14 year olds or two 40 year olds in a marriage or two strangers on a bus it's like the way that we misunderstand each other causes so much pain in the world and when that misunderstanding is happening on a world stage it you end up with atrocities like we're seeing now and atrocities like you know young people having to walk halfway across the world to believe that they're gonna feel safe when they get there and to then arrive and realize they're not safe here either. And to know that we have the capacity to choose to feel safe if we just know how to do it that feels really important to me. Like I can be objectively unsafe but feel safe inside my own body I can be objectively very safe and feel completely anxious and unsafe and like I'm on the verge of a panic attack every day. And that's down to me. Like I actually do have the power to understand what's happening inside my body and and to do something about it. I can't stop what's happening in the world I can't stop somebody driving at me in traffic I can't control what's going on around me but I can control how quickly that challenging moment passes and how well I deal with it.

Cecilie Conrad: 43:45
That's very powerful if you can one thing I've noticed this might have to be the last bit because I've got class is that one mistake that we make over and over both of us is if there's discomfort some sort of irregulation noise something's off we try to fix it before we regulate the emotion that's a mistake I mean I know it you don't have to tell me I shouldn't do it but I still do it try to fix the thing before I fix myself and for me that's a quite general red flag or if I'm not balanced and I'm trying to do things it's usually a really bad idea. Even though the thing might still be quite chaotic it's better that I find my peace before I act unless it's really urgent obviously sometimes things actually don't have two seconds to wait.

Kate McAllister: 44:46
Yeah if the if the house is on fire you want to just jump out the window right like you you don't want to take a breath and think about it too much. No. But most things in life so we do this we do an exercise in the training and it's like we have a an elastic cord the magical invisible cord that you can see because it's an exercise and one person jangles it really hard and the other person is holding it and we're in the middle of training so we've been talking about this for two days right and instantly your nervous system has a reaction instantly now it either has a reaction where you pull at it and you try and shut them down control it hold it push the annoyance back or people go floppy and try and get away from it or they kind of check out and they smile and pretend that they can be there all day. But you watch it happen really quickly that they go into this defensive mode straight away they still look like them they're smiling they're doing something but not too much because they know they're on display but you can see it's their nervous system. And then we do it again straight away afterwards and I say use the five keys of mates I want you to think a helpful thought I want you to take a deep breath I want you to move your feet further apart I want you to soften your legs and be able to go with the flow have a little bit of movement and then you watch how quickly it shifts and it normally takes three to four breaths that's it and so you're talking 30 seconds is the difference between screaming at your kid just get your shoes and get in the car nah right or actually darling is there something that I can do that will help you get into the car so that we can get to school on time right and it's just it's like 30 seconds and we've nearly always got 30 seconds the house is never really on fire we just our nervous system believes it's on fire because that's how we're wired yeah but we do the mistakes anyway all the time or many of us I remember Cecilia and I when the kids were smaller often talking about that not in being in a place where we could regulate ourselves ended up taking longer time because then you ended up maybe yelling off the children and then you needed to clean up all the emotional liftover of that it's like okay so I actually got I was late at work because I was the idiot instead of just embracing the child and the feelings.

Jesper Conrad: 47:32
I think many many people know this feeling and what I would like now Kate is to invite people who would love to know more about the training you're doing and first of all I would say you should also listen to the whole other episode we have with Kate where we talk about the hive and all those things but here now if people want to know about the work you do in this area can you share where they can learn more about it and what it is you do for people yeah so the the whole organization is called thehumanhive.org and so if you go onto the website there you can see the different things there's an online course that you can do about which is all about this about how to be a change maker so how to change things in your family life or in the way that whether you want to be a volunteer whatever it is that you want to do where you want to make change or you can book you can book training with us depends whether you're an individual person or an organization.

Kate McAllister: 48:33
So I've got a group coming to Dominican Republic to do the training with me at the end of next week actually so you can we can come to you or you can come to me or you can do it online.

Jesper Conrad: 48:46
Wonderful but piece of options yes once again thank you for your time it was a big pleasure hanging out with you and I have food for thoughts which is why I love making these podcasts I I I grow every time it's wonderful.

Kate McAllister: 49:02
Yeah stop and breathe yes if you get annoyed yeah stop and breathe like and my daughter now makes me do it when I'm overwhelmed and I've stopped breathing she holds my hands and she says breathe and I do that thing I go I'm too busy not now and she says no now right because I I I've got myself into a flap because no like it's not like knowing this stuff makes you immune to life like I say yes to too many things I get too busy I run out of time and I'm panicked looking for my keys and my daughter says just breathe and I go on I can't I've got to go so breathe and then you'll remember where they are and I'm like oh damn she's right if I breathe I'll remember where I put my keys because then you know the what happens is the front of your brain comes back online. It's not online when you're in a panic so you can't think so there you go. That's what happens your children co-regulate with you after a while.

Cecilie Conrad: 49:60
But isn't that great I think it happens with friends as well sometimes you passed some information or some technique or some something five years ago and suddenly this friend is saying oh you taught me this and you go did I but you really needed it back at that moment. It's a little bit the same dynamic happens to me quite often indeed yeah okay we can keep chatting or we could let's end the episode say goodbye when we say goodbye.

Jesper Conrad: 50:25
Yes thanks a lot for your time it was a pleasure hanging out with you.

Cecilie Conrad: 50:28
Yeah it was very nice.

Kate McAllister: 50:30
Thank you for having me. It's lovely talking to you