Tanya (00:02)
Hello, and I just want to welcome Ellen Nathan, a friend of our show back onto the podcast. Ellen is going to be talking about interoception and neuroception to really, I think, sometimes not really understood senses and just sort of unpack them a little bit for our listeners today. So welcome to the show, Ellen.

Thanks for having me back. It's really nice to be back. It feels familiar. It feels safe. It feels like awesome work to do with you. So yeah, I'm excited to be back. and I know that you have a very busy schedule, so I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to us today. So.

First of all, we wanted to just kind of touch, go into interoception. Is that what we've decided? Yeah, think we were, yeah, thinking about interoception and neuroception. And if these are quite new terms for people, we don't want to get them too tangled up by talking about them together, even though they often do play out together quite often. So I think if we just try and stick to one to start with, which would be interoception or interoception.

And then, yeah, really take some time to consider that and then we'll shift on to neuroception next. Awesome. So like my understanding from my own life, this is perhaps how listeners might identify it is like as a neurodivergent person myself, quite often will forget or not get the sense from my body that I need to eat or drink

or go to the bathroom or things like that because I get so caught up in the things that I'm doing that my body doesn't send me those cues. And I know that, you know, that could be a lot of people's experience, but I'm sure it's a lot deeper than that. Yeah, I think there is different reasons why people's sense can be available to them to read or not.

And I think that goes with all the senses. We have nine sensory systems if we're including neuroception. Interoception is often called the eighth because it was the most recently found sense or discovered sense that's a really big topic in neuroscience now. And then neuroception has come along and is becoming the ninth sense. So we're always learning.

it's still really quite new in the grand scheme of things. you know, if it's your first time hearing the term, then lots of people are in that boat where they haven't heard about it yet. But once we talk about it, it'll just all come clear. I think it's good just to remind everyone that we all have sensory systems and we all have all nine of these sensory systems. So,

even if you're here thinking about your kids or you're here thinking about the people that you work with or if you're an adult who's curious about your own world, whether you have autism or ADHD or sensory processing disorder or anything that you may or may not have, everybody has these senses. So I think that's what makes it so nice to work inside sensory is just knowing that

Yeah, it's the thing that drives our knowledge of the world. So it's good to understand it. So interception in a nutshell is our sense of what's happening inside our body. And really it's about what's happening inside our organs. So it's our sense of what's happening in our bladder, in our stomach. It's the sense of what's happening inside our heart rate and our heartbeat.

it gets, you know, none of our senses really work by themselves. So an example would be if you take a really deep breath and you take a deep breath in, you're going to feel your lungs. And some of that is going to be proprioception because your lungs are muscle. And so proprioception sits inside our muscles and our joints. So taking a deep breath and being able to feel those lungs is proprioception, but it's also interception because it's that sense inside of your lungs filling up with air.

And so, you know, that brings us back to if you can't feel those things very well, or if you feel them a lot to the point that maybe it frightens you a little bit, you might find, for example, mindfulness breathing really tricky, or you might find it a really hard task to do, or you might be, you know, at the moment in schools, it's cross country season here in New Zealand. So lots of kids are doing cross country. And if they can't feel their lungs,

or if they can't feel their heartbeat, then they may be struggling to regulate those systems to be able to take the deep breath to calm down or to get enough oxygen through the body. So it's really important to understand that in order to self -regulate or regulate ourselves, it actually starts all the way back and noticing sensations inside our body. And then our body, once it notices the sensation,

we want to be able to recognize what that sensation is trying to tell us so that we can respond appropriately. So it follows like a notice, recognize, respond pathway. So I notice that there's a heaviness in my lower abdomen. I recognize that that means that maybe my bladder is full. And so I respond by going to the toilet. Or I notice there's a...

kind of tight feeling in my tummy and so I recognize that I'm feeling a little bit nervous because I'm about to give a speech and so I respond by taking a deep breath to help myself calm down. So that's the pathway from interception to self -regulation and why it's really important that we understand that not everybody has interception messages that they feel like they can rely on.

Yeah. That's so interesting hearing you say that as a person who has not had a lot of awareness around that kind of stuff. It can sometimes really, really like sneak up on you. You know, like for example, I know for myself, I don't often get hungry hues. And then all of a sudden I feel like, like really hungry.

or I notice that I'm feeling really agitated or irritable. And then I'm like, well, that's because it's like three o 'clock and haven't eaten anything today. Yeah. So, you know, I can just imagine what that would be like for a child who perhaps doesn't have the logical pathways or the experience of like, okay, this is what's going on in my body.

Yeah, and it's also that doesn't have necessarily the autonomy to do something about it at random times. So, know, as an adult, if you suddenly get to like 2 .30 in the afternoon and you go, I haven't eaten today and I only know that because the message is now, you know, my body is yelling at me that I'm starving rather than giving the quiet little cue that I'm hungry. And it's 2 .30, you can just often get up and go and meet your needs. Whereas some of our kids,

or young people in schools or children that may not have the language yet to kind of put it together, they can't necessarily just say, hey, actually, I'm hungry now. I get the message now that I'm hungry. Can I go eat? It's like, well, no, lunchtime was an hour and a half ago. You should have eaten then. So sometimes it then becomes this really confusing thing because when you do get the message, you're not allowed to do anything about it, which is why it's so good to kind of have that understanding that not everybody

necessarily gets the message at lunchtime that they are hungry or their body doesn't tell them that they are hungry yet. So they've still got some time to kind of learn to learn that. then with interception, some people are, you know, born without the ability to really sense what's happening inside their body. And that's how they are.

Some people have interception but might get, kind like you explained, might get just super busy or super involved in something and then you're so hyper -focused somewhere that your body tunes out all those other messages. Sometimes we tune out the messages from our body because our body doesn't feel safe for us, whether that's because we don't like those sensations or we don't understand those sensations or maybe we've experienced some trauma.

and our body doesn't feel like a safe place anymore. So we want to kind of numb that feeling a little bit. So we're tuning off to the feelings that we have. Sometimes we have some control over that. You know, we can tune in or tune out from what's happening inside our body. But some people can't. Some people it's just that they don't feel those messages until they're really, really loud or till another sense is kicking in. I remember working with a mum who explained that

when I asked the question of, you know, how do you experience hunger? She said, when my eyes go black, when my vision goes black, that's when I know it's time to eat. And I was like, well, gosh, you know, that sounds like a survival response. That sounds like you're losing some of your vision because you haven't eaten in a long time. But she had no other body sensation that told her she was hungry. It wasn't until she was about to faint that she would get that message. And that's how she had learned to read that it was time to eat.

So yeah, for her it was about putting in some systems to remind her to eat every two to three hours so that she didn't get to that stage because that stage is quite extreme, quite unsafe. yeah, definitely. And you know, I was thinking too about, you know, the child sort of example, you know, when we look at it through a behavioral lens, we might like think, they're just being disruptive or they're just being, you know, naughty or whatever.

and not actually realizing that it's an inter reception thing. And as an early childhood teacher, you know, with especially with toileting, you know, and not a lot of teachers, didn't think in that space, or even parents recognize how inter reception could perhaps play into that, you know, with children, like, you know, withholding, or, you know, or struggling to, you know,

to toilet trained because they're just not getting those messages. Yeah, and it might be, for example, sometimes it's that, for example, if they're going into the toilet at two o 'clock in the afternoon, it's being used so much by then that it can be quite smelly, quite messy. So they may be shutting down kind of all of the sensors that they can. They might know that they need to go to the toilet, but they're too overwhelmed to go to the toilet.

So they're trying to dull those messages because it doesn't feel safe for them to be using the toilet when it's that smelly or messy. And then the flip side for lots of our kids is that, they either don't notice the sensation in their body or they notice it, but they don't recognize what it means. Therefore they don't respond. And it takes a long time to learn. That's what toilet learning is. It's that moment where you notice the sensation in your body and you connect it to,

this is that wee thing I need to do, or this is that poo thing I need to do. And then you go to the toilet and something happens. So it's only through, you know, kind of like cause and effect that you get to practice that skill. And that's what toilet learning is. And then for some kids, can take a lot longer to learn that skill because the message isn't quite getting there fast enough, loud enough, clear enough. So for some people, interception can be kind of...

muted or dull or it's like a message but it's almost like a whisper it's really quiet and so it can be quite hard to catch it's like there was a sensation in my body and now it's gone I don't know what that meant and for some people it can be super loud super intense so like the message comes through and it just comes through hard

fast, consistently, like it's like you can't switch off the message that you need to go to the toilet or that you need to eat. And then for some people it can be disorganized. So, you know, like that feeling of needing to go to the toilet for some people, it's like a, like it might be a sensation in their kind of body torso somewhere. They know it's not in their hands and their feet, but they don't quite know which part of their

body that it's in, you know, is it up by my shoulders or is it down by my hips? They can't discriminate exactly where it is. They know it's there, but they can't quite discriminate exactly where to then choose the right response. And for some people, yeah, it's disorganized, like it comes in and it goes and it's loud and it's not, or it's kind of like it was yesterday, but not really. So it can be distorted, confusing.

it can create other sensations and other ways that take over. So you might have, if we stick with toileting, you might feel that weight in your abdomen that tells you you need to, you know, go and empty your bladder, but it might cause like a radiating pain down your leg. And so then that becomes the thing that you notice more. And then you forget about the need to go to the toilet. So yeah, it can...

can cause quite a lot of confusion for some people, which is why we've just got to be gentle and go slow and support people to grow their interception awareness and then hold a bit of space for how one person experiences their internal organ world is really different to how another person might. It's so great that we're actually being able to recognize the differences between people and

to recognize that it isn't just, you know, like, if I think earlier, like in my early sort of training as a teacher, and as a parent, you know, there was like, this is the normal way that children should behave in these kind of like self help or self care kind of skills. And, you know, if they're not doing it, there's kind of like, there's something wrong with the strategy you're using as a parent, or, you know, and

Yeah, so, you know, I remember, you know, a parent like a child that was withholding a lot. You know, like they were going to like, you know, doctors and things to like, you know, get them to like have laxatives and stuff like that, which was very distressing for the child. Just, you know, because then they had no control over their body at all.

And so I'm just, yeah, I'm just kind of like thinking about some of those earlier experiences that can really shape a child and the way that they feel about the things inside their body. Yeah, definitely. And sometimes some of our strategies, for example, might be to like sit on the toilet for five minutes or 10 minutes while the, you know, bowel motion comes down or comes through. But

If you have tactile hypersensitivity, if your skin is really sensitive, then sitting on a toilet seat is really hard. There's not many other places where we experience that sensation of sitting skin directly on top of something cold and plastic with a hole in the middle of it. So that can be really difficult. the strategy of, this is where we've to be careful about just saying, okay, here's a great strategy.

And we've got to think about the child in front of us. if you're visiting a continence professional who's advising laxative use or sitting the child on the toilet for 10 minutes and playing games with them, yes, that might be an okay strategy to support a healthy bowel motion, for example. But if your child has a sensitive tactile sense or if they have sensitive to smell, these things might become

really difficult for them and create a sense of danger in the toilet space and then you're holding them in the space that feels unsafe. So then you're starting to tangle up in other sensations that are not nice and you're accidentally doing the opposite. So I think this is where, you know, we've got to listen to our parents. We've got to, they are the experts of the kids. They're going to know when a child finds things difficult and what sort of things they find difficult.

And if there's consistent challenges with going into a public toilet because it's loud and noisy, then we've got to apply that to the other strategies that we're thinking about. And then if it's sitting on the toilet for a long period of time, you can make the toilet fun and you can try and distract from the boredom of the toilet. But if your skin is still giving you a really loud message that this is uncomfortable for me.

then we need to address that as well. So there's lots of nice toilet seat covers, for example, that you could put down. It's not to say that the strategy's not right for the healthy bowel motion, but it's just taking a pause to go, well, what else do I know about this child sensory system that we need to accommodate before we go ahead and try that strategy of toilet sitting for five minutes, for example. Yeah. when it comes to

helping children like with interoception strategies and things like that. You know, we were talking a little bit before we started the show just on like, you sometimes we need to be a little bit trauma informed about this. Yeah, definitely. So sometimes with interoception, if we're not used to the sensations in our body, if we haven't been feeling that googly,

a stabby kind of feeling that comes with hunger. If we're going to start working on interception and we're going to help a young person or even an adult, you know, I'm working with a 35, 40 year old at the moment on interception. So it's not just for kids. But if we're working with somebody and we're trying to increase interception awareness, there's kind of two things to really consider with a trauma informed lens. The first one is that

these are new sensations and they, for some people. And so when you finally start to queue into those sensations, they may not feel pleasant. They might be painful. They might be a little bit gross. They might be a little bit different. So that's why we've got to kind of take it slow and steady. And we work on the outside of our body before we work on the inside, which I'll explain in a minute. And then the other piece is that,

is that thinking about interception and perhaps dulling our interceptive sense, kind of muting that sensation can sometimes be a response to trauma. So if we think about trauma in a couple of different ways, we can think about big T trauma, like big capital letter T trauma, and then our little T traumas. And so, you know, the big traumas are, you know, kind of what we've historically known about trauma.

a big event where you felt like your life was directly under threat in that moment. And then, you know, for some people that might be, for example, a flood event or, you know, a gunman event or something like that, but it's really big or a car crash, which in that moment you felt like you were going to die. And so your body might shut down certain sensations or shut down your awareness of your body. It's dissociation.

Dissociation is a really, it's a safety mechanism, right? It's a survival response. When the feelings inside my body are too overwhelming, I'm gonna shut them down for a moment so that I can survive this. And that's a very natural, normal way to survive really big events. And then when we come out of that traumatic event, we might still be shut down to our body sensations because we're still trying to protect ourselves.

So for some people that can be why interception's little bit tricky for them because they have kind of dulled the sensations inside their body because they don't want to feel the ones that are scary for them. And then the little T traumas is that acknowledgement that for some people it's not a singular big event that made them feel threatened. It's just living life in the everyday normal world that was not designed for them.

So that's our neurodiverse population. If you're neurodivergent and going through the supermarket is just a massive assault on your senses where the smell of the fish oil makes you feel like you're gonna gag and people have perfume and you're going through the bakery section and you can smell that and then you're going through the meat section and you can smell all the meats. Like for some people that's...

really, really overwhelming and really unsafe for their body, makes them feel sick, makes them gag. And so, but they have to go shopping. So they have to kind of endure it. But you never know when you're walking down the street, when you're going to walk past somebody with, you know, a smell that's going to make you feel gross or when the weather's going to suddenly change and that wind is going to, you know, touch your skin and it feels like prickles or it feels like bee stings.

So just constantly experiencing the world in this way is like ongoing these little tiny assaults that build up and build up and build up and the world just gets really scary. So then that creates a nervous system that is going into protective mode because you just don't know when you're going to hear that siren that's going to feel like a sharp knife in your ear. You don't know when you're going to...

eat some food and it's just going to have this massive reaction inside your tummy that makes you want to vomit. But hang on, I'm in a restaurant and everyone's looking at me and they're expecting me to eat and then I've got to kind of keep going. It's this real complex tangled up space that our neurodivergent people have to go through every day because the world's often not sensitive to them.

Yeah, and you know, I'm also thinking as you were talking about, you know, sometimes the co -occurring like chronic conditions that go with being uro -divergent as well. We only recently found out that my daughter who has had continuous like GI issues her whole life, I mean, we've had multiple testings with celiac. We've only just discovered that she actually is celiac at 20. And you know,

having something like that that's been like part of her life for the whole time, I can only imagine the sensations that might have been in her body that she's now, you know, had to learn to live with. Yep. Absolutely. Absolutely. And we don't really hold a lot of space for people who have like chronic pain conditions. And if we can't kind of pin it down or diagnose it or

you know, if it's not, I don't know, almost tangible and seeable, we kind of don't believe it. Yeah, there's a lot of gaslighting that happens for people that have experiences that they either can't really explain yet, or that we just don't have the science to the answers or the questions yet. So yeah, for some people living in those kinds of chronic states is really hard. And it would be too hard to feel all the feelings all the time for some people.

So that's where sometimes we shut those feelings down. So before working on building interception skills, we wanna really make sure that that's a safe choice to be making for the person. And the only real way to do that is to make sure that they themselves want to work on this. So we shouldn't be working on anything without someone's consent or permission. And then that's about having the conversation of, know, like for me, it might sound something like...

you know, working with a child who's eating three or four foods and there's some concerns around nutrition and there's concerns around, you know, self -regulation and tiredness and fatigue and they can't do the things they want to do. And so the conversation I might have with that, you know, six, seven, eight year old is, you know, I really noticed that you get tired quite a lot and I can see that you want to play with me on the swing, but you're getting really tired and you're needing a break. I wonder if, you know,

you were eating more foods if it would give you more energy to be able to stay on the swing for longer. But I also know that eating foods for you is really hard. And I wonder if that has something to do with feeling hungry or full inside your body. Would you like to explore that with me? So it's kind of taking it from, what's the point for this child? They want to play, right? Most kids want to play or most kids want to have a play date where they can go to a friend's house for dinner and a sleepover.

But that means that they might need some skills around toileting and they might need some skills around self -soothing themselves to bed and they might need some skills around being able to say yes or no thank you to the meal that's presented to them. So there's quite a lot of interception required for all three of those things. So it might be over the next year, we're gonna work on interception with the child -centered goal or the family -centered goal being about being able to sleep over at grandma's house or auntie's house, a safe place to start.

so that they, know, if it doesn't work for them, they've got some help there. But yeah, drilling it back to this is why we might want to work on those body sensations and then just taking it super slowly with them.

And I just wanted to sort of ask now, so now that we've kind of like looked at that, what are some of the things that we can do to, you know, support some of that, you know, that person to start to recognize some of the signals on their body? Yeah, so one of the easiest ways is kind of starting on the outside of the body.

because it's really hard to interpret what's happening inside someone's body. And if we can't see it, then it's harder to kind of understand it. So a really good example would be, for example, working with the hands and just feeling the sensations in the hands and maybe starting to get some shared language around different sensations and working on discrimination. So a really good way to start would be, for example, hot and cold.

So you might have a hot water bottle and some frozen ice. And then just allowing that child or that person to explore what that feels like, touch it if you want to touch it. But obviously it's always around autonomy. They get to choose to touch it if they want to. So it's just an offering of these two different textures and sensations and temperatures. And then seeing if they want to hold it and then noticing how that feels.

So if you hold a hot water bottle, you know, you might feel, it might feel quite hot and you might like that heat for a short period of time and then it might be too hot. You might want to pull your hand away. And so then it's about noticing, did you notice how that felt on your skin? Did you recognize that to be hot? And then your response was to pull away. Cause we've got reflexes that will pull us away from pain. But again, not everybody has those pain reflexes either.

So if you feel the hot water bottle and you might start with one that's not too hot, but not too warm either, because that middle space can be hard to discern. So starting with a hot, but not too hot, hot water bottle, and then seeing if they want to touch that. And then if they're not pulling away from it, then supporting them to pull away or moving the hot water bottle away and saying, let's look at our hands. Have they changed colors? Are they tingling? And then giving some language around what they might be feeling.

but again, not telling them this feels hot because it might not feel hot to them. They might not be registering temperature or if they're touching something smooth or something soft like the hot water bottle might have a fluffy cover on it, might have like a rabbit themed hot water bottle cover. And then to say that's soft and fluffy, it might not be soft and fluffy for them. That might be an experience of sharpness because they can feel every single fiber.

in that hot water bottle. So it's holding space for what words would you describe this as and then you can share how you know you might describe it like I might say that feels really hot for me and hot feels a little bit tingly and I can feel it spreading up my arm and then I'd ask them how does it feel for you and just seeing if they can experience that. For some people they can't really kind of

Tune into what hot feels like until you then compare it to cold. So giving the offering of hot and cold at the same time, sometimes it's in the difference between the two that you then understand there's a difference between the two. And then you can go, well, they feel different. And for some people, that's as much as they can give. They don't know what it feels like. They can't give it a word, but they do know it's different. So that's a great place to start.

It's, it's really interesting, you know, like, as a person that, you know, does know the difference between hot and cold, you know, it's kind of interesting to recognize, or, you know, curious to recognize that there are people that can't feel that sensation. I wonder how many parents or caregivers or teachers, or even like, you know, doctors and medical professionals sometimes don't actually recognize that that's

that there is those differences and that some children or some people might have a different experience. Absolutely. And sometimes it's due to a difficulty with, in the sensory system where I can't feel it. And sometimes it's due to just not a lot of exposure to these things. So from the hot and cold, you can shift into lots of other textures. You could have a fairly big of all sorts of different textures. might have some.

you know, some grainy sand and some super fine sand, or you might have, you know, raw sugar and castor sugar, you know, those are going to feel different in your hand. One's going to be less gritty than the other. And then you might move to blind testing, you know, so you might put something in a bag like a pencil, and it's in a bag you can't see through and say, okay, can you reach your hand inside here? And can you feel what's inside this bag?

And then through touching that pencil, there'll be some people that will go, that's a pencil. And there'll be some people that won't know what that is. They can't discern through their tactile sense what it is. And they can't figure out what, they know what a pencil is. If you handed it to them, if they could see it, they know it's a pencil. But when they can't see it they just have to feel it, do they understand what that is? And then if they do, you can put like a plastic animal inside a bag and a cow.

feels very similar to a dog, for example, but it's often something like the ears that tells you the difference between those two animals if you're trying to feel it. So that's really subtle discrimination. Say if you put a snake in there and a cow, then it would be easier to guess what they are because a snake doesn't have any legs and a cow does. But when you go cow and dog, they're really similar. So that's when you're starting to work on discrimination. so discrimination with interception is

When is that weight in my abdomen telling me I need a poo? And when is it telling me I need a wee? When is it telling me that I'm full? When is it telling me that I'm hungry? When is it telling me that I'm scared? Our tummy gives us so many messages. And it's often, that's why kids say, you know, I've got a sore tummy. It's either gonna be hunger, toileting or feelings. It's gonna be one of those three things. And it takes years and years to figure out what that is. There are some kids that just get it.

They get their emotions and they get their hunger cues. And then there's some kids that kind of still don't really know what their tummy's telling them. They just know that it's sore and I've got to go to sick bay. So this might be your nine year old that's turning up sick bay every afternoon and they're not really sick. They don't have a temperature, but you know sick bay shouldn't have to just be for kids with temperatures. You know, it should be for those kids that, you know, are feeling anxious in the classroom, but they can't quite identify why.

but there's still a messaging in their tummy that they're feeling sore. So if they need a little break in sick bay, or if they need a break from the classroom, they should be allowed to get there. Even if they can't really discern it yet to say, I've got a sore tummy, because I'm feeling really anxious, because there's a relieving teacher tomorrow and I've just found out. That should be enough to say, I need a break while I process this information. But not all our kids can advocate for themselves to that level.

because their interception sense isn't quite able to tell them that's the whole process. Sawtummy, anxiety, relief teacher, notice, recognize, respond. And that's the, I know just from my own personal experience that sometimes feelings can be like emotions can be tied to like bodily functions like

I know for me when I feel really anxious, I need to go to the bathroom. And it's, you know, it's actually like that, that sort of like response in my body. And so I think for some children, that might be quite confusing, or some people that might be quite confusing. Absolutely, absolutely. And that's why, you know, we do so much work on self regulation and so much work around making good choices.

or trying to practice calming down or feeling good about thinking positive thoughts, but all of that's down the response end. So if you're not feeling those sensations in your body first, you might, there's lots of kids that I work with that can give me a whole list of things they should do. Like I should take a deep breath and I should walk away and I should play with my pate and I should go outside and take my shoes off and walk in the grass because I know that makes me feel nice.

but I haven't quite figured out yet when until it's too late and I'm a meltdown and then I don't want to go in the grass and I don't want, just want to scream. So, you know, it's like they know the response that's expected of them. They just don't feel the early warning signs to use that response quick enough to then have the regulatory response. You know, it's like, I know they're all there, but I didn't get the message that said, hey, it's time to go use those things.

I want to come back to that, but I just want to ask one question. You know, I was thinking about this when you were talking about like, you know, putting your hand in the bag and then feeling the things. Is there a link between like interoception and being able to like make pictures in your mind? Yeah, so yeah, this is where like, this is why I love sensory because it's so complicated, but it's also so simple. And

our sensory systems, they all work together. So yes, if you're putting your hand into like a fairly bag and you're playing a game of guessing what it is, you've got to be able to draw down your visual memory, your auditory memory, and then that's how we're discriminating between what we've got going on. You've got to have some interception sense around, you know, staying calm, staying focused, keeping attention to what you're doing.

all feeding into that for sure. So yeah, they're all linked and we have to learn through experience. know, like you don't necessarily know the difference between, for example, a cat and a dog. They both look the same. They've got four legs. They're often fluffy, but it's not until one barks and one meows that you go, like for me, I've got a French bulldog. And the amount of two or three year olds that come over and say cat.

because his ears look like a cat and he's the size of a cat and he doesn't woof very much. There's not a lot of auditory information that is different from a cat. But yeah, you've got to piece it all together and then you've got to draw that down and remember that. And so in that moment when you're trying to figure out what something is, you're pulling on all your senses, which is why we have to learn through doing. And it's also one of the hypothesis as to why interception has

it seems to be becoming more and more difficult for kids. And one of the questions around that is, you know, now that we've got less of a play -based childhood, is there an element of, you know, kids are exploring their bodies a little bit less. So then they're not getting all that body knowledge, all that body information. Like if you're outside riding your bike, then, you know, your lungs are blowing up really.

big and getting really small and your heart is racing and you are moving really quickly. So that's a lot of body knowledge. And then if I have a lot of body knowledge or if I fall off my bike, then I'm going to feel sad. And there's going to be this element between, you know, learning that my body is driving my emotions. But when we haven't had quite the same experiences, we haven't had all of that sensory input, then we don't have a lot of knowledge, body knowledge to draw from.

So then it becomes more confusing and the older our kids get, the more we expect them to have language around this stuff and they don't have language around it. If I haven't felt my body sensations, I certainly am not up to the stage where I'm naming them yet. And then like coming back to the bit about, you know, like not knowing when you need to like use the strategies to regulate yourself. That is, you know,

a question a lot of parents ask me that I work with, know, you know, I've given my child the strategies and the things to use, but yet they're not using it or they refuse to use it. You know, what are some things that parents can do to support their children to be able to know, okay, yeah, I am starting to like feel like I am, you know, going to meltdown or something's happening, I need to use the strategies and

Knowing that that's incredibly hard, like two weeks, this week, I've had two meltdowns myself and didn't actually realize that they were actually going to happen until they happened. So, you know, even as an adult, sometimes you don't have the skills around that. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And a part of that sometimes too is that we're so rushed and we're always rushing that.

rushing is one of the things that also stops us checking in with our body. And that's when we forget to eat, we forget to go to the toilet. And then we find ourselves in a public place where we can't use that toilet because our other sensory systems won't let us do that. And our kids are rushed, you know? And if they are rushing from school to an after -school activity, then also they might not have had time to check in and say, you know what, I'm feeling anxious. There's something happened at school today and I haven't processed it yet and I just need to pause.

enough to process it. So a lot of these things are building up because we're just not giving enough downtime to reconnect to what's happening. one of the first things I guess is really hold on to the knowledge that interception is about the notice, recognise, respond. A lot of our parenting strategies are in the respond category. They're in like step three. So it might be for example that you are

you notice that your child or you might just say, you know, grab a drink of water. We're about to go out or grab a drink of water. you know, the child might say, I've got a headache. go, okay, cool. Grab a drink of water. We're down there giving strategies, rather than pausing and coming back and saying, okay, well, tell me a bit more about that. Tell me what's happening in your body right now. And then coaching them to actually body scan and helping them to pause and go,

where is there a sensation that's telling me what I need? A really clear example is when young children are toilet learning and we know they don't have a nappy on, parents are super invested in making sure they catch every little sign that the child might need to go to the toilet. So you notice them squeezing or you notice them starting to jiggle. And so we'll often go, quick, go to the toilet. We're teaching the response, but we're not teaching the, did you notice that your body is moving?

So in that moment I might say to kids, pause, I noticed something's happening in your body, do you notice something's happening in your body? And then they'll kind of pause and they'll think, and it's like, if they can't say anything, then the next thing, you they haven't noticed it, so the next thing is into that response space where it's like, okay, well, I noticed that your body's moving a lot, I wonder if you can feel something heavy in your abdomen, I wonder if you've got that feeling that you might need to go to the toilet. And then they'll be like, yes, I do have that feeling. Okay, cool, off you go.

So it's like just pausing in the rush to get the job done and coming back to what does this feel like and have you noticed it? And if you have noticed it, have you queued into what that means for you? I think we also do quite a lot of, we apply the strategies when it's too late. Like we apply the strategies or we ask our child to apply the strategy when they're already stressed.

So a lot of our self -regulation strategies, we should be practicing them when we're super relaxed. So a good example of this is deep breathing. When you are really overwhelmed, it can be really hard to breathe deeply because you are really overwhelmed. So your body's actually telling you to breathe fast and rapid. If you have practiced deep breathing when you're calm, your body will have a motor memory of that and you will have a memory of how that felt.

So practicing those things when we're calm is always gonna be more useful. And then remembering that kids are play machines. They wanna do these things through play. So that might look like just blowing bubbles, grabbing a bubble wand and blowing a bubble and practicing, can you make the biggest bubble with this bubble wand you can? So the way to make a big bubble is actually to blow really, really slowly. So then the child is practicing big breaths while they're blowing bubbles. So you can have a bubble wand.

and you could play a game where you're blowing little bubbles which is like super quick blow and then big bubbles which is

and then they're practicing their out -breath and then they're seeing this big bubble and go, wow, that's your big breath. And then talking to them about what do you notice inside? Where do you think that breath is coming from? Where do you feel that? Take a deep breath, see if you can blow a really big bubble, but where do you feel it in your body? And then see if the child can even identify that that's coming from their lungs and then pull that back to a, do you notice your lungs any other time? So.

you're kind of working backwards. You're working with the breath and you're giving them this visual representation of the breath through the bubble. And then you're queuing them back into where is that breath coming from? Did that come from your bottom? You you can make it as fun as you want to make it to get the child engaged. And then stepping back to have you noticed that any other time? You know, I wonder when else your breath gets that big. And then you might go practice it. You know, you might do star jumps and practice what's happening on those lungs.

Candle blowing is another really fun one. Every kid loves to blow out a candle, but they only get to do it once a year. So why not bring it into like a weekly, know, Wednesday night is candle night and we're all gonna practice blowing out our candles. But before we blow out our candles, let's see if we can make them dance without blowing them out, which again is a long controlled breath. And then we're practicing breathing before we actually need it in meltdown.

do you have much experience with working with teenagers? Because I know, like from, you know, talking like these are really great strategies for young children when they are more, you know, more placed. But I know with my own teenagers, when we started like working on some sort of self regulation skills, they're a little less like,

I don't know, they don't really want to like do the strategies that the parents are trying to teach them. And I think a lot of times, you know, people say to teenagers, have you tried breathing? And, know, and they can get quite resistant to that. Yeah. Yeah. And so I think that it's thinking about what is naturally in their world already. And

During the teenage years, there's a real desire to not be lectured by people. You don't want everybody knowing more than you. It's a real cognitive clash. It's really hard to hear all this expert opinion and everyone's got a piece of advice for a teenager. So sometimes it's like, how can we present this information in a way that it doesn't sound like we're the expert or that we know more? And I'm thinking about the teens that I work with.

and I'm a therapist with them, not a parent to them, so it's a little bit different, but they'll still happily blow bubbles with me, or we'll be on a walk and we'll find, I don't even know what flower it comes from, but you know the wish flowers that you blow? dandelion. Is it a dandelion? Yeah. Yeah. So we'll find those, we'll go, let's go on a dandelion hunt, and then we'll find the dandelion and...

It's just about being whimsical and if you could make one wish for your future, if you could change one thing about your parent, whatever it is, and then blowing those wishes. And then when we're there, we're also talking about breathing and those sorts of things. So I think sometimes it can be really tricky.

when it's coming across like somebody knows more than me. And so it's trying to get alongside and it's trying to catch those moments and it's trying to connect to their why and connect to their meaning. You know, like what do you want to achieve in life and how can we get you there and what sort of skills and strategies will help. And I know not everybody's into sport, but this is where sport is so helpful because there's so much that comes from learning sports. So if you can get kids into sport really young, you know, it's a real

resiliency factor for young kids and you're working in your body so much, so there's lots of opportunity to feel what's happening in that body. Okay, I realize our time is marching. Did we want to kind of like segue into neuroception a little bit? yeah, I think it'd be good to cover that as well. So, yeah, so neuroception is our sense of

safety. It's our felt sense of safety and it's the difference between understanding what feels safe for us and what doesn't feel safe for us. So safety and danger and it's about acknowledging that there doesn't have to be a tiger in the room to be feeling scared. Safety is felt inside, outside and in between.

So we scan for safety four times every second. So every second of the day, I know it's a lot, right? Every second of the day, we are scanning four times. It's an automatic, like a gut instinct. It's pre -verbal, pre -thinking. know, babies are scanning for safety and danger. And so we're scanning inside, outside and in between.

So inside is scanning inside our body. So when you get that sensation that you need to go to the toilet, you're kind of scanning or when you feel like you're hungry. know, hungry is your first sign that, you you need to eat to survive and thirst, you know, you're gonna die after seven days if you don't drink anything. So it's a little tiny cue of danger. It's like, okay, you're getting hungry or you're getting thirsty. You must go do something about this.

So you are body scanning inside. You're searching for pain, hunger, boiling needs, emotional needs, anxiety, frustration. That's your inside scanning. We're doing that all the time. And then outside is we're scanning in our environment. So we're scanning for bees that might sting us. We're scanning for a dog that might come and bite us. We're scanning for the weather. Is it safe to go outside today?

in shorts and singlet or will I freeze? And I actually need to put a jumper on. We're scanning for what feels safe and what doesn't feel safe. And then the in -between is we're scanning between two people. So I'm scanning, so when you and I are on podcasts, we can see each other's faces while we're recording and we're checking each other's faces for, is this landing? Is this the conversation we want to be having? Are you on board with what I'm saying? Or do I need to kind of explain it slightly differently?

In the classroom, it would be scanning your best friend sitting next to you, scanning your teacher, are they okay with me? Do they understand me? And the in -between scan can also be, this one's a little bit more complicated, but it's scanning your own internal voice of yourself. So if you're feeling like I'm not good enough, I'm dumb, I'm stupid, no one loves me, then that's an in -between scan as well because you're scanning for

your own interpretation of your experience of the world. And so when we're scanning in those three spaces, that inside, the outside and the in between, we're scanning for if we feel safe with this person, safe in our body, safe in this environment, or if we don't, if we feel unsafe. And unsafe with a person can be a really subtle thing like, you know, I might crack a joke and if you don't laugh, that makes me feel like, ooh, that...

wasn't safe, we're not aligned with that type of joke, that wasn't very funny. And then I might, you know, go into a space of like, no, what are going to think about me? Was it inappropriate? You know, we can start to get a little bit wrapped up in the danger, the social danger in that situation. We know that, you know, we were talking a few years back about the first thousand days being really important around babies' experiences.

We now know that it's more like the first 30 days are really important for babies' development of safety. And so that looks like, you know, when a baby is born, if they cry and someone picks them up and soothes them, they're learning that the world is a safe place. That when I feel uncomfortable or when I'm in pain, someone will come and help me. If a baby hasn't had that experience, for example, then they might scan the world as inherently not safe.

and then moving forward for the rest of their life, they might kind of always have this slight feeling that the world is not a safe place. And so that dictates our actions and our learning, our behavior, the people that we gather around us, those sorts of situations. So neuroception is our sense of safety and danger. We scan for safety all the time and we don't think about it, it just happens.

And we're scanning our own self, the environment and the people around us to look for messages to tell us whether we are okay or not. And then whatever message we get back, whether we're okay or not, we activate our body to respond in some sort of way. And some things we have control over and a lot of things we don't have control over. Our body will take over, our heart rate will increase if we're feeling anxious, for example, because it's preparing you to run.

That's neuroception in a nutshell. Now, I just want to like talk about some of the threat responses that we can go into when we feel, you know, that danger for whatever reason. And I know, I think like, you know, the fight flight one is one that's a lot of people know about, but there are a couple of other ones out there. And can you talk a little bit about those?

Yeah so, neuroception is the like surveillance system that then tells you to respond and if there is danger or threat detected then yeah there's a number of different responses. So this is our flight, fight, fright or fawn responses. So there's...

they kind of go into two categories. So when we sense danger or threat, we respond with either mobilization, like movement, or immobilization, and just like staying super still. So mobilization responses are often our first response. And so that's flight, like running away or running away from the threat, or fight, fighting the threat. So that might look like, you know, physical fighting, like hitting or kicking, but it can also be verbal.

you know, just yelling and screaming at somebody or having a heated argument is a fight response. And so something is threatening you. So you might be, you know, having a political discussion with somebody and you feel so passionate about being opposed to what they're saying that you might argue that. So that is a fight response because you're sensing a threat to your livelihood because of how this person might vote, for example. It's still a threat response and you are fighting with your words.

A mobilized response when we're fleeing from something or running away from something or running towards something to fight it, the body has activated a response in your body that you can do something about this. You can run away or run towards. There is hope that you can survive this through the resources your body has to fight or run away.

So that's the mobilized response. If your body senses the threat to be one that you kind of can't survive, or you can't fight, or you can't run away from, if your body kind of gets the feeling that you're not fast enough, or you're not strong enough, or you're not powerful enough, then it might create an immobilized response, which is our fawn response or our freeze response.

And then that's actually a worse response or a heightened survival response because ultimately your body is saying, you're possibly not gonna survive this. So we just want you to shut down and get really tiny or get really small or get really still. And so the fawn response looks like people pleasing. It looks like saying, know, yes, sir, no, sir, sorry, In an attempt to like appease your

attacker or appease the person that you're feeling threatened by because you feel like you have no other strategy right now to survive. So that's like the fawning response. And then the freeze response is like you can't move or you get a bit stuck or you get shut down and withdrawn. These four responses, whether it's mobilized or immobilized, they are often activated without conscious control.

So you haven't thought about it. You haven't gone, can I fight this person? Probably not. I might just get stuck. You know, it's just your body, your neuroception, it's nanoseconds and it's just responding. And what it does is it gives you these like biological responses. So for example, if your body says you can fight, you're gonna get an increased heart rate and the blood is gonna pump to the ends of your hands and the ends of your feet because you're gonna punch or you're gonna run.

you know, blood carries oxygen, you need that oxygen, so you're gonna start breathing faster, you're gonna get adrenalized, and the blood's gonna flow to the ends of your body so that you can fight or run away. If your neuroception, if your sense of safety and danger cued you into feeling like you will not survive if you fight this, it's gonna biologically stop your heart from beating so much. It's gonna slow your heart rate down.

it's gonna draw those blood resources away from your hands and your feet and bring it into what we call your life box, which is like your stomach, your heart, your brain. And it keeps the blood and the oxygen in that space. So that if, for example, you get bitten on the arm or you lose an arm or you don't need your arms right now, you're not going to fight. So they get really cold and they get really heavy.

That's your biological response of your heart rate slowing down and not pumping so fast so that you can survive by not bleeding out so fast or just becoming very quiet and very still. So your breathing often slows down as well because that's quite a loud thing to do. So your body can take over these responses without you necessarily even wanting it to. It's just a...

survival response, and we are born with these responses. So babies are born with the ability to fight, that's what they do when they cry. You know, if a baby gets hungry, they cry and they cry and they cry. If they cry for a really long time and no one comes, they will stop crying. Not because they're now calm, but because they're now activated into the higher level where they are now going quiet because they're like, actually no one's coming.

So I don't know what to do about this. So I'm going to reserve my energy and shut myself down just in case no one's coming for a while. So it's actually not a good thing when a baby cries for so long that they stop. They haven't soothed. They've actually gone into a high level of panic. Yeah. And that kind of like, you you think about things like sleep training, you know, cry it out. Yeah. Some of the sort of strategies parents are given. Absolutely. And, you know, like

Yeah, you do the best you can until you know better. And then when you know better, you do better, right? Because so many people have used those strategies and it's what was advised and it's what's still being advised. But for our, you know, it's not good for any baby, but for a baby with a vulnerable nervous system, like a neurodivergent baby that, you know, it hasn't been diagnosed yet, it can be even worse.

And, you know, like the thing that just really like, like, touch, touch something for me when you were talking about, you know, fawn and freeze being the worst response, like worse for you and your worst survival response than fight or flight. I just think about like all the children and even like, I think myself as an adult, you know, like, when our children are in that fawn response,

And they're appeasing and it looks like they're just kind of like, you know, following the rules of the super like, obedient kid. Really compliant, you know.

It's like, you know, it makes you sort of wonder like it's so hard to pick up that of foreign response. You know, is the child actually feeling safe or are they in that foreign response? Absolutely. And then when you tangle that alongside things like interception, you know, if they're not feeling

their internal body cues, you know, they might not be so like one thing that I do when I'm working with, you know, children that have been through significant trauma, and it's really hard to work out exactly how they're feeling about their own bodies or situations is for me as a trained clinician, I'm doing a lot of checking the temperature of their hands and feet, you know, because if their hands and feet are super cold, then for me, that's an indicator that blood's not quite getting there right now.

So we might activate the body in a safe, fun way to try and get that blood pumping again to kind of almost reset the heart so that it can get there while I'm checking in with how you feel. But I've worked with kids who, coming back to food and interception, and I've worked with a child who's been on less than 10 foods and has been through cognitive feeding therapy where they've been told to tell themselves that

you know, food is good for them. And they're literally vomiting in front of me, vomiting their food that they don't like, but then saying, it's okay, it's good for me. I'll try again. And I'm like, stop. You don't need to eat that food here. You know, it's okay to say no, thank you. And they're like, no, no, it's okay. It's good for me. And then they'll try again to eat the foodness. And I've had to take the plate away and say, you are vomiting.

your body is saying it doesn't want this food right now, we can try again another day to give them like that sense of like success and not failure. But you know, that child is so confused about what their body is telling them. And they've had this like response training of like, well, tell yourself it's good for you and you'll be fine. Rather than really acknowledging that something for you tells you this food isn't okay. You know, whether it is undiagnosed Crohn's or whether it is

you know, the sensory sensation of the squirminess that makes you feel really yucky. But yeah, so sometimes it's all tangled up and some people don't know themselves whether they're feeling safe or not. They can't put a word to that. You know, sometimes we feel anxiety and we don't know why or where, or there's just a whole body sensation and you can't quite pin it to anything.

which is why sometimes we just shut all that down. It's too hard, too confusing. So it's really important to work on interception. Yeah. I mean, I didn't even realize that people pleasing was a survival response, you know, for many years. And the only sort of indication to me that I felt unsafe was when I went away from the situation and went, hey, I didn't respond in a way

that I felt was good to me. I found myself agreeing to things or doing things that are now making me feel shame because I went against my values or like what I would usually sort of say. And I think if you don't actually realize or recognize that as a survival response, you can be really hard on yourself and think, well, I just toughen up. You know, I need to, you know,

or you might have some really harsh words about yourself and that you're not, you don't have integrity or, you know, all these things that you make, you make it mean, right? So I think, you know, and I think with parents as well, you know, when they're trying to advocate for their children and then they find themselves agreeing with an authority figure and then coming away and going, I really should have said that, or I really should have done that. And now I didn't do that. And I feel so guilty because I've let,

myself down and my child down. And I just to recognize that that is actually just your survival response and have compassion for that. Yeah, yep, absolutely. And, you know, we're still not very far out of the patriarchy, right? We're still living in a male dominated world. And so, you know, it's, there just hasn't been that much time for whole generational learning.

We're still living with the generational traumas that came before us. And so, you know, I'm thinking about nurses who are, you know, retired now, but who were absolutely trained to no matter what you say yes to the doctor and you don't give the doctor any advice. And so, you know, the doctors were often males and the nurses were often females and no matter what you saw.

you just had to go along with it. you know, we're still within a generation where that was trained in medical school. And now we're catching up and we're saying, well, no, that's not right. You should always speak up against things, but we're still very much learning it and trying to hold these safe spaces to have safe conversations. And, you know, it's the Me Too movement. It's the, it's everything that's coming out now around

Yeah, what's happening in the world and how we stand up for these things. It's what's happened in Hollywood, you know, and all those women that felt like they couldn't say no, because otherwise their careers would be ruined by these powerful men. So I know this is a little bit away from the original topic and thinking about parenting, but actually I think it also lets us just pause and go, hang on, this is across the world. This is humans.

everywhere, whether you are standing up against that clinician because they're not listening to you when you're trying to advocate for your nonverbal child, for example, or non -speaking child, or whether you are a high -powered, respected, beautiful actress or actor who still doesn't feel like in that moment you can say no. So yeah, and we haven't known about fawn for very long, you know, it wasn't around in my childhood and

It still surprises me sometimes when I learn about, you know, certain words like neuroception and interception. They weren't around when I was a child. Dyspraxia wasn't around when I was a child. So yeah, we're still, we're doing so well. We've still got a long way to come, but we are doing really well. And I think as parents, it's just, you know, taking a breath and going, you know what, we're, really are all learning together. And there is still so much to learn, but we've just got to

do a little bit better every day if we can or when we reach that limit and we go, gosh, this doesn't feel good, you know, to do some research into why and try and figure it out. And a piece of advice that someone gave me years ago, so my baby was born premature and I remember walking in when, because there's no bed, you can't stay there. And he was born at 29 weeks and I came into the hospital one day and I saw a doctor

with my baby's head in his hand. And he was practicing a reflex technique, which is where you twist the head really quickly and the arm will shoot out the opposite arm to the way that you twist the head. And he was training a trainee doctor of some type. So they twisted my child's head and activated this response. And then he handed over to the other doctor and asked the other doctor to do it. And the other doctor did it and the reflex didn't happen.

And as an OT, I know that he probably did that test wrong, which when you're twisting a little 29 year old week's head, he was a little bit older by this stage, but it was still pre 40 weeks. And my gut just like exploded inside myself. I felt like screaming and raging and crying and like even now thinking about it, it's bringing up those big emotions. And I said nothing.

and we got transferred the next day and I didn't have the opportunity to go back and it took months of therapy later to really unpack that feeling and the guilt and all the rest of it. And I remember the therapist saying, there's no reason why you can't call that hospital now, have that conversation now so that you get the feeling in your body that you've done something about it. And I was like, that's a really good idea. So I went home and rang the hospital and said, hey, like.

Five years ago, this happened to my baby and it's not okay. And it really helped me to get my voice back. So even though in the moment I totally fawned because I was just in such survival response and protection for my child. But in that moment, I didn't know if I was meant to protect my child or if they were protecting my child. But then years later I could go, no, no, I had the right idea. I should have stepped in. I couldn't activate my voice in the moment, but I could activate it later.

You can always go back as a parent and lay a complaint years later if you want to, or have a conversation with somebody and say, hey, I've just got some words I want to get out of my body. Can you just kind of hold space for me while I say what I wish I'd said that day? It's so hard. That is so hard. So just like, so I know we've pretty much run out of time, but I just want to ask as some like little passing, this like a little closing piece.

If we are noticing that our child is in some type of survival response, like falling or freeze or fight flight, what are some of the ways that we can signal safety to them? that their nervous system can regulate? I know there's things like breathing and things like that, but just like in...

in the moment, if we don't have those strategies, you know, like what is the best go to? Absolutely, absolutely. So, you know, it's really about attunement. It's really about knowing your child and tuning into that experience. If there is a moment that you notice that you can just see that, you know, that child is so frightened or even if you're not completely sure, just trying to...

tune into that and acknowledge it in some way. For some people, they don't wanna hear the words. The words are even more frightening. But for some kids, they might wanna hear the words and it might be something like, hey, I'm really noticing that you look like this is really big for you or that this is worrying you. Then you can kind of cue that in and see if it gives a little moment. Safety does come from everywhere. And I think...

rather than waiting until we're at that meltdown stage or we're at that moment. Like it's really good to have strategies there, but a bigger part of what we need to be doing is preventing getting to that stage. And so the thing that works really well for me is thinking about triggers and glimmers.

So triggers, know, if you get triggered, that's like a known word where something's been said or you've seen something that's triggered a really unsafe feeling in you and you've gone back to a memory or you've, it's just not something that's nice for you. A glimmer is like the opposite of that. A glimmer is something that sparks a sense of joy or happiness or a fond memory for you. And so when you are triggered, you want to avoid that. When you're glimmered, you want to lean into it.

And so finding your child's glimmers, finding your glimmers, and when you notice them, really pausing and trying to stretch that micro moment of safety and happiness. So some of the glimmers for me are things like, I love a rainbow in the sky. Like when I see a rainbow in the sky, I'm always like, like I'll point it out to anyone near me, whether it's in a shopping center and I've just come outside and I can see this rainbow or driving in the car with my kids or.

You know doing a podcast and looking out the window if there was a rainbow I'd go there's a rainbow. I love rainbows What do you think about them and I'll just stretch that glimmer for a moment and then get back to the conversation and Butterflies is another one for me, you know a child's giggle and all these little things that when you have that moment that sparks true joy just sit in it and teach our children to sit in that so when we notice that you know

somebody has stopped and they're noticing the snail and they want to pick that snail up and that's giving them a real sense of joy. Stop and sense it with them and go, it's a snail. You know, should we look after it? Should we put it in the shade? Should we make a home for it? Whatever it is. And the more we lean into our glimmers, the safer we're making our nervous system. And then when we have a stressor, we've got more bandwidth to cope with it.

So we wanna reduce our triggers and we wanna reduce our stresses, but actually the best way we can do is by stretching the joy in our life and stretching the sensory safety. So leaning into your glimmers. that's really great advice. And yeah, I love rainbows too. I think one of the coolest things like winter and spring here, we have a lot of rain, but we also have like five rainbows in a day. So amazing. So beautiful.

Yeah, yeah, and I think that another really big glimmer for me is like sunsets and sunrises. Yeah, I'm literally getting goosebumps as we're talking about glimmers. You know, we've just had some really hard conversation and it took me to a really sad moment in my life. But like I already feel so good and like goose bumpy good at your sunsets and sunrises and that you get five rainbows a day like yeah, this is how we look after our nervous system. Yeah, yeah.

And yeah, it's, think, rainbows hold a very special place in my heart. I had a really hard moment in parenting where one of my kids was in hospital. I came, was staying at, they'd already moved out of home and I'd spent the whole day in hospital with them. And then I'd gone back to their, their flat to go and

have a shower and just kind of get some stuff before going back to the hospital. And as I got to their apartment just above the apartment building was this huge, big double rainbow. And to me, they felt like this is a little confirmation of like, yeah, it's going to be okay. They're going to make it. Yeah. So it's always just kind of like, whenever I see it, I'm like, yep, we're going to make it. Yeah.

That's really nice. It's really nice. And I think sometimes we can accidentally get so wrapped up in trying to solve the difficulties for our children that we spend a lot of time thinking about them and that's hard work. And same for our kids to think about the things that are hard for them. if we can take some moments to think about our sensory joys and really living into our sensory joys, whether it's the visual joy of seeing a rainbow, whether it's, you know, whatever temperatures or textures or...

Feelings in our body feel good. know, some people, I was talking to somebody today that was talking about how they love the feeling of being in the shower, but they hate the feeling of getting out to the point that they almost can't shower. And so, because that coldness and the rubbing down of the body with the towel and the stickiness afterwards. And so for them, the sensory joy is being in the shower. And so staying there for long enough to kind of prepare yourself for

the sensory stress that's gonna happen on the other side of this. Yeah, being okay to lean into our sensory joys and going, okay, well, I'm only gonna be able to manage two showers a week. So I'm gonna make them really long ones because I'm saving water on other days. And then that means that it would have been worth the stress on the other side. We've got to do more in the sensory joys. Maybe we need to do a whole podcast on sensory joys. that would be amazing.

I think they would be really, really good. Thank you so much, Ellen. Once again, just so much to unpack and so many little bits of wisdom and understanding for our listeners. Really appreciate you sharing this beautiful resource with us. You're very welcome. Thank you for having me.