October is ADHD Awareness Month, and this year a theme to explore is ‘understanding a shared experience’. While ADHD is a very common brain-based disorder in children, and we are seeing ADHD identified increasingly even later into adulthood, those experiencing some similar symptoms of ADHD don’t all share the same lived experience of this very broad diagnosis.

So, what do we share, regardless of whether we are challenged by symptoms of ADHD?

What is a shared experience that is common to US ALL?

SELF – REGULATION.

…and from many conversations, in innumerable clinical contexts, it seems self-regulation is a skill we could ALL benefit from a little more understanding of and practice with, regardless of any diagnosis at all.

Photo by Callum Shaw on Unsplash

SO, WHAT IS SELF-REGULATION?

Put simply, because you can define it in seemingly limitless ways, really it is ‘how we manage the stress that we are under’.

Stress is personal. What we need to do to manage stress is to.

There seems no need for any strange stigma around the ways we manage the stress we are under. Managing stress is stressful enough, don’t you think?

Biting fingernails, chewing gum, pacing around, huffing and sighing…we all do ‘things’ that are signs we are trying to regulate – or ‘get back to ok’.

It is way more fun to be curious about what we do, why we do it, and how it works…curiosity leads us to cultivating a really effective life-long tool kit for managing our ever-changeable stress.

Esteemed Professor Emeritus - Dr Stuart Shanker - refers to five areas of self-regulation. Five domains that relate very deeply to the order of things we need in place to thrive at life.

These areas are:

Biological
Emotional
Cognitive
Social
Pro-social

With these in mind, we want to provide five brain-based understandings and five fun activities to cultivate self-regulation within each of these clear areas.

Photo by Eric Nopanen on Unsplash

BIOLOGICAL SELF-REGULATION

Biological self-regulation is grounded in the body and the nervous system. To get better at biological self-regulation we can play games that help us really tune in to what we can feel in our physical selves. When we get better at understanding sensations in our bodies, we can get better at making the connections between what our bodies do when we experience stress and then what it feels like potentially to change parts of this.

Activity to cultivate biological self-regulation

This is a mindfulness activity that is nice to do outside with some external sensations like the warmth of the sunshine, a cool breeze, cold grass in the shade, sand under your feet etc.

Find somewhere to sit or if you can lie down together, even holding hands, backs on the grass looking up at the trees and sky. Start slowly talking through how you are turning your attention to the shapes in the clouds, the warmth of the sunshine, the tickle of the grass. If you can close your eyes, and keep sharing with each other what you can feel on the outside and what it feels like for you. Then begin to move your talk and attention to sensations you can feel on the inside of you…it might be the gurgling of your tummy, the tension in the muscles in your neck, the rise and fall and whistle of the air going in and out of your lungs, the buzzing in your brain…describe anything you feel and what it feels like for you. Enjoy sometime in silence just tuned in and feeling for a short while. Then come back slowly to the world and the rest of what you have to do today.

It's not always going to be possible to use a meditative approach to this exercise, but think about how you can work this concept into your playful chatter while you are in the sandpit, in the waterplay space or sitting together eating some snacks on the grass.

A progressive muscle relaxation is also a great technique for getting ‘out of your head’ and into your body. Here is a helpful guided progressive muscle relaxation for both kids and adults:

EMOTIONAL SELF-REGULATION

Emotional self-regulation struggles seem often to be explained with how we manage negative emotions like frustration and anger, but the stress of big emotions can be positive too – like when excitement becomes overwhelming. When we get better at understanding sensations in our bodies (our biological self-regulation), we can get better at making the connections between the type of physical sensations we are experiencing when some big emotions come up too. The areas of self-regulation are like steppingstones.

Activity to cultivate emotional self-regulation

Making a body map with someone is a helpful tool for identifying how we experience emotions in our bodies. Body mapping exercises are used extensively as a part of education, therapy and psychology programs with children and adults alike. The Black Dog Institute has published a great guide for high school students with anxiety that may be useful resource for teachers and parents alike. All you need is two people, a large roll of paper, some coloured textas, and an accepting and open intention to better understand the similarities, differences, and complexities of how we deeply experience emotions. From here more helpful conversations can roll on.

First lay out the paper and then one person lays down on top of the paper. The second person then carefully draws around the outline of the person from head to feet and everything in between. Each person then takes the outline of themselves and starts to reimagine emotions, the big ones are sometimes easier to recreate with our powerful emotional memories. In fact big emotions can be so powerful that even without the stressful situation, just with the memory, we can start to feel the ways our bodies (or nervous systems) behave when this emotion is present. Some common emotions you may wish to think about could be: anger; fear; sadness; calm; happiness; excitement. You can fill the representation of your body with any symbols, pictures, words, colours to represent each emotion and what you feel going on inside you when it comes up – from your brain down, or from your heart out, from your toes up…however it feels for you.

Photo by Anna Samoylova on Unsplash

COGNITIVE SELF-REGULATION

When it is challenging to self-regulate in the cognitive domain we might be feeling distracted, inattentive, like our thoughts are ‘all over the place’ or that we ‘just can’t get started’, perhaps feeling like our memory is letting us down. These feelings of stress can be incredibly frustrating, overwhelming, especially when functioning in the cognitive domain is what we are expected to do for a 7 hour school or work day. To get better at cognitive self-regulation we can direct our attention to what we are paying attention to. Understanding that attention doesn’t just take our brains, it takes our whole body.

Activity to cultivate cognitive self-regulation

The traffic light game. You can use words, or words and signs, to inform the players of when it’s a red light, amber light, or green light. RED means STOP, GREEN means GO/RUN and AMBER means ‘SLOW DOWN’. The caller gives everyone a chance to practice each of the speeds and then randomly moves between each of them. This activity helps expend energy and have fun while also learning how to control the speeds at which we can go. As a parent you may also find with repetition kids can start to ‘generalise’ the skill, meaning you might call out ‘red light!’ in a situation where they need to stop quickly and they will, but still be smiling.

Photo by MI PHAM on Unsplash

SOCIAL SELF-REGULATION

We are social beings and when we are with others we need to be able to pick up on what others are trying to communicate to us with words, tones, gestures, facial expressions. Social interactions can be stressful. It’s not always easy to make and keep friends, negotiate conflict, and recover from it, it’s not always easy to play in the playground or in a team. To get better at social regulation we can practice the skills underlying making connections with others in safe spaces.

Activity to cultivate social self-regulation

Emotion charades. This is a great game for families, and it could also be an insightful game for a group of trusted adults. Create the emotion cards, easy ones and tricky ones (the tricky emotions and the new words that name them are a great way for us to gradually build emotional literacy). If you’re looking for a comprehensive list of emotions and body sensations The Hoffman Institute has created this one page list. Pull a card from the hat, leave the room and re-enter the room embodying this emotion. Exaggeration and exploring the emotion in different ways can be necessary to help the others in the room guess what emotion you are. Just doing this helps improve our self-regulation within the social domain.

This one minute clip is a simple snap shot of the game:

PRO-SOCIAL SELF-REGULATION

Moving beyond being social we have the capacity to demonstrate empathy, compromise, a collective consciousness, and act together working toward a higher purpose beyond ourselves. To get better at regulating all the other domains of ourselves, to then enable us to behave in pro-social ways we can play games that help us grow together.

Activity to cultivate pro-social self-regulation

Give each other ‘do-overs’. This concept comes from Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Centre’s – Seven Ways to Foster Empathy in Kids. Rather than using this just in ‘teach-able moments’ perhaps we could all benefit from the opportunity for a do-over, sometimes on the daily. We can agree to act forgivingly and come together after an unkind or insensitive interaction (we all have them) and give a ‘do-over’ a go.

What could a ‘do-over’ look like? We could grab it in the moment, and

Pause and point out the unkind or insensitive behaviour.
Give each other a chance to understand how each person in the interaction was feeling - before, during and after the interaction.
Now, knowing this, we can try the interaction again. How would we do it differently? How would our ‘best-selves’ do the ‘do-over’?
Acknowledge together how much better the ‘do-over’ version felt.

Photo by Steve Jewett on Unsplash

The ability to self-regulate is a great skill, it may indeed be at the heart and mind of so many of the challenges we face day-to-day. It is a vital skill for us all to learn and practice through our lifespan, knowing that as we change so to do our sources of stress and the ways we regulate.

The Perth Brain Centre has helped thousands of people over 15 years to improve their self-regulation, whether or not they have a diagnosis of ADHD. The clinic uses QEEG Brain Scans to understand how each individual’s brain works to help develop drug-free therapies such as biofeedback and neurofeedback, that work by re-wiring and re-training the brain.

If you would like to find out more about how your unique brain functions and changes, with everything you think, feel and do each day, the Team at The Perth Brain Centre embrace you and your curiosity. You can watch, read, call or email, to find out more today.

About the author - Ms. Emily Goss (Occupational Therapist, Senior Clinician, The Perth Brain Centre).

ADHD SELF-REGULATION FOR YOU, ME & WE