Self-reg, we now define as a very powerful method for understanding stress and managing energy levels. And of course those two... variables, those two sides of the equation, are really saying one and the same thing because that's what stress is. Stress, by definition, is anything that requires our internal systems to burn energy in order to make it work.
maintain some sort of internal balance. These are very new ideas and you know when you first read about it, it seems fairly straightforward, makes perfect sense. Then when you start to go into it a little you find that stress is actually much more complex. It's a much more complex area phenomenon than we have had really understood before. And so we break stress down into five domains.
And those five domains are the physical, emotion, cognitive, social, and pro-social. And then to add just a bit more complexity, we show how, in fact, you're never just dealing with a stress from a domain. Stresses bounce around and they impact each other. And you're really always dealing with all five domains. And And so we have to understand the various connections and we have to understand, you know, to make even a bit more complicated, we have to understand the difference between obvious stress, what we call overt stress, and hidden stress, things that burn energy.
And then just recently, we've started to emphasize the distinction between negative stress and positive stress. Because, of course, there are all kinds of positive stresses that we need our children. exposed to.
A positive stress is a stress that burns energy but in the process promotes growth or it might be promotes, creates more energy than it burns. So an awful lot of distinctions and to guide you through this, Self-Right takes us through five basic steps. The first step is we call it reframing and what that means is we need to recognize stress behaviors for what they are. Understand the difference between stress behavior and misbehavior.
Understand the signs of stress behavior. Understand them in ourselves as much as in a child or a teen. Recognizing the very idiosyncratic nature of these signs.
What's a sign for one child may not be for another. So that's, all of this is involved in the world. in reframing.
And as you'll see, as we go through this, it gets a little bit more complicated as we begin to break down what we understand in self-reg by something called mindfulness. We can break that down into five categories too. Becoming mindful of the kinds of assumptions and biases that we have that cloud our perception or skew our perception of why children or teens behave the way they do and becoming mindful of internal states and so on. So an awful lot of work will go into that first step, that reframing step. Then the next step is identifying the stresses, recognizing what the stresses are.
And as I've just mentioned, it can be remarkably, it can be very difficult but remarkably rewarding as we start to understand how things that we thought were totally innocuous are in fact stresses. I remember once being asked by a parent, why is it that my child has an absolute meltdown every Christmas? And in fact, we know that Christmas is a huge stress in all sorts of ways.
And even getting a present or a number of presents is a stress for a child, which is very interesting when you start to understand why we are, why we. we are seeing these meltdowns or whatever. The third step is to reduce the stress. So if we go back to the Christmas example, there are so many obvious ways that we can begin to take this theoretical knowledge.
and really applied in ways that not only help our children, you know, do the kinds of things we want them to do, you know, be happy and healthy and behave, but really turn things like Christmas into the joyous event or occasion that it should be and that can easily be if we understand and reduce stress. So we look at ways that we can in, you know, in the moment. apply these strategies and that leads us to our fourth step and our fourth step is becoming stress aware, recognizing when we are overstressed. You know it's quite remarkable how in the modern age I talk about a generation that careens from one stress to another and quite often we do it quite intentionally as we inadvertently raise our stress levels.
by seeking out highly stimulating activities to keep the adrenaline going. So we work on developing stress awareness in ourselves and, of course, in our child or teen. In order for them to practice self-reg, they must learn what it truly feels like to be calm, what it feels like when they are starting to become agitated. And then the fifth and final step.
is developing strategies that promote restoration and resilience. And as we've been emphasizing throughout today, these strategies have to be unique to each individual child or family. There is no one-size-fits-all. And I talk about this as, think about it, this is not like going to a department store and buying a suit off the rack. This is like going to German Street in London and buying a custom tailored suit.
So we have to figure out how do we custom tailor the Selfreg strategies that will work for my child, or for my family, or for myself. And so that's what Selfreg is.