Welcome back to become a calm mama. I am your host,

Darlyn Childress. And today, I'm gonna talk about your nervous

system. And, particularly, we're heading into the

holiday season, and I wanted to give you some

ways to prepare your nervous system

for the next couple of weeks. We have All of the holiday

build up and then, of course, winter break is coming, and that is when

parents have their kids home. Even if you have them in camps

and things like that, it's still a lot of time with your children,

which means your nervous system is going to get activated,

and It's going you're gonna need to work harder to

reset your nervous system. So let's talk about nervous

system. I wanna give you an idea of what I'm even talking about.

On this podcast, I have taught you

quite a few times about your stress response,

about what happens to you when you experience misbehavior and how

your brain interprets that as an emergency, and it activates Your

stress response and you get flooded, your amygdala goes you know,

sounds off the alarm, and it sends a message to your pituitary

gland and your, and your, adrenal glands, and

your body gets pumped with Cortisol

and adrenaline and epinephrine. Right? So you've

learned about that before. You know about stress juice. That's what I call

that chemical cocktail that your body gets flooded with.

You understand about your amygdala. If you're new to this podcast, no

problem. I'm gonna walk you through it today. But I'm gonna

walk you through your nervous system today. But if you have been a long time

listener, then you really are you're in the calm mama club or you've taken one

of my classes, You kind of understand how stress

affects you and affects your parenting. So I

wanted to talk today and about the same concept,

but really expand a little bit about your nervous system

and help you See what is happening to

you when your nervous system gets activated, when

your stress response gets activated. But today, we're gonna add a new

level, and we're gonna talk about how you calm yourself

using your nervous system. So a big part of my program

is calm. Right? It's all about the parent

managing their own stress and their own emotion

so that you don't dump all of that out on your child. That's where

yelling comes from. Yelling is a stress response. That's where

emotionally checking out and zoning out on your phone comes from. That

is a strategy to cope with overwhelm. So we

wanna decrease your overwhelm, and we wanna Give give you better

tools to regulate your nervous system and and manage your stress

response so you don't dump that on your kids. Right? So

today, we're gonna talk about your central nervous

system, which is sometimes also thought of as your

sympathetic nervous system. And then I'm

going to talk about your parasympathetic nervous system.

So these 2 parts of your nervous system, they work

together in order to help you

respond to stressful situations and then decrease

that stress response. So your if you think about

your sympathetic nervous system and your parasympathetic nervous

system, they are like a seesaw or a teeter totter.

As 1 is activated, 1 is decreased. And then they

start to kind of Swap places, and the

other one takes over. And so we wanna be able to

be, like, Response flexible. We wanna respond

to stressful situations, and then we wanna be able to

reset our nervous system. So if you think

about the calm mama process and all of those tools in calm,

we talk about the pause break. And the pause break is really a pause

and reset. So we're gonna pause our stress

response as much as we can, and we're gonna reset

our nervous system. So today, I'm gonna talk

about what nervous system that you're resetting, and that is called the parasympathetic

nervous system. So real real quick

recap is that, essentially, you

have an information highway going running

through your body at all times. And

that is your nervous system is kind of This giant

information highway, and it takes in information through your

senses, and it tells the brain how to respond to

what we are experiencing. So you take in information with your

eyes, with your senses, your smell, your touch,

your your your just your environment, and then that is how

we interpret the information we're receiving

With our thoughts, we interpret what we're seeing, and then that

triggers our stress response. That triggers our

nervous system to activate the sympathetic

nervous system. So you get all this

information. Your brain interprets that information, and it tells your

body how to respond, and it uses neurons to do that. So there's all

the sorts of neurons you have in your brain. All neurons mean is brain

cell. So it's just a different fancy way to call a brain cell. And

so you have all these neurons in your brain, and they send signals throughout your

body. They using the the central nervous system.

So if your brain decides that something is dangerous, it

interprets Something dangerous like a kid spitting in your face

or a bad letter grade or a child who

spills, you know, Really hot, really sticky apple

juice all over the table. Your brain is gonna be

like, oh my god. This is an emergency, and it's gonna Activate your sympathetic

nervous system. And we often call that fight, flight,

freeze, faint, fawn. And then you get flooded with

stress juice, and the stress juice is designed

to give you that oomph to respond,

whether that means running away Or fighting

or hiding or freezing, playing dead, or

trying to people please. That's what call that's what we call fawn response.

So your your stress juice is like all

those chemicals that kind of give your body that adrenaline

boost or that That hit of epinephrine

and cortisol that then makes it so that you can respond.

So that's actually really healthy. You need to have your stress

response. Stress in itself isn't wrong or bad. What

happens though is our brain misinterprets things. It

like I said, it misinterprets that sticky apple juice

all over the The table dripping onto the floor is

an emergency that you have to respond to. Now, of course, you're

gonna wanna get up and, like, Wipe it down, you know, if you

can, but it's not an actual life or death emergency. You're

not currently being attacked by a wild animal who's also known

as a 4 year old. You know? You're that's not

your 4 year old is not attacking you. You're not under any threat. You're

not in danger, But your brain is interpreting

that scenario as dangerous, and it's activating your

stress response. So when When we have a

little bit of stress here and there, it's good. Right? That gives us, like we,

you know, respond to our life. I think sometimes about,

when I was in a a car accident, I was driving with my kid

and a friend's kid, and we I got, like, t boned

and while going through a green light. And it was really

terrifying. Now in that moment, I am responding

to a stressful Situation as I should. I don't

think, should I break? Should I not? Should you know, what happened here? Why

did he hit me? Like, I'm not Thinking. I'm just responding. I'm

putting my foot on the brake. I'm, you know, very hyper focused on the steering

wheel. I'm getting us to safety.

That is important. We need that. But what happens is if

we have a lot of stressful situations in our life and our

we don't have enough time to recover them. We don't have enough time

to activate our parasympathetic nervous system in between

stressors. What happens is we become chronically stressed.

We have chronic stress juice pouring through our body, cortisol

pump and dump all the time, and it makes it

really difficult to stay calm. That's

what happens to you. When you find yourself Just getting angry

and annoyed about every single thing your kid does, that's a signal that

you're in a stress response, that you might have been in an activated

stress response for a while. Now

we call that dysregulation. That's

the phrase that's used in And

so, psychology and in,

other fields, like, you know, in the medical field as well. We just call this

a period of dysregulation. So what is

happening is that there are times where that stress

juice is, like, way intense and too intense for the

moment. And that is a temporary period of

time where you are completely out of your mind. Right?

You're not able to regulate your nervous system.

You're not able to get it back online, which essentially

means you're not able to access your parasympathetic

nervous system. So today, I

wanted to talk about this because the parasympathetic nervous system

is, Like, your best friend when it comes to

managing your stress response. The teeter totter, the

seesaw, we wanna be able to Practice

getting ourselves into our our parasympathetic nervous

system so that we can easily

Go up and down. Stress, nonstress. Stress,

nonstress. I want you to be able to flow between these 2 states,

Especially as a mom because kids, it's

oftentimes coming at you quite a lot, especially if you have, like, more than

1 kid or 2 kids, 3 kids, 4 kids. It's like you deal with

1 little fire with 1 kid, and then the next thing you know, you have

another. And then the next thing you know, you you have another. And it's just

constant. But there are little breaks in

between, and the better you are able to

access The soothing, calming parasympathetic

nervous system, I'm gonna give you a bunch of hacks. I promise.

And In the holiday the calm for the holidays guide, I give

you over 30 different parasympathetic nervous system hacks.

So we wanna practice training our

brain, training our body to Tip dip into

that parasympathetic nervous system so that you can go from stress

to de stress. Then the next thing comes, it's like a

new thing. Oh, okay. Now I have a new stressor.

Now I calm down. Oh, now I have a new stressor. Now I calm

down. So we wanna be able to move between these

2 states. So the parasympathetic nervous

nervous system, it's also Part of the central

nervous system, it's got its own network of nerves,

and it helps relax your body

after periods of stress or danger. I'm thinking about that

car accident again. And because I was in such a

heightened state of stress that I don't remember really

exhaling or sighing until

the Road was all clear. The ambulance had come. They

had checked us out. I had some injuries that but I didn't go

to the hospital. Some people took my kids. They took them home.

Like, everything was sort of managed, and I was sitting there by

myself, oddly enough, waiting for the tow truck to come.

And it was during that waiting period where I could feel

the cortisol releasing, and I was able to deep breathe

and, You know, like, start to feel like I was back online.

And so that makes sense that it took a while until the

Stressor was dealt with, and then I was able to activate

my parasympathetic nervous system. It actually activates on its

own. It's meant to do that. But because as a

parent, like I said, we have so many stressors

that our parasympathetic nervous system almost gets,

like no. I was gonna say lazy. That's not what I mean. It it

it's not a strong muscle. Like, it gets weaker. That's what I'm trying

to say. So your parasympathetic nervous

system is is your best friend when it comes to relieving

your stress response.

Now why are you chronically distressed? Like we said, parenting

is just it's just a lot, and so it's not your fault

that you find yourself stressed a lot. I wanna

help you understand that, like, the way the modern world

is set up and the way that parenting is Set up right now, it is

really running parents, but particularly

the default parent, which is typically the mother, Through the ringer

every day, there is so much demand on you. And so

you have a lot of stressors going on, and we don't

always have time to reset our stress response.

Giving your body a chance to tap into that parasympathetic nervous system

is really helpful. This Episode is really here to

help you kind of learn how to activate your parasympathetic nervous

system in times of calm. So there's, like, that

teeter totter, right, when your sympathetic nervous system is activated and

then your parasympathetic is not, And then they teeter back and

forth. But there are times when you're just in, like, a normal like,

you wake up and everything's, like, fine. Right? You're just in a

homeostasis. You know, you're in a regulated state. You're not

working towards regulation, and you're not disregulated. You're just, like, kind of

there. Those are the moments when you wanna strengthen your

parasympathetic nervous system response. We wanna practice

doing things when we're calm so that when we get stressed, we can

activate them faster, which is super cool. So

intentionally activating the parasympathetic nervous

system. It teaches your body how to reset

itself after a stress juice surge.

So you might have heard of the phrase, the vagus

nerve. It's spelled not like Las Vegas. It's spelled v

a g u s. And it

is your parasympathetic nervous system,

75% of it is in this vagus

nerve. And so when we talk, sometimes you'll hear people

talk about that, the the vagus nerve. I don't think it's Vegas. I think it's

Vegas. The you'll hear people talking about that. And so I'm

telling you I'm teaching you today that they're the same thing. The parasympathetic nervous system

and the vagus nerve Are kind of the similar they they use the same people

use the same vocabulary to describe both. So we want to

be intentionally activating our vagus

nerve and our other cranial nerves in order to strengthen their ability

to respond. So we wanna move from a weakened parasympathetic

nervous system, a weakened vagus nerve to a strengthened

vagus nerve. So the crazy thing about the vagus

nerve, just parenthetically, is that it connects to parts of your

mouth. It extends down through your neck to through your chest, through

your abdomen. So it's really where you feel

stressed out. Right? People, say, like, where do you notice stress in your

body? They'll talk about their head, which makes sense because you have a lot of

cranial nerves that are activated in your nervous

system. But a lot of people will talk about the point to their neck, their

point to their throat, their point to their chest, their point to their belly.

So your your Stress response is there, but then your,

your your stress relaxer is also there. So we're

gonna strengthen all of those Those, that

nervous system, those the the nerves and the glands and all of

that. So how do you do it?

What I want You to realize is that during the holiday

season, especially, that you're going to

be under a lot of extra stressors. And so if you

wanna have a calm holiday, if you wanna invite

peace and joy and contentment and connection And all of

those amazing wonderful things that the holidays can bring, you're

gonna need to be activating your parasympathetic nervous

system as often as you can.

Because your body, it's like digestion. Stress juice comes up,

and it's gotta go out somewhere. So I don't want it to dump on your

kids. I don't want you to implode and dump it on yourself.

Instead, we're going to do activities, exercises, movements with

our body that help activate our vagus nerve,

activate our parasympathetic nervous system. So the

best way to do this, In general,

is to preset or reset your

nervous system most days. So How do you

do that? In general, remember, we regulate our nervous system

through move, through movement or rhythm, through

relationship and through reward. So you wanna be

activating as much as you can, rhythm, moving your body in a

rhythmic way. You wanna be activating relationship connection

either with yourself through journaling and self compassion or with

others. And then reward as that little dopamine kick

that you get when you finish a project, when you get something done on your

to do list, when you kind of finally finish something. Even, like, just

finishing the dishes or making a bed or whatever, it's like pump. Right? It's a

little dopamine. That dopamine counters the cortisol. When you

finish a task, you're communicating to your brain, look. I've I'm working

on the future, so that means I'm safe in the present.

So there's all these cool little tricks that we use to with our brains that

help us, feel calmer. So the

best thing I think in general is 20 minutes of

movement each day. But it doesn't so that's like

daily rhythm. So that's can be a walk. It can be a a

walk before dinner. It can be a morning yoga class that you watch on

YouTube. It can be a night off where you just lay down,

And and don't have to do the bedtime routine, and you can sit and read

or go with a friend. The this daily break is

really important. Giving 20 minutes that you

focus on soothing yourself. One of my

best friend calls it moments of delight, and I love that. So she

thinks of, throughout the day, small moments of delight

that she can bring into her life. Lighting a candle, using a cloth

napkin, Taking a few extra minutes to put lotion on,

you know, making your bed, going to an exercise class, calling your

friends. So what can you do to bring in more moments

of delight? So if you don't

have 20 minutes at one time As a mom, I don't

want you to go, oh, forget it. Darlyn's ridiculous. She's making me do all

this stuff. I can't even do it. It's dumb. You can make these

teeny, teeny time chunks. So in

the calm for the holidays guide, In the back where I have all

these different ways to reset your nervous system, one of

them is called, The shimmy

shake. Okay? And it's like imagining you're a wet dog

from the tip of your head to the ends of your hands and feet.

You just take the wet off. So I just I put my hands up in

the air, and I just shake all the way down. And I just that

resets you. That doesn't take that's, like, less than a minute.

Another small one is a pillow hug. So when you feel

overwhelmed, you can just go grab a pillow For a cushion and give it

a real big hug and really breathe into it and notice the

sensation of that pillow on your chest and in your hands

and squeezing it and pressing down. And then while you're

doing it, open your eyes and look around and start labeling objects

in your space while focusing on the

hug. So that doesn't take long. You can just look around. I

see right now in my space. I see a pink candle. I see a phone.

I see a water bottle. I see the windows. I see the trees

outside. I see a clock. So that

is telling your nervous system, look. We're safe. We're okay.

That doesn't take that long. Right? So if you are already

liking these, I want you to get the guide. So you go to calm mama

coaching.com, and you can do you know, You can

get the guide. I have one called find the sparkle.

So all that is is to take a moment to remember a

time during which you felt safe,

peaceful, connected, happy, or simply okay.

And when you find that moment, you think of it as a sparkle. So

I typically my sparkles tend to be when I'm outside

in nature and or on vacation or very specific

moments where I'm like, oh, yeah. That was good. I felt really good. I feel

connected and safe. I think of this one moment, I was on this

hike in Yosemite with my friend, and we hiked up to

Nevada Falls. And the washing

watching the waterfalls just rushing down, and I just

felt so safe and connected

and grounded. So that's a moment of sparkle for me. It doesn't

take any time for me to tap into that, and I can feel it

even as I talk about it. I can feel it In my

chest, I feel myself calmer. I'm activating my vagus nerve right

now. So within that

sparkle, When you're thinking about it, just noticing

your breath, your emotions, your sensations.

So when you seek these little sparkles, it trains your nervous system

to seek and savor more and more positive, connected, and

joyful experiences. So think about this holiday

season, think about the moment that you, you know,

decorate cookies or bring something to your neighbor

or hand your child their their Hanukkah present or their Christmas

present, lighting that candle, doing whatever

tradition you have, Really looking at it, it's like

this is a sparkle moment. This is what I wanna remember. I wanna savor this.

I wanna pull this in to my consciousness.

You're activating your vagus nerve when you do that. You're activating your sympathetic

nervous system, which is just amazing.

So You if you have time to do 20 minutes of

movement, that is ideal for resetting your stress response.

But you might not, and that means that you need to get the guide, the

holiday guide for sure, and then have

doing all of these small little, these little

teeny Resets. So

other little de stress mini breaks, I think about where you can

sit quietly and enjoy a cup of cocoa or

coffee or whatever. Putting on your headphones and listen listening to

music when your kids are playing or they're watching a show or they're on their

iPads. Pull in some of those

sensory pieces that that help you feel calm.

Put on some music. Enjoy that moment.

Turn on an audiobook. Turn on a podcast. Listen to this podcast. Find the

ones that you love. I have I have several of you that have told me

that you have favorites that you've listened to many, many times. Amazing.

Go back. Tap into that. So when you

are doing these small little moments or the body ones that are

in The workbook, like, you know, twisting,

doing a twist from side to side, you know, putting your legs up,

like, Laying on your back, putting your knees in the air, and just kinda twisting

from side to side is very, very soothing for your nervous system.

So when you're doing those little exercises or you're You're having your cup of

cocoa. Trying not to think of it as ignoring your kids,

but instead reframing Those moments as I'm recharging,

I'm resetting my nervous system. This is parenting.

What I'm doing is also parenting. The cool thing is your kids

will probably start doing it with you, especially if they're little. You'll be like, I'm

gonna be resetting my nervous system, and then we're like, me too. And then I

love thinking about having a bunch of little kids walking around the school saying,

I'm resetting my vagus nerve, Or,

like, I'm resetting my I have a lot of stress juice. You know? Like, if

we can talk about this and teach our kids how to talk about it, amazing.

What is that gonna look like for their adult life? They won't need to listen

to this podcast, which is my goal. I want your children to grow up

having been trained and and coached and loved and parented

by you in such a way that they feel like, oh, no. I know all

about my nervous system. I know all about stress juice.

I know how to calm myself. I know how to self soothe.

That is amazing. If you're worried that your kids are someday gonna become drug

addicts or, you know, Some sort of video game addicts

or something like that, or they're gonna you know, for girls, like, if we're worried

about they're gonna, you know, Be more so much so focused on boys, they

will lose their self esteem and all that. All of those are

negative coping strategies that we use to manage stress.

So if you teach your kids now, they won't have to do those things, which

is my goal, my hope, my dream for all of you.

Okay. So this

holiday season, I want you to be thinking

About your nervous system, I want you to be thinking about taking care

of it as much as you can and intentionally

Reactivating the parasympathetic nervous system in order

to stress, to de stress, in order to get that

stress response to from active to deactive. Like, I I

wish you could see my hands because I just keep flowing them in and out,

back and forth from one side to another because that's

You're not gonna get rid of stress. You're not gonna get rid of stress juice

nor should you. That would be terrible. That would be,

You know, under, like, the

disassociation, that would be an unhealthy response to just emotionally

check out. I don't want that. I Want you to be present in your life

and aware and, like, actually deal with dangers. Like, if your kids,

you know, doing something dangerous, of course, you're not gonna, oh, I don't

know. It's Not that big of a deal. Like, no. You need your stress response.

You're a human. But what I want for you is to not get

stuck there. You don't have to stay stressed all the time. You don't have to

stay activated all the time. So how do we do that?

We activate our nervous system. So some simple

ways, of course, is movement. Dale daily movement,

walking, or stretching. I

personally really like vigorous exercise, but that's not

for everybody because sometimes vigorous exercise creates

cortisol. Though sometimes I don't want sometimes I have too

much cortisol, and I know I'm not supposed to do vigorous exercise that day. So

instead, I do a gentle Yoga type of workout or

stretching or something like that, or I go for walks or go to hikes and,

spend time doing things like that. You can also, of

course, use the exercises in the workbook once you have it, the calm

mama sorry, the calm for the holidays guide. Connecting with

adults is really important during the holidays. Healthy

sleep habits, spending time in nature, Being

really kind to yourself. So these are all

just practices that you're going to

be doing in order to Reset

your nervous system. Reset your sympathetic nervous

system. Activating your parasympathetic nervous

system. So that's your that's your task this week. That's your

your homework assignment. Although this is not school, and I'm not, you know, grading

you. But if you like the take the tie the takeaways

and you want to have something to work on this week, I want you to

get the guide. Go to calm mama coaching.com right now. Get

the guide and start once a day. Once a day.

Pick one of the exercises. I think there's 20 to do.

And you're just gonna dedicate 3, 4 minutes in the

morning or whatever time in the night. I don't care what time you do it.

You're gonna go, I'm gonna activate my parasympathetic nervous

system. That's your task this week. Let me know how it

goes. Contact me on Instagram At Darlyn Childress,

message me. I love DMs. I also love when you send

me funny reels and things like that. Everybody does that. But I wanna hear from

you, so you can message me there. Connect with me through the guide. And then

next week, I'm gonna have a holiday party, calm holiday

party, and you're all invited. It's gonna be online on

we're gonna meet every morning, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday at

8:30 Pacific just for about 30 minutes, and we're just gonna practice

resetting our nervous system. We're gonna practice saying no to things. We're

gonna get ideas about what to do this holiday. I'm gonna give you

scripts and support and exercises, and it's gonna be really

fun. Also have prizes. So I want you to be there at the

calm mama holiday party. And I think that's about it for

today. If you do not have the guide, I'm holding it in my hands,

calm for the holidays. This is your guide to preparing

your nervous system, your expectations, and your calendar

for the whole holiday season so that you can feel less stressed. That's my

hope for you. So get the guide and reach out to me on

Instagram. If you're not on my newsletter, once you get on the guy the guide.

You'll get on my newsletter. You'll learn about all the holiday parties and all the

events. And yeah. So I just thinking about you

mamas as you head into the season, and I'm wishing you The best

week, and I will talk to you