Nervous/Excited Energy

Sometimes I have a conversation with my kids about something they feel scared to do, but they would really like to do. Take, for example, my daughter’s interest in participating in a theater class at her school. The idea of being on stage, singing in front of everyone, is so scary for her to think about that initially, she said a big no thank you to joining the class. But gradually, after days and weeks and months of thinking about how fun it sounds and how she would like to do this bonding experience with her friends and be brave, she changed her mind and decided to participate.

We talked about it a lot of times over the months, at bedtime and in the car. She kept saying she was scared or too nervous. She was telling me about a message she was receiving from their body that felt like, "this might be dangerous", and it's making her heart pump faster, her breathing a little shallower, and she might have tense muscles or butterflies in her stomach. I listened, and reflected, saying what I heard her saying. And then sometimes, I just reminded her that "nervous" and "excited" are right next to each other in our bodies. That’s the way I think about it, anyway– those two emotions feel very similar while we are experiencing them. It's a reframe that helps us remember that those two feelings are very close and sometimes overlapping, and that it's okay to feel nervous, and it might actually mean that you are excited about something. 

In the background of this conversation, a couple of different systems in our bodies are at work, and I am assisting in calling them out and describing them when I talk to my kids about “nervous” and “excited”. One is our nervous system, working to help us pay attention to signals outside our body that alert our brain to respond, which activates our bodies in turn. And the other is interoception, which is the name for the feelings we can sense inside of our body. Together, we can use those systems to identify what’s happening inside us, or inside a child (or person really) that we are helping. 

For those of us who have been studying emotional regulation in the past ten or twenty years, this information forms the basis of our understanding coming into any situation, but most people have not read multiple books and countless articles about the neurobiological study of emotions, it turns out. What I am actually describing is a state of mobilization of our Sympathetic Nervous System, and we can identify that by those physical signs that we can notice, like a faster heartbeat, quick, shallow breathing, and muscle tension. I am identifying my child’s interoceptive ability to read that combination of physical cues, which, it turns out, is easier for some people than for others, and helping them name it. 

Let me be clear that I am a Human Development person by training, and my formal education did not include any information about this research or what is called Polyvagal Theory, developed by Dr. Stephen Porges and explained in an accessible manner in books like The Whole Brain Child and Beyond Behaviors. So while I throw out these science terms you may never have heard before, please know that I am teaching myself and learning from experts through my strong interest in these subjects, and using my understanding to inform the way I interact with children and families in my work, as well as in every area of my personal life. You should also know that this is a developing area of research, and interoception in particular is a new word even to most professionals working today. 

I think it is fair to say that I am an expert in child development, however, given my education coupled with my experience teaching young children in this school where social and emotional learning is our focus. One topic that never fails to come up in any class is this particular area of emotional regulation where we observe behaviors in children that fall somewhere in this “nervous/excited” area. A shorthand I hear myself use when I am starting to notice those physical signs is “up-regulated”, or I might also describe it as “dysregulated” behavior. Those two terms are closely related but different, in the same way that “nervous” and “excited” are. Sometimes it is hard for us to tell which one it is, even inside of ourselves, and definitely in another person. 

That’s because the same physical signs characterize both feelings, and the difference is our feeling of safety in the moment. Remember when I said that my child was experiencing these feelings that told her, “this might be dangerous”, even though there is no physical danger to doing a theater class? That’s because our mind doesn’t distinguish between emotional safety and physical safety. We are, on some level, truly worried that we will die of embarrassment. Our mind reacts to that perceived threat and gives us whatever tools it thinks we will need to survive: fight, flight, freeze, and/or fawn. That blood-pumping, tense muscles feeling? It’s so we can throw a punch, or run for our lives. It’s also really helpful for throwing a basket or running down the field. 

To complicate things even further, lots of different factors surprise us by occurring in our minds as perceived dangers. Some people have super sensitive sensory systems that activate a threat response from simple things like being in a very crowded place, or loud sounds, or someone entering our personal space. Some people have traumas in our past that created specific threat responses for things that might have otherwise been neutral, like a particular smell or a specific kind of touch. Some people have had so many experiences of very real threats to our safety that our whole system is thrown off and we exist in a state of trying to keep our alert system up all the time, because our experience tells us that we can never afford to relax. 

For attentive, caring adults, ostensibly supporting children’s emotional regulation, our goal is to utilize the tool of co-regulation: a set of signals between people that send the message to our nervous system that we are safe. I say ostensibly because this is an effective strategy for people of all ages and for our own self-regulation as well, but let’s frame it as us helping our kids. We use co-regulation because we are social animals and this is how people learn how to calm ourselves down and return to a state where we are able to think clearly and make choices, instead of relying on our threat detection system to make our choices for us. 

Quality co-regulation involves attunement and responsiveness. The adult focuses our attention on the child who is displaying those signs of dysregulation (heart pumping, breathing fast, tense muscles–it can also look like they can’t slow down or stop themselves, inappropriately laughing, trying to escape or run away, hitting/biting/throwing, yelling, or other displays of “fight or flight” behaviors). We watch for what their behaviors may be telling us, and listen to whatever communications they are sharing, without judgment. We keep them safe and keep them from hurting others. We keep ourselves calm as best we can. And slowly, though our physical and emotional closeness, we transmit our own calm to our child, nervous system to nervous system, by slowing our breathing, relaxing our muscles, adjusting our sensory environment to a more calming one, and staying together like this until our child’s sympathetic nervous system attunes to ours, which is giving the message, “We are safe. We are safe. We are safe”. 

It won’t work well if we are not actually calm, because our nervous system signals won’t lie for us. It won’t work well if we have not developed a trusting relationship with the person we want to help. It won’t work well to ask the child to do this on their own, like in a time-out, because they need our signals to know that they are safe, and in the absence of that, they may well conclude that they are not safe and they can’t trust us. It won’t work well if they are still immersed in the environment that brought on the threat response. 

When it does work– when we are effective in providing quality co-regulation that helps another person return to a calm, emotionally regulated state, it is infinitely more helpful in the short and long term than anything else we might have done to address that dysregulated behavior. That’s because we are actually addressing the problems that caused the threat response, and in turn whatever expression of that baseline lack of safety that might have occurred in the form of dysregulated behavior. What’s more, we are creating and enforcing neural pathways that reinforce the experience of calming down, so that in the future, our child can provide their own path back to a relaxed parasympathetic nervous system. 

Practically every day at Cottage (and in parenting young children), we have a new opportunity to practice co-regulation. This week, there was a day when one child seemed to be a bit up-regulated the whole day: they were working furiously on their building project and had a quick and defensive response for anyone else coming close to the area where they were working. Later, they kept chasing people who didn’t seem to want to be chased. 

The teachers were observing this. We signaled to each other about the need to keep an eye on this child, to make sure they were being safe. Their up-regulation seemed to grow as the day went on; they went from verbal defense to pushing, and increasingly, they seemed not to be able to slow down or make conscious choices about how they were interacting with people. Teachers stayed close to be ready to help, as the child seemed motivated to keep playing, even though it was getting to be more difficult.  

At some point, we saw a new uptick, and the teachers found each other’s eyes to see if we were making the same assessment (this child is overstimulated, or “dysregulated”, and they need help to down-regulate), and when we saw that we were in agreement, I asked their safest teacher to take that child from where they were playing to the small yard, and that teacher's assessment was that the inside of that classroom would be even better for a calm, quiet area. There, the child found a small basket of toys to play with, and they did calm down, as their teacher stayed close by, providing her calm in co-regulation. 

Later, the teacher was telling me that she had helped this child calm down before when they were overstimulated, and then, like this time, she could feel the child's heart beating super fast, like a hummingbird. Their nervous system was giving them the energy to run fast from danger, and in this situation, the sense that that energy was needed had come from just playing with lots of other kids in a safe environment with caring adults paying close attention. 

We are not sure what had the child feeling so activated. Sometimes we can observe patterns over time and start to make some good guesses. Sometimes we are just at the beginning of learning enough about a person to understand what a mobilized sympathetic nervous system looks like in them. It can take a much longer period of observation, and sometimes the help of an expert, like an occupational therapist, to understand more fully. What we can do, while we are still learning, is to trust kids and believe them about their experience. What we can do is listen to them and pay attention to their communications. We can withhold judgment about how those communications are delivered. It's not logical and it can't be reasoned with in the moment. Our brain is just trying to keep us safe the best way it can, and sometimes that means having this super-pumped-up response to a situation that is not actually dangerous, but more like exciting.