How to Teach Yourself and the Kids to Hack the Body’s Wellspring of Calm

Has Anyone Ever Really Calmed Down by Being Told to Calm Down?

It’s the school holidays and never have you understood the words we ain’t nothing but mammals more acutely.  Your five year old is swinging like a baboon from his cabin bed while the seven year old is grubbing around like an anteater in the back of the cupboard to make sure you meant what you said when you told him you weren’t buying anymore biscuits.  The tween has formed a troupe of monkeys with other tweens (and you’re currently wondering what their parents are doing while you look after their offspring - lying down in a darkened room sporting a cold flannel on the forehead you suspect) and, are the tweens practising pant-hoots that sound a little like a vaguely familiar Taylor Swift song?   

Before long, a cry will go up that they’re all bored and you’ll be told that whatever activity you suggest that doesn’t cost at least a million pounds is boring too.  And we all know that there is only one thing that is certain to break the boredom and that’s a good old-fashioned argument of oh, no I didn’t, oh yes you did!  At least that will set everyone back to those familiar feelings of modern ‘aliveness’ - overwhelm, anxiety, suppressed (or not so suppressed) rage and the strain of having to stitch on a forced smile due to the pressure of the perpetual pursuit of the perennially sunny disposition, come what may.

But instead of a backdrop of a Japanese Zen garden unfurling in the pantomime theatre that your home has become and a soundtrack of birdsong and trickling water bestilling the place, absolutely nothing changes.  All the feels just keep coming.   If we don’t know how to calm ourselves and haven’t taught our children to do the same, we can only expect, well, more of the same when we utter those futile words.  We might also expect, to add insult to injury, a derisive explosion of laughter from any tween in a ten mile radius because how many times do they hear that phrase in school and still the chaos reigns? And in the midst of all this, we might have one child who is that archetype of the lost child, keeping quiet and seemingly keeping calm and carrying on regardless.  It’s no accident that in one episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a character completely disappears because she was so quiet no one paid her any attention - it is a salutary lesson to us all that not all states of un-calm, in children, have outward signs.   

A super easy thing to do at this very point is to give a sympathetic sigh then do a double inhalation - just when you think your lungs are full, snatch another bit of breath in.  This will help stop the cortisol and trigger the parasympathetic nervous system to help calm you down.  After that, pop the kettle on and make everyone a cup of tea, stirring in some Hydrolysed Bovine Collagen Peptides.  15g of this stuff can increase GABA in your brain - that’s one of the neurotransmitters that can help with feelings of calm.    

At WillPowders, we love a biohack, whether that’s achieved through the help of bioavailable ingredients from plants or tapping into something our body will enable us to do naturally if we leave it to adjust.  

Here we’ll take you through eight ways to hack for a more harmonious holiday! 

The first thing we need to understand is that not all bodies and minds are the same, which sounds obvious, but increasingly we can find ourselves being treated as one homogenised collective in the 21st Century.  If we’re told to just breathe one more time, we’ll scream!  Be ready for some trial and error and self-research.  It’s ok for you and your family to take what you like and what works for you and your bodies from these hacks and leave the rest.  There’s no need for keeping calm to be just one more thing that gives you stress.

Try it this way:  Your survival brain likes to know you are in a safe place.  Take a look around you and let your eyes rest on things in your environment for a second or two.  No need to judge that the lawn needs mowing or that vase is dusty but you could have a monologue in your head that says, oh, that vase, I like that, ooh, that plant is flowering, lovely and so on.  Look under things and over both shoulders so that you see behind you.  Don’t rush.  Take your time.  

Or try this:  As you bounce the eyes from place to place, roll them a little as you do so, your tween will excel at this, of course.  

The aim:  To convince your survival brain there are no crouching tigers or hidden dragons, encouraging your nervous system to calm down.  If you are also slightly rolling your eyes as you gently move from object to object as well, this helps to make the eye muscles feel slightly strained and that encourages sleepier feelings.  Remember, you are gently straining your eye muscles, it is not a weird eye muscle man competition.  Compassion for your eyes at all times, please!

Why it might work for some:  Some muscles in the eyes when either stimulated or relaxed signal to our brain that there is no threat and some muscles tell us it’s time to sleep when they get tired so the eyes will want to close, telling your brain, sleepy time.  If you’ve just come back from a high octane day at the theme park, practising lying in bed and trying to look at the headboard while keeping the back of your head flat on the pillow will have Bib and Bob desperate to close their eyes in no time.  

Why it might not work for everyone:  For the grown ups, don’t we just live in a world that encourages competitive speed?  It can make us go too fast when doing this so slow down and be mindful.  For the kiddywinkles - they can get a bit giddy with the novelty of the metaphor of rolling and bouncing their eyeballs.  Tell them they’re Buzz Lightyear and press the reset button in their back to slo-mo!  

Try it this way:  Really press your back against a wall so that you feel how solid it is.  You can add in really trying to squash the floor with your feet at the same time, feeling how the floor pushes back with equal pressure.

Or try this: Push and squash as above but add in an awareness of other senses, for example, the texture of the wall and its temperature or the way your foot feels in your shoes.  If an effortful sound comes out, that’s ok too.   

The aim:  To feel yourself sustaining effortful muscle positions.  

Why it might work for some: Perception of the world changes from the immediate stressors to the wall, floor and the relation of your body with them.  When we are sensing our bodies in this effort, we aren’t thinking through complicated revenge scenarios like never leaving the house again with your child to teach them a lesson!  We are giving the neocortex a little holiday from its Megamind-style plotting.  Plus, tensing muscles strongly then releasing them gets rid of muscle tension so our mind believes that we must have done the running from the tiger as the adrenaline that tensed our muscles ready for fight or flight has now dissipated and we can just chill with a nice cup of tea … ah, at last!

Why it might not work for everyone:  This one doesn’t work so well with the sides of the soft play area, obviously!  Alternatively, pushing something that is designed not to move can feel frustrating for some and as surrender is the only option when pushing walls, you’ve got to be willing to lose.  Also, it can feel disturbing that there is no escape through that wall or floor - you’re stuck where you are.   Not to be tried in a haunted house with unsound floorboards that you could break through.  Also, if you do disappear into the wall in said house, that would be angst provoking, thereby defeating the whole object!  

Try it this way:  Look at the furthest horizon line in your vista.  Let your eyes rest there for a while.  

Or try this: Look up at the sky if your distant view is compromised by the concrete jungle.  

The aim:  To naturally allow the angle of your gaze to move outwards. 

Why it might work for some: We have Dr. Andrew Huberman, a Stanford University researcher, to thank for this stress reliever.  He’s so good at this stuff that he has a whole research lab named after him.  When we focus close up, like trying to stare our toddler down when they’re testing our reaction as they are about to eat from the dog’s bowl, our eyeballs rotate inwards towards our nose.  This tells the brain we are really having to focus our full attention on something and be vigilant, which, as we all know, is both a pain in the ass and stress invoking.  Dilating our gaze to the horizon switches our eyes from the vigilant gaze angle and so the mechanism in our brain switches to relaxation mode.  

Why it might not work for everyone:   It depends how committed you are to calming down by looking at the scenery.  Children often find gazing at a landscape rather boring and so don’t feel motivated to engage in the activity whereas a parent on a sunlounger could stare towards where the sea meets the sky all the livelong day, given half a chance.  For children, eye spy on a car journey might encourage more looking at a distance if you set the rule that they can’t spy anything that is in the car.   Your tween would probably be more wound up being asked not to stare at their phone so this could defeat the object for them.