Put Two Hands on the Wheel and Drive: 9 Intrinsic Factors Influencing Self-Regulation
By Julia Grover-Barrey OTR/L
Founder of In-Tuned®
We do have influence over our ability to self-regulate.
We are not born with good self-regulation to get through life seamlessly, we need to work at it. Some of us need to work harder. Those with brain-based disorders and sensory processing challenges need help to learn how to self-regulate; yet the brain’s infinite neural plasticity (ability to change) makes adaptive self-regulation possible.
Self-regulation: our ability to alter our attention, impulses, state of mind or emotion and activity to match the situation or the task we need to accomplish. Adaptive self-regulation moves us towards achieving positive results through engagement in our life roles.
Here are 9 intrinsic factors, things we can influence, to improve self-regulation:
#1. Autonomic (ANS) and Enteric Nervous Systems (ENS) – We can use techniques, such as breathing and deep relaxation, to either kick up or tone down our arousal state. We can take action and actually do a task we are fearful of. We experience more positive neurochemical release (dopamine) when accomplishing challenges than we do avoiding them or taking the easier path. We can choose to have a gratitude practice, which in doing so naturally releases the neurochemical serotonin, making us happier. We can influence our gut health when we pay attention to what we eat and drink and make connections between what we’ve consumed and how that has influenced our emotional, motivational and energy state. Although we can’t be in 100% control of these physiological systems, we can make choices that influence them. This type of influence directly changes our brain chemistry and is key to adaptive self-regulation.
#2. Emotional Control – We can’t always control the environment and what’s taking place, but what if we could acknowledge how a certain situation makes us feel, accept the emotion, remain objective and make a good decision about our actions anyhow? When we work on ourselves, our ability to self-regulate, we can be in control of our emotions. It’s not denying the emotion, it’s about making better choices on how to act on them.
#3. Attention – Supporting our sensory systems and tuning them in to fully support our mental focus is fully within our control. Movement, visual target processing and active listening is a good place to start. Medication can help this as well, but ultimately a change in behavior is required for long term control of our attention. A multi-sensory approach to gain attention is often required…it gives us a way into the nervous system and therefore a way to accelerate neural plasticity.
#4. Altering Arousal and Activity to Meet Demand – Working on things #1-#3 helps provide us with the tools needed to adjust to our environment. A certain level of stress is necessary to get things done. As self-regulation improves, we are more able to work flexibly and volitionally into the stress to gain the rewards (dopamine hits) along the way. We start to recognize that “the doing” is the reward, not just the end result, and we alter our state of arousal and activity to match what is required of us in real time.
#5. Self-Awareness – Adaptive self-regulation is not possible without a grain of self-awareness. We gain self-awareness and exert it when we chose to work on the other intrinsic factors. We do the work, we take action, because we know we need to. We all live in a world of our own perceptual constructs. Self-awareness allows us to operate from a place of control, collaboration and contentment with others. Our shared realities can comingle productively when we have self-awareness. When our reality is in constant conflict with the reality of the others, it can be a very lonely place from which to operate.
#6. Self-Efficacy – is a self-fulfilling feedback loop. The more we use forward momentum on the path to self-regulation, the more joy we experience from exerting our control. Self-efficacy is essential for living a self-directed life.
#7. Automation of Motor Skills – It’s hard to self-regulate if we are distracted by things that should be reflexive, automatic or a non-issue. Consider the student with illegible handwriting. It’s not just about the hand’s inability to push the pen adequately across the page. These students are usually thinking about how they are sitting in the chair, how they are holding their pencil, how much pressure they are putting on their pencil, how their pencil feels in their hand, are distracted by the waist band of the pants digging into their ribs as they lean forward towards their desk and they often have to self-talk to keep their eyes connected to the paper. This is very cumbersome to the self-regulation process (and legible handwriting), but because of the gift of neural plasticity this lack of automation can become reflexive when the right multi-sensory tools are provided.
#8. Sleep – is essential for self-regulation. Sleep is when neural plasticity happens. We learn during the day and our nervous systems are busy consolidating what we learned by making new neural pathways while we sleep. It takes deep sleep and or deep relaxation to maximize our brain’s ability to change in a positive direction.
#9. Impulse Control – Working on self-regulation gives us a fighting chance at making better decisions about our behavior in real time, by weighing options and quickly reviewing consequences before taking action. Adaptive self-regulation changes our perspective from having limited choices to having many.
For years I scratched together scientific articles and resources to support what I was doing in my practice…what I felt worked in practice with myself and my students (clients). I would do public speaking engagements and workshops giving what were often implied, weak or loose associations of the science to support what I was doing and seeing. It’s what had been available at the time.
My belief: “The science is coming”.
Thanks to neuroscientists like Andrew Huberman, Ph.D., of the Huberman Lab at Stanford School of Medicine, many of the tools we have used to help ourselves or others maintain or improve self-regulation are gaining wider support, because of groundbreaking work on how the brain changes in response to our actions and behaviors.
We need to be aware of the tools available and to use them…knowing and talking is not enough.
Our ability to self-regulate starts in childhood. Teaching self-regulation skills should be part of school curriculum just like reading, writing and math. I believe teaching these skills and bringing them to the forefront of our awareness at a younger age is key to fighting the growing number of mental health problems we are seeing in our culture.
Don’t be a back-seat driver when it comes to self-regulation, action, not talk is required.
Julia