Glossary

Shanker Self-Reg® Key Terms

Shanker Self-Reg® 

Developed by Dr. Stuart Shanker, Self-Reg is a process for enhancing self-regulation by understanding and dealing with stress. Self-Reg is the pathway to enhancing resilience, motivation, learning, & well-being.

Steps

• Reframe the behaviour: What is the behaviour telling me about myself or others?  What is the behaviour a sign of?  
• Recognize the stressors across the five domains: What stressors – overt or hidden – Biological, Social, Prosocial, Cognitive and/or Emotion – could be leading to this outburst or discomfort?
• Reduce the stress: What stressors can be alleviated to lower the stress load?  
• Reflect and enhance stress awareness: Learning from my own responses how can I become more aware of stressors that I and those around me face and seek to reduce them more quickly?
• Restore energy: How can I return to homeostasis, find calm, and increase energy? Restoration happens through following the first four steps of the Shanker Self-Reg method and occurs across all five domains

*(Respond:  the original name of the fifth step which was changed to reflect new learning and understanding.)

Domains

• Biological – physical health, sleep , nutrition, exercise, and various aspect of maintaining energy
• Emotion – ability to deal with the stress of strong emotions, both positive and negative.  We consider the energy and tension related to the strong emotion, not the emotion itself or the event that may have triggered it
• Cognitive – stress of processing various kinds of information, maintaining attention, dealing with time pressures, and the demands on working memory
• Social – recognizing social cues and the effect of behaviour on others, understanding and responding to the feelings and intentions of others, communication skills and the ability to repair and restore relationships
• Prosocial – coping with other people’s distress, a sense of justice/injustice, and the ability to co-regulate with others and put their needs and interest ahead of one’s own

The 5 practices are not a linear sequence. Rather, there are multiple points of entry and Self-Reg can, in fact, be pursued in any order. Mastery of each step grows by working on all the others. This cyclicality is the key to custom-tailoring Self-Reg to suit the distinctive stress-reactivity and needs of every individual.

Glossary

Adaptive coping strategies: Strategies that can be used to effectively deal with stress and help people return to a state of calm and balance

Allostatic overload:  The “wear and tear on the body” which accumulates as an individual is exposed to repeated or chronic stress.  It was coined by McEwen and Stellar in 1993.

Balance: In Self-Reg, the state of Blue Brain/Red Brain balance: a state where the blue brain and red brain are working smoothly together and acting as a check and balance for each other so that energy expenditure and recovery are finely counter balanced. Blue Brain/Red Brain balance promotes optimal self-regulation in each of the five domains (biological, emotion, cognitive, social, prosocial), social co-regulation and also biological functions such as digestion, cellular repair and the immune system.

Calm: In Self-Reg, a physiological and emotional state of low tension which, combined with alertness, is the ideal state for learning, social engagement and thinking.

Co-regulation: Occurs when a caregiver regulates another’s physiological state via voice, facial expressions, body language, and gestures activating dynamic feedback loops up and down the vagus nerve (Porges, 2018)

Co-Reg: A shared state of calmness between individuals within which, as a result of our understanding of Self-Reg, we reframe the other’s behaviour, identify and reduce their stresses, and help them shift from maladaptive to restorative modes of self-regulation.

Down-regulate:  To move from a state of high arousal towards one of lower arousal vs Up-regulate: To move from a state from low arousal  towards one of higher arousal

Dyad: A system that consists of two parts, e.g. parent-child, caregiver-child. Dyadic interactions are the primary platform for human development.

Dysregulation: Occurs when stress levels are so high that various systems for thinking and metabolic recovery are compromised. The signs of dysregulation can show up in our physical well-being, behaviour, mood and attention level.

Hierarchy of stress responses: A “hierarchy” of four neural mechanisms for dealing with stress, identified by Dr. Stephen Porges:
1. Social Engagement
2. Fight-or-flight (sympathetic nervous system)
3. Freeze (parasympathetic nervous system)
4. Dissociation

Homeostasis: The ability of an organism or system to seek and maintain a condition of equilibrium in the face of outside influences.

Interbrain: A theoretical “wireless” connection between a caregiver’s brain and a baby’s brain, for the purposes of arousal regulation. The higher-order brain regulates the immature brain that cannot yet self-regulate. As children mature the Interbrain’s function changes, but it remains a potent force throughout the lifespan supporting nurturing, mutual understanding, connection and intimacy.

Limbic system: The brain system involved in reactive behaviours, strong emotions, urges and motivation. It initiates the fight-or-flight response and plays a key role in the formation of memories. The limbic system’s main structures are the amygdala, hippocampus, hypothalamus and nucleus accumbens. It is involved in social interaction and harmony.

Mindfulness: The state of being in and fully attending to the experiences of the present moment. In Self-Reg, mindfulness is about looking non-judgmentally at not only our own mind, but also the mind of another and the feeling of calmness that comes from attending to and experiencing another person’s calmness.

Negative bias: When our perception becomes distorted due to excessive stress, which causes our limbic system to become primed to look for threats and danger everywhere. This causes a tendency for people to see threats and danger where there are none and to interpret people and experiences in a negative light.

Self-regulation: In the original psychophysiological sense, it simply refers to manage stress. This is said to be “maladaptive” if it constrains possibilities of growth (e.g., gaze aversion). Mindful self-regulation refers to how people manage energy expenditure, recovery, and restoration in ways that enhance growth. Mindful self-regulation requires learning to recognize and respond to stress in all its many facets—positive and negative, hidden and overt, and minor and traumatic.

Soft eyes:  A phrase gifted to Susan Hopkins by an Indigenous Elder in the NWT after listening to a talk she gave on children in the early years. The Elder shared that what was described sounded like what in her language was called “Soft Eyes”. We do not know the Elder’s name or would credit her but we are very thankful for this gift. In Self-Reg, a phrase that describes how the compassion that you naturally feel towards people (especially children) is aided and enhanced by the Self-Reg lens which helps you see past the child’s behaviour, to the stresses that are behind the behaviour and their impact on the person’s energy and tension levels.

Stress: The non-specific response of the body to a demand imposed on it; also, the emotional or physical strain and tension associated with demands or adverse circumstances

• Stress behaviour: Behaviour that is reactive or caused (versus intentional) and has excessive stress at its roots
• Stressor: Anything that causes a brain-body stress response