Unlocking Your Child’s Potential: How to Train the Amygdala for a Calmer Mind

Welcome to Where Parents Talk. My name is Lianne Castelino. Our guest today is a child and adolescent mental health clinician and a licensed independent clinical social worker.

Anna Housley Juster is also an early childhood education consultant who began her career as a teacher. She was the former director of content for Sesame street and is an author. Her first book is called how to train your amygdala.

Anna is also a mother of two teenagers, and she joins us today from just outside Boston. Thank you so much for taking the time.

Thank you so much for inviting me. I'm grateful to be here.

Certainly a fascinating title for your first book, how to train your amygdala. Let's start for those people in our audience who may not know what is the amygdala.

So the amygdala is a small but mighty part of everyone's brain, and its primary job is to be a central piece of the alarm system in our brains. You'll know that your amygdala is working if you have.

You're about to speak in front of people, for example, in a podcast format, and you might feel a little bit nauseous or your heart might be a little bit faster. It's basically the brain saying, this might be dangerous. And in fact, of course, in this case, it's not.

And the point of the book is that it kind of helps kids and the adults reading it with the child understand the neuroscience of that, what your amygdala is designed to do to keep you safe, and also that it can sometimes make mistakes. And then how do we work together to help it in those situations?

And I'd like to pick up on that point. Why is it important for us to understand how the amygdala functions and what it is?

I think it's important because for some reason, I think that the neuroscience is newer than how we understand your heart, your lungs, the bones, and the body. Young kids understand those things. They understand that the skeleton, they can feel their bones.

They know that their bones keep them upright and help them move. They can feel their muscles tighten, they can feel their heartbeat.

There's an intuitive understanding that you have all these things going on in your body.

I think it's really important that as the science catches up with human evolution and as like daily practitioners and parents and teachers catch up with the science, that we give kids the language to understand not just what happens in their bodies, but what happens in their brains, which is where what happens in their bodies starts, right? So we can help them understand that behaviors don't come out of nowhere and their feelings have a origin in the brain.

And really young kids can use this vocabulary. I often say, like, you know, the word amygdala is fun to say. That's one reason I feature to this as the character in the book.

And young kids can say it.

I mean, I have three and four year olds I've worked with that can say to their parents, my amygdala is doing jumping jacks right now, or my amygdala is really charged up and the parents says, what did you just say? You know, and then the parents are using the words too.

But it's not any more complex to say than the word rectangle or any number of words that we teach young kids. I think it's just that adults have to get comfortable with it first.

Definitely. Now, knowing what the amygdala is and understanding how to train it so you're using it optimally are two different things.

So how do you go about explaining that to a child, certainly at different ages and stages of, you know, of childhood. And also, what do you think parents need to understand about the importance of training your amygdala?

Some of the feedback I've been getting about the book is that people buy it for young kids because it's a picture book, right? So it's for four to eight year olds. I've read it in my practice with kids as old as 11 or 12, depending on what they'll be interested in and do.

But what people are saying is that as the adult who buys the book, they now understand more about what's happening in their own brain and body. So I think the conversation actually doesn't shift that much.

The language we use might shift, but the basic psycho education of what's happening with the threat response or the fight flight freeze response in the body can be translatable across all different ages.

And the core essence of the conversation is that you can rewire your brain and that will impact behaviors and feelings and so that we all have more control over this response than we think that we might.

So I think that's the primary lesson learned in reading the book, especially if a child and an adult read it together and then co regulate and practice the skills that are introduced throughout the narrative.

As a practicing clinician in this space with respect to children and adolescents, what concerns you most as you see your patients and their families and potentially their parents coming in with anxiety as something that they're struggling with? What are you seeing in terms of trends and what gives you pause?

That's a really good question. I think there are a lot of reasons today to be rationally fearful. Right.

And so therefore we need this amygdala response, we need this threat response, we need to know when something's not safe and we need to know when to back away.

But the primary problem is that when the amygdala is activated chronically, like when kids are staying in threat response mode and that's leading to high levels of cortisol in the, in the body and it's impacting their overall function, I do get very concerned and I think that's where we need to take a step back and think how do we start at younger and younger ages of health in supporting mental health? Not as a disorder. Right. Like we tend to think, you only talk about mental health when there's a diagnosis.

You only talk about mental health when there's a clear intervention that's needed.

My hope with this book and, and with the trends in mental health is that we start to think about mental health as in the same way we think about physical health. You don't wait to give children a nutritious diet when they are malnourished.

You try if there's resources and if there's enough social supports in place, you give kids a healthy diet proactively. And I think if we can move towards that lens with mental health, we will be putting, we will be setting everyone up for greater success.

And it's really about tools and practices. And that's one of the reasons I wrote this book for such a young target age. Right.

Because I think generally if it's supportive and age appropriate content, then the earlier you start, the more likely you are to be building some important habits and vocabulary with really young kids.

Now, in researching your book and a little bit about yourself, I read that you believe that training your amygdala is a life skill. Why do you believe that?

So what I can say is that I wish that I understood this about myself at a much younger age.

Because when you do understand, the reason it's a life skill is understanding what's happening in your brain and body helps you in conflict resolution. It helps you manage fear that might hold you back from doing something that otherwise would be a really good thing to do.

And so I, I think of it as a life skill because humans primarily are oriented towards social relationships. We're hard, we are wired, actually, you know, at birth to reach out and connect. And sometimes our anger can get in the way.

But what I help parents understand is that anger is a secondary emotion to fear.

And so if we as a life skill know how to manage our fear, otherwise known as, like in this case, the threat response, then it sets us up for success in every other area of life because we're so relationship based. And the threat response can get in the way of trust and effective communication. That's why, I guess I think about it as a life skill. Yeah.

How do you go about then training a young child, training an adolescent, training a young adult to train their amygdala, what is involved in that process?

So it could seem really didactic. Right.

My goal with the book was to take a serious concept and this is where I'm drawing on my teaching career as a head start, my early fascination with how kids learn and what makes things funny and my work at Sesame Street. You have to have a compelling story and you have to have a character that people actually care about, really, if you want to have learning happen.

So my hope is that the way we train our amygdala through the use of this book is that you, the way it's designed is that it's. You could read this book with any child. It's not an intervention necessarily, it's a picture book.

But that as you are helping the amygdala character in the story to calm down, the reader is then participating in those practices as they're reading the story. And then you lift it off the page and try to bring it into everyday life.

But the most important thing about a practice is that it's something you do a lot of the time.

So any parent who has tried to offer the strategy, just take a deep breath, to a child who is already in major fight, flight, freeze response, and already has these hormones running through their body and is in sort of panic mode, I would say strong emotional mode. You can get, it can backfire because if you've never offered that strategy when the brain was calm, it can feel even more threatening.

You don't see this, that I see. Like you don't. How can you ask, offer me a breathing strategy.

Like I'm, I see only danger and you're being so calm, that can actually be pretty threatening. So you have to practice, as with anything else, the skills, so that when there is a need, you can access the skills.

And so I think of it as sort of a daily, a daily practice. And I'm not, I am going to say right now that I will say this as, as a parent, as an educator, as a human in the world. It's never perfect.

I mean, I talk to kids all day long about Trying to calm that threat response. I lose my temper. I get stuck in traffic. It's Massachusetts, it's Boston.

But in the moment, if you can recognize, oh, I'm mad at that person who just cut me off because my brain thinks they're a lion charging at me. That's why my heart is getting is racing and that's why I feel like I'm ready to do something about it.

Except I'm in my car, stuck here, and I'm not going to do anything about it.

It's about tuning into that process and then the practice of slowing it down, using other areas of the brain and the body's neurofeedback to the brain to be calm.

You know, it's really interesting as I'm listening to you describe it, Anna, what strikes me is that a lot of the parents who might pick up this book and read it to their kids probably aren't equipped themselves and have not trained their amygdala themselves. And this is like an ongoing pursuit for, for some people, certainly.

So then how can you proactively support your child as a parent to train how their brain and how they deal with anxiety?

Well, so the first really piece of, big piece of good news is that it's never too late. We know about the ACEs studies, you know, we know how many parents are parenting today with their own adverse experiences.

And if you have had adverse experiences, you may have a more hyperactive threat response to protect yourself. Right. If we needed the amygdala at some point and there's a memory formed there, the amygdala really does a good job with memory.

And so we might have this challenge later managing our emotions. And that's understandable. So the first thing is it's understandable. The second thing is it is never too late to create new neural pathways.

And it feels better when you do because nobody likes to scream and yell. Generally we don't love the feeling of that afterwards, even if it feels like what's happening in the moment warrants that reaction.

So a lot of people are reading this book and saying for the first time, I like I didn't know as an adult what was going on. That's okay.

If you can tune into some of the strategies and beyond the strategies I'm offering in the book, think about how you calm yourself because it's an individual process and make it a practice. You are more likely then to be able to engage with your child in a way that is mindful and showing up. What do I mean by that?

Like actively able to listen, able to be present in the situation and not in your own threat response mode, which would mean moving away from it because it's too hard, going into fight response because it feels really threatening or freezing, which is only the third option there is, and kind of not knowing what to do with the emotion that your child is presenting.

If both brains can be stabilized by the practice, that's where growth forward happens and new neural pathways are created in the context of that of an attachment, of an important relationship for both the parent and the child.

So then what would you say to a parent who perhaps like many of us, tend to be reactionary? Right. Let's not worry about it if there's nothing to worry about yet and being proactive is maybe not on the top of our list.

What would you say to those parents about why this, the, the thrust and the theme of your book and training your brain from a young age on how to deal with, you know, anxiety and stressful situations is important from a young age.

I, I think with most things, if it's done in an age appropriate way, you start earlier, it's better, right? Because you're building these habits of mind basically and habits in the body.

So it's a physiological habit, it's a brain based habit and over time that's helpful. But what I would say to a parent is in the same way you want your child to know how to read, that's a really important skill.

In the same way you want your child to learn math, which is a very important skill. And in the same way you might want your child to have friends or listen to you, etc, all of that kind of starts with this, right?

Like it all starts with our ability to tolerate frustration, to interpret what's happening around us and make sense of that. If the threat response is always activated, it's very hard to learn anything actually.

So I think of it in a building block sort of way as these are the fundamental skills, these are foundational skills for life that will then make a difference in the way that the child brings in information about the world, interprets it and learns forever, always. Right. So I think it's important I would, I help parents understand.

I do a lot of parent guidance when I'm working with a child because I don't think you can effectively do individual therapy with a very young child unless you are highly engaged with at least one adult that's in their lives. So I do a lot of parent guidance and some of the work is psychoeducation.

What's happening in your body when your child has not listened 10 times to you asking them to stop using the iPad, because if you just keep yelling and they stay in threat response mode, both your brains are just stuck.

So a lot of the work is actually that internal look, you know, trying to figure out what's happening in the adult and then figuring out what you want to bring to the situation that you're facing with your, with your child.

So along those lines, then, what are you seeing in terms of your patients with respect to the young people who are your patients and the toolkit or not, that they may have access to when they're encountering a situation that may be anxiety producing? Like, are there trends that you're seeing in terms of what they're lacking or, you know, along those lines of what they need to be able to access?

I mean, I don't think we can have that conversation without mentioning the pandemic, because I do think that there were a lot of lagging skills coming out of essentially two years and then really trickling into like, really two or three years of major uncertainty on top of anything that was happening before. Food insecurity, stress in the home, a organic predisposition towards anxiety or depression or attention challenges.

So I think it's sort of like a melting pot now of all of the things, right, that, that we're managing. And for really young kids, usually it is a disruption in a relationship that is part of the problem. Right.

You could have, I have a lot of kids that have an organic predisposition towards anxiety, but then maybe if they are stuck in a behavior pattern, they are internalizing I'm a bad kid, and then that the brain then tends to look for data to prove that that hypothesis is correct. And they get it because they get in trouble at school. They're the one of the three siblings that's constantly in a timeout at home.

And so it's really about trying to look at the whole system with young kids and figure out what are all the moving pieces and how do we think about this holistically?

So my individual work is just one piece of the work and across the board, some of the strategies that are explained in this book, in particular, controlled breathing, progressive muscle relaxation, and visual imagery. Those are just three main categories that are evidence based for helping with anxiety, are helpful if you can really practice them and use them.

So I try to stay hopeful with parents and with kids. The main point is this is in your control more than you think it is.

And, and there's changes that we can make together to help you feel more successful in your life.

And it's such an important point if you are a parent or a child who feels like there is no hope that you're on this island that no one understands. And you, you know, you might be reticent to reach out to friends, neighbors, family, because you don't want to be seen as somebody with an issue.

Let me ask you, Anna, is there an anecdote that comes to your mind with respect to maybe your, a patient that you've seen or somebody you've encountered where their ability and their learning of how to train their brains in these situations made a huge impact and a difference, Whereas maybe initially or in the past, prior to, they didn't have those skills. Kind of paint that picture if you can.

I mean, I've had kids, really young kids use the word amygdala and then say to their parents, my amygdala is, you know, the story of this book evolved from the work. So I was talking about this for a long time before I actually wrote the book, right. So there was like a narrative story first. And kids will.

We would talk about what's happening in their brain and then they would go and try to express that to an adult. And even the moment of expressing what's happening can deepen, escalate a situation. Right.

So kids will come to me and say, you know, everybody was still angry a little bit, but it kind of helped when I tried to explain what was happening in my brain. And parents then will say, oh yeah, I could feel my heart racing. I could feel all this built up emotion. So I decided to take a walk first.

Like, I knew what was happening in my brain, I could tell was happening in my body. I knew it wasn't the right time to go down this path. I knew we were both in threat response mode and so we, we needed the time first.

And we came back to it when we were calm. And it wasn't perfect, but it was less stressful because the intensity level wasn't so high when we both weren't stuck in threat response mode.

So anecdotally, I guess those are examples. And the way I try to.

The anecdote I use to explain this to parents when I'm doing parent guidance is if, when your child is in threat response mode and is very anxious, their brains perceive that there is a lion charging at them. And if you go into threat response mode and are like, it's not a big deal. What is the matter?

We have to go get in the car, it's time to go to school, like, this is enough. You basically align with the lion. Now everything feels threatening because. And what's happened in you is you've gone into threat response mode.

You're starting with feeling threatened because your child, you need to get to work. And your child is saying they're not going to school. That's very threatening. So what comes out is anger, fight response. Right.

And the child is now frozen, maybe, because now this is also the other thing that can happen is that the parent can go all in on the emotion. Oh, gosh, you're right. I don't know if you can go to school today. It has been too hard. It's too stressful.

Now the child's brain says, hold on, we're both going to get attacked by this lion. We're both just sitting here sort of stuck in fear and sadness. And what kids need to help adults understand is balance of the two things.

I can see that you're worried, and I'm confident we're going to be able to get through this together. That stabilizes the threat response in both brains, and it's really effective.

So I generally just try to help parents understand that they can tune into their own emotions, figure out what they need first, and then figure out how to be calm enough to accurately understand what the child's need is that's driving whatever behavior is coming up.

It's such a wonderful example that you provide because it's so relatable. You probably not find a parent on the planet who has not had that exact experience.

Yes. Putting in my own head.

Yeah, for sure.

So.

So let me ask you, because you bring such a depth of knowledge and a variety of knowledge to this book and to the writing of this book. When we're talking about your background as a teacher, your, you know, your clinical background, your.

Your background as a parent and seeing kids and families in different ways. Like, how did you go about drilling down to the key messages with all of that information that you have into this picture book?

It's a really good question. I. Let's see. I, as a very young child, was going way back, only allowed to watch pbs. I had really strict viewing habits.

And so as a result, I watched Sesame street until I was like 11 or 12 years old when all my other friends are watching Brady Bunch or Gilligan's island or other show that wasn't allowed to watch. As a result, I managed to watch it long enough to understand the. The genius behind the two levels of humor.

Like that the parent, an adult, had to like it in order to Watch it with a child and that's what you wanted. You wanted connection. And that has led me to how I engage with kids and think about learning.

And so when I wrote the book, I wanted it to be something that an adult would tolerate at, like that there would be enough of little comedic moments or would it be too saccharine, you know, that there'd be something that. So from a content and style standpoint, I think this book represents how I kind of think about how to engage people overall.

And part of that starts with how long I watched Sesame street as a child and then my work there decades later. Also, I wanted it to be practical and tangible and I wanted to pull the clinical relevance, but make it age appropriate.

So when I was in graduate school studying cognitive behavioral therapy, which is considered one of the best frontline interventions for anxiety, I was taking the course as if it was going to be used with adults. And so I had to do a lot of work in figuring out how to translate the concepts for younger and younger kids.

Then I was trained in trauma focused cognitive behavioral therapy, which is evidence based for 3 to 21 year olds. So then I had this pulling of, oh, this is actually a really good way to think about this.

This is how we actually understand how we can, like how we teach these strategies for younger and younger kids.

And the core concepts, the psycho education piece where you teach kids how their brain works and if they have had trauma, why their body and brain might respond differently following that time when the experience overwhelmed their brain's ability to cope. I've basically distilled some of that into the picture book.

So the strategies that are learning about how your brain works, learning how your brain function is going to feel in your body and how the symptoms that are physiological show up.

And then these three core strategies control breathing, progressive muscle relaxation and visual imagery, followed by maybe naming your feeling once you can access language to a child, to an adult, are all coming from my clinical training. I mean, those are like the bread and butter skills that I guess I would say.

And so in a short picture book, I thought let's focus on the main, most specific practices or strategies, tools in the toolbox that we can give the child to manage threat or perceived threat.

At what point then did you decide that this needed to be a book? It needed to be a picture book. Like what was the tipping point for you to, to pursue writing your first book?

So I do think in stories, like I'm constantly. I sort of like I. My major undergrad was double majored in creative writing. And the writing end in child study with teaching certification.

So I've been a writer in my head for a long time and I had written for parents and was constantly working with writers in children's media. But this, this, this being my first time that I wrote the picture book.

It actually evolved during COVID when I was doing only telehealth with kids and I was working with a child at who was in her apartment with her cat and she was like petting her cat in her lap as we were talking about how to calm the threat response or the calm train her amygdala and her in her brain. And we made this connection. Oh, it's kind of like the way you train your cat.

You know, if you're stroking your cat and being kind to it and calm, how's your cat going to act? And then if you're screaming at the cat and the cat is getting the cat threat response is coming up, how's the cat going to be?

And so that night I laid awake for hours. You know, everything was so strange during COVID but I laid awake thinking, like, that's the hook, right? Like the.

How do you, how do you, how do you train your amygdala? And then I thought, how do we make it interesting?

Like, so it develops as a narrative, which led to the idea that the amygdala would be a character that's proud and overzealous and like, ready to protect. And then, oh, you know, makes a mistake halfway through the book and needs to ask the reader for help to help train it. And that's how it all started.

What would you like parents and kids, your target audience of kids, but maybe also parents, as you mentioned earlier. What would you like them to take away from this book?

I hope that we are working towards a time when the word amygdala and the understanding of brain function, it's sort of, this is the usual suspect, but the whole understanding of how our brains, our behaviors and feelings start in our brains becomes part of equitable, common language. So what I mean by that is I hope that the science doesn't stay up here inaccessible.

I want kids all over the world to have access to the understanding that of how their brain works and that they have a lot of control actually, and that they don't have to just feel like they're spinning where these things are just happening to me. And a lot of life is out of our control depending on our circumstances. The part that's in our control is where we usually manage anxiety.

And so I just really want this to be a conversation so we don't stop teaching kids about their bodies at the collarbone, and that we work up and help kids understand, because I think there's agency and power in that understanding.

And then we're equipping our kids and other people's kids, whoever it is that we work with or live with, for a more balanced life in the ways that they can be in control.

Anna Housley Schuster, author of how to Train your Amygdala as well as child and adolescent Mental Health Clinician really interesting conversation. Thank you so much for taking the time to be with us today.

Thank you so much for inviting me.