Podcast#12
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[00:00:00] Today I wanna talk about something you feel every day, but you may not always have the words for it or be conscious of this. And that is the energy in your home. Not just what your home looks like or what routines you have, but the, the sense. Of how it feels in the space, the emotional climate. Your house kind of has its own nervous system, and you've probably programmed the nervous system, at least in part, completely subconsciously.
Why is this important? Well. It's important because our children don't just grow up in our homes. They grow up inside of the nervous system of our homes, and it's more important than we [00:01:00] think children experience the world through the nervous system, and the majority of this is happening on a subconscious level, so it's not.
So much about you telling them in this house, we speak kindly to each other and everyone in this house deserves to feel their best when they're home. But it's more sort of the underlying subconscious cues that their nervous system is constantly picking up on. Am I safe here? Am I seen, what do I need to do to belong?
And we all do this, not just kids. If you go to work and every morning one of your coworkers looks at you and looks away without responding, when you say good morning to them, you're also gonna think, am I safe here? What do I need to do to belong? Have I done something I shouldn't have? That person can say something.
Nice to you at lunch that [00:02:00] maybe makes things seem more normal than the treatment you got in the morning, but you'll still be left with an underlying feeling in your body that says that something is off. Kids do exactly the same when they walk into a room. They aren't thinking logically. They are reading the tone of voice of the people in the room.
They're looking at the facial expressions or the tension in the bodies of the people there. They're feeling the emotional temperature of the space and their nervous system is constantly adjusting to these subconscious cues. Every home has a signature energy and each person who lives in that home contributes to that energy.
You felt this before. You walk into someone's home and it feels really inviting or really calm or peaceful. Or you walk into someone's home and it feels tense there or [00:03:00] heavy or chaotic. Nobody has to say anything. You just know. We've all had a friend when we were in school that we just really liked being at their house.
Right? Or maybe all of our friends wanted to come to our house. It was like the energy pull was so good, it just drew people in. And we also had the opposite, didn't we, at the friend's house where. Their parents seemed irritated or the energy felt off somehow, or we just, we had an underlying sense of not being comfortable in that space.
That's the nervous system of the home, and yours has one too. It's been shaped over time by stress levels, communication patterns and styles, emotional expression, the pace of the life that you live in, that home unresolved tension. And of course also how chaotic or how cluttered it looks. That plays into this as well.
But you don't necessarily get a warm, [00:04:00] inviting feeling home just because you pick up after yourself. It's a little bit more complex than that, so. The question is whether the energy in your home is something you have defaulted into or something you have consciously created. If the dominant energy in your home is calm and connected, children learn that the world is safe.
They can relax, they're supported. If it feels tense or unpredictable. They learn to stay on guard, to be reading the room and that their safety is not dependable. If the energy feels rushed or overstimulated, they learn to move fast. They learn that there's no time or space for their feelings, and rest isn't something we do here.
It's not safe, it's not allowed. And over time, your child internalizes and mirrors this environment. It becomes their normal, their baseline. And [00:05:00] since this baseline becomes the foundation for their nervous system as adults, it's really important for us as parents to be conscious of it. And if we aren't happy with how it has been, the really great news is that we can make a new, more conscious choice about that anytime we want.
We want our homes to be a place that the entire family can come to land. To reconnect with each other, but also with themselves. It can be really confusing trying to navigate a day full of other little confused, growing, developing people all day every day. It should feel nice and safe and relaxing and comforting to come home and to remember who you really are when you can hear yourself think again.
So. Stress and chaos spreads, but so does calm and relaxing. Children need their home to feel that [00:06:00] way for us as well because our kids are using our nervous system to co-regulate their own both before they can actually self-regulate, and even once they can self-regulate. Once they're more able to do that, they still borrow from our nervous system.
When things feel really confusing or really scary. So how can we shift the energy in our homes if we realize we need a change? We can start, first of all, by noticing how things are now and then defining for ourselves how we would love the energy in our homes to feel if we could have anything we wanted.
You can use a list, choose words that feel aligned with you. You could choose words like calming, peaceful, playful, connected, safe, energetic, and then you can think about the things that your family experiences through their five senses of [00:07:00] smell, taste, touch, hearing, and what they see when they come home.
You can make adjustments to maybe. An area or two that would make the most impact. Maybe you buy a diffuser and you diffuse essential oils like eucalyptus or lavender in the morning, or before bedtime. Maybe you tackle the mountain of shoes that everybody has to step over to get into the door. Maybe you decide that every time your child comes home, you get up from where you are and you go and give them a hug and a smile.
It can be small things and it can be whatever you want. It could be that you wanna focus more on routines you have in your home for how your family connects with how it feels in their own bodies, by making rules like you know, no phones come to the dinner table, or you play board games together on Friday nights to connect.
Or you go for a 20 minute walk after dinner every night. It may be that you really think about your [00:08:00] own tone of voice and how you speak to the people in your family. If someone came to your house who didn't speak your language, what energy would they pick up from the way you sound when you talk to each other?
If you mostly need help being less overstimulated and overworked yourself, maybe you need to set up routines for how to get the people in your family to help more with whatever things they can do themselves, and then you all get the reward of a. A family movie night or a night out at, I don't know, mini golf or something.
When I just said that I got a picture of one time my friend Rebecca and I took our kids. We have between the two of us, five kids in total. To play mini golf, and my youngest had the most epic tantrum. She was seven years old. I don't think I have ever seen her so mad. We still laugh about that trip. Every time we drive past the place, it's close to where my dad lives.
[00:09:00] She threw her golf club onto the ground, stomped on it, picked it up, and went and returned it to the reception area. We were halfway through the game because it was going badly for her. I have never seen her do anything like that before. And then after a few more holes, when she had calmed down and wanted to play again, she had to go back to the reception and ask if she could get her golf club back.
She is a true Leo, that kid, so I just thought about that. Maybe mini golf in an attempt to have better nervous system regulation was not a great idea. You adjust these ideas to your own family, but you get my point here. The main thing is just to bring some awareness to the idea that if our kids or our own nervous system has to go into defense mode every time we come home, this is going to have a long-term detrimental effect on our health and on the upside, we can easily modify our environment to produce more health in our bodies [00:10:00] by being aware of it and making some small changes that can really build up over time.
So I hope that was helpful, and I would love to hear from any of you about some of the things you do in your own homes to have a happier and a more calm, nervous system, both for yourself and for your kids. You can DM me on Instagram at Dr period Lisa Peterson. It's P-E-D-E-R-S-E-N. I would love to hear your ideas and what works in your family.
Thank you for being here. Thank you for listening.
