3. Helping your child stay calm during lockdown! (Sensory Experiences to Regulate)
Updated: Apr 24, 2020
Welcome to the 4th post in this series of blogs giving guidance, and tips, on how Yoga and movement can help your child (and you) get through the day with minimal upset and maximum enjoyment.
This series of blogs started with five key thoughts.
Five key thoughts
Appreciate your child’s, and your own, levels of alertness and how this varies during the day
Get in touch with all your sensations – these are food for our brains!
Understand how sensory experiences can help regulate our alertness levels
Become a sensory detective for your child (and yourself). Discover the sensations which alert or calm your child, and you. We are all different.
Use our yoga poses and bespoke music to gain that 'just right level of alertness'
We have explored thought 1 levels of alertness and thought 2 sensations the food for the brain.
Now we bring these two ideas together to ask ourselves how sensory experiences can impact on levels of alertness? Which sensory experiences wake us up? Which sensory experiences calm us down? How can we harness our sensory world to feel 'just right for learning'?
Sensory experiences, and how a we perceive them, can have a huge impact on our state of alertness. Reflect on the 'alertness staircase' (mentioned in the alertness levels post and shown below) and think about what type of sensations would move you, or your child, up or down the staircase - 'Wake me up' moves us up the staircase, 'calm me down' takes us down…
Some ideas. Is this true for you and your child? Remember we are all different!
Our Body Sensations and Levels of Alertness
To remind yourself on these 'body' sensations please see the previous blog post on sensations.
Proprioception
Often called the ‘safe sense’ by therapists, as proprioceptive input grounds us and organises our brain. Proprioceptive rich activities often make a great ‘movement break’.
Examples of yoga poses full of proprioceptive input include downwards dog, or crab where muscles have to work hard to lift the body off the ground.
Crab pose - for guidance on this pose see our blog.
The vestibular sense
Sometimes called the ‘volume control of the body’, the vestibular sense is crucial for our state of alertness. If we dial up vestibular input, by moving our head vigorously, we rapidly become more alert, indeed with too much vestibular input in one go can lead to overexcitement. If we dial down vestibular input, by keeping our heads still, we feel calmer.
Yoga poses full of vestibular input, as the head will be moving, include our frog pose or our volcano pose - this will be the pose of the week in one of our May sessions.
Maybe take time to reflect on your own, and your child's, sensory input during your days. Do your sensations support your levels of alertness? In our next blog we will be discussing how to be a 'sensory detective'.
Sue
Be apart together
Movement with a yoga twist is so good for mental and physical wellbeing. Our great franchisees continue to support their communities. Find out about virtual classes running in your local area at https://www.beaparttogether.com/virtual-classes
