Shanker – self-regulation model

The heart of self-regulation is really the autonomic nervous system, and there are two systems that are counter-balancing each other, the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system, and you can understand this in terms of a simple analogy: the sympathetic nervous system is a system that supplies energy to meet various challenges, various demands, the way the body works is that if the body’s going to direct its energy to meet some challenge that the child is trying to master will say, that energy has to come from somewhere else, and typically what happens, and we know this now from some wonderful research done by say, Steve Borges, what happens is the energy gets re-directed from the systems that are regulating your internal states: your temperature, food resources, so all of that, all of those resources get shunted over to those parts of the brain that are going to deal with this  challenge, well you can only do this for long before the body starts to suffer, you can only concentrate for a problem for so long, or try to deal with some sort of stressor before the body starts to get hungry or tired or, and the body sends out a signal: now it’s time to stop, it’s time to rest, it’s time to recover, and that’s when the parasympathetic system kicks in.  

The parasympathetic system is essentially a braking system, and this is essential to restore the body’s equilibrium. So we have these two forces that are counteracting each other: one is like a gas pedal and the other one is like a brake pedal; when a child is really self-regulating well, we call is optimal regulation, when a child is going really, really well, there’s a sort of seamless shifting back and forth between these two systems- the body spends some energy and then it recovers to prepare itself for the next challenge, whatever that might be, when a child starts to get into an allostatic condition, it’s a condition where the balance between these two systems is a little bit out of whack, it’s because there’s been too many stressors, the child is constantly putting his foot on the gas pedal, and because of that, constantly putting his foot on the brakes. Brakes, we kind of think of as having brake pads that can start to wear out, essentially if the child has too many stressors, then he’s activating his parasympathetic system, his braking system, the inhibition system a little bit too much, and this can have long-term consequences, it can have long-term consequences for how well that child will respond to stressors, physical and psychological, throughout the lifespan.