We know that the brain is not born fully developed!
We know that the brain must move through a specific trajectory of development.
We know that stress can impact the brain.
There are changes that happen in the body as a result of stress that can impact the way a child moves through development and/or processes their world. Our clinical approach looks for these changes, click here to read our approach.
But we also know that it isn’t just the presence of stress that impacts the body and brain but an individual's ability to adapt and handle stress. Too much stress or an inability to adapt to stress can negatively impact our health and brain.
When we are unable to adapt and handle stress, we FEEL it! We feel the physiological changes in our body as it shifts into a more sympathetic state in our nervous system: increased heart rate, muscle tension, shallow breathing, sweating, digestive changes, nervousness, visual changes, headaches, and more.
An inability to adapt to life’s stressors can cause dysregulation of the autonomic nervous system (dysautonomia). Our autonomic nervous system is unable to appropriately shift between a sympathetic state (fight, flight, or freeze) and a parasympathetic state (rest, digest, heal, grow). This causes an individual to live in a more sympathetic state, which is not an optimal state to grow, learn, or heal.
Too much stress that an individual is unable to handle causes compensations and physiological adaptations in the body.
Two examples are:
2) Negative gut changes.
These physiological changes impact communication between the brain and the body and cause stress.
We know that stress can impact the brain!
This means stress can also impact development!
As our brain develops, they move through a specific trajectory of development. From the bottom to the top, the brain develops, and as it develops, we gain more sophisticated tools for processing, connecting, and learning from our world.
How we are able to use those tools and the efficiency of those tools is determined by how we move through development. Behaviors are then windows into an individual's brain and help us understand how they are primarily processing.