What’s in Your Bucket?

“I think we’ve created a culture where when we feel something negative, we think that someone should take it away, so we can feel relief. But every emotion we have is a signal to tell us how well we’re performing in the world… If we ignore these feelings, we don’t learn to read the signals and deal with them properly.”

 

Tricia Riddell has a point. As a Professor of Applied Neuroscience with Neuroscience for Education, she’s made it her mission over the last 15 years to take the study of the brain and apply it to the real world. The result is a fresh perspective on behaviour which we could all benefit from listening to.

 

When she speaks to LWC’s Academic and All-Round Scholars as part of our Listen, Wonder and Create Programme, she’s hoping to offer some practical insights into how to manage challenge and build resilience, based upon her years of research.

 

“One of the first things I want to do is encourage people to look at what’s in the stress bucket when they’re feeling stressed,” she explains. “We know when the bucket’s filling up, but we often don’t actually look at what’s inside. There are lots of different ways to be stressed, but once we start making some distinctions, we can start doing something practical about it.”

 

Sounds simple when you put it like that and the message couldn’t come at a better time for the LWC teenagers taking it in. The Listen, Wonder and Create Programme is designed to enrich academic learning, encourage personal growth and illustrate the benefits of reflection at a pivotal time in their lives.

 

“Even many adults feel that emotions are just a distraction,” Professor Riddell continues. “But that’s just stiff-upper lip. In fact, to carry on and ignore them is a waste of good information. This information is highly useful. It’s how we develop empathy – by recognising how we feel and wondering if someone else is feeling like this.”

 

For those preparing to take exams this year, Tricia gives an example. “Listen to how you’re feeling and if it’s uncomfortable, that’s ok. If you’re anxious about exams, it may be because you’re not prepared for them yet. So think what you can do to make yourself feel better. This will help you respond to the emotion, rather than wanting someone to take the exams away because you don’t want to feel anxious.”

 

“Someone I worked with was diagnosed with cancer… She created what she called her ‘Dopamine Diary’ and said that she wasn’t going to deal with her cancer only as a risk, but instead would look at all the opportunities it gave her. This helped her to manage her journey better and because she was coping well, her family coped better too.”

— Professor Tricia Riddell

 

Aside from championing us to feel and deal with our emotions, Tricia is also an advocate of understanding brain development and its impact on our behaviour. This is particularly relevant for young people, when you consider that the brain continues to develop and mature until the mid to late 20s.

 

“I can tell you that from my own perspective, knowing what might be happening for someone in terms of the way their brain is working and therefore, the behaviour that we’re seeing has given me compassion,” she reveals. “You realise that’s how you would behave if you were in their situation, with their level of development and with everything that’s happened.”

 

For the teenagers listening to Tricia’s talk, it’s important to consider where they sit in the developmental journey. “They are at the point of beginning to learn how to regulate their emotions, but this isn’t fully developed yet,” she explains.

 

So how do you go about not only dealing with emotions and finding a useful application for these feelings, but also building resilience?

 

“The way you build resilience is by having things happen to you that you emerge from and think ‘that was horrible, but I’ve learned a lot about myself in the process’. Obviously, we hope that most students won’t have had these experiences yet, but rather than waiting for them to happen, we can give them the tools to start thinking about how they can manage in these situations. I share a model with them which gives some suggestions of what they can do if they’re feeling anxious or depressed. The result is that they start taking responsibility for their own state and have a way of thinking about what they can do to feel better in the moment.”

 

Photo Credit: Professor Tricia Riddell

 

Tricia is keen to encourage us to understand that we all have a choice about how we view the world and as a result, how we behave. “We respond to the story that we tell ourselves, rather than what’s really happening in the world,” she continues. “Six people can see the same thing happening, but it can affect them differently because they each tell themselves a different story. Understanding your narrative and thinking about whether changing it would get a better result is key and introduces choice.”

 

When it comes to examples of how applying research to the real world has changed lives, Tricia reels off a stream of case studies, from young children and their motivated response to pocket money, to people being made redundant and emerging from it feeling better, having understood how their brain processed the information.

 

“Someone I worked with was diagnosed with cancer and understanding how her brain worked was never going to make the cancer go away, but it made the processing of the diagnosis easier for her and as a result, for her family,” Tricia elaborates. “She created what she called her ‘Dopamine Diary’ and said that she wasn’t going to deal with her cancer only as a risk, but instead would look at all the opportunities it gave her. This helped her to manage her journey better and because she was coping well, her family coped better too.”

 

In short, it’s important not to sweep negative feelings away. Allow yourself to acknowledge them and give you the information you need to take some next steps. All of this will be influenced by the stage of your brain’s development, but there will often be a choice in how you view it and what you can do next.

 

It all begins with what’s in the bucket.

 

Professor Tricia Riddell will be talking about ‘Stress and Resilience’ as part of LWC’s Listen, Wonder and Create Programme for Academic and All-Round Scholars on Monday, 24^th November at 6.45pm in the Nadine Uppal Theatre. Students and staff from the wider College are welcome to attend.