S3 Episode 21: Why Healing Is Never Just About The Child - Understanding The Family Nervous System in an Overwhelmed World with BG Mancini

Welcome back to My Mighty Quinn

In this deeply compassionate and eye-opening episode, I’m joined by BG Mancini — neurodevelopmental specialist, functional medicine practitioner and educator, whose work has spent almost three decades connecting the dots between the nervous system, sensory processing, movement, the gut and the emotional wellbeing of the entire family.

This conversation feels more urgent than ever.

Because children today appear increasingly overwhelmed.

More anxious.
More sensory-sensitive.
More emotionally reactive.
More exhausted.
And, in many cases, less able to adapt to the relentless demands and stimulation of modern life.

But this episode is not simply about what is happening to our children.

It is about what is happening to all of us.

Together, BG and I explore the concept of the family nervous system — and why healing can never happen by looking at the child in isolation.

Because when a child is struggling, the parent is often struggling too.

When a mother has spent years holding everyone else above the water, her own body may eventually begin to shut down.

And when an entire family is living in survival mode, everybody’s physiology, behaviour, emotions and capacity for connection can be affected.

BG helps us understand how stress is not always one enormous, identifiable event. Often, it is the accumulation of hundreds of smaller experiences — sensory overload, disrupted sleep, inflammation, digital stimulation, environmental stress, emotional strain and the constant pressure of trying to hold everything together.

These “micro-traumas” can gradually drain the body’s reserves until even an ordinary demand begins to feel like a threat.

But this is also a conversation filled with hope.

Because healing does not require us to change everything overnight.

Sometimes the smallest intervention — a moment of movement, touch, silence, visual rest, nourishment or connection — can begin to shift the nervous system towards greater safety and resilience.

Key takeaways

• What the “family nervous system” means — and why healing is never just about the child
• How the accumulation of small, everyday stresses can gradually overwhelm the nervous system
• Why the goal is not to eliminate all stress, but to build the resilience and flexibility to recover from it
• How neuroception shapes whether the brain and body perceive the world as safe or threatening
• Why the gut and microbiome can influence inflammation, anxiety, emotional regulation and neurological function
• How vestibular, proprioceptive and interoceptive input help children feel safer within their bodies
• What shutdown, numbness and “the lights are on but nobody is home” can reveal about prolonged survival stress
• The biological importance of co-regulation — and why parental self-care is not selfish or optional
• BG’s powerful 5% rule — and why small, accessible changes are often more effective than overwhelming protocols
• Simple micro-resets families can use through movement, touch, rhythm, visual exercises, nourishment and connection
• Why play, joy, hope and community are not luxuries, but physiological resources for healing

If you have ever wondered why your child appears unable to cope with things other children seem to manage…

If you have tried countless protocols and felt increasingly overwhelmed by everything you are “supposed” to be doing…

If your child has started to improve, only for your own body to begin falling apart…

Or if you recognise yourself as the mother beneath the water, holding everybody else above the surface…

This episode is for you.

You do not have to do everything.

You do not have to do it perfectly.

And you do not have to heal alone.

Sometimes healing begins with one small moment of safety, repeated gently over time.

Because when we support the family nervous system, we create more regulation, more resilience, more connection — and more possibility for everyone.

Resources

The MicroResets™ List - Gentle Nervous System Resets for Parents and Children

BG Mancini's Website

Transcript

Lucia Silver (00:00)
Today's episode is very importantly entitled, Why Healing is Never Just About the Child, Understanding the Family Nervous System in an Overwhelmed World with BG Mancini. Welcome back to My Mighty Quinn, a mother's conversations with world leading experts, the podcast where we bring you the doctors, researchers, clinicians, therapists, and pioneers helping parents connect the dots.

behind the growing epidemic of neurological, behavioral, emotional, and developmental struggles affecting so many children today. And today's conversation feels more relevant than ever. Because years ago, right at the beginning of our journey at the Brain Health Movement, we interviewed today's wonderful guest, BG Mancini, about something called the family nervous system. At the time,

Many of these ideas still felt relatively new and a little bit niche. Conversations around polyvagal theory, co-regulation, neuroception, nervous system safety, sensory overload, and Bee Gees very particular micro traumas and the brain gut connection were only just beginning to enter mainstream parenting and therapeutic spaces. But now these conversations feel quite a bit less niche. In fact,

I think many parents, teachers and practitioners can physically feel what BG was trying to explain years ago. We see much more conversation, including language around fight or flight, for example. Children seem more overwhelmed, more dysregulated, more anxious, more sensory sensitive, more emotionally reactive, more exhausted.

and in many cases less resilient to the increasing demands, stimulation and stresses of modern life. And perhaps the most important thing BG's work helps us understand is this. The goal is actually not to remove all stress as much as we would love that from life. It ain't gonna happen. Stress, challenge and adaptation are really a part of being human in this modern world. So the question is,

Does the nervous system have the resilience, flexibility and physiological safety required to process, recover from and integrate those experiences? Or does the body begin storing stress and threat within its systems over time? Because the way our bodies respond to the world, as we're always saying at the Brain Health Movement, the way our bodies respond to the world around us ultimately shapes our health.

BG Mancini AP, MHSc (02:24)
Mm.

Lucia Silver (02:48)
our behavior, our emotions, our resilience, our relationships, and even the way we experience safety itself. BG Mancini has spent almost 30 years, I don't know how she looks like she does, but has spent almost 30 years working at the intersection of neurodevelopment, functional medicine, movement integration, retained reflexes, developmental vision,

Holly Weigel theory and the brain gut access. Sounds complicated, but as we talk through all of this will start to make sense and her work uniquely bridges so many of the disciplines we educate parents about here at the Brain Health Movement, helping families understand how physiology, nervous system regulation, environment, sensory processing, emotional wellbeing and connection are all profoundly intertwined.

And perhaps most importantly, she reminds me and all of us that healing is never just about the child. It is about the entire family nervous system. Beejee, a warmest welcome back to my mighty Quinn.

BG Mancini AP, MHSc (04:01)
Thank you. It's so good to see you and be here again.

Lucia Silver (04:05)
So BG, we're going to start directly into why this conversation matters so much now. When we first spoke, I say years ago, like I've been doing this for a decade, haven't, we're kind of approaching the end of our year too. But when we first spoke years, that time ago about the family nervous system, these ideas still felt a little bit ⁓ new, I guess, to a lot of parents and practitioners.

Why do you think this conversation suddenly feels so much more relevant and urgent right now?

BG Mancini AP, MHSc (04:39)
So I think, you know, when I started working with kids 18 years ago, you know, I was working with adults for 10, 12 years before that. But the feeling, the image that I had was that the train had hit the wall and kids were flying through the air. And I think that now, because of the overwhelm of living in a world that really is quite unbalanced for where our systems are able to process things, I think parents are experiencing it more.

This overwhelmed sense, this need for more adaptations in order to feel comfortable in their own brain and bodies. And then that's getting translated for children. You know, it's here's what it looks like in adults, here's what it looks like in kids. And this is the language that helps to depathologize many of the diagnosis that kids are getting. And so I think that.

People are hungry and searching for something that feels more number one, agency producing, because when we name things and understand through a lens, you know, if we if we put the same image in front of my glasses and one's foggy and one's not, right? And if we sort of clean up the foggy end and give it new understanding, then we can process these things differently. And so then families start to work together and kids start to understand what's happening. And many of the children that

you know, we we see are old enough to need language to understand what's really happening on a physiological basis, it takes the fear away, right? It helps to reduce that because they're not in control of their own bodies a lot of the time. So we want to give them that agency restored.

Lucia Silver (06:22)
indeed we want to give that agency restored to parents as well in order to advocate, right? I mean, the agency piece is for everyone. We need to be absolute agents of our health and take back our voice to some extent from the over-pathologizing that is happening because what I'm finding is so many parents present to me, Beejee, you know, I have a diagnosis, there endeth the story, as opposed to...

Well, that's great. You have a diagnosis. How about we now ask why, why we got here or what's really the drivers underneath it? So it's our encouragement and our invitation to our beautiful families is to begin the journey here and to stay curious. And I really wanted to ask you, know, across these 30 years of practice, how have your observations of children, families and nervous system resilience evolved?

BG Mancini AP, MHSc (06:55)
Mm-hmm.

Lucia Silver (07:18)
What do you genuinely feel is perhaps worsening and are there areas where you feel awareness and understanding are perhaps improving as well?

BG Mancini AP, MHSc (07:29)
So I think just giving a little timeline of how I was practicing might actually answer that. You know, 30 years ago, working with chronic illness and neurodevelopmental challenges in kids through movement and through health ⁓ food as medicine, that was enough. Okay. Food as medicine and a little bit of movement therapies were enough to see tremendous changes in reversal of all sorts of chronic diagnosis. Then 20 years ago, it was.

Food and movement and maybe some herbs, tiny bit of supplementation. I mean there's minimal and still seeing these profound reversals, these profound impacts. Ten years ago, it was food, lots of supplementation, herbs, some lifestyles. Since COVID, it's all of the above, plus plus, plus. But the thing is, really, from my perspective, it's

Now having to having reached that pinnacle of okay, we were doing so much, because systems are so sensitive now and reactive, because you know we are processing up to a billion bits of information per second, is what neuroscience shows us. Pardon me, but only about 30 to 50 bits are conscious. And so if we think about how much we're actually processing and the amount of reserves that we're using to do so, you know, it really brings it to.

Finding the smallest intervention. It's almost like I'm going back to the origin, right? Where is the nervous system willing to accept a new intervention? Whether that's a touch therapy, a movement, a supplement, red light therapy, lasers, you know, any of these things are all information. And it's becoming more apparent to me that the more reactive a system is, the smaller introduction, titration of information we want to give to the body to see, does this feel safe?

Because I'll bet everyone listening here has had the experience of trying something that worked for their best friend or worked for someone else's child and then saw a different reaction than what they were expecting. It was it was a worsening of effects. So really just these small cumulative changes that don't have, because we know there's no magic pill. We know there's no magic exercise, right? And so we want to start with where's the accessible point for our own nervous systems?

And where is the accessible point for our children?

Lucia Silver (09:58)
And where for you are you feeling with this, if you like, worsening level of stresses, more demands on the nervous system? Where, conversely, just on a positive note before we drill a bit deeper, do you feel there are areas where awareness and understanding is simultaneously improving? Because that's important. We can't address it if we don't recognize it's happening.

BG Mancini AP, MHSc (09:59)
Yeah, I think

Yeah.

Sure. So I would say, and yes, everything is punctuated with this is a message of hope because we are naming things and giving language to what is impacting us so that we can start to change and impact those things. And we don't have to change a hundred things at once.

Because sometimes just a little bit of an intervention, if we put on blue blocking glasses at night and that gets us five percent better sleep, which over the course of a week gets us significantly better sleep, right? And then we then our brain has cleaned out during the night and then we feel better, right? Then we have more restoration and reserves, which we'll definitely talk about. ⁓ and so you know, I think that.

The fact that these conversations are being more welcomed, they're being integrated into more mainstream practices. I do have, you know, ⁓ gastrointestinal doctors, I do have neurologists, I do have ⁓ SLP OT and PTs that are taking my classes, who are interested in how do I connect all this, you know, GIs who want to know ⁓ what do you mean anxiety is starting in the gut potentially, right? So it's it's really.

It is optimistic and a lot of times it's all of us, like both the people who are teaching and talking, linking arms, and then also just the parents bringing that into their conversations so that you know the more we link arms, the more we push fields forward.

Lucia Silver (11:46)
Yes, and the more we co-regulate, which we're going to come into as well, because a big piece of this pie, you know, I was laughing to myself, Biji, when you were saying, know, 10 years ago, it was just this, this and this. And now it's this, this and then all of these protocols and supplements that in turn are stressing us out. I was laughing because there are days sometimes when I don't watch myself with Quinn and I'm like, have you drunk? Have you seen sunlight first thing this morning? Give me this morning.

BG Mancini AP, MHSc (11:47)
Yes.

Lucia Silver (12:12)
Have you done your breathing exercise? And I'm thinking, oh my God, the biggest problem here right now is the stress state that I'm in when he got home. He's actually doing really well, you know, just to take a bit of a humor pill for a minute, because I think we are so, all of us, overwhelmed. Like you and I were talking about before we hopped onto the podcast, how many of you mums out here are scheduling a time to try and call a girlfriend and then you can't even get on that shit? Do you remember the time when you just called someone?

spontaneously without thinking it was a assumptive of their time or demanding. Now you're just like, I'm not going to call anybody. They're busy. They don't have time to speak. yeah, yeah. Who would ever do that? know? Yeah. I mean, we, we are most of us navigating ourselves fairly permanently out of a nervous system that is already at max and doing its best to kind of adapt its state.

BG Mancini AP, MHSc (12:50)
Quickly used knock on the door.

Lucia Silver (13:10)
But what we're not, which is I think one of the worsening factors, is we're less and less available to one another to provide that co-regulation down regulation as well. So as part of that worsening bigger picture is how we service everybody, which is where I love where you sit with this. It's so important that we look at the whole ecosystem, if you like, the whole family.

And a thing that I think your work explains beautifully is that modern life itself placing increasing stressful loads on the nervous system can be seen via something you call micro traumas. ⁓ I find this really, really helpful in keeping my awareness on it moment to moment. And I'd love you to talk to us about why this accumulation of so many small stresses rather than why

huge event gradually overwhelms the system because again I'll just give it some context many of the parents that I speak to in my one-to-one parent coaching sessions are sort of well I haven't had one big trauma I don't feel like any big thing happened in some cases there really has been you know particularly with parents of children with pans if there was an abrupt onset that's a traumatic event for sure it certainly was for me and parents have heard me talking very openly about how I contended with that

impact. But I think it's really important this piece on micro traumas and the gradual accumulation. There might have been a straw that breaks the camel's back, right? But could you talk to us a little bit about that, please, BG?

BG Mancini AP, MHSc (14:52)
So I remember ⁓ 30 years ago, actually, probably a little bit longer, Michio Kushi was one of my first teachers. He was the founder of macrobiotics and he taught about food as medicine. I learned a tremendous amount from him. Remember, I was doing a project for the Smithsonian called the History of Alternative and Complimentary Medicine in America. So it was a long time ago. And I, my back for the first time in my life.

Hurt so badly. It was like three days to the black tie opening. I'd been working on it for two years and I couldn't stand. And he spoke in broken English. And I couldn't, I was in the study house and I said, Michio, I can't get up. It was late at night. And like he had his assistant was there. And I said, I don't know what to do. This just happened. And he said to me into his assistant in broken English, he said, So interesting. They always say, just happened.

not building, building, building, you know, and that stuck with me so clearly because when we talk about, you know, the idea of neuroception, which was a term coined by Dr. Stephen Porges, the founder of Polyvagal Theory, neuroception is this unconscious, subconscious, ⁓ let's call it a lens or sort of a radar through which we process what's coming into our system.

Now that's largely happening unconsciously. So whether or not the hum of my lamp or the leaf blower outside is starting to grate on my nerves is going to depend on what state I'm in at this moment. What is my viewpoint? What is my lens, right? So if I'm, you know, if you think about Edronic's ⁓ still face experiment, okay, the still face experiment is one where they had, I think it was the 70s or 80s. ⁓

Where they had a mom who was distracted, or you know, what the baby's reaction to that was, and how the face, when it went still, was terrifying and very distressing for the child. And so when we go into these modes of

viewing the world largely unconsciously, even if it's a neutral face, let's say, as you walk through the mall or you're in the street, neutral, and it's getting red as threat, depending upon where your system is, it's not a conscious thing, but constantly inside it feels like it is. So little bits because of what our lens is, is landing as threat, threat. The grate of that sound is a little bit of a threat, threat if my nervous system is saying

Auditorily, everything coming in feels really stressful. What is that doing? It's using my metabolic resources just to stay functioning right here in this moment. And then it drains those over time. And as the next one comes in, or a bigger real stress, what we would call real stress, right? But just like you, when I talk to families and they say, Well, I didn't really have a traumatic childhood and I didn't really have, you know, we move the goal line.

Of our traumas, our stress, our health issues, how we're feeling our pain levels, we move it forward based on what we can deal with, right? So we dealt with it. Okay, well, then it wasn't that big of a deal because I survived, right? But when we really sit with how that impacted us and how it wired our nervous system and our brain to that moment, because here's a key point: is that

Our brain and our body and our nervous system are extremely efficient. And so nature does not waste resources. So it's going to utilize through prediction and history: hey, the peptides and the hormones and the chemical state that I experienced during that is being emulated again, being recreated right now from whatever reason, inflammation, stress, whatever. And so then we then associate sometimes back to.

That experience through those experiences that we're having physiologically. So we really want to be mindful about what is happening in this moment that is impacting us in a way, and how do we make some simple changes? It can be as simple as changing out a lamp so that the hum is not there as much for you. ⁓ Putting ⁓ a sound guard against our HVAC, which in America is very common. You know, we have these loud compressors.

Put an air purifier in because everyone has dust, everyone has little bits of mold, everyone has pollen for the springtime. And so, you know, or is it a humidifier or a dehumidifier? What are these small environmental changes that can have tremendous impacts on lowering inflammation, histamine, MCAS, and all those things?

Lucia Silver (19:35)
So it's a very central point then, neuroception, or we could call it neuroception of safety. And it's very, what you're saying as well is it's incredibly bio individual. What may bother one person may not bother another, right? So a lot of it is in becoming aware of what you or your child is responding to in a given environment. I mean, it's that moment as well at the simplest level when you turn, I do this a lot when I've been sort of.

is a part of me that really wants to dance to the radio in the kitchen and Quinn and I are like jumping around and I think this is great, know, we're having a book. But then if I carry on having the music on and then I'm cooking and then I turn it off, I'm like, my god, thank god. ⁓ silence. You know, don't, sometimes you don't realize when enough is enough. Sometimes you don't, you're not picking up on that. So how, how do we become more aware of that? I mean, is neuroception,

in itself the level of awareness. mean, how do we, how can we get better at that BG so we don't go past the point of nervous exhaustion, if you like, because it was blaring and we did need silence or we did need quiet. But what, yeah, how can we help our children?

BG Mancini AP, MHSc (20:48)
Yeah.

So first I would just ⁓ refine you know the idea of neuroception is going to neurocept safety or threat, right? So it's it's really more of this external, this radar picture like a sort of beautiful lens around you or a little bubble, right? And it's sort of is my lens perceiving safety in the world? Am I feeling safe enough?

So that things that are coming in are going to feel safe enough, whether it's loud, toxic, noxious, whatever. Or am I in a state where everything coming in, or some things coming in, are going to feel more triggering, reactive, threat-producing on every physiological level? ⁓ it really depends on how much safety we're we're garnering from within, right? So then to your question.

I think naming things, you know, our brain can't predict or using history when it doesn't have language, like what I talk about. So when I talk about brain, gut sensory axis right? We're we're talking about the fact that and when I say sensory, of course we have our five, right, which is vision, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. But then bringing in vestibular.

Proprioceptive. So vestibular is the middle ear is helping through our brainstem to figure out where we are in time and space. Are we safe? Can I turn my head without getting dizzy? ⁓ can I move through the world in an equilateral manner? Okay, proprioceptive is the input that we get through our joints, right? So sometimes we're sitting still for so long, and kids in classes, right? Just having, just taking our wrists and our ankles, even as we're sitting here, okay, and rotating them.

Actually sends cues to the brain that I know where I am in time and space and I'm safe. When we sit still for so long, we actually lose some of the connection to our body. And our brain always wants to know are we safe in this moment? So input, that's why heavy, heavy work for kids, pushing, pulling, that kind of thing. And then also interoception, which a lot of kids struggle with, which is this sense of not just there's two different definitions for interoception.

Interoception is yes, this felt sense of the body. You know, am I feeling peaceful? Can I take a breath? Do I feel these things? But interoception is also a biological term that says our organs are constantly sending cues back and forth up to the brain and back so that we can understand what the state of affairs in our body is, process it through the brain, and then the brain sends affirmation or changes as it can.

And then finally we have neurosception. So I look at it through a nine-piece lens. And so for ⁓ for families to start to identify that these are parts of our existence that are happening, whether we name them or not. And also if we name them and become aware of them, and it's not about hypervigilance and scanning and it's where can I put up some of these micro resets, which we'll talk about, right? And that's really where.

The magic happens. These tiny little inputs, if you add a little proprioception in, or some compression with your hand, or even putting your hands on your abdomen, it changes your microbiome. That is a reset that then re improves your heart rate variability. That's a reset that helps lower your blood pressure. So if we can put these things in that are no-brainers, right? That don't take a lot of effort and meet us where we are in that moment, then ⁓

We can start to use language in a way that helps prepare our children to use this vehicle that they get through life, right? And also for us to reset and then ultimately for us to do these things either together or to be able to talk about them and create these connections.

Lucia Silver (24:48)
And this

is a very positive approach, particularly because much of it is preventative. Once you understand it, you can put these wonderful

protocols, that sounds kind of sciencey I don't mean it to, but it's really about, you know, the awareness to put this support in place, as opposed to then dealing with your child who has had the meltdown because there was so much noise, because there were so many people, because there were all of these things and they're having an appropriate response because their nervous system is responding to not feeling safe. But the point is, how can we little by little create the safety

that maybe mitigates against that happening less perhaps. So your work bridges a lot of this, if you like emotional wellbeing space with the physiology of our bodies really. And can you help parents understand then let's just dig a little bit deeper with how the nervous system, sensory processing and the brain gut connection.

which is really kind of what we're surmising here, these three things, all influence, resilience, and regulation and behavior. What is the connection? Why, when one is affected, does it impact on the other? What's actually happening, BG?

BG Mancini AP, MHSc (26:06)
And so, you know, our microbiome is something that is largely misunderstood. Of course, there's wonderful research that's coming out now. And there's a great documentary, Hack Your Health, on Netflix, that I like to recommend for families because it's so easy to understand, it's a little animated and it's enjoyable. ⁓ but essentially, our microbiome is, and from the bottom up.

80% of the signals in our body are coming up to our brain, 20% go back down. And so our body is again interocepting all of these cues to our brain. So the microbiome is in constant communication with our autonomic nervous system. It's in constant communication with our central nervous system. Right. And so these cues, we want to make sure that.

What's going up, what's being sent, is actually a balanced signal, something that is resilient. We have to make sure that our microbiome is healthy because, you know, a quick dabble into ⁓ the gut, our gut is supposed to be closed, right? The junctions. When it opens, that's what we call leaky gut, right? Or intestinal permeability.

But what happens is when that's open, food particles, bacteria, viruses go through, then inflammation's created, cytokine storms, which everyone talked about, but also signals to the brain can impact the vestibular system, right? Gluten ataxia is a thing. You know, when people eat gluten and they suddenly become unbalanced, they actually can't walk straight. We'll take that on a lesser level. I actually wrote a clinical note on.

gliadin or gluten and how it's impacting the nervous system and the brain and triggering cell danger response in both autism and pans. And while that doesn't mean that everyone needs to be mindful of every single thing they eat, there are some of us who do need to be mindful of certain things because it's going to have an inflammatory process that we can't ignore. And so this idea of you know gut microbiome,

Creating also many of the hormones, many of the neuropeptides, that then we have a sense, those get created, and then we have a sensation from them. And then our brain quickly builds the emotional story and brain story around what that feeling sensation was, because the that's already been created, the hormones are there now, now we feel it. And then our brain goes into.

Okay, this was like that. Am I still safe? Remember, it's always about orienting to safety. ⁓ this feels like that one time that happened, or what's about to happen, because the last time this happened, right? So we're always trying to navigate how do we keep our body within what I call the metabolic window of tolerance, you know, with enough resources and the right resources in our building blocks so that we can have that story as it comes up be one of I'm safe enough.

Because then what that does is our brain can then go back down and say, okay, now this is what safe enough feels like. And the next time I feel this, it's going to be okay. ⁓

Lucia Silver (29:23)
Yes, and we recover perhaps or

we adapt more quickly next time. may not. that's because sometimes I think the journey, which you and I talk about all the time is not a linear one, nor is it a, you know, a one hit wonder magic pill. It is a steady, compassionate, I like to call it, you know, deeply gentle journey ⁓ of extreme awareness. And my girlfriend just

last week popped off to Pisa and she has struggled with anxiety on and off in the last ⁓ years until she discovered cold water swimming, which, you know, as we know, in many of our podcasts and free guides can be one of the helpful depending on it's not a unilateral, it's not like deep breathing for everybody or cold water swimming for ever. It really is dependent on where your nervous system is sitting. But for her,

It seemed to work wonders and she goes religiously. I mean, I'm talking five or six times a week, she cold water plunges and it just seems to have done the most incredible things for her nervous system. But BG, she called me a few days ago, she'd just come back from Pisa and she was like, Lucia, I don't understand. I'm having massive anxiety and nothing particularly has happened. I can't wait to get back into the pool, but I don't understand.

And I said there had been something emotional that had happened, which I think had triggered her, but that's just sort of by the, a little bit by the by, as you say, but you know, micro traumas, these are all contributing factors. But what was really interesting is I said to her, you don't normally have too much gluten and, and pasta. Did you have pasta? Cause you were back in Italy and she was like, yeah, I had a lot.

BG Mancini AP, MHSc (31:07)
Yeah.

Lucia Silver (31:10)
And was like, well, isn't that it? Because we don't kind of, if you've had a little bit of a pasta problem over these, you might think you're going to get that pregnant belly or you're going to feel it physiologically. Some do, some don't, but would you remember that it, you know, it messes if you happen to know that kind of some of the neuroscience around it, you your GABA, your serotonin, all sorts of things are kind of interfered with that might ordinarily calm the excitability. They're kind of off whack because the gluten kind of interferes with some of that.

the inflammation and so forth and before you know it you're manifesting with anxiety right so this is where these if you like cross references or the importance of not just the whole family but the whole ecosystem and how in a way I feel like I don't know if you agree B G but the nervous system is the kind of mothership it's directing so much of what's going on and when it's off

out of whack and self danger response that it in turn the guts out of whack and when the guts out of whack it in turn is impacting on you know it's a very delicate little system right? Isn't it?

BG Mancini AP, MHSc (32:16)
Yeah, it is. And it's really, as you said, it it is a reciprocal. That's why I'm always going like this, right? It's a feedback loop, but there's 12 feedback loops or a hundred feedback loops, and we're still learning about more of them. And so, you know, the heart feedback loop to the brain, the you know, the liver to the brain, there are all these accesses that we have to be mindful of. Now we can't pay attention to everything all at once, but what you're naming is this idea that

Lucia Silver (32:22)
Yeah.

BG Mancini AP, MHSc (32:43)
How do we work with these systems that are overly activated? And that for me, it's one micro moment at a time. You know, and it's just the example that I use is if you're in California and you take off on a plane headed for New York and you're one degree off, you end up somewhere in Newark. Very different place, very different than where you originally intended to go, right? But if we can.

keep ourselves through these micro resets just continually easing the pressure, letting the pressure valve off. Even when it comes to being on a computer, right? Can we allow our eyes to just drift left and right? Although in this case it's left and right. So that it releases some of the visual strain. Visual system uses so many of our brain's resources. And so many of the kids that we work with, right, they have their peripheral vision goes offline.

Well, that's a threat because now they can't see what's really happening. They can see their eyes work perfectly, but the brain is not processing the same, right? And so can we use VOR, vestibular ocular reflex, you know, where we're putting our thumb in front of our face? Let me see if you can see it. I'm just keeping it still and then keep my eyes on it. And then can we go up and down? If you do this.

Moms and dads, anyone who's listening, you will generally feel a real ease of tension in your head and almost like an instant relaxation because it's reorienting your brain, your body, your eyes, your visual system, which we keep hyper micro focused on our screens all day. And what do when do we have that in history? We stay hyper-vigilant when we're in threat. We keep our eyes

Piercely focused forward. So in our screens, they're generally we're not our phones are not big enough for our eyes to go left and right. We're not getting as much ⁓ distance vision, right? Because everything is so built up around us now. And on the computer, generally it's big enough where our eyes don't have to scan left and right either. And so it really is one of those brilliant access points that we can just start to work with and get a lot of that compounding interest in order to start building up.

The reserves, so that as we move out of our metabolic window of tolerance, we have a faster opportunity to recover. And then over time, that adaptation adaptation starts to build more reserves. And then we move on towards the life of connection, joy, reconnection to purpose, fun, and all the things, not just losing symptoms.

Lucia Silver (35:23)
It makes me think it's as you're mentioning a few of these moments where

you're staring at a screen, you're sitting still all day, you're, you know, in many ways the cards are stacked against us in daily life. And I mean that in a hopeful sense because the more we become aware of what it means to stare forwards to the nervous system, to sit still to the nervous system, to...

for a child who is, and I remember one of the most powerful things I did with Quinn at the beginning of our story really was getting his balance back, getting his eyes on track, getting the primitive reflex work we did because he went from having no balance to being balanced. He went from falling over and being pretty clumsy. He went from being last in the running race to being the first. mean, he became, it transformed him physiologically and with that,

the fear state was softened because as you rightly say, if you're not balanced and your body doesn't know where it is in time and space, you're not safe. Imagine an animal, I mean, how often would you ever see an animal tottering around unbalanced, but it can happen. ⁓

BG Mancini AP, MHSc (36:35)
And stay there for just a moment. You know, what you just talked about with the fear state, you know, that amygdala, right, that brings ⁓ that is primarily reactive, right, for the for the fear. If you think about the fact that we can retrain other parts of the brain to be more active, which also calms that amygdala down. So if we're doing prefrontal lobe exercises, if we're using metronome training or

⁓ bilateral exercises like running, swimming, even just taking our hands and going across our body. It does, it it strengthens one area that helps to calm down and balance the other areas.

Lucia Silver (37:09)
Just on the midline. ⁓

Yeah, it's bit of a yin and yang and it is. If we look at how often the amygdala is on high alert, then how often can we bring in exercises and processes? We did a wonderful little exercise sheet in the podcast with Aaron from Hybrid Fitness on all of these things to physically calm down the nervous system. Because quite often when kids get back from school, that terrible time of transition at sort of four o'clock when they've been in the...

of managing fight or flight all day long, they get home and they're just ready to explode. It's wonderful to have some sort of adaptations to throw at them where they can just kind of let it go, right? But I want to move from there, B G to something that took me a while to recognize because I think we feel we recognize meltdowns, we recognize ⁓

when we're in a, like I was describing to you, that kind of crazy stress state, we're in a kind of hyper stress state. But what I didn't recognize in myself is that kind of the lights are on, but nobody's at home where you have been managing for so long, a level of chronic stress. ⁓ And there is, you and I've talked about it before, between us, know, that state of sort of dorsal vagal where you have been in it for so long, you've kind of adapted to

shut down because you can't be in the lions in the room state all the time. Your nervous system and your physiology can't possibly be at that heart rate, at that cortisol release and so on. Instead it moves into this space of minimum output in order to just keep ticking along while, because we just can't maintain this any longer so we're going to kind of shut down.

And I think if you really look at a lot of people, find myself saying all the time, the lights are on, no one's at home, where have they gone? They've just shut down, look, they're so stressed, they're not even there anymore. This is quite serious, you know, to be stuck in a prolonged state of stress and survival. What actually is gonna happen physiologically with this, BG? Talk to us about that when we hit that wall.

BG Mancini AP, MHSc (39:23)
Yeah.

So I think this is the origin story of the family nervous system in a sense, because I had been working with kids for

15 years or so. And at one point I had brought in ⁓ the safe and sound protocol by Dr. Porges. And now he also has the RRP, both of which are remarkable programs. ⁓ and I was using it on children, and a lot of them were having neurodevelopmental challenges or had ADHD or diagnosed autistic and having behavioral challenges as well. And then there was this one young man, ⁓ he was only about

I want to say nine or ten, I don't recall, but he would not either put on the headphones nor listen to it from the speakers. He would elope, which means, you know, run out of the room. And then I was like, all right, let's put it on the mom first. And this is about five years ago, six years ago now. Wow. And ⁓ the next day the child went and hugged the mom for one of the first times voluntarily. And I went, we worked on mom's nervous system.

helped her reach a little bit more balance and relaxation. And the child's behaviors started to change. And so then I never worked with just the kids. It was always let's work with the family too. And so the the image is mom and dad, family, whomever is the primary caregiver, is under the pool water, holding the children above them. And people used to say, here, help my child. And the child, what I was seeing is that children were getting better.

And then many times within weeks, months, mom started showing up with chronic fatigue, autoimmunity, could no longer sleep. ⁓ and so what was happening was holding it all together.

holding it all together, as soon as the child starts to, then this body starts to be able to have the opportunity to process what it's really experiencing. Right? There you can only hold that in so long. And then what was actually happening was children were going this way, families were sort of going this way and the gap had widened, which was not my intention obviously at all. And so then I learned that by working with the whole system to move everybody up together.

Right, to create language to be able to communicate this, to not silo therapies or individuals within this organism of the family. That was where a more comprehensive healing happened. And also, as parents or as clinicians, therapists, we're always willing to do for the other what we are not willing to do for ourselves. And this idea of self-care just feels like another thing to do. And if we're able to bring in this idea that

Wow, I am truly in this dynamic relationship. And I cannot just ignore myself if I really want to support these other individuals. Then it becomes something of let's figure out a, can we do it together? Because that's always where the magic happens. ⁓ where I always have parents doing some of the exercises, and then the kids would sort of like see it happening, and kids want to be a part of, and kids also love to learn when they're younger about.

food and how it impacts the body, because they want to support their parents. They want to feel a sense of purpose. They want to feel, hey, listen, I told my kids, I said, I really need to be doing interactive metronome. For me, it's great for my nervous system. It helps me sleep, all these things. They didn't want to be doing it. I said, could we all just do, you know, a five or 10 minute session each day? Like just make sure I do mine. And then it was, okay, mom, time for interactive metronome. And then, you know, they got me on board. So you know, this, this

This sense of purpose, sense of community is something within us that we long for. And kids want to be a part of and help us feel better too. So it's about finding these ⁓ ways to interact and ⁓ name that we are in this organism together. And it's always dynamic. So it's never just one person. And to your point, ⁓ when I'd be ⁓ working with parents, and I would say,

Okay, you've told me all about your child, thank you. And how's your nervous system and how's your gut? And they'd go, ⁓ my gosh, I don't sleep. My head hurts all the time. I'm exhausted. I I can't eat, or if I eat, I get this, you know, because we don't get apples from orange trees. And taking that moment to check back in, right? Our this is our home. And we are using all of these adaptive tools wisely.

to survive moments that we might not survive otherwise because we're watching our children suffer or we're watching our clients and patients suffer and we're not able to help. But those adaptive techniques are taking us out of here and that limits our ability to connect to self to our children, et cetera.

Lucia Silver (44:31)
Thank you, that's super feeling and very, very helpful. I found when I share with mums, know, or set the lens on them for a little while, it can be uncomfortable, but it's also obviously so very necessary as we'll discover as we come on to just talk about co-regulation specifically in the kind of healing journey. for a mum listening now saying,

wow, that's me, I'm under the water and I'm holding everybody up and then, you know, Freddie got better and then suddenly I just crashed and then he seemed to get worse, you know, that's often a very typical story we hear, isn't it? What can you say first to mum in terms of what can she do right now if she's feeling in that...

absolutely blocked, shut down. I kind of don't even feel like I'm feeling things anymore. That's the kind of trapped state. Things don't matter or I'm a bit numb. Yeah, what can she do to that immediately to help BG?

BG Mancini AP, MHSc (45:35)
So I would invite them if it felt good in whatever way to even just take their right or left hand first and just putting it on their arms across their body or to hold on to their legs and put a little bit of input. ⁓ number one, that's proprioceptive input also. Number two, it is this sense of I've got you. Okay, and just inviting this idea of wow, I have been surviving.

Okay, I am still surviving. I have done this for my family, right? And that this body and brain is not betraying them. Okay, it is actually behaving in a way that is in favor of their survival. Because when we have symptoms and autoimmunity is so common in women, Hashimoto's is autoimmunity, all of these different things that are often going undiagnosed, histamine intolerance, MCAS, ⁓

Lucia Silver (46:34)
fibromyalgia

BG Mancini AP, MHSc (46:36)
Right, all of them, right? The

undiagnosed mystery diseases, your labs are fine, but you feel horrible. Right. So all of those things, taking a moment to say that this home, our body, is a safe place to be. And it really is working 24 hours a day, every single second, to try and help find homeostasis, balance, recovery. Whether it's the inputs that are coming in.

Lucia Silver (46:40)
Yeah.

BG Mancini AP, MHSc (47:04)
or the inputs that are happening within us that are stimulating us to have more reactivity rather than response to the world and to the thoughts and to the feelings inside, we can then start to say, we don't, we we can then start to experience, I don't have to run away as often, right? And adaptive techniques for those who don't know that language is binge watching Netflix, drinking a bottle of wine,

You know, eating a handful of edibles, scrolling on the phone for two, three hours, picking up the phone a hundred times a day, even though it's made no noise. You know, these are techniques that help us feel safer and more regulated, just the same way that stimming works for some children, just the same way that other things ⁓ you know, sugar, etc. These are all adaptive. They are things that worked in the moment at some point that made us feel better, and then ultimately undermine our ability to stay in presence.

With our body, which then makes it more difficult to stay in presence with our family. And here's the thing about that: like that's not just like an open-ended sentence. The problem is that when we are not getting this reciprocal communication in our nervous systems from our children, our loved ones, et cetera, if our child is not in a state to be able to give a smile or to be able to make us feel like we are succeeding as a parent, right? Then we are constantly feeling this pull.

This dream, this worry, this all-consuming. And there is this unspoken, unnamed thing that's happening within us as a parent, and for the child. Well, that's a different story, but within us as a parent, that we are ashamed, we are broken, we are unsuccessful, and we are not getting that natural fulfillment that parents are meant to have, that bond, that joy, that experience with our children.

So it's very complicated what's actually happening, both emotionally, physiologically, and also in real time, how we experience it. And then our kids, of course, as we get more stressed, they feel more protective, they feel more standoffish, their body gets inflammation because oxytocin, right, which is primarily made in the gut, is that connection, that bonding hormone ⁓ is not being produced at a level.

And expressed on a level genetically that's bringing the family together. And that is on a soul level very painful. ⁓

Lucia Silver (49:37)
soul level and as you

say every level BG, every level and we've quoted Stephen Borgers before around co-regulation because I think sometimes when I speak to parents that they've been locked into providing and containing and enabling everybody else in the family for so long they don't really recognize a the part that they play beyond being that.

but be the part that they need to play in order for their children to be able to move out and into a regulated state. It's not a nicety, Stephen Porges says, it's a biological necessity. I think sometimes moms respond better when you go, no, I'm telling you, you need to do it. It's not an oxygen mask, please, would be nice. It's a, if you don't do it, you cannot provide the care because they do not have.

matured nervous systems yet. So if yours are up the spout, where are they going to get it from? you are, you know, as part of your, you know, if you're not feeling good enough as a mom, then number one brownie point, take care of you. It's not, it's not a kind of, because we're so, we're so driven by these feelings of, of not enough and ⁓

having to justify the time we take for ourselves or to light that fragrance candle that really we should just repackage and give to somebody else. You know, we've got caught in this strange trap of not really knowing the value of us being in the best possible, best possible state. yeah, ⁓ I'm, I that's, that's, I'm on my soapbox a lot on that one to support our mums. ⁓ And you speak about it so, so sweetly.

and kindly and I think it's really, it's kind of number one, you know, on our course, BG, that's where we begin. We didn't begin there before. We began with, you know, what's going on with your child and here's all the stuff about brain development and, you know, get onto the baseline autonomic nervous system and then fight or frighten. What state you get. Now we start with mum. Now we start with mum. So another piece that you are

very eloquent about and that we use, kind of, we steal it from you all the time, we quote always B G's five percent rule. ⁓ I think it's super important this one because parents listening, you know, they'll be writing notes fiercely about what they can do, what they can do, what they can do, what more they can do. And now they'll have a list for what they've got to do for themselves, what they've got to do for themselves now. It's another list. But actually, you've always said, and I remember

It was like a permission slip that you gave to me the first time we spoke. You don't have to do it all. You don't have to do it all at once. Just do a little. Set yourself, and you know, here we are back to the sort of oxytocins and the rewards and the serotonins. Each time you do actually achieve something, it kind of fuels the next chapter. So don't set yourself tasks.

that are unachievable because that just feels lousy. That just compounds things, right? Your 5 % rule is so beautiful. Talk to us about that and why so many families become overwhelmed trying to do everything.

BG Mancini AP, MHSc (53:04)
Well, I would say, I mean, that's certainly a universal theme. You know, when we get instructions and when we're in pain, we want to do everything right so we get relief. But then what ends up happening for all the psychological reasons is we end up picking up a bigger stick, beating ourselves up even more because now we have an instruction manual and we still can't get it right. And so this idea is yes, if we can find those little tiny things, the micro resets, right? Where they're, as I said,

Put an air purifier, see what that does for you. Put a HEPA filter in, get cleaner water, buy a pair of blue blocking glasses, install ⁓ I always forget the name, iris tech software on your computer for $20 for lifetime to minimize the flicker rate and the blue light when you're working. ⁓ Maybe that would ease your visual system, maybe that would help you sleep better, maybe you wouldn't have a headache at the end of the day and your eyes won't itch and all those things. So that we have this opportunity to then start stacking these little things.

That don't feel heavy to us. Like for some people, you know, sit down and breathe is really threatening because they don't want to sit down and feel silence. It's not the access point that works. So that's why I work with movement so much. You know, and and I have therapists and practitioners, you know, I have them install those go lights, you know, we're

Okay, they they flash and like left right and then kick one and then you know or have a little vibration and the resin max ⁓ I love to work with or tuning forks because maybe sound or the vibration. And it's something that you can do throughout your day. You just leave these things laying around so that you can pick them up and ⁓ downregulate, re-regulate in those moments, get from 10 to seven, get from 10 to 3, right?

Those breaks are what actually start to build your resilience. Now, in an ideal world, we all have bodies, we all have a gut, we all have a brain. So there are certain requirements in order to even just, you know, for the United States, it's the ⁓ the recommended daily allowance, the RDA. And if I have people list out, which I used to, I don't do it anymore, but I'd say, write down what you ate and let that this little thing calculates. Did I get enough?

Vitamin A, D, protein, et cetera, et cetera, in my day and how much sugar and all that. And it was shocking. You know, no one was getting the right amounts. And that was just to survive scurvy, essentially. That was only just to barely keep yourself alive. And we know that with all of the oxidative stress of all the chemicals and all the things we're exposed to. So we all have brains and bodies that require certain nutrition. So should we all be mindful of getting enough protein?

enough good quality fat, ⁓ you know, avocado, coconut, olive oil, enough water, right? All of these things, you know, are we getting omega-3 essential fatty acids? And they're called essential because we can't really make them teeny tiny bit. And they are essential for life, really. So how can we support just bodies in general?

⁓ in a way, all right, so great, I can take a fish oil, fine. Or if it's not fish oil, I can take an omega-3 vegan, you know, whatever. they have several of them out there. I can't think of the name right now, Udo's gold. ⁓ and can I ⁓ use a little bit of these interventions that give me those breaks? We'll call it 5%, but it's often much more. But in the moment we might experience it as five. Can we use the Stanley Rosenberg reset?

A huge proponent of that. That's taking our hands. You can look it up online, put it in the show notes. You can just sort of lock hands behind your head, around your occiput, and then you use visual direction. And that helps to reset the vagus nerve. Now that's that's his language, but what I've found is that for kids it's profoundly impactful.

Lucia Silver (57:00)
These are little things that are very achievable. And I also like that they don't cost anything, BG, because sometimes we're overwhelmed with lots of the things. And another reason for not doing them is perhaps, you know, financial. I mean, I actually took the overhead light bulbs out. How about that in Quinn's room? There's no overhead lights at all. ⁓ So, you know, some things can be stripping back. They're not just adding in. ⁓

BG Mancini AP, MHSc (57:01)
Is it

Yeah.

Lucia Silver (57:24)
And yes, little exercises, if they don't respond to one exercise, I the Rosenberg is fantastic, we do that one, but you know, a little bit of pressure on the legs, little bit of, know, burrito rolls, if they're little, you know, there's many a thing that we can do that is incorporated into playfulness too, which I think is a super important part of it. And as we've talked about with your little 5%, it's doing it together.

because I think a lot of the time we go, you know, have you done that yet? have you, know, Quinn and I do almost everything we do, we do together, including, you know, I don't eat a lot of the foods that would be tricky for Quinn. don't eat them either. I sometimes binge on apple, crumb, and custard when he's not there, because I do have a little bit of a sweet tooth. But when we're together, we do it together. ⁓

So these important things like movement and rhythm and coming off the screens, you know, a couple of hours before bedtime and also not looking at the screen first thing, that's something I've been doing just recently, BG, I've been waking up in the morning and not using my phone as a clock, which is the excuse for using your phone, right? An alarm. And I come straight down in my new house, I have a little bit of green grass outside at the front.

and I come straight out and I spend my first 10 minutes looking into the real light, the proper circadian rhythm to set the day. And I've noticed just in the last four or five days, I was up at five o'clock this morning and I'm actually still feeling amazing, whether I'm gonna crash and burn, it's now nearly 5 p.m. ⁓ I feel much, much calmer just for those simple things, the connection to nature.

getting my sleep patterns a little bit more regulated. It doesn't have to be all the fancy stuff and the 100 supplements, know, it's those 5 % margins that you're talking about can start super simply, can't they?

BG Mancini AP, MHSc (59:20)
Yes, and you know, to your point, when I found myself going, well, have you done this, that, and the other thing, I was really saying, I need those things, right? My nervous system is such that, and what I fra what I learned to frame it as is why don't we? Right. And I brought them along for what I needed and then the connection, and then they got the benefit, I got the benefit.

Because sometimes body doubling and having someone there and having our children seeing us take care of ourselves is also incredibly important. You know, this this you know they whether you're tagging it as overwhelm, shutdown versus agitation, you know, there's different ways of framing these emotional states that we witness in our kids that are the same states we're going through.

but they exhibit differently. So ours might look like more adaptation because we have a developed frontal lobe that says, don't go screaming and running from the room. Don't punch my husband, right? Instead, go drink a bottle of wine, right? Because that's gonna get me out of this state. But kids don't have that developed executive function. And a lot of the kids who are suffering with pans pandas ⁓ or are non-speaking autistic, right?

Lucia Silver (1:00:26)
you

BG Mancini AP, MHSc (1:00:46)
They have a language barrier also, right? And so we want to be mindful that we are often feeling and experiencing the same chemical cocktail if you looked at it, but we manifest it completely differently. But we could all benefit from the same things.

Lucia Silver (1:01:02)
Yes, mean, Quinn, Quinn Stim,

you know, the movement of just sort of self regulating or letting that go when we become actually quite repressive. mean, I agree, don't go punching your husband. But the point is, we have kind of stopgap, you know, that we've put the cork in the top of the champagne bottle with so much. Of course, we want to address why the why we feel like an explosive champagne bottle all the time. But at the same time,

I will often feel that even more interconnectedly, Quinn will play out the exhaustion or the ⁓ dysregulation that I am masking. How about that for interrelatedness? And that is, I am constantly watching that and surveying it. Sometimes it's very simple. Quinn will just turn around and say, boy, you need to address your nervous system, mommy.

You know, he just says it, right? And I love the fact that our journey is together now with it all. that's just such a beautiful system in play and speaks to everything that you're saying. ⁓ So BG, for parents listening who perhaps feel a bit frightened, ⁓ I know many of the parents I speak to are exhausted and feeling quite hopeless.

⁓ What would you want them to most understand ⁓ about themselves, of course, their children and the possibility of healing?

BG Mancini AP, MHSc (1:02:42)
the most important thing I would hope that people would understand is you are not alone. Okay, there are more resources now than ever before. This is not something that each individual needs to reinvent the wheel for. and that all of the things that you might read about or hear about.

Are not going to be the right thing for you or for your child, but that you can start with just the smallest interventions. And a lot of times intention and decision and just declaring, I'm going to do something, right? Once we move out of that analysis paralysis, that fear response, a little bit more flow starts to happen in our nervous system flow is a nervous system state.

In a sense, right? It is a state where like, okay, things are moving. Whereas we're like this, because we're so paralyzed with fear of what's happening to our children, and that brands us emotionally as parents. And we get stuck there, and we hold our children where they got stuck. And so, even though some of these things start to move, you know, we're still waiting for that tick back to where it was that impacted us the most. And a lot of parents relate to that. And so

I would say that finding any of these that we've talked about, even if it's the one visual reset, the Stanley Rosenberg, jumping on a $50, you know, trampoline, one of the little rebounders, right? For you, and then get your child on, you know, doing a little bilateral movement, doing any kind of movement, doing these things with our kids.

Is something that's going to free up some of this pressure valve that we have contained, as you said. And that helps to create flow. It helps create I'm doing something and it feels good. It feels safe enough for me. And then we start to add in little things. And I would say there's so much more research available now. And while diet and nutrition are not necessarily.

⁓ something so changing someone's whole entire diet is not necessarily in the cards for everyone. What can we add in nutritionally that's going to have the biggest bang for your time and buck is really important. And there are some things that just biologically we need and we're not getting them in our food. So let's add those in, right? And also figuring out what works for your gut, because you know, I call ⁓

Datis Karazian calls it the microbiome matchup. I call it something else, but just something where, okay, can we chop up a whole bunch of vegetables in a food processor, freeze it once a month, take a little bit of that? It's much more effective at creating a hospitable microbiome than it is to take one probiotic, which is more like almost like a pharmaceutical level, unless it works for you. I'm not advising medically anyone, but.

Probiotics are kind of like here, this is what you're going to take in. Here's how it's going to impact you. We know how these all respond in our body. Whereas using the fibers actually help to allow your body's microbiome to go, I need a little bit of that. And this one needs a little bit of this. And then it protects the inner lining of your gut. It protects the tight junctions of your gut. And it helps to signal the nervous system directly that I am getting what I need, that I am healthy, that I can create what I need to create.

Lucia Silver (1:06:13)
And it comes back to that agency and empowering knowledge of trusting and feeling safe in your body that it does actually know how to bring you back to homeostasis if you enable it. So what you're saying is rather than chuck a bunch of probiotics, give it what it needs and it knows what to select. It knows what to do, right? And I think that is, you know, certainly the whole raison d'etre of the brain health movement is to look to the root cause. You know, we're not looking to fix, we're looking to facilitate.

So the body does what it needs to do and continues to and that we are simply providing information so parents can champion and feel confident in what they're doing because they're taking agency back over their body again. Your body is an absolute miracle. It is the greatest feat of engineering known to humankind. ⁓ So finally, BG, after almost three decades of work, just can't believe that.

What still gives you hope? In closing, what gives you hope? What excites you?

BG Mancini AP, MHSc (1:07:19)
I mean, it's really everything that we've talked about, and it's the idea that more of these conversations are being had because you know, just because I know what I know and I've been doing this work, it doesn't mean that my kids have not had their own challenges. And when I watched my youngest at eight months, after I had been quite postpartum and really stressed and didn't realize it, and I watched him be a little bit delayed, and then I like came to.

Out of the fog, I saw he was quite delayed through movement. And within a week or two, through a little supplementation, a little bit of exercise, some laser, he caught up and he was cross-patterning after being on the floor. Okay. And he was up on all fours, moving, head turning, vision starting to come online. And I had about 30 seconds of relief in my heart. And then my heart broke wide open because I thought.

How many moms out there are not going to have that moment or be able to call my colleague like I did and say, Hey, I can't function right now. Can you help me here? Right. And so this idea that we are all starting to have these conversations that moms are not so siloed. You know, we don't live in communities anymore where one person would then be able to take the child or everyone you would be nurturing when mom needed the nurture for her and for the children. And so

I would really just say that being a part of community, knowing that you're not alone, there are resources out there, we don't have to do everything, taking just a moment to say that my body is working to help me, that my child's body is working to help them.

And keeping a little bit of curiosity around what little intervention that I can do today instead of listing the hundred that likely I don't feel able to at that moment, whether it's for me or my child. And then just using some of these simple resources to add into the day, whether it's movement, a little bit extra fiber, ⁓

Some touch, whatever it is that feels accessible for us, and that is where hope is restored. And hope is medicine, connection is medicine. Play, enjoy are actual physiological game changers for us, creating more safety, which changes our neuroceptive lens, which means the world is not coming in at such a metabolic cost, which gives us more reserves for today, for tomorrow, next week, next year.

Lucia Silver (1:09:46)
That's beautiful. Thank you so much, BG. ⁓ This has been, as always, an incredibly important conversation. It feels kind of defining of parenthood in so many ways. You know, I adore you. I think what your work offers families is not just information, but it is a completely different lens through which to understand themselves foremost and their children, not through blame.

BG Mancini AP, MHSc (1:09:47)
Yeah,

Mm.

Lucia Silver (1:10:13)
not through shame, not through fixing, but really through a profound understanding of physiology, connection, resilience, nervous system safety, and the reality that healing was never meant to happen in isolation, which you touched on earlier, right? We've just started a charitable arm that we've called the Mighty Village because you cannot raise a child alone. It is really a calling for us to remember our tribal spirit.

One of the things I really feel driven by with your work is your, the heartfelt practical application and compassion. know, we, this sympathetic dominant state that we're in, in this era where people are in disconnect from themselves, their loved ones and so forth, it is the tenderness, the gentleness and that to come back to your heartfelt connection. And that doesn't have to be woo woo and spiritual. It's actually just to try

to explore and be curious as to how you can come back to just being available, fully present with your children, fully present with your loved ones, fully present with your friends. And I know you want to it.

BG Mancini AP, MHSc (1:11:21)
fully present with yourself right and fully present with

yourself being able to sit for maybe it's five seconds maybe it's 10 seconds maybe it's a minute maybe it's five minutes to see can I be with myself with the birds outside without a digital device without a technique of leaving my body and brain because I'm so uncomfortable

And if it's a case where, and I'll just share this, when I was in college and I went to a, I was doing a Buddhist studies class and we went to a monastery up in Vermont. And the first meditation period, I remember the room got very silent, and I can viscerally remember feeling like my hair was on fire and that I should go running screaming from the room.

That was my feeling. Now I masked and I sat there and I did it, right? But I remember that feeling of okay, that is me uncomfortable being silent and present. And it is a lifelong practice, and that is okay. And just being curious about, okay, what would it feel like to listen to a guided meditation, which is an easier way to start? It feels more accessible for most people for one minute.

And maybe then it grows from there, just to be able to touch base, maybe for the first time. It's not always about restoring, but maybe for the first time about being okay, being in this moment, and then seeing how that compounds and changes. It's a really wonderful journey for for many of the parents who have started with those guided steps.

Lucia Silver (1:12:49)
Yeah,

and that's it. mean, it's so profound and yet so simple. Who'd have ever thought that where you could begin is can you be with yourself for five minutes? I'm reminded just there of Gabor Mate and his feelings that so much has driven, you know, with ADHD and the symptoms that we're seeing. If you don't make it safe, how can it be safe for them?

And then you think, well, what am I mirroring if I can't sit still for five minutes? If I'm not reflecting safety? We talked about co-regulation, but even a step back, if you can't sit in stillness and silence, you are not expressing safety. You are not feeling safe right now. Right? mean, it's so simple and yet.

look how difficult it's become and I put my hand up to that. Sometimes I'll do things I hate like hoovering rather than sitting. mean, it's extraordinary what we'll do to avoid the stillness. So yet thank you for reminding me that because in closing that's hugely important. there you go again, you understand that families are busy, they're overwhelmed and they're often carrying more than they can manage.

This is really why I'm delighted that this little kind of freebie download that we always produce, but I'm excited when we do this with BG. This time we're going to work it around resources for families and we're going to call it a family micro set list. We'll put this together with BG's guidance and it'll give you something that really will support you at home inspired by many of the principles we've discussed today, including BG's famous 5 % rule.

some realistic nervous system resets that parents and kids can enjoy together throughout the day. Nothing overwhelming, nothing complicated, just small moments of regulation, connection and resilience building that can create meaningful change over time. So you can download the free family reset list using the link in the show notes and you'll also find ways to connect with BG directly and explore more of her work, resources, training and educational materials in the show notes too.

So BG thank you again for the extraordinary work you continue to do for children, families and practitioners around the world. And thank you for joining us again on My Mighty Quinn.

BG Mancini AP, MHSc (1:15:02)
Yeah.

Thank you.

Lucia Silver (1:15:11)
If you found today's conversation helpful, please take a moment to like, subscribe and leave a review. It helps us reach more parents, carers, teachers and practitioners who are searching for answers and looking beyond symptom management to understand the root causes of childhood struggles. And if there is a parent in your life who feels overwhelmed, exhausted or worried about their child right now, please share this episode with them. You never know when one conversation might provide the missing piece.

a new perspective or simply the reassurance that they are not alone. Until next time, remember, healing is never just about the child. When we understand the family nervous system, we create more safety, more connection and more possibility for everyone. See you next time.