Dr. Marielle Bouquet

If they're in the middle of the school day and something happens,

they have the opportunity of just rocking a little bit and even, you know, humming and allowing themselves to feel calmer.

When neurodivergent folks, especially, especially folks who are living with autism, they have stimming behaviors, like actual rocking is a part of what they naturally may do in order to self-soothe.

And so we're in essence borrowing from that also in knowing that it's quite effective in calming down the nervous system and we're utilizing it in order to initiate that calming response within us.

The easiest thing that we can do is take time.

deep breaths and not three, not, you know, just a few.

We need to take at least five minutes of deep breathing.

It's really essential because that allows our nervous system to catch up to the fact that we're giving it the opportunity to recover.

And oftentimes I get people telling me like, who has five minutes?

Like we live in a busy world.

And if you're a parent, you're incredibly busy, right?

But I always like to remind folks, you have 1,440 minutes in a day.

If you just take five of those minutes and recalibrate and just give yourself an opportunity to engage in deep breathing, you're going to feel so much better.

Well, because you're exposing the wounds and the places where they're still needing to work.

You're exposing the shame that's there.

And, you know, shame loves closed doors.

It loves to hide, right?

And so if you expose someone to something before they're ready to acknowledge it, they're just going to

Clam up.

So that clamming up typically looks like, I don't know what you're talking about.