What’s your body budget?

This week I'm leaning into exploring big ideas that help me understand my kids (and myself) and breaking them down into actions or reflections.

This podcast episode, featured super genius Lisa Feldman Barrett on Your Parenting Mojo discussing where emotions come from. The information is complex, nuanced, and really useful, so I encourage you to listen! But in the meantime, here are some bare-bones cliff's notes:

• We have a body budget: the physical/ emotional capacity we have in any given moment, based on whether our needs for things like food and rest and self-care (and any and all of the other needs that we have) have been met. This budget, like all budgets, is not infinite.

• Our brains are constantly making up explanations for our experiences that are not always really tied to what's actually happening.

• We don't always know a lot about other people's internal experience

So what can we do with these big ideas? How can we use them to improve our relationships and experiences? Two ideas:

1) Honor your body budget. What builds your physical and emotional capacities? What drains them? Protect that budget. Know that your experiences are affected by where you are in your budget.

2) How do you/ can you have true curiosity about another person's experience (or your own for that matter!) without blame, shame, or judgement? (This one is going to be reaaalllllly hard for me!)

Let me know how it goes!