The Therapy Edit - One Thing with Celest Pereira on how your reactions are shaping your childrens' ability to deal with pain

Episode Date: September 29, 2023

In this Friday guest episode of The Therapy Edit, Anna chats to Celest Pereira about the fascinating topic of neuroplasticity and the impact that your well intended words can have on your child's approach to pain. You'll learn about the 'Threat Bucket' and how you can nurture your child's confidence and pain tolerance in later life.Celest is a self-confessed geek who loves anatomy, neuroscience and biomechanics. She miraculously acquired her BSc (Hons) in Physiotherapy in 2009, despite dropping out of school at 16. She found learning at school really tough, however now credits her ability to make complex concepts easy to grasp, down to her learning struggles. She runs regular education-based workshops where she takes current scientific research, anecdotal evidence from senior healthcare providers and applies them to movement disciplines. She’s currently specialising in functional neurology, learning how it can be applied to improve pain, health and performance.You can find out about Celest's app and all of her other services on here website here.You can also follow Celest on Instagram.

Hello and welcome to The Therapy Edit with me, psychotherapist, mum of three and author Anna Martha. Every Friday, I invite one guest to tell me the one thing they would most like to share with mums everywhere. So join with me as we hear this dose of wisdom. I hope you enjoy it. Hi, everyone. I hope you are, well, as you tune into this podcast episode today, I've got an absolute treat for you. I always say that, but it's very true. I get so excited about the different guests that we have on the therapy edit.

Today, I have for you, Celeste Pereira. She's on Instagram at Celeste Pereira Physio. You've probably seen me share bits and pieces of her stuff before. Her biggest passion has been the human body since she was little. She trained as a physio and she specialises in functional neurology. And I'm sure we'll hear a little bit more about that. She has been passionately teaching optimal movements since she was 16. She's just been so passionate about the human body and found ways to communicate different ways that we can support ourselves.

Her passions include neuroscience. We've already discussed together how I find it sometimes I have to stop myself from Googling neuroscience PhDs because I am so intrigued. So we've bonded over that already. And she is also passionate about biomechanics. And she loves in her podcast, which is called Love at First Science, delving into all of these different topics. with lots of different wellness entrepreneurs in a way that is, and this is my favorite thing about Celeste. She communicates neuroscience, biomechanics, optimal movement, which are phrases that many of us kind of go what at, but in a way that is really fun and easy to understand and you can watch her

videos and you'll end up thinking, oh my gosh, I never thought of that or that's amazing, I'm going to implement that. She has got an app called Anatomy. Now, this is an app that helps you move in a small space, it helps boost productivity and improve mood. Yes, please. Classes range from as little as five to 75 minutes, and most of them need little to absolutely no equipment. Now, I love following Celeste, mostly because everything that she teaches is kind of like a little light bulb moment. You think, oh my gosh, I need to make that little tweak or I need to try this out. And I was looking on her Instagram this morning and saw her doing something with another favorite of mine, Hannah Barrett, the yoga teacher. And there was a little bit of my. And there was a little bit of a little bit of

doing some kind of visual movement break. I'm going to have to ask you about that Celeste. But hi Celeste. So I'm going to stop talking about you. I'm going to start talking to you. But how are you? And then tell us about this visual thing that you were doing with Hannah. Oh, I'm doing so good. Thank you. And yeah, the visual hacks basically just helped so that if you're staring at a screen for a long time, which Hannah and I were, we're busy preparing for a big presentation. It just helps your brain not feel so tired. And we're going to talk a little bit in today's podcast about something called the threat bucket and how we can keep our threat levels quite low. And one of the ways that you can do that is by actually moving your eyes around.

Because the eyes occupy so many different areas of your brain, when we start to move them around, when we get them to focus on different objects that are either far away or close, we actually do see much better function of the brain that boosts your energy, your productivity. And like I said, it lowers your threat levels. Your threat levels. Okay, so first of all, yeah, I'm excited to hear about this. But if someone is listening who has just been all morning looking at screen, their phone or their laptop, what should we do with our eyes?

How can we give our... The best thing you can do is look out into the distance at something as far away as possible. And even if you just allow yourself to focus on that thing for about 30 seconds, that is already going to give you a huge mental boost. The other thing that works exceptionally well is taking the palm of your hand, placing it over the orbit of the eye. So you create complete darkness, but you don't push on the eye itself. And again, you can hold that for about 30 seconds. I give this to a lot of my pain patients and actually they often report a subjective decrease in their perceived pain.

Wow. So those are two things that we can. I was just looking at the tree tops that are poking over someone's house, my neighbor's house. I was just looking at those. And you're right, it's just, yeah, because I think we can just get so fixated on this one screen. And our eyes don't really move a huge amount. So just getting that kind of different perspective and focusing on nature, even better, I guess. And then just giving your brain a break by placing your hands over your eyes. It felt really comforting. I tried that for a second there.

So, thank you. So if you could share one thing with all the mums, what would that one thing be? So first of all, before I get into this, I just want to say the fact that you're children are alive. You are doing such a good job. So listening to the tips that I'm about to give, please don't let these tips make you question your methods as a parent. Please trust yourself. And if your instinct is saying to go against what I'm sharing, you follow that. Because at the end of the day, you know your children better than anyone. And you know yourself and you know what you need. And I just don't want to disempower you with this information.

if anything, I want to give you even more empowerment. The thing that I want to share with everyone is understanding how pain works in the brain and in the body. Because what we can do as, I'm not a parent, but what we can do as society for each other, but particularly as parents towards children, is we can actually amplify their experience of pain just by how we interact with them and how we respond to them, particularly when they hurt themselves. So where do you want me to start? Shall I go straight into pain neuroscience and give you guys that background? Yeah, that sounds amazing. I'm intrigued. Okay, so first of all,

what I want you guys to remember about pain is that we often think that if I cut myself, a pain signal travels from the cut to my brain and I'm like, ouch, that hurts. But that's not how it works because we don't actually have pain receptors in the body. What we have is the word I used before, threat receptors. The fancy anatomical terminology, if you want to do some Googling, is no scepters. And what they do is they will send a signal to the brain, telling the brain that potential harm has happened. And the brain then decides, is this harm or is this threat enough for me to produce an

output of pain? Because pain, I want you guys to write this down if you have a pin in paper, pain is an output. It is not an input. And what the brain does is it chooses pain to help modify your behavior. Because if you're in a lot of pain and you lay down in bed, you're safe there. And the brain doesn't care if you're thriving in life and doing the best life ever or if you're just surviving. It only cares that you are safe. Now, when I say this to corporates, the corporates that I work with, they're like, I don't know about that. I've written my goals down and I think my brain quite likes challenging itself. Yes, your conscious human brain that's right at the front,

but the bigger part of your brain that's in charge is your old brain. It's the unconscious part of who you are. It's ruling the show. And it only cares about your safety. So it chooses outputs like pain, nausea, anxiety, depression, stiffness, weakness as an output to hold you back so that you don't do anything too risky so that it keeps you safe. And pain is the most effective behavior change tool out there. Now, the reason I wanted to share that background with you guys is because we all have different thresholds. And by that, I mean, imagine a bucket.

We can fill up our bucket with various different threats and eventually our bucket might overflow where the brain goes, I'm not safe. Now, all of the different things that I'm about to mention can contribute to pain, such as you had a fight with your partner. You're not really loving your job. That's one of the biggest risk factors for pain. You may have watched the news, and there was distressing information broadcasted. Maybe you go to a yoga class, and you're constantly being told you're fragile,

so you need to contract every muscle at 80%, otherwise you're going to hurt yourself. That fills up your threat levels, fills up your threat levels. maybe you haven't been looking out at the distance as we spoke about enough and your eyes are fixated on these screens that fills up your threat a little bit higher and there's so many but I'll throw in the last one maybe we haven't been moving in complex ways as our nature intended and so our body in its stagnant state means that again our threat fills up until eventually we reach the threshold all of our thresholds are different and our threat overflows Now, how does this relate to parents and navigating being a parent with your child falls down and hurts

themselves? Well, all pain is a subjective experience. We, in our brains, will decide if the pain I'm feeling is level 10 or level one. And it's not only the biological aspect of what happens that determines how much pain you feel. We all know people that have gone through terrible trauma and they're like, ah, it's nothing. I'm fine. Honestly, this is just a scratch, but you can see it's quite a gaping wound. But we know others that have got nothing going on in their bodies, and they are suffering level 10 every day. So, yes, there is a biological aspect of it, but there is also a psychological and sociological aspect to it. And this is the birth of this incredible model. Sounds really boring to talk about, but it's actually pretty cool, called the

bio-psychosocial model. So there's these three elements that are coming into play when we're looking at pain. Now, the little kid falls, hurts themselves, cuts their knee open, biological aspect. The psychological aspect will be looking at the blood and being afraid. And the sociological aspect will be the parent rushing to the child's aid and doing one of two things, either saying, do you know what, you're going to be okay. You're resilient and strong. I'm so proud of you for pushing yourself, you know, well done, or scooping him up going, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, you're putting me, quickly, ambulance, you can see the two distinctions. And there's a lot of peer-reviewed scientific data that backs up the fact that if we have got

this, I think the word I'm looking for is catastrophizing when a little child does hurt themselves, if we have got that in our nature where we respond very emotively to an event. event, this can actually increase the child's threat and it can increase their central sensitization to events moving forward. And when they looked at large cohorts of chronic pain people, they found that very often these people did come from these backgrounds where there was this catastrophizing or this, you know, real emphasis on how vulnerable your body is as opposed to how resilient you are. Oh, it's a total reframe, isn't it? You know what's going through in my mind as you're talking is in one of the antenatal classes I did. I found it really helpful when they said

reframe pain, the pain of contractions, you know, in the language that you use around them, you know, how painful they are, how much they hurt, what scale of one to ten, and talk about instead of pain, talk about strength and intensity. And I found that so helpful. because instead of seeing it as a problem, I could start seeing it as something that my body was doing that was productive and not scary. And I just found that reframe really helpful. So it's almost like a little bit like instead of seeing that pain

when your child falls over mind, do all the time I've got hypermobile child. She is always falling over. And I am clumsy as anything. I'm always covered in bruises from banging things. but so going from that place of catastrophizing to that place of what did you say talking about resilience yeah yeah i mean there's that and again you know my the people i work with you work with moms and you really encourage moms to understand that there's so much more to parenting

than what we've been led to believe and in my my people that i work with is often yoga teachers because they go into teacher trainings and they are taught to tell people stack your knee over your ankle to keep your knee safe. Contract your core to keep your back safe. You know, don't do this so you don't injure your shoulders. And all of this language is nociceptive. It increases your brain's perception of vulnerability. And it's really not true because there's even studies to show that our language and the way we respond to our perception of how resilient we are is actually more of a risk factor than doing really dangerous things with our bodies. And I mean, a classic example is going into headstand. Oh, your neck is so vulnerable. You know, your neck, you could

damage it, you could hurt it. But actually, when we look at the human population, humans have learned how to do things like head spins. And in CrossFit, they do handstand push-ups, boom, that land on their head between each handstand push-up. And these are incredibly resilient athletes that can do incredible things with their bodies. And so I just wanted to inspire all the moms out there. Of course, you want to have bucket loads of compassion. You want to scoop up your babies when they hurt themselves and kiss them all over. Don't limit that at all. But at the same time, remind them that they are strong, that their body can heal. They've got a little pharmacy inside of them. Sending just the right amount of platelets to stop the blood. Then it's sending the immune

system to make sure that if there is an infection, that the body will push that out. So just keep reminding your kids and yourself that you are so resilient. And the example I use when I'm lecturing the yoga teachers is if moms can survive childbirth and the trauma related to that, followed by no rehab, those mothers have to go into sleepless years feeding an infant. Trust me, your body can deal with so, so much. If mums can survive that and walk and talk and be these epic beings, these queens, these goddesses, trust me, your little kids can handle falling over and tripping and breaking things, getting the stitches, let them experience life to level 10. I love this. So it's about the language that we use. And I'm always talking about, you know,

when we're using kind of this critical internal dialogue and we're shaming ourselves, how much that tangibly impacts self-esteem and identity. And people's lives are changed by using different language internally. So how powerful it is to use words around strength and resilience and, yeah, just your body's ability to mend and heal instead of what we might go to, which is that kind of catastrophizing of like, oh my gosh, quick, get the first aid kit. just an encouragement to think about the words using and how that actually impacts your body's perception of pain. So it would be lovely to hear a few words for those moms listening

who are thinking, oh my gosh, I'm that person. What have I done? I've been that person that's, you know, call the ambulance. This is, ah, you know, panicking and stressing. And what have I done to my child's ability for pain now? Are they going to grow up and experience chronic pain because of my reactions. What are some words of encouragement for those, for those mums? Do you know what? It's just never too late. And also they did these incredible studies where they took people with chronic pain.

And they gave them three different interventions. One was classical physical therapy. I'm a physio. So I'm throwing myself under the bus here. The second thing was pain medication, analgesics. And the third intervention was pain education. pain neuroscience education, what we've just gone through that short little five-minute discussion about it's an output, you've got threat levels. And what they found is every single time,

pain education far outweighed any of the other interventions to help people manage their chronic pain. So right now, you within yourself, teach yourself about the stuff. There is brilliant TED talks about pain. Watch them. It's pain will rule your life if you don't learn about it. So devour information about it and start to understand when you do hurt yourself as a parent. Let's talk you now. If you do feel a pain, instead of that initial reaction, that initial tightness that your body would go, I want you to envelop that area with a lot of love and compassion. Tell your body, thank you for these signals.

You are sending me a message that you need support. And I'm so grateful you communicate with me. maybe I don't do exactly the right thing that you need, but I promise I'm going to try my best to find out what the solution is. Your own response to your own pain is already the first step. The next step is then when you do see that something's happened in the environment to your child, watch that initial, oh my God, watch those reactions as they come up spontaneously. Don't beat yourself up if they come up naturally.

This is just part of being a human. But then catch yourself and then go to your, babies and remind them again with the same advice that I gave before, it's really never too late. You know, if this education can work on populations that are quite old, trust me, it can work at any time. And first of all, can we just pause and say, you are doing such a good job. Your kids are walking and talking. I mean, my goodness, that's such a huge achievement. So, yeah, be proud of all of the things that you've accomplished thus far as a parent. Oh, thank you for those really warm, compassionate and grounding words.

So yeah, the encouragement to think about the language that you're using. And just as we talk about critical internal dialogue and how we can really challenge and change our identity and transform our confidence through the words that we use to speak to ourselves, we can also transform our experience and our children's experience of pain in the world, in the language that we're using and how we're responding. So amazing. Thank you so much, Celeste. I would love to finish off with some really quick, a couple of quick fire questions just so that you can get to know you before we say goodbye. What's a, what's something that you do that makes you feel good? Oh, I'm a big kite surfer. I absolutely love being on the water and I love being dunked by big waves and I'm an ocean. My partner calls me a mermaid and I think that, yeah, that's probably my favorite place. I've never done it, but I always absolutely love watching people do it. It just looks absolutely wild.

Maybe one day, maybe one day. And what's a challenge that you're facing at the moment? So right now, it's just been a very intense year. My partner had long COVID. My partner's mom had cancer. It's been brutal with work. It's just been relentless. All the amazing things happening, guys, I'm not complaining.

It's been a gift, all the wonderful things flooding my way. But I think the sheer volume, and in top of that, we sold a property and bought a property, and the paperwork was so intense. So it has been a process to get to this point in this year. So I'm looking forward to simplifying as I move forward and maybe saying no to a few more opportunities that come my way. I think that's my big lesson from this year. And also just taking moments,

Hannah Barrett always says this. We love Hannah. Just taking more moments to pause so that it's easier to cope with the stresses of life. Yeah, so simplifying things down a bit and taking. 100% of course through this challenging year that you've had. Well, thank you so much and I encourage everyone to go and find you at Celeste Perrae at Physio and to watch some of your videos and maybe to look at Anatomy of the app that will help you just support your body and boost productivity and improve your mood, which yeah, we're all for. So thank you. And I love the fact that some of

those are five minutes long. I'm all for the short and the quick and the things that we can wedge in. And there's a few of the vision drills in there as well. So maybe you can guys can get your eyes working. I love that. I'm going to, yeah, I'm going to see what I can find of that. So thank you so much, Celeste, for your warm wisdom today. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of The Therapy Edit. If you have enjoyed it, don't forget to subscribe and review for me. Also, if you need any resources at all, I have lots of videos and courses on everything from health anxiety to driving anxiety and people pleasing. They are all on my website anamatha.com. And also don't forget my brand new book Raising a Happier Mother is out

now for you to enjoy and benefit from. It's all about how to find balance, feel good and see your children flourish as a result. Speak to you soon.