Downregulation Skills to Enhance Executive Functioning

Hey there, everybody. And welcome back to this series whole person counseling. 26 tools for 2026. I'm your host, Dr. Donnelly Snipes. Today we're talking about down regulation to restore executive functioning. A lot of us have had the experience where people that we're working with can use tools in session perfectly. It's beautiful. We practice, we rehearse, we prompt them. Wonderful. Not a problem. But as soon as they get out of session, it's like they forget how to use these tools. And they kind of do. Because when people enter fight orf flight, when people trigger that stress response, blood sugar and everything else is shunted away from our thinking mind, from our prefrontal cortex to help us fight, fight, or flee. So they do kind of forget, especially skills that are not completely ingrained. So it's not that they have a lack of desire, but an inability to turn off their autopilot and get into their thinking mind. Stress contributes to inflammation, exhaustion, brain fog and irritability by increase increasing adrenaline and shunting blood sugar away from the wise mind to provide fuel for that fight orf flight. This is such an important concept because when people are stressed, when people are in fight orf flight, they're on autopilot. They are going to really struggle to apply new tools or make wise mind decisions when they are in fight orf flight. When stress becomes chronic, it adds inflammation, sleep problems, exhaustion, and mood swings, all of which increase brain fog and make thinking clearly more difficult. Mindless mindfulness and proactive responding just becomes nearly impossible at this point. Downregulation helps clear the adrenaline haze and activate the thinking center of the brain or the prefrontal cortex. So what do we want to do? We want to help people learn to downregulate. And this is different than distress tolerance skills. Part of it is distress tolerance skills. But down regulation essentially means triggering that rest, digest and repair or your parasympathetic vagal nervous system. And in order to do that, people need to get their heart rate down. People who've had an experience of trauma, especially physically oriented trauma, are not often going to do well with noticing their breathing and doing a body scan and those sort of internal sensory awareness things. That's okay. That is fine. We don't want to force them to do something that's going to trigger them. What we can do is encourage them. It almost becomes a game. They can get one of those little finger pulse ox machines like you have at the doctor. They're like seven to ten bucks on online. They can get one of those that's all they need. If they've got a fitness tracker, they can watch their heart rate on there. All they're doing is watching their heart rate. They're not feeling it, they're not noticing it, they're watching a number. And a lot of times that can be less traumatizing than doing sensory awareness training for people with trauma history. So we're meeting them where they are getting that finger. Pulse ox can be super helpful. When they want to practice down regulation, they are going to get up and walk around the house a few times, maybe do a couple sit ups, something to get their heart rate up. Doesn't have to be anything big. We don't want them trying to engage in this initially or exclusively when they are upset. We want them to develop a sense of nervous system mastery, if you will, when they are in a good frame of mind. So walking around the house a few times, your heart rate's going to go up 10, 15 beats. I don't know, fine. Then they sit down and they start doing one of the techniques we're going to talk about and they watch that little number that represents their heart rate go from maybe 85 beats a minute down to 60 and they're like, hey, I did that, I did that. And it can become almost a game to see how quickly they can do that. It's a game for me when I do interval training, I have a polar H10 strap which is a lot more accurate than your wearables like a, a watch or a pulse ox. But you know, we're not looking for medical grade quality here, we're just looking for a guideline. But when I do interval training, I will get my heart rate up to 160 beats a minute and I'll see how quickly I can bring it back down to 115 beats a minute. And yeah, it feels kind of miserable in the moment, but it be like I said, it becomes a game and I gain a sense of mastery. So encouraging people to do what is comfortable for them. Most people are not going to want to do interval training and that is totally fine. Walking up a flight of stairs, walking around the house does the same thing. As they become more confident in their abilities to trigger their relaxation response to down regulate, then they can start doing it when they're distressed, when they're upset, they get off the phone with somebody that they had an argument with or something. They put on their little pulse ox monitor on their finger, they sit down, they practice their down regulation skills and they watch their heart rate go down. This serves Two functions. Two functions. Not only does it trigger the vagus nerve, the rest and digest system, which is great, that's what we want it to do. But by focusing on that number, guess what they're not focusing on? They're not focusing on that conversation or whatever it was that made them upset. So it's a two pronged attack, if you will, on the stress response. So how do we slow heart rate? The easiest way to slow heart rate is to slow your breathing. Box breathing is one way to do it. You breathe in for four, hold for four, exhale for four, hold for four and repeat. That can be very triggering for people with a trauma history. So if that doesn't work for them or they're like, no, I'm going to dissociate if I do that, Okie dokie now, no problem. Put that one over on the shelf. That's not going to work for this person. Blowing bubbles with bubble stuff. You can get these little containers of bubble stuff that they use at parties or weddings or whatever. And blowing bubbles, if I can get it open, See how long it took me to exhale to gently blow those bubbles, It's a great technique. And I actually add one or two drops of essential oil to mine so I get a double whammy. But they don't have to do that. Blowing bubbles is helpful and that's a great technique for kids, but it's also a good technique for humans. If you're in a place where you can blow bubbles and not feel self conscious about it, you can also blow bubbles with bubble gum. If you can chew gum, not everybody can. The same principle applies. You chew it, then you've got to stretch out the gum, then you've got to inhale big and you exhale slowly or that bubble's just going to pop right in your face. So you're accomplishing the same thing. A 60 year old walking around the office blowing bubbles probably is going to get a couple side eyes. But you know, worst case scenario, you go into the bathroom where nobody can see you in a bathroom stall and you do it for a couple of minutes. Singing loudly can really help because when we sing loudly, we take in a deep breath and we project from the diaphragm. So singing loudly can really help actually slow our breathing. Other things you can do include energy blowing on the little noise makers, which you can actually get. The little party favors, you know, the ones that roll up and unroll when you blow on them. You can get them so they don't make noise. They have silent ones. That's something else that you can do or kids can do. Blowing on a harmonica is something else that can be used with kids. I it can get really loud when they do it. Anything that involves slowing your breathing and I'm sure there are techniques I haven't thought of. The last one is energy release and I have asterisks by this because it doesn't initially slow your heart rate. Energy release is, for example, if I'm upset going out on a walk or walking up and down the stairs a few times, that actually increases my heart rate. But the interesting thing is when I start to do that, when I stop, my body is almost forgotten about whatever the stressor was. So it down regulates like it's supposed to after I quit walking stairs. So that's a way to actually switch, if you will, from emotion based nervous system to exercise based nervous system, if you will. Doesn't work for everybody. There is a field called bioenergetics that also underscores the benefits of what I'm calling energy release for grounding your nervous system. When I worked in residential, when I'd have people start to kind of get on each other's nerves in the day wing, we would separate them and we would take them out onto the patio or somewhere else where they could walk around. And by using those big muscles, it helped them get to a place where the energy was. It almost felt like it was being being pulled down out of the chest, down into the feet so they didn't feel like they were going to explode. Once people have downregulated, then they're going to need tools to decide what to do next. So in the next video we're going to talk about increasing emotional intelligence and exploring the plan.