How this Ivy League Student Grew Her Confidence

I definitely am really grateful for the skills that you taught me when I was a kid, especially because they helped me feel like I had more control over my emotions and my resilience.

Hello there, and welcome to the Mind Body Space Podcast, where we learn about the brain-body connection to help us and our families thrive. Hey, Liv, thanks so much for being here. My daughter Liv is here. She's a rising senior at Princeton University, and she's going to share with us some of the skills she learned when she was growing up with me, right, Liv? And from what she says, she still uses some of these tools today.

Thanks, Mom. So excited to be here. Thank you for having me. There are definitely a lot of skills that you taught me as a kid, specifically based around how my brain works and how these tools were impacting my brain, that helped me to deal with my emotional regulation and develop resiliency. I used to do pre-professional ballet, and I also was in music a lot. So that resulted in a lot of recitals, dance and music. Throughout school, as many of you know, you have public speaking events or tests, and a lot of the time I would struggle with anxiety. So my mom taught me some really valuable brain-based tools that helped me to overcome this performance anxiety, and I still use them a lot today. Being in college, there's a lot of high-pressure situations that you come into.. And now going into the workforce, there's a lot of situations where you have to rise to the occasion, and it's important to be able to manage your emotions when doing so. So thank you, Mom, and I'm excited to share these skills with more people.

So one of the things I remember, Liv, one time you had a teacher who would give you mini quizzes, I think 5 times a week or something, and he really kind of— it tortured you, but at the same time, I think you learned a lot. And right before you used to go in, 'cause it was like the first period of the day, we would talk about how you could pretend that it was a game when you were taking the quiz. And we also used the bubble exercise, right? The bubble visualization. Can you explain that a little bit?

Yeah, definitely. I distinctly remember those quizzes. They were called the Fast Five in my physics class in high school. I actually remember you teaching me the bubble exercise when I was just in third grade. My high school physics class was an opportunity to re-implement those skills that you had taught me before. Basically, the way that the bubble works is that when you sit down preparing to take a test, you imagine a clear bubble around you, kind of like a force field. And within this bubble, only focus and calm are allowed. So all other distractions like noises or like, you know, people breathe heavily when they're taking a test or like papers are turning and you can get really stressed by people moving faster than you. All of those distractions bounce off the bubble. This activity, and Mom, you can build off on this with the neuroscience, but it really activates your prefrontal cortex, which is the brain CEO, and it helps you to filter out and improve your executive function. This particular tool helps you to train your selective attention, and you're literally strengthening pathways in the brain by blocking out irrelevant noise.

So how useful do you think it was that you knew that it was actually your occipital lobe or the area that you visualize and make sense of the visual world around you. How did that impact how effective these exercises were for you?

Yeah, I think it makes a really big difference because it's one thing to tell a kid like, oh, you can think of a bubble being around you, but understanding that your brain is actually activated and creating this visual of a bubble surrounding you and making you feel like safer and more calm. I think that understanding the power of the brain and the specific activation made me feel like I was actually doing something instead of just like thinking about making a bubble. It felt more real.

Okay, that's awesome. I love that. So tell us, so it might sound a little complicated, but actually it was a very simple exercise, right? It was literally the ability to inhale and then exhale, imagining that bubble surrounding you, right? Can you just, can you recap on that?

Yeah, for sure. It's a super simple exercise. I remember like as my teacher was handing out the test, I would just close my eyes, take 3 deep breaths, and imagine this force field being activated around my head and my desk and my body. And then by the time the test landed on my desk, I was already centered and really focused. And I think that this skill also relates to the other skill that we developed a lot, which is like visualization. So even like the night before the exam, imagining myself taking those 3 deep breaths and activating my bubble really helped to make it more seamless when I was sat in the chair taking a test.

Awesome. Thank you so much for sharing that. And let's also talk about the second part of the mental challenge of when you're taking a test, even when you're in the bubble, we often talked about You know, looking at going through the questions and if you had issues with a question to be able to kind of leave that and not revisit it or even think about it as you moved on to the next question. So the ability to let go of a question or a problem that you couldn't exactly solve was another mental skill we worked on. Remember?

Yeah, I definitely remember that and I think. From high-level perspective, it goes back to a skill that you taught me when I was really little about your thoughts as clouds that kind of pass by and you don't get too attached to a thought. So taking that higher-level understanding of the brain and how we process so many thoughts every minute and applying that to a test-taking scenario, if I came across a question that I didn't understand, instead of getting caught up and spiraling into this series of thoughts that I didn't understand what was happening. I wasn't sure what to do, which then activates your fight or flight response where you kind of just wanna move on or panic. Instead of doing that, you let the question pass by and say, I'm gonna come back to that later. It's not an issue right now. I can keep moving on with things that I might know better. And then sometimes what your brain needs is just time to think about it. Instead of panicking and your brain shutting down, you're just processing and moving on and telling yourself that it's okay to come back to things.

Oh, I love what you brought up just now because when you let something go and you sort of let it germinate or, you know, kind of on the back burner while you move on to the next question, literally your brain may not be exactly focused on that problem, but it's still solving in the background, right? So understanding those kind of brain processes absolutely helps you to be able to let go, right? What do you think about that?

Yeah, so I think that really helps me to think about letting go and like continuing on with an exam or a task at hand. As we were talking about, sometimes your brain just needs the time to process things and your brain's capable of like doing many different things at once. So just because I'm working on another question, it doesn't mean that it's totally forgotten about something I was stuck on. It could be solving that in the background. I think that's really empowering to understand that even if in a certain moment you don't know how to solve a problem, it doesn't mean that you can't solve it over time. And if you give yourself the room to breathe and not panic, because that's really the thing that will shut you down and stop you in your tracks, is this feeling of like, oh my gosh, I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know how to do this, which I've felt many times, as I'm sure many of us have in many different situations. But having the ability to be aware that you don't know how to do something and be okay with that, I think is really valuable.

Okay, so you would let a problem go. If you were gonna let a problem sit for a while and come back to it later, you would make sure to put a few notes on there or to circle it so that you didn't forget to come back to that problem, and that way your brain could actually rest and feel relaxed that you weren't gonna forget about something, right?

Yeah, definitely. So I think circling something, making a note to come back to it, maybe jotting down a few ideas about how to solve something and then moving on is really valuable. And then that also relates to skills of time management because yeah, it's good to leave something behind and kind of move on, but you don't wanna forget about it and run out of time. So I think that leads to another skill that you really helped me develop, which was prioritization and time management.

And I know you were talking about the fact that we introduced these concepts to you very early in life, right? So how, how do you, what do you remember about when you were much younger versus how it comes to play now?

I mean, now it feels a lot easier to me because I've done it so many times. I've used these skills a lot, so For example, if I have a final at school, I don't really need the 3 deep breaths to make a bubble. I just need one. And I think that that has to do with the idea of routines and rituals and how that increases the communication between your neurons over time as you build myelin and practice. So these skills, when I was younger, like sometimes I would need reminders to like make my bubble or to learn about how to do time management. And like, obviously I still need reminders now. Like everyone needs reminders. But I think that those routines have become a lot easier and a lot more ingrained into my everyday life.

And did you enjoy learning about things like myelin? For those who don't know, the speed at which neurons can talk to each other, the more we practice, the more myelin it lays down, which is like the sheath of fatty cells that go around the nerve so that the way that the neurons communicate with each other get faster and faster, right? And as a little kid, you were kind of into science, but not— I wouldn't say you were a science geek, but you're definitely curious about it. And how important do you think that is to have learned that kind of stuff when you were little?

Yeah, so I think that learning about what's actually happening behind the brain processes is super valuable and probably one of the most valuable parts of these tools. Because as we said earlier with the bubble, like understanding that you're activating your prefrontal cortex and your occipital lobe, it makes it more real. Like there are so many tools that you could have or try to implement but not fully understand what it's actually doing. And then it's hard to feel like you're actually doing anything. So as a kid, even though I might not have been the most like science-oriented person, which I think I became more interested in science through the initial introduction to it through these tools. I do think that understanding the processes behind things makes you feel more confident in their implementation and their purpose. I will add that in my sophomore year, I took a neuroscience class and we learned about myelin and I was like, I already know that because I learned that from my mom. And I think that it's so valuable to learn these things when you're younger because your brain is a lot more malleable. So learning about your brain as your brain's developing, it's an extremely valuable skill.

So do you feel like learning about your brain is empowering to you? What kind of effect does it have when you understand how your brain works?

I think it's extremely empowering because when you understand, like, basically every human process that we engage in is monitored and starts in the brain. So it's our most powerful organ, and it really dictates everything that the rest of your body does. So being able to understand how your brain works and the potential that it has that you can unlock by understanding like those processes at a very fundamental level, I think it's extremely empowering. And it always makes me think it's a bit unrealistic, but there's this movie called Lucy that is about this woman who is like the only person who's able to unlock the full power of her brain. And yes, it's like a sci-fi movie, but I do think of it as understanding your brain is unlocking your power, and that's empowering in and of itself.

That's very cool to know. I'm so proud of the young woman you are and all the tools that you still use to this day. And because of you, I learned all of these tools myself. But going back to the movie Lucy, That is an urban myth that we only use a certain percent of our brain. That has been disproven. So everybody don't think that you're not using your brain or that's, you know, all of these skills and tools are available for you now, right?

I think that it makes it easier to know how to use your brain in the most effective ways when you know how to use these tools. So I'm really grateful that I was able to learn them at a young age, and I'm really proud of you for creating tools to help other young kids take advantage of the superpower that they have.

Okay, awesome. This is so great. I can't wait to have more discussions with you, and it's such a thrill to see, as with many other students, but especially with my own daughter, that these tools have actually helped because we're like anybody else. I mean, all the things that I used to say, sometimes my kids would listen, sometimes they wouldn't, and a lot of times they would seem like they weren't listening. But actually, I have to say, Liv did use a lot of the tools a lot more than my other child, who definitely learned them also but didn't particularly seem to use them as overtly as Liv did. Thank you again, Liv, for being here, and can't wait to have you on again. I know you have a lot more skills to share now that you have been in so many high-pressure environments. And it's awesome to hear your perspective.

Thank you so much for the opportunity to share, and I'm excited to be back.

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