How to Stop Losing Your Temper with Your Children

How to Stop Losing Your Temper with Your Children

As a mental health counselor, one of the questions that I’m commonly asked by young mothers is “how can I stop losing my temper with my children?” 

Have you ever wondered this? You feel wound up and tense around your children. You want to be the best parent you can be but struggle to keep your cool. 

You use every skill available to you and you go along great for a while only to have an explosive episode that leaves you wondering, “where did that come from?” You feel terrible as a parent and wonder if there’s ever going to be a way to break this cycle.

I get it because I have wondered the same thing for many years. I tried all the things that I taught my clients to do: take a deep breath, build in a pause between trigger and response, take a break, etc.

But recently I realized that there is one thing that has been missing. Once I learned this, I had a drastic change in the way I felt around my children. Here it is:

In order to stop losing your temper with your children, you must understand why you’re yelling at them in the first place.

And no, it’s not because you’re tired or because they’re disobeying you, or because you’re not trying hard enough. 

It’s because your autonomic nervous system is hyperfunctioning. Learn to regulate your nervous system and you’ll be able to manage your temper around your children in no time.

What is the autonomic nervous system?

The autonomic nervous system is a network of nerves and cells that carry messages to and from the brain to various parts of the body. It regulates your heart rate, blood pressure, breathing, digestion and sexual arousal–in other words, it regulates various functions of your body involuntarily without you having to think about it. 

The nervous system includes the sympathetic nervous system which is responsible for getting you amped up, and it includes the parasympathetic nervous system which is responsible for helping your body to rest. 

When your sympathetic nervous system gets activated, you go into “fight or flight.” Your heart rate increases, your breathing gets shallow, your pupils dilate, your hearing becomes keen, and your muscles tense. Your body is gearing up to either fight or get out of the situation.

The parasympathetic nervous system is responsible for “rest and digest” processes like slowing of heart rate, slowing of breathing, digestion, elimination, and relaxation.

Your body can either be in one or the other. It cannot be in both at the same time.

The threat response leads to losing your temper

One component of the nervous system is the threat response system. When your body detects a threat, that information goes through a part of your brain called the amygdala and down a nerve in your spinal column called the vagus nerve. This nerve connects with your heart, lungs, and muscles in your neck, among others. Your heart rate increases, your muscles tense, your breathing increases. Before you are even aware of the threat, your body has already mobilized into self-defense and activation–this is the nervous system in action.

The reason why you lose your temper with your children is because your logic and reasoning go offline when you’re having a threat response. You can’t think through how you want to respond. You don’t have access to good parenting strategies. Your body is taking over. 

The threat response is involuntary

Your history determines what you experience as threatening. Something that activates your threat response may not do the same for someone else.

Here’s how to tell when you’re having a threat response. Your muscles involuntarily tense. Did you know that the only reason your muscles involuntarily tighten is because you’re in a threat response?

When you’re in a threat response for a prolonged period of time, energy builds up until it explodes out of your body–i.e. Yelling at your children. Once you get to this point, it happens involuntarily, This is why it can feel like you have no control over it.

So does that mean that there’s no hope? Does that mean that you are doomed to be subjected to your body’s response without any say in the matter?

Absolutely not.

Learn to interrupt the threat response and you can live in a calm body more often than not. After all, this is the way our body what always meant to live. Calm body = no pent up energy. No pent up energy means that you can stop losing your temper with your children. Staying in a calm body means that you can put those good parenting skills to use.

Here’s how to interrupt the threat response.

Here are four steps that you can use to interrupt your threat response. 

1. Build in a pause. 

Victor Frankyl said, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose a response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” 

Build in a pause and you start to have space to choose how to act. 

But what can you do in that pause to bring your body into a state of calm?

2. Use tools that quickly and effectively switch your body from threat response to calm. 

You don’t have to take a long time away from life to get back into a calm body. With a little practice, you can literally do this in three seconds or less. These tools include things like,

• Muscle relaxation. When you relax your tense muscles, you interrupt your threat response and bring back a state of calm.
• Abdominal breathing. Focusing on your breathing allows you to activate your focus while at the same time bringing oxygen into your body. Both help to interrupt the threat response and reengage a state of rest and digest.
• Imagery. Imagine yourself in a calm and peaceful place. Activate all of your senses by noticing what you see, hear, feel, and smell. Notice what you you feel inside your body. If you feel calm, congratulations! You just accessed a state of calm.

3. Notice what it feels like to feel calm.

Study this feeling. Memorize it. Notice how it’s different from tension. Notice what changes and shifts in your body. Take a mental note that this is what it feels to be relaxed. Then, next time you want to calm you body, you can access this feeling in a matter of seconds.

4. Check in with your body throughout the day. 

My guess is that every time you check in you will notice that your body is tense. Remember, this is your body have a threat response. Energy is building up and it’s bound to come out if you don’t interrupt it. Use your favorite skill to quickly interrupt this threat response. You’ve just reset your nervous system. Continue to interrupt the threat response throughout the day and over time your body will learn to live in a state of calm more than in a state of threat.

That’s it. Simple, right?

To be clear, just because it’s simple doesn’t mean that it’s easy.

The best way to learn how to regulate your nervous system is to experience it for yourself. 

In order to switch from threatened to calm–fast, you’ll need to have a felt-sense of what this feels like in your body. In order to do this, you will need to experience it for yourself.

Here are three exercises that you can try to experience the power of flipping the switch from tense to relaxed.

1. Scan your body from the top of your head to the bottom of your feet. Notice any muscles that are tense. Relax them as you go.
2. Relax the muscles in your whole body at once by relaxing the muscles in your pelvic floor.
3. If you’re having difficulty relaxing these muscles, you can try a progressive muscle technique in which you practicing tensing and then releasing groups of muscles in your body.

Once you experience the difference between relaxation and tension, you will be able to flip the switch anytime you want and stop losing your temper with your children.

Conclusion

Now that you know why you involuntarily lose your temper. You have the power to interrupt your threat response so that you can show up for you children the way that you always wanted.

If you would like to go deeper and get even more tools to help you regulate your nervous system, check out the Quick Calm Toolkit which is full of 15 simple but powerful strategies for a predictably stress-free body.

Thank you for trusting me on this part of your healing journey.

The information in this post is general information for educational purposes only. While Sheena Kaas Mudaliar, MA; LMHC is a licensed mental health counselor, the information on this site is not intended to be a substitute for therapy or psychological advice. The information provided does not constitute the formation of a therapist-client relationship.