An introduction to The Resilient Father

​Hey dad, I hope that wherever you are now, whatever you're going through, I just hope that you're okay. I hope your family is okay and if things are not okay, just know that, I hope it gets better. If you're here listening to this podcast, then you're showing up for yourself, you're showing up for your kids. And that's the most important thing you can do. So with that, I'd like to welcome you to the resilient father podcast. I'm your host, Cavan Edwards, I'm starting this podcast because I, myself am a dad, and being a dad is hard. I'm recording this podcast about four weeks after the birth of my second son, with my first son rapidly approaching his second birthday. You know, I have a background in mental health and psychology, I've been involved in all kinds of mainstream and alternative types of mental physical health care for the last eight years. And when I went into becoming a parent, I really tried to keep my expectations low, because I knew it was going to be hard. And I wanted to be ready for whatever came at me and not expect it to come easily. And you know, what, I struggled, I still struggled, I struggled a lot with being a dad, despite all my training in self regulation, all these brain therapies, supplements psychological therapies that I know about, I had a really hard time coping with, with the demands of being a dad. My first son was very loud, he was very spirited. And so you know, he had a tendency to kind of scream at me at this very, very high volume. And I can only take that for so long before I really just started to break down and I would be sort of up at night with this infant, like swearing at them, and, you know, just behaving in ways that I really never thought that I would, and honestly, almost worse than I would towards even like a stranger. And it really took some very important feedback from my wife, and really me coming to the realization that this is just not how I want to be, this isn't the life I want. For myself, this isn't the kind of person I want, taking care of my children. And so you know, it took a lot of problem solving, it took a lot of counseling. And at one point, it even took an antidepressant to really help me kind of get into a place where I was able to really bring my full self to being a dad, with my second son, I will say things are a lot better this time around, we've come a long way, we've done a lot of adjusting, I've been working on myself quite a bit through this process. But it's still hard, you're still sleep deprived, you're still adjusting to having a new member of the family that's very, very high needs. And that's been hard to, but this time around, I really paid a lot more attention to taking care of myself, and not letting things go until they got to a point that I was not able to manage myself anymore. And you know, that's really what inspired me to start this podcast is I, I struggled and I want to be able to help others. Now things are getting better every day. And that's because I consistently just tried to problem solve work to make myself in the challenges in my life just a little bit better all the time. And it really is paying off, it really is paying off. And so Dad, this podcast is for you. While I may have had my own struggles, I also feel that I have a lot of useful skills, techniques and resources that I've accumulated over the years. And my goal really is to share them with you. So hopefully something in here made speak to you speak your personal experience seemed like a useful skill that you can, you know, take and effectively implement in your own life. And I hope I can help another dad maybe manage some of the weights that they carry. So I'd be remiss if I didn't talk about resilience. This is the resilient father podcast. So I mean, we got to talk about what resilience actually means to me. And what I mean when I talk about it. Now, when I think about resilience, I think about the famous Bruce Lee quote, and he says notice that the stiffest tree is most easily cracked, while the bamboo or willows survives by bending with the wind.
And really, you know, that makes me think about strength and what it is to be strong. So for example, I'm holding in my hand here, a pencil. Now ostensibly, a pencil is fairly strong, you know, you can take it in your hand and you can apply a fair amount of pressure to it, and it seems to withstand it. But eventually if you apply enough pressure, enough stress to a pencil, it snaps. In engineering, the tallest buildings in the world are actually built to flex and sway because if you make them rigid, they fail. They can't stand up to the wind and they crack and they break. People are kind of like that. You know, people are strong The human body can endure just an insane amount of mental and physical punishment. And really, this is one of the primary ways that people cope with their problems, cope with stress. You know, they knuckle down, they dig deep, they toughen up, they gut it out, there's a million different kinds of versions, ways you can say it. But inevitably, if your strategy is trying to just stay strong, at some point, that system is going to fail, there's going to be a limit where you cannot sustain it any further. And so, you know, in a lot of ways, the strongest things that human beings can make are things that are solid, but also flexible, they have to have the ability to shift and move to adjust to the circumstances. And that is point number one. That's one of the biggest things for me that resilience is about. So there's a saying, I came across it goes like this, toughen up or come prepared. Now it sounds like kind of a cross between like a macho man sort of suck it up kind of thing. And boy scouts being like, be prepared. But as I see it, these are really the two primary options you have when faced with a challenge. So for example, you're caught out in the rain in the cold. What do you do? Well, you know, you can toughen up, you can dig deep, you can try to just endure it, you can stomp your feet, flex your muscles run to try to warm up. Or another option is you can come prepared. So you can bring something like a raincoat which will help reduce the negative effects of the cold in the rain. And it's going to allow you to preserve your energy and strength in case of an emergency. And this is what I'm trying to do with this podcast and with kind of just my work in my life is I'm always looking for these raincoats. What are these practical and effective tools that people can use to preserve and bolster their mental health build resilience against problems that they encounter in their daily life. So I've accumulated what I think is a pretty good list of things that can be really, really effective for helping people relieve stress, cope better with problems that they deal with in their life. And that's where the first thing in this podcast is going to be. It's the resilient father toolbox episodes. So check these out. In these, I'm going to cover one technique in detail that helped me and that I've seen help others, I'm going to go over how to do it, I'll share some resources that I found. If you're interested in learning more about these things. And really, my hope is that you'll find something that can help you to all the toolbox techniques, or things that are specifically designed to be easy to fit into your daily life, things that even a really busy, you know, overwhelmed person can really take on and use to make a meaningful difference with very little time that we all have to spend with all the things that kind of pull us in so many different directions. And that brings me to point number three, which is what resilience is not. Resilience is not perfection, you know, I'm gonna kind of jokingly call myself the resilient father. But I'm not going to pretend that everything is perfect resiliency and becoming resilient. It's not about never feeling bad or becoming emotionally bulletproof. It's about developing the flexibility and resources to better cope with our low points, becoming more skilled at recovering and learning from our mistakes when our limits are tested. How can we bounce back? How can we bend in the wind? In addition to the toolbox, I'm going to cover episodes that have topics of parenting and fatherhood, you know, common problems that many fathers experience, I'll try to dig into what the scientific literature has to say, and relevant experts have to say on the topics. Hopefully those will be more sort of just interesting thought provoking. Maybe point you in new directions, new ways of thinking. I think it'll be fun. As I'm recording this, there's a baby crying upstairs, the laundry machine is going off behind me ruining my recording.
I do want you to be able to come away with from this episode was something of value. So I want to talk about one really important topic that a number of the tools and skills I'm going to be sharing will revolve around it's a topic I'm going to talk a lot about. And that topic is stress. More specifically, how does stress affect us? And how can you effectively reduce it? Everybody knows stress is bad for you, blah, blah, blah, ruins your sleep and makes you unhealthy on and on. Everybody knows that the world we live in is stressful. Everyone is a little overwhelmed in one way or another and it's hard to keep up. And that's where stress comes in. Traditionally stress is you know, a survival mechanism, the classic sort of fight or flight response. In response to danger your body switches on mechanisms that create extra energy allow it to endure punishment in order to survive. This is a highly effective, but it drains a lot of resources from your body. And in the modern world. We don't really have these direct survival threats, you know, You're not going to get hunted by a tiger attacked by a rival tribe. But we are overworked. We're overstimulated. We're overtired. And to compensate for this, the brain and the body kind of work to activate low grade stress response and us kind of constantly in order to try and basically generate more energy. So you know, you think about like 3am, and your kid wakes you out of a deep sleep and their in need, you know, it's stress, that kind of gives you that bolt of energy to get up and take care of them, , it's 2pm, you're at work, you're hating your job, you're exhausted, but you keep going, because you need the paycheck. And, part of that is stress that keeps you running. But the thing about stress is, it works a little bit like a muscle, it gets stronger, the more you use it. So over time, the more people continually just strengthen and grind on their stress response, you know, they stay strong, the more easily they can do so the next time and the harder it is for them to come down from running the stress response once it's been started. Now, the biggest problem with this, I think, for dads is that our are emotions are tied to stress. So the more active your fight or flight response is, the more likely you are to become irritable, angry, sad, overwhelmed, anxious, you know, people who have a lot of stressors in their lives, they become kind of like boiling pots that have just been taken off the stove. So you know, you got to your pot is boiling, because you're overwhelmed, you're stressed out, take it off the stove, you get a little bit of relief, and the water settles, but it stays hot. And as soon as it goes back on the heat, it starts to boil over again. On the flip side, if you put a pot of water on the stove that's been cooled off, it takes a lot longer to heat up and boil over and cause problems for you. So this brings me to the thing I sort of want you to take away and the theme that we're going to go forward with for much of this podcast. And it's the importance of the lesser known little brother of the fight or flight system, the rest and digest system. To its name, the rest and digest system allows us to recover after stress, it allows us to restore physical resources and recover and heal from mental and physical exertion. It acts almost like an opposing muscle to our stress response. So if you think like a bicep on your arm, you know, if only your bicep was strong, you could do a curl your arm up, I just hit my desk. But it would be hard to get your arm back down again to neutral without a triceps muscle on the back to pull it back down. Right. So you have to have that balance in your system. The rest and digest system helps to pull us back down from stress, and bring us into a more neutral state where we can recover and start to kind of heal and recuperate our energy. The problem is for most people the stress or sorry, the rest and digest system is just kind of weak. You know, it's underutilized because the modern world requires constant action. And so people they never truly relax. The relaxation muscle isn't really strong enough to help them do so properly. And it's not strong enough to counteract their super strong stress response. They've been cultivating basically their whole life. So this is what I want to get you started with is how can you get good at relaxing? How can we develop our relaxation response so that we can increase our flexibility and tolerance for problems? How can we learn to cool off so that we aren't a hot pot on the stove, ready to boil over on our kids and our partners? I would invite you to think about things that make you feel relaxed. You know, when was the last time you took us five minutes to sit quietly and just do nothing, you know, let your mind body beedis. Now easier said than done, I know. But start to think what even like very small thing can you do for yourself today that might help you relax just a little bit. In the next episode, I'm
going to share the very first resilient father tool, which is probably the most powerful technique I've ever found for reducing stress, something you can do in five minutes or less and instantly notice a positive effect on your mood and stress levels. It's a skill that I've shared with hundreds of people and no one has ever said to me that sucked and I hated it. The vast majority said it was a valuable skill they voluntarily used every day going forward because they found that it just it helped them so much. And so I invite you to check out the next episode for that. But in general, I hope this was interesting. I hope you just start to think about like things that make you feel more relaxed and things you can do to start to take care of yourself because you got to take care of yourself, dad if you're going to be able to take care of your family. Alright, well thanks for listening. I hope you enjoyed that. If you have a topic you'd like me to cover about fatherhood you have questions you have comments. Shoot me an email at the resilient father@gmail.com Check out my instagram resilient Father or check out my YouTube channel also the resilient father alright until next time like I said thanks for listening and take care of yourself