This week on Homeschool Highschool Podcast: Staying Calm in Times of Imminent Stress and Natural Disasters with Teresa Wiedrick.

Staying Calm in Times of Imminent Stress

If you watch the news or social media, you might be noticing lots of stressful events, it sometimes feels like stress is a looming, imminent presence! That’s difficult enough for us parents, but even more so for teens, who are just developing their self-awareness and stress management skills. With that in mind, I asked our friend, Cousin, and Homeschool Mama Self-care coach, Teresa Wiedrick, to help us work out some skills we can all use for staying calm in these times.

Teresa often works with homeschool moms who are dealing with periods of time when there is significant stress at the moment or coming soon.  In those times, homeschool parents have to put on their good skills in order to lead the family in a possibly dangerous time.

Teresa’s story

Teresa homeschooled her four kids for almost two decades four kids. They are all graduated, and as Teresa says, she now as a graduated homeschool mom.

She felt called to help her fellow homeschooling moms and gradually moved into the homeschool coach role. She officially launched her coaching practice at Capturing the Charmed Life in 2019, after she had written the wonderfully helpful book, Homeschool Mama Self-care.

Next, Teresa started the Homeschool Mama Self-Care podcast and started connecting people around the world from my home. She absolutely loves this work of empowering women to be all that they were meant to be in their homeschool lives and in their lives in general.

Teresa lives western Canada, where there are some stressful times of year

She live in mountainous British Columbia where she homesteads outside of a small town. One of her big, yearly-imminent stressors is fire season. When we recorded this episode, there were fires within a one-hour drive from her home. At the time, one of the fires had been generally suppressed about a mile away! SO, there’s a lot of imminent stress going on!

The news in the US showed pictures of airplanes dumping the fire retardant chemicals on the fire. That was the fire just a mile or so from her house! That fire is what you could call an imminent stressor, especially for the many evacuees in her area. The government was trying to find new places for people to move to because so many homes had been lost.

What Teresa has learned about managing imminent stressors

The biggest thing that Teresa has learned is that we are not in control of everything that happens. We stress ourselves out more when we do not accept that truth. For instance, she could not control the Park Forest fire that burned thousands of acres of land, including a small town of 15,000 people. She cannot control the fact that all those people were left homeless.

Some of our homeschool families are in areas that are prone to natural disasters

We have homeschooling friends who live in areas that have seen more tornado activity in the past few years. Our families on the East Coast and Gulf Coast see hurricane activity some years.

So there are these times where we can’t “make it better”. We can’t say, “there won’t be a fire, there won’t be a hurricane”. However, as parents, we must still keep some measure of mental health in the family.

However, we can give our teens, younger children, and ourselves, some stress-coping skills, so that they are more resilient and positive (and not simply waiting in fear for a natural disaster).

Teresa teaches her family meditations or somatic mindfulness kind (such as yoga or tai chi practices). These calming activities help ease the body and soul when they feel anxious.

One practice Teresa likes is identifying somatic feelings

Identifying big emotions is truly helpful. You ask teens (and yourself) what you are feeling and where in the body we are  feeling it. (You noticed, there are probably places in your body that carry your stress, like a tense jaw or neck.) In a way, identifying the feeling helps to almost bring it outside of us, like we are observing it. It lessens the feeling of stress for our bodies and souls.

Then, importantly, you say (and teach your teen to say), “I feel this but I’m still okay.”

I think that there’s certain breath work activities that stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system that really do help to slow down what’s going on inside of us.

Breathing helps

When we do slow, deep breathing, it helps all the systems in our body will slow down, just like you’re putting a foot on a brake in the car. (You can add this to your teens’ health credit by explaining that slow, deep breathing will stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system, which calms the body. We know also that oxygen reduces the stress hormone.)

There are many types of deep breathing. One of Vicki’s favorites is called progressive relaxation (it combines tensing and relaxing muscle groups as you breath. Here’s a how to for progressive relaxation.)

Teresa enjoys “box breathing”. In this deep breathing you breathe in for four beats breath. Then you holding it for four beats. Next exhale for four beats, and then hold for four. Repeat the exercise three times.

Connection helps

When teens (or adults) feel stress, it can help to have a go-to person to talk to. For instance, when the fires were raging in her region, and Teresa was watching the helicopters fly over their homestead with huge water buckets. She was alone on the homestead that day, and knew that she was feeling anxious. Teresa’s go-to person is her husband, so she called him.

She asked for his help in getting grounding (feeling less anxious). Although she knew how to do box breathing, it felt good to her to breathe over the phone with her husband. The breathing calmed her, and connecting with him calmed her.

People are made to connect, to look out for each other. Thus, during times of imminent stress, it is important to do simple things together, like talking and breathing.

Be prepared

It helps to lower anxiety if we are prepared ahead of time. Recruit your teens to help create an emergency plan and emergency kit. (Remember fire drills at school when you were a kid?)

Create an evacuation plan if your family faced fire or natural disaster. Create an emergency kit with medical, first aid, emergency radio, and copies of important documents. Teens feel empowered if they have completed the Red Cross first aid and CPR classes.

Learn to be calm before the stressful times, then practice often

There are many ways to teach the body and mind to be calmer. These are good to practice every day.

Teresa enjoys guided meditations (one of the many things she talks about in her Homeschool Mama Self-care Support Group on Facebook).

Somatic meditations are good self-awareness practices (also called a body scan meditation). In this meditation, teens breathe, then notice each part of their body and identify what those parts are feeling (stress?, pain?, just-fine?). Respect the feeling, then remind yourself: “I feel this but I’m still okay.”

It helps to have a coach

It’s a nice thing for us homeschool moms to have a calm, wise person to talk to before and/or during times of imminent stress. Teresa has helped so many of her coachees grow in self-awareness, manage stress, feeling empowered to enjoy their homeschool work.

Connect with Teresa Wiedrick

You can find Teresa at:

• Homeschool Mama Self-care/Capturing the Charmed Life.
• Check out her encouraging podcast: Homeschool Mama Self-care: Nurturing the Nurturer
• Find her on social media:
  • Facebook Homeschool Mama Self-care
  • Instagram Homeschool Life Coach

Also, you will love our other chats with Teresa on Homeschool Highschool Podcast:

• Harmonious Homeschools
• How to Engage Homeschool High Schoolers
• Homeschooling in Canada

Join Vicki and Teresa for a discussion on helping the family to stay calm during times of imminent stress and natural disasters.

Thank you to Seth Tillman for editing.

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