How Protective Experiences Rewire A Traumatized Brain For Calm

What if your daily routine could calm an overactive stress system and open the door to a healthier, happier life? We sit down with Dr. Jennifer Hayes-Grudo to unpack ACEs—the ten Adverse Childhood Experiences that predict health risks—and then turn toward PACEs, the Protective and Compensatory Experiences that help the brain and body recover. Heather shares her raw story of loss, secrecy, and hypervigilance, and how mentors, marching band, and sports became lifelines long before she had language for resilience.

Together we map the science to the everyday. You’ll learn why unconditional love lowers allostatic load, how a best friend and a sense of belonging buffer bullying and isolation, and why volunteering uniquely transforms pain into purpose. We break down five relationship-based PACEs and five resource-based PACEs—meeting basic needs in a clean, safe space, building steady routines, moving your body, staying curious through learning, and finding hobbies that invite flow. These aren’t nice-to-haves; they are evidence-based tools that rewire stress pathways, boost executive function, and anchor hope.

We also challenge assumptions about where healing happens. From military service to enlightened rehabilitation programs, structured environments often bundle PACEs—predictability, community, skills, and physical activity—so people with high ACEs can regain agency. And if you’re in midlife thinking you missed your window, here’s the good news: it’s never too late. Start with “PACEs stacking,” like a walk with a friend that blends movement, sunlight, and connection, or a book club that unites learning and belonging. Reclaim a childhood spark—music, sketching, gardening—and schedule it like medicine.

If this conversation sparks a shift, share it with someone who needs a practical way back to calm and connection. Subscribe for more science-backed stories of resilience, and leave a review to help others find the show. What PACEs will you add this week?

Transcript

Opening And Theme Of Hope

Jennifer Hayes-Grudo 0:00

So, one of the best ways to get more paces going in your life is find a friend or a family member to connect with a pace you want to do, whether it's walking or being in a book club or uh another kind of topic.

Speaker 2 0:16

Your next favorite podcast pick starts now. Here's the Professor and Heather Anne.

Joe 0:23

Welcome to the Professor and Heather Ann. Although we don't have all the answers, we hope it can encourage and excite you. We're here sharing our lives to inspire you to make the most of the second half of your life. And today's episode is kind of a heavy topic. Yes.

Heather’s Story Of Trauma

Heather Anne 0:43

With with some lighthearted hearted lighthearted with a little bit and encouragement and hope. That's the big thing is hope. So um I grew up in trauma, and the biggest trauma of my childhood was when uh my dad died, and my mom had gone to prison, was convicted of second-degree murder. And that happened just a few weeks before my senior year of high school. So I had gone it, you know, was excited all summer as my senior year. I had a full ride scholarship. I was going off to school as soon as I graduated, and my whole life just basically imploded with that one fateful night on in August. And everything just changed. Um, I actually started my senior year as um with my mom in county jail. And I'm pretty sure not too many people can say that. So that in itself was traumatic, but it was just the culmination of the whole my whole entire life. I I remember uh the first time my dad hit me, I was as young as three years old. And with each house, I've come to realize as I've gotten older that with each house I have my own memories of that's how I remember my childhood. I know a lot of people remember their their childhood differently, or maybe even don't remember it at all, but the good and the bad, I remember by the color of the door, the house that we lived in, and that last house that I lived in with my mother, um, was the most traumatic. It was not just that all of that had happened, but it happened and we were front page news. So all those my whole entire life up until that moment, I was able to hide everything. I didn't have people come over and stay the night at my house. I very rarely had friends over. I was always I always went outside that door that we were living behind and built a whole different life. So I didn't know at the time what I was doing, but I was determined. I was very fortunate to just have the right people in my life at the right time. I had amazing coaches, amazing teachers. Um, one of my biggest mentors is probably uh my band director, and he he didn't even probably know that at the time, but the band helped me. I was in the band for like four years, played the clarinet, we marched, so we were a marching band. You were gonna say something.

Joe 3:55

Um so yes, we're we're our guest we're gonna introduce in a few minutes, our guest today will bring a a research or academic perspective on on what you're talking about.

Introducing Guest Dr. Jennifer Hayes-Grudo

Heather Anne 4:09

What exactly I'm talking about, and I'm very excited because I I actually just learned about this myself um just about three and a half years ago, that when I I was at a conference, I was actually speaking at it, and I just read these 10 questions, and my whole life just basically made sense to me at that time. Because even though you know I was able to go play sports and I was involved in just everything I possibly could, everything that was going to take me out of my house, I was just very fortunate to be able to do those things in my childhood. So because of those things that I did, I was able to pick myself up every single time. I was able to, even though my senior year of high school um I blew my scholarship and lost my scholarship, I even had a suicide attempt that I was after that, after the suicide attempt was like, okay, nobody's coming to rescue me. I've got to do this myself. What am I going to do? How am I going to protect myself? And at the time, we really didn't think our mother was going to go to prison, but she did. And so that was another drastic thing that happened in my life is that not all just all the stuff that I grew up with and the thing that happened with my parents, but now I truly, you know, now my mother's sent off to prison. And what does that entail? So I've just tried to talk about it a lot because I always want to give other people hope. I think that was my biggest thing growing up is that I always dreamt I was going to have a better life. This wasn't my real life. I, you know, hope was what got me through my childhood. Hope is what got me through the traumatic thing with my parents, and it has gotten me here today to even us having this podcast and having amazing guests like our next guest and hope.

Joe 6:28

And these people, uh, these people whose uh guidance and support counteracted the the effects.

Heather Anne 6:38

Yes, and especially since we've learned I've learned about these different steps and things that I've been fortunate enough to go through myself. Um I've been able to look back these last couple of years and I've truly been able to go, okay, this is what happened. I had a gymnastics coach that took me under my wing. I had a band director that took me under my his wing. I had amazing coaches through the years. My junior high PE teacher, who also coached us through, you know, basketball and track and all of that, um, was just amazing influences in my life. And then um friends, parents with without even realizing these are the things that I was going through. It's been amazing these last couple of years to look back and reflect on all of the amazing people that I truly I keep using that word amazing because it really is that it just seemed to be at the right place. When I was going down a wrong path, or I could have, you know, in the seventh grade, I started hanging out with older kids. I started going down the wrong path. Um, you know, drugs and drinking. And uh another story we'll share the car, the you know, the whole episode with the car. And at that right time, something dro happened. My mom um was for the first time um kicked my dad out of the house. It was just me, her, and my older sister that was living with her at the time. And she moved us out of a different neighborhood. And for a whole that whole year, my eighth grade year, I had to go to a friend's house at um and be there like six o'clock in the morning, because that's when um I could get there, and go to school, walk to school with her, and even knowing that was a paces, it was a place where I got to go be safe and have fun, and eighth grade was one of my best years in school and all of that. So to say I am excited is a uh big under uh uh understatement for sure.

Joe 9:02

Okay, and with that, um, we are very pleased uh to have as our guest on this episode, Jennifer Hayes Grudeau, PhD, uh, who uh as of last October uh is an emerit, a professor emeritus, a regents professor emeritus of psychiatry and behavioral science at Oklahoma State University Center for Health Sciences. Uh for the 10 years before that, she was the director of CERCA, a $20 million National Institutes of Health funded center, leading a collection of research projects to better understand the effects of childhood adversity and to promote resilience in children and adults. With her colleague and friend, Dr. Amanda Morris, she is the author of Adverse and Protective Childhood Experiences, a developmental perspective, and raising a resilient child in a world of adversity, effective parenting for every family. And she's the founding editor-in-chief of the international journal Adversity and Resilient Science, published by Springer Nature. Prior to joining the OSU faculty, she was a George Kaiser Chair of Community Medicine at the University of Oklahoma Health Science Center in Tulsa and an associate professor of medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, where she was one of the principal investigators in the Women's Health Initiative, the largest study of women's health ever funded by the NIH. So welcome, Jennifer, and thank you for being with us.

Jennifer Hayes-Grudo 10:30

Hi.

Heather Anne 10:32

It's lovely to be with you both. Thank you for coming on. You know, I'm really excited. From the first time I asked you, would you be on our podcast? So tell us a little bit more about what we're going to be diving into. So PACES. Tell us a little bit about.

Joe 10:52

Maybe start with ACEs.

Heather Anne 10:53

ACES, then PACES. Okay, go ahead.

What ACEs Are And Why They Matter

Jennifer Hayes-Grudo 10:55

Okay. Yeah, he wants to drag us back into ACEs before we get to climate into the light, into PACES. Um, well, you know, you mentioned that I that I was at the University of Oklahoma before I went to Oklahoma State, OSU. And while I was there, I was doing a project with some folks at Harvard that was funded by George Kaiser, a big philanthropist, a wonderful man in Tulsa there. It was called the Tulsa Children's Project. And our our goal was to help eradicate poverty one generation at a time, basically. We went into early Head Start centers, specific ones called Educare, and we worked with not the kids, because Educare does that really well. It's like Early Head Start on Steroids, it's a lovely program. And it states all over the country. But it was to lift up the parents and the teachers because you know when you're doing hard work, um, particularly working with families who have so many challenges when they're living in poverty and qualified for a Head Start, sometimes it drags you down too, right? So we were working with the parents and the teachers, and we had this fabulous program to help the parents go back to school and get degrees and make more money and have some better jobs and get their families out of poverty. And they did so well in the early stages. So 100% of our moms who were in this program became certified nurse assistants. The first two years we were doing this anti-poverty program. And then they all wanted to go back to school and become a nurse, you know, licensed professional nurses. And instead of 100% success, now we had 19% success. And we really didn't understand it's the same women doing the same things we had been doing all along. We were providing tutoring and support and the money for books and childcare. But the work was much harder, you know, to become a nurse. You have to know, you know, math and science and physics. And it was it was really challenging and demanding, or you had to be there at 6 a.m. and your car broke down, and you didn't didn't plan for that. And we we wondered what's going on. And somebody at that point suggested that it may be more than just lack of poverty, poverty, lack of external resources. It might be some of the lack of internal resources that happen as a result of childhood trauma. And that's when I discovered the ACES study. This is like about 2011. The ACES study had come out in 1998 while I was off doing other things and didn't even notice. But it was a landmark study. They published 27,000 people's health data from Kaiser Permanente, collaborating with the Centers for Disease Control. The researchers had the idea that maybe it was more than just behavior that's degrading our health as we get older, you know, by smoking or drinking or eating too many pints of ice cream when we're depressed. It might be something more inherently physical, biological, that that holds us back from being really healthy. And it might have to do with childhood trauma. And they put together all these questions and boiled it down to 10, which they called adverse childhood experiences. Yes. Or aces. Yes. And we like to say, you know, this is one time when you don't want to hold a full hand of aces. You don't want, you know, it's not a winning deck. It it's difficult. Five of the aces are typical, or what we think of as, you know, traditional abuse and neglect. Physical, emotional, sexual abuse, physical, and emotional neglect. And then five of them are what we would just normally call kind of family dysfunction. Having a parent who has a drug or alcohol problem, a parent who has a mental health problem, illness, or is suicidal, parent who has a criminal history, criminal record, parents who are violent with each other, domestic violence, exposure, and divorce. And so these 10 items, it turns out the answers predict health and life, how long your life is better than any 10 questions we've ever come up with before or since. It has such a profound effect that people started trying to understand why. So for the past almost 30 years now, 28 years since this study first came out in 1998, these, first of all, the results have been replicated all over the world. And what we find is that every society is full of aces because human beings have carried pain forward. You know, all the trauma and all the wars and in all the upheavals and in all the disasters somehow find their way into our bodies, into our behavior, and into our families. So they're common. About two-thirds of people in most communities have at least one ace. In some communities, it's much higher. Certainly, if you go into our prison population, if you go into death row, everybody's got 10.

Heather Anne 16:54

Definitely much higher. And mine is a 10.

Jennifer Hayes-Grudo 16:58

I know. You're you're such, we would call you a positive deviant. You are deviant in all the most spectacular ways, Heather.

Heather Anne 17:09

And it was about that time, maybe a few years later, that I learned about ACEs. So about that time?

Jennifer Hayes-Grudo 17:16

It takes a long time for research to trickle into the communities that where it needs to be talked about. That's why I love your podcast that we're getting a head start this way, getting paces out there. Maybe we don't have to wait 20 years for people to discover paces. But we discovered ACEs and we knew they were common. We knew that they co-occur. If you have one, chances are you have more than one because they often go together. Yes. They cluster. And when they do that, they are cumulative. So it's not like, oh, you have one, it doesn't matter if you have more. No, it's like a little bit of poison, maybe your body can tolerate, but you take four hits, four doses, four different aces. It's cumulative. It just adds to your distress.

Stress Biology And The “Bear” Brain

Heather Anne 18:05

So when you learned about the aces and you were thinking of, you know, in the middle of the research that you were doing, what came after that?

Jennifer Hayes-Grudo 18:15

So what we did there when we were working with the moms, um we we backtracked and we said, oh, we're trying to cram knowledge into their heads so they can become nurses. And instead, we need to help them rewire their brains so that they can learn to be nurses or whatever they want to become, because we've we discovered that ACEs affect your biology, they affect your behavior, and they affect your brain. Because yeah.

Joe 18:48

Sorry, Joe. Not to get too far you know into the weeds, but how is the the stress response system, sort of the programming of the stress response system in childhood implicated in all of this?

Jennifer Hayes-Grudo 19:00

Well, if you think about it, if if you are growing up living with a bear who is always about to attack, you are always on high alert. You are always waiting for the bear to bust through the door. You you don't know if the bear is in a good mood or the bear is in a bad mood or if he's gonna hurt you or hurt somebody else. Imagine if you were out hiking and you saw a bear. You you've been out there just enjoying the sunshine and maybe a blueberry bush that you see next to you, only it's the bear's bush. You're not thinking about anything else at that moment except survival, except securing safety. You're not learning your multiplication tables. You are not thinking about, you know, being uh kind to somebody who was mad, you know, mean to you at school that day. You just want to survive.

Heather Anne 19:58

And that's one of the things that I talk about. So a child that grows up in trauma, we do not, at least for me, I did not just jump out of bed every day. I woke up, laid in bed for a little bit to kind of I call it listening to the house. Where are my parents still going on from the night before? How did he get up in the morning and stub his toe and that sent him into crisis? So that it was never just like get up out of bed, let's go have some cereal, or on a Saturday morning, let's go have some cereal and watch cartoons. It was always, do I get to watch cartoons today or do I need to get out of the house already? Or for him, it was the way he would close the slam the door when he came home from work.

Jennifer Hayes-Grudo 20:45

Yeah.

Heather Anne 20:46

That would tell us a lot. And sometimes the way you would slam the door, you would hear it, and then you'd go out the front door because he was coming out the back and you knew it was going to be a bad night, so we might as well just get out.

From Mindfulness To Rewiring And Parenting

Jennifer Hayes-Grudo 20:59

Yeah. You learn to read a room real quick. You're reading signals that other people are not even paying attention to. Some people would say that has become a superpower for yours. So it's it's not that this is a skill that you'll never use again, but there are skills that it supplants. That that becomes your your overall overriding concern is maintaining safety and surviving. And when that happens, those parts of the brain develop really solid connections, the amygdala, all of those, those emotion regulation, you you're very tuned into that. But it's it's at the expense of other parts of the brain, perhaps not developing as much. And we knew some researchers um who were doing work on mindfulness. And when you train yourself to be calm and to stay calm, no matter what. Your inner chatter voice says that's what mindfulness is. It's just letting the chatter flow through you. That's what brains do. They create noise, but stay calm. Just practice. That's what we call practice mindfulness. You are actually rewiring the brain. So that's what we did with the Educare moms. And then we built it into a parenting program. And around that time, I left the University of Oklahoma. I was recruited to go to Oklahoma State, where I met my my now best friend and colleague, Amanda Morris. And she had been studying emotion regulation and parenting. And I was interested in how trauma and poverty and other environmental issues impacted parenting and child development. So we combined forces. And this is my favorite part of the story. I invited her to go to the first National ACES Summit, which was held in Philadelphia in 2013. And because I knew we were going to be working together. So we both go, and I was presenting data that we had collected both with the Educare moms and with our patients in the clinics at the University of Oklahoma. And it was a fabulous, very small conference. People were so kind and giving and loving, and you know, people who really cared about their patients and about kids. And yet, Amanda and I got back and we're like, there was something missing. Because there were no developmental psychologists like us there. Nobody who studied optimal development. How do we create conditions in which children can thrive no matter what? Because we had about 50 years of data as a field at that point on resilience, the concept of kids growing up in adversity, in trauma, in abuse and neglectful situations, and doing okay in spite of it. And identifying what those conditions were that would allow a child to come out of it okay was what was missing from that first conference. So Amanda and I sat down at my table in my office and said, before we go do a literature search, you know, get into the research online, I bet we know these. Just know them from our own review of the research over the years. We have 50 years of research experience between the two of us. And we wrote down 11 or 12 things. I think we wrote 11. And the only one that didn't make it, the cut, when we went back then and did all the research, was having a pet. And that's just because there wasn't enough research at the time. I bet if we did it again now, we would find it. I think you can put it with the one that is our favorite, which is having unconditional love. Now we just say whether it's from a human, ideally, it's from a parent or caregiver or another that you have lots of contact with, but it could also be from a pet. Because I mean, who loves you more than your dog? That's true. That is true. Or your cat. I know you guys are cat people. My daughter has cats. And my son, who's a dog person, recently adopted two little kittens. So I I'm pretty much of an equal pet. At least with mammals. Mammals have the capacity to form attachments. That's right. Mr. Primate researcher, I should be doctor probably.

Joe 25:48

Although cat cat love is different from dog love.

Jennifer Hayes-Grudo 25:52

Definitely. Definitely. It's definitely that could be a whole episode in an episode. Yes. I kind of like the way cats love you, you know. It's like it's on their terms sometimes. But dogs, dogs are just, you know, that's total unconditional love.

Heather Anne 26:07

So what did you and Amanda in that meeting? That was the start of everything. Yes. What came out of that task?

Birth Of PACEs: The Antidote To ACEs

Jennifer Hayes-Grudo 26:17

So there are, you know, we were we were coming up with these things and we realized what we were doing was coming up with what we thought of as the antidote to aces. And so, first of all, we named them paces because we wanted it to be connected, you know, like aces can do you damage. Maybe you get some superpowers out of them, but they also take a toll on your body because of the stress uh release, the stress response that's associated with them. Paces do the opposite. Paces restore your nervous system to a system of calm. They restore your ability to regulate your emotions. And that stands for protective and compensatory experiences. What do I mean by protective and compensatory? Think about a terrible winter in the north. Right now, as we're doing this, I kind of think I see some snow still in your shoulder. Yeah. Big snowstorms everywhere. Well, you when you go out, you need protection. You want to put on a big, big, you know, warm coat and boots to protect your body, but you have to compensate for all that snow out there too. So you're going to sprinkle your sidewalks with some something like salt or some other grit to keep it from causing you to fall. So that's what we mean by protective and compensatory experiences. Things that they don't quite even everything out because abuse is still happening or neglect is still happening, dysfunction takes its toll, but it evens the playing field just a little bit, it compensates a bit. And we came up with five that are relationship-based and five that are resource or environmentally based. And I mentioned the first one, which probably is the best researched and the most important that I know of, which is feeling unconditional love. And what I mean by unconditional, somebody is not going to say, Oh, I don't love you anymore because you made a mistake, because you did something bad. When my son was through about four, you know how their imagination starts to work. And he's like, Mom, is there anything I could ever do where you wouldn't love me anymore? I was like, no, I will, I'm I'm your mother. I love you. I will always love you. And he goes, What if I killed Amy? That's his little sister. That would test it. Um like only a four-year-old would come up with that. Like, because they got along pretty well at the time. And I was like, Well, you know, if you did something like that, I would, I would want to get you help because I would know there was something really wrongly wrong with you to hurt your sister so badly. But but you know, there are parents who don't realize how important it is to to get love unconditionally, they will use it as a reward or a punishment for behavior. So that having that from any source is is really important. The second one we've we discovered is having a best friend or a really close friend. Children who have a best friend, a close friend. First of all, they're less likely to get bullied at school. There's somebody there to take up for them. They also have someone to share their joys and their griefs and their problems with. They also get a window into somebody else's life. So, you know, often, and I and Heather, I've heard you talk about this. You go to somebody else's house and you can breathe easy for a while. Ah, this is what a safe family feels like. Ah, this is the kind of dinner table I could have someday when I grow up. This is the kind of atmosphere in a home I can shoot for someday when I'm an adult.

Heather Anne 30:17

I was very fortunate to have a lot of friends like that. Yeah, I can see why.

Five Relationship PACEs Explained

Jennifer Hayes-Grudo 30:21

You're a very lovable person. Yeah. So yeah, but it teaches the teaches you that too. It's like I'm a worthwhile person. Other people love me and care for me, and and you also gain skills as a result. You learn how to share and empathize with others and take different points of view. So there's there's the close friend. Being part of a social group is like that, but on a different scale. It's that feeling of belonging, whether it's Cub Scouts, the marching band, you know, a church group, but a group of people who you feel a sense of belonging and kinship with. Again, it helps you feel like you fit in. It gives you a safe place to be and to be yourself. And the fifth relationship-based one surprised me because Amanda's the one who brought this one to the table. I didn't know the research on volunteering. But volunteering in your community at whatever level is appropriate for your age and circumstances, when you give to others, whether it's your time, you know, you you go in and you you read to little kids kids younger than you, or you go in and and play cards with someone in the retirement home. Whatever it is you can do to give back is a way to connect by giving and not just by taking. And it teaches us that we always have enough to share.

Heather Anne 31:53

And it's interesting that those are the ones you bring up, because as you're saying them, it and again, I just learned about paces uh with a conference that I was with at Amanda. That's how I met Amanda, and then how I met you. And just reading through that um just kind of gave me an aha moment. It was like, okay, now a lot of my life makes sense to me. Because just in the five that you went through, I have a best friend. We're still best friends almost 50 years later. Uh she was the only one that knew my secrets, though she did live in trauma herself, but she was the only one that knew my secrets. My grandmother was my unconditional love, and my best friend just happened to come into my life just about the time that she had passed away. Oh, lovely. And then um I I having friends and having parents and all that stuff. But also um the doing band and sports uh was a big thing for me. So I was always involved in something. But the volunteer thing, I would I forgot about that one. When I, for a couple of years, I was a um candy striper and absolutely loved that. It was uh I had a lot of fun. I looked forward to no matter what was happening at home, two weeks, two days out of the week, I would go and put on my little candy striper. That's when they wore uniforms on candy striper. Yes, right. We look like candy stripes, we look like little stripes on us. So um, so tell us, let's dive a little bit more um into the paces.

Five Resource PACEs Explained

Jennifer Hayes-Grudo 33:41

So for the average the first five. Let me let me start by talking about the next five because these seem so mundane that we often take them for granted and don't realize how powerful and important they are. The first one are really just making sure kids have their basic needs met. They're living in a clean, uncluttered, safe home, safe enough, you know, not on the streets or in a cardboard box with enough food to eat, you know, clean clothes to wear, just basic needs. Abraham Maslov's hierarchy of needs. You are not going to reach your full potential if you're hungry, if you're cold, if you're if you don't have a safe and the clutter part kind of is surprising, but there's been a reason a lot of research in the past 20 years that regardless of income levels, kids who live in cluttered, messy, disorganized houses do more poorly at school than kids who come from clean, neat, or you know, kind of everything have a place for everything. Everything, everything has a place. Um, and if you think about it, it's it's stressful to always be looking for the scissors. Stressful to not know where the permission slip is for the, and and I'm pulling some of these out from my own experience. So it's not like I've always lived a perfect life, you know. But if you're always looking for that permission slip for the field trip that has to be turned in today for your child, it's just another source of stress. And so it's really important to try to bring some order into our homes, clean, safe, uncluttered, enough food to eat, clothes to wear, etc. The second thing is kind of related, and that's having healthy routines. I actually went to school with someone, graduate school, who became a psychologist and did not realize that there should be bedtime routines for her twin infants, her twin toddlers. They would just play until they fell asleep because that's what she thought was normal. It's like, um actually, it's really important to have a bedtime routine. You know, you take a bath, you brush your teeth, you read a book, you get a glass of water maybe twice, but there's a lot. And then you turn off the light, say I love you, and that's your routine. And it's not a fight every night because this is what we do. You get on that kind of conveyor belt and it takes you into sleep. And it helps us all to have a bedtime routine, a dinner time routine, a Saturday morning. You said, you know, cereal and cartoons. How reassuring is it when your world is somewhat predictable? You know what to expect. So that's that's important, and it also helps you build in the other paces that we want to have is when you create a routine that holds those paces. The next one is physical activity. You could see how that would be part of your routine. If you get up and you go to the gym or you go for a walk, or you take a walk after dinner, it becomes part of life. You're not trying to make yourself do it every single day because this is what you do. So physical activity and movement does so many things. It actually creates the chemicals that help our brain replace neurons as they die. It helps us be smarter, it helps us get rid of stress, it just helps, you know, our circulation helps us feel better, it releases endorphins. Exercise is better than antidepressants in study after study. So physical activity is a pace. The next one is learning, keeping your mind awake and alive and curious. And it's not just learning in school, but just being interested in new things and checking out books in the library or joining new clubs that teach you new things, how to do things related to the last pace, my favorite, which is hobbies. Hobbies seem like a luxury in our day and age where everything needs to have a payoff, right? We're so busy. But hobbies really are what keep us alive, having time, maybe not daily, but regularly, to just get lost in something you're interested in, something you either do alone, whether it's stamp collecting and reading, or painting, or drawing, or sculpting, or writing poetry, or in a group, you know, being part of an acting group, an amateur performance group or a magic group, but some hobby where time just magically disappears while you're doing it. It's it it nourishes our soul. So those are the five um resource spaces.

Joe 38:51

You know, um thinking about this, I wonder if so it does seem like a kind of a common thing for people whose childhood involved a lot of aces to um be set on the right path by military service. And so one one of one of Heather's sisters served in the Navy, and then you think about like J.D. Vance or this guy, Robert K. Henderson, who's written this memoir called Troubled. And so it as you're going through these paces, it seems like military service includes a lot of those things that you belong to a group, there's routines, very rigid routines, and physical activity, right?

Jennifer Hayes-Grudo 39:29

And and you have a safe, clean, uncluttered space with enough food to eat. Yes. Um, my husband grew up in in Israel during its austerity years, and there was just never enough food. The first time he was he was in the Navy, he it was the first time he could eat all the meat he wanted. They always had enough bread and vegetables, but you know, maybe they had one slice of salami and they moved it around on the bread, so every every bite you got a little tiny bit. But, you know, just what the military has done for probably millions of people over the years is provide those basic needs, the structure and predictability of routine, the belonging that you get from being in a group, the physical activity, and the learning. Most people go into the the military and come out with skills they did not have when they went in.

Military And Corrections As PACEs Systems

Heather Anne 40:28

And that fully describes my sister. She had she got the worst of it. She was a juvenile delinquent, got involved in drugs, all of that, in and out of group homes, juvenile hall. But when she went off to the Navy, it was tough for her at first, but she fell right in. And she talks about it today as she tried, she was in the Navy, she traveled the world, she tells wonderful stories. It it I truly believe that it truly saved her life because she had that for the first time. She had the discipline, uh, you know, being able to predict what was happening. And that was the biggest thing, I think, for her was our childhood was so unpredictable that this is what happened. You knew every day when you got up, this is what you were going to do for the day.

Jennifer Hayes-Grudo 41:19

It is very comforting to have some predictability in your life. Um I would also point out that there are a lot of more enlightened correctional facilities now that are providing the same kind of structure and opportunity to recover from trauma through physical activity, through learning, through hobbies, through skills, through connection with others. A lot of the diversion programs that help people with nonviolent crimes, if the crimes are primarily drug related, there are a lot of programs across the country now where people go into either inpatient or or outpatient, but but work on the source of the problem and not just the punishment for the problematic behavior.

Joe 42:14

Um so once someone is, you know, uh because you know, our our podcast is uh to a certain extent like aimed at uh well at at older people, at uh motors and and gen Xers. And and so like what what can be done to like bring paces into your life, you know, at as you know, you're older?

Heather Anne 42:41

Which is something that you know we've talked about. Um because I was fortunate enough to have those paces as a childhood as a child and be able to bring them. But what about the the people who have experienced trauma, have high ACES scores, but never had paces in their childhood? What are some things that we can share with them today to bring paces into their lives now?

Jennifer Hayes-Grudo 43:08

So the first thing is to realize that these things seem so simple, we might assume they can't be very important. And the first thing is to realize these are really important. These are really powerful, everyday, simple activities and um situations we can create for ourselves, and it's never too late. It really is never too late. I see I I spend a lot of my time, I'm at it right now, a house in Mexico, because I love it here. Um, Mexico for me is full of paces, it's full of people connecting and talking and groups and activities, and a lot of people in the community where I have a house here is um a lot of people are retired. So I see that. We even joke. It's a little village called Ahihik. It's spelled like in America, in English, it would be Ajijik. That's what my GPS says. Ah, it's a jijik. Well, not really. It's Ahijik. And it's a sweet little village, very artistic. It's actually called a Pueblo Majica because it's it is a magical village because there's so much art and things going on. People say they come here to die. Because they come here after they retire. Cost of living is lower, it's climate is fabulous. They come here to die, but they are having so much fun they never get around to it. And it's because of all the paces. It's because of the friendships, all the groups that are formed, all the activity that you can do from golf and pickleball to biking and cycling and hiking, because the weather's so nice, all the hobbies, the art groups. I was at my urban sketching group last night with 30 people that we sketched everything inside and outside of the local museum and then went to dinner together. I mean, we make time for this after we retire, or we don't.

Heather Anne 45:16

Well, and real quick on that, um, one thing I was just thinking was so we did a lot of beach um vacations when I was younger, and nothing ever they were the best trips. We always knew if we went to this, we always rented this house, if we went here or went there at the beach, that it was going to be a good week. There was no fighting. For some reason he behaved, everything was good. So the beach became a paces for my sister and I because it was a safe place, all of that. As we grew up into adults, beaches are our favorite place. We feel safe and calm there. And now we've raised our children, and we all happen to have boys, and so all of our boys love the beach. It's a calm, happy place for them. So that's even something we could dive into another time.

Jennifer Hayes-Grudo 46:12

And you know, I love how you're naturally linking today with then, because one of the things we tell people to do when you're thinking about having more paces is to allow your mind to go back over time and think what used to be a great pace for me? What was a situation or um activity that just made me happy, made me feel safe and calm and full of joy.

PACEs Stacking And Closing

Heather Anne 46:41

And maybe that's something you stopped doing, and now as an adult, you could go back, look at, and say, you know what, I'm going to start writing again, or I'm going to start. One of the things I've been talking with Joe is I no longer play the clarinet, but I'm missing that music and the way it made me feel, and how much I I really enjoyed it. So I um he has agreed to allow me to take up the drums. So I want I've been obsessed with the drums. My parents would not let me do the drums when I decided I wanted to be in bands.

Jennifer Hayes-Grudo 47:18

Some cause, yes. Yes. I once had a neighbor whose son had drums, and yeah, there's a downside. There is a downside to it, but uh also really great exercise as well as musical, you know.

Heather Anne 47:32

Yes, yes. So we are very thankful. We could have we could talk all day with you. You and I can talk all day. Um, we really appreciate you coming on today and sharing with us. Um, I hope that you'll be on with us again so we can dive into even more paces and really focus on how we can help our listeners with finding uh paces in their life right now.

Joe 48:01

Um is there any is there any last little thing that you'd like to say that we we haven't asked you about yet?

Jennifer Hayes-Grudo 48:09

The last little thing is, and I mentioned it briefly before, but paces work with other people oftentimes. So one of the best ways to get more paces going in your life is find a friend or a family member to connect with a pace you want to do, whether it's walking or being in a book club or uh another kind of hobby. Something where you can, we call it paces hacking, is paces stacking. So, you know, I'm a big one for finding two for one paces, you know. If you can go for a walk with your best friend, even if it's on headphones, you know, for it.

Heather Anne 48:51

Or like us, we're moving next door to be next door to my best friend, so we can do walks and do more stuff together. So my best friend and I are doing a stacking that our husbands are going along with our craziness.

Jennifer Hayes-Grudo 49:06

So you know, you'll be happier, and then he'll be happier. So that is true. That's true.

Joe 49:15

Jennifer, thank you so much very much for being on our podcast.

Jennifer Hayes-Grudo 49:18

We all need more paces. We do they build us up when everything else wants to tear us down. It seems like paces up.

Heather Anne 49:27

I agree with that 100%.

Jennifer Hayes-Grudo 49:29

It's a delight. Thanks for having me.

Heather Anne 49:31

Thank you very much for joining us.

Joe 49:35

Well, um, please subscribe, support our podcast, as we have so many exciting discussions coming up, including more guests, and we can't wait to have you along for new episodes. So join us here each week, my friend. You're sure to get a smile from lessons learned to mishaps. The adventures go on for miles. Here on The Professor and Heather Anne.

Speaker 2 50:01

Thank you for listening to The Professor and Heather Anne.