"I believe that education is all about being excited about something. Seeing passion and enthusiasm helps push an educational message. "

In 2026, many parents, teachers and coaches are asking the same question. What is happening to our children?

Across schools and communities, we are seeing more aggression, faster escalation of conflict, online humiliation spilling into classrooms, and young people struggling to regulate strong emotions. At the same time, childhood is now lived through screens in fast, stimulating, comparison-driven digital environments that developing brains were never designed for.

In this episode, I sit down with Bryan, Head of Student Engagement, football coach, father and husband, who works with young people every day. We talk honestly about what he is seeing on the ground. Rising reactivity. Exposure to gambling culture through sport. Earlier access to drugs and alcohol. The growing pressure that boys and girls are facing in 2026. This is not a blame conversation.

What does constant stimulation do to a developing brain?

How does sleep loss affect impulse control?
Why are some conflicts escalating so quickly?
And what can parents, schools and communities actually do to help?

We explore the neuroscience of regulation, the difference between character and capacity, and why connection must come before correction. Most importantly, we focus on practical steps. Strengthening sleep, protecting childhood from screens, rebuilding community boundaries, and restoring the conditions that help children thrive.

Screens are not the only factor. But unregulated exposure in developing brains is not neutral. If we want safer communities, we must build stronger nervous systems. If we want resilient adults, we must protect childhood.

Based on the sources, physical activity is not viewed as a reward but as essential biology that supports the nervous system and builds the capacity for frustration tolerance. The following activities and approaches are highlighted as beneficial:

• Team-Based Sports with "Flow": Engaging in sports that emphasise team dynamics—like the New Zealand All Blacks’ "caterpillar" model—helps students move away from individual frustration and social comparison. When a team "flows" together, they learn to communicate and work together to "fix links" when someone fails, rather than a student feeling like a "loser" when they don't personally score.

• Outdoor Time: Restoring outdoor time is considered a high-leverage intervention to help regulate the nervous system. This provides a necessary break from the chronic load of digital stimulation and screens, which often depletes a student's ability to handle setbacks.

• Mindful Movement and Stretching: Incorporating daily stretching can help transition the brain from a reactive state to a centred one. These "tiny habits," when done consistently, help rewire the brain for better emotional control and less reactionary behaviour.

• Walking and Connection: Physical activities that facilitate conversation, such as group walks, can help students and adults alike "unpack" their day and process frustrations through connection rather than isolation.

• Competitive Play with Resilience Modelling: While competitive sports like football or rugby league can be sources of frustration, they serve as a training ground for resilience if adults model how to "bounce back" after a loss rather than blaming others.

Ultimately, these activities support frustration tolerance by strengthening human capacity—including social intelligence and emotional regulation and to keep

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This week on Thriving Minds, I’m joined by Associate Professor Tara Walker, Senior Research Associate at the Queensland Brain Institute (UQ) — and co-host of the trail running podcast Trail Tales with Tara and Bryce.

Tara and I are both neuroscientists, and we both love running. In this episode we explore the science and the joy of trail running — what it does for brain health, mental health, confidence, and connection. We talk about why running on trails feels so different to road running, how being in nature changes the experience, and why community is often the missing ingredient for people who think “I’m not a runner.”

We also dive into Tara’s research program investigating how lifestyle interventions like exercise and diet support brain health, including what we’re learning about hippocampal neurogenesis, exercise-related blood factors (exokines), and the emerging idea of exercise mimetics — ways to mimic some of the benefits of exercise for people who can’t run.

Along the way, Tara shares her personal trail-running journey — from her first 10–12km trail race to ultras and 100km events, and the mindset and training strategies that make endurance possible. We also discuss injuries, why trail running is booming, and how moving outdoors can help us feel more regulated, less stressed, and more connected.

If you’ve ever felt disconnected, stuck at a desk, or unsure how to start moving again, this is a practical and hopeful conversation — grounded in real neuroscience and real life.

Listen now — and if you’re in Brisbane, you might even want to join a community run (koalas included).

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What happens when we mistake compliance for strength?

In this episode of Thriving Minds, Professor Selena Bartlett explores a powerful and confronting conversation with a man who was proud of the physical punishment he received as a child. He believed it made him disciplined. He believed it taught him consequences. He believed it made him better.

But beneath that story lies a deeper question: when does discipline build character, and when does it condition helplessness?

Drawing on neuroscience, behavioural science, and parallels from the multi-billion-dollar horse industry, Selena unpacks the psychology of learned helplessness — the state that occurs when repeated stress teaches a nervous system that effort does not change outcomes. A quiet being is not always a regulated being. Sometimes it is a shut-down one.

From parenting to leadership, from classrooms shaped by industrial efficiency to the rise of AI-driven optimisation, this episode challenges us to rethink control, compliance, and the architecture of agency.

True resilience is not built through fear. It is built through co-regulation, relationship, and adults who can pause rather than react.

If we want thriving minds, communities, and countries, we must ask ourselves:

Are we building agency — or perfecting compliance?

#ThrivingMinds
#LearnedHelplessness
#IntergenerationalTrauma
#AgencyMatters
#Neuroscience
#Parenting
#Leadership
#Resilience
#EmotionalRegulation
#CoRegulation
#HumanDevelopment
#BeyondCompliance
#DontBreakTheirSpirit

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In this episode of Thriving Minds, Professor Selena Bartlett is joined by Ellie Murphy, founder of Storitiv, to explore why authenticity is becoming one of the most important human skills in an AI-mediated world.

As technology makes it easier than ever to generate polished language, profiles, and narratives, many people are sensing a growing gap between how they present themselves and what feels true underneath. This conversation examines why that gap matters, how humans are wired to detect authenticity, and why trust, consistency, and follow-through remain central to meaningful work and relationships.

Drawing on neuroscience, evolutionary insight, and lived experience, Selena and Ellie discuss authenticity not as branding or performance, but as alignment. They explore why oversharing isn’t the same as honesty, how misalignment shows up in the nervous system, and why trust is a key driver of productivity, speed, and psychological safety at work.

This episode is for anyone who feels that the story they’re telling no longer quite fits, and who is navigating leadership, identity, or connection in a world where words are easy to polish, but truth is still felt.

In this episode, we explore:

• Why humans are built to detect authenticity
• The neuroscience of trust, predictability, and alignment
• How AI changes storytelling and perception
• Why trust accelerates work and strengthens relationships
• What it means to align truth and presentation in modern life

🎧 Thriving Minds explores brain health, human connection, and what it takes to thrive in a rapidly changing world.

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The podcast episode featured a conversation with Professor Sharon Lawn about mental health systems, lived experience, and the importance of humanising care for individuals with mental health challenges.

We discuss the need for more person-centered, compassionate approaches in mental health services and the value of incorporating lived experience perspectives into research, policy, and practice. The conversation emphasized the significance of community support, everyday acts of kindness, and treating individuals with dignity beyond their diagnoses to transform mental health care systems.

Sharon covered several key topics:

Personal and Professional Background

• Sharon's journey shaped by rural upbringing, family openness about mental health, and early career experiences working with veterans at a psychiatric hospital
• Her observational approach to understanding mental health systems and power dynamics

Lived Experience in Mental Health

• Definition and importance of lived experience work in valuing individuals' perspectives
• How to intentionally use lived experience to create understanding and humanize mental health services
• Challenges of incorporating lived experience safely and effectively in professional contexts

Dehumanisation and Systemic Issues

• The contrast between seeing people as humans versus focusing solely on diagnoses and symptoms
• Problems with impersonal language, labeling, and assumptions in mental health care
• How systems deflect responsibility by labeling patients as "non-compliant" or "too complex"

Transforming Mental Health Services

• The need for services to reach people in their own spaces rather than requiring them to seek help
• Importance of person-centered, proactive approaches versus crisis-driven systems
• Value of both formal and informal support systems, including community organizations

Humanisation and Connection

• Practical ways to show compassion through everyday acts like using people's names, bringing flowers to hospital visits
• The significance of small human connections and being seen
• Building community through simple gestures of kindness and acknowledgment

Based on the meeting discussion, Sharon Lawn recommends several specific changes for mental health systems:

Shift from Crisis-Driven to Proactive Care

• Services should reach out to people in their own spaces rather than requiring them to seek help
• Move away from reactive, crisis-driven approaches to more accessible, preventive care

Humanise and Personalise Services

• Use people's names and treat them with dignity and respect
• See individuals beyond their labels and diagnoses, recognizing their strengths and skills
• Stop using impersonal language and dehumanizing practices

Incorporate Lived Experience

• Increase representation of people with lived experience in the workforce
• Value and integrate lived experience perspectives into research, policy, and practice at every level
• Create safe spaces for people to share their experiences without reducing them to mere "performances"

Respect Autonomy and Rights

• Recognize individuals' autonomy and human rights in treatment settings
• Stop deflecting responsibility by labeling patients as "non-compliant" or "too complex"

Integrate Formal and Informal Support

• Recognize the value of both professional services and community-based organizations run by people with lived experience

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Episode #207 marks a moment of deep gratitude and reflection. In this special episode, I look back on the journey that shaped Thriving Minds from the early days of questioning how the brain works, through decades of neuroscience, to the new era we are stepping into together.

This episode explores how early life experiences shape the nervous system, why connection is a biological regulator, and how compassion, presence and daily habits drive real neuroplastic change and where AI and digital technologies will transform how we detect anxiety, personalise support, and understand the social brain, while reminding us that healing will always come from human connection.

We close the episode with the key takeaways from 2025—lessons to carry forward:

• Connection is medicine. Our brains regulate each other; synchrony is measurable and essential.
• Healing is relational. Being seen, understood and met with compassion changes the brain.
• Neuroplasticity is always possible. Small, consistent actions reshape circuits across the lifespan.
• ACEs matter, but they are not destiny. With awareness and support, resilience can be built at any age.
• Digital life must be redesigned for wellbeing. AI can enhance support—but human presence is irreplaceable.
• We are each other’s environment. The communities we build shape the next three generations.

A hopeful, science-grounded blueprint for anyone seeking resilience, clarity and a future built on seeing and supporting one another as we close out 2025.

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2025 has felt like a turning point.

Across this year’s Thriving Minds conversations—from brain health and dementia, to stress, team flow, near-death experiences, and the “neuroscience of two”—one message keeps rising to the surface:

We are only just beginning to understand how powerful we are for each other’s brains.

In this special reflection episode, I explore what we learned in 2025 and where Thriving Minds is heading next, at the intersection of neuroscience, healing, neuroplasticity and community.

We dive into the major shifts reshaping neuroscience today:
• The move from snapshots to living, dynamic brains, made possible by new imaging and genomic tools.
• The neuroscience of two (and many) with insights from Dr Joy Hirsch on interbrain synchrony and why being in the same room matters.
• Bioelectricity, fields and consciousness, inspired by conversations with Dr Bruce Greyson on near-death experiences.
• A “middle way” that unites rigorous science with lived experience, trauma, recovery and human stories.

We discuss how healing is changing—from a symptom-focused view to a relational, systemic model—where early life experiences shape the nervous system, and being truly seen becomes a biological event that calms and connects the brain.

We revisit practical lessons in neuroplasticity and resilience: small daily actions that build new habits, strategies that strengthen the prefrontal cortex, and a shift from deficits to capacity—especially important in ageing, dementia and mental health.

And we explore the powerful truth revealed again and again this year:
Community is part of our neurobiology.
Humans regulate each other. Team flow, synchrony, compassion and presence activate brain networks that cannot be accessed alone or online.

Finally, we look ahead to the future of Thriving Minds:
bringing connection neuroscience into real-world settings, designing homes, schools and workplaces aligned with what we now know about the brain, and continuing to build a bridge between science and lived experience.

If these ideas resonate, subscribe to the Thriving Minds podcast and join the growing community working toward a more hopeful, brain-wise future.

We change our brains—and each other’s—every day.
The opportunity for the next decade is to do it consciously, together.

#ConnectionNeuroscience #ThrivingMinds #Neuroscience2026 #BrainHealth #HumanConnection #InterbrainSynchrony #Neuroplasticity #CollectiveIntelligence #CommunityHealing #RelationalNeuroscience

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Thriving Minds Podcast Deep Dive: Building a Child Sexual Abuse Prevention Team Hosted by Professor Selena Bartlett
Expert: Feather Berkower, Author of Off Limits: A Parent’s Guide to Keeping Kids Safe from Sexual Abuse

The top 5 things to keep children safe in the digital age.

Feather challenges the outdated belief that children should be responsible for protecting themselves. Instead, she empowers adults to take charge by building what she calls a “Prevention Team.” This team includes everyone in your child’s world—teachers, coaches, grandparents, babysitters—and sets clear boundaries and safety rules that deter potential offenders before they ever gain access.

It is the small, brave conversations that can make a lifelong difference. From teaching kids the difference between secrets and surprises, to addressing online grooming and exposure to pornography, Feather shows how open, honest, and continuous dialogue is the most powerful protection tool we have.

Top 5 Takeaways for Parents

1. Adults are responsible, not children, for preventing abuse.
2. Talk, talk, talk—and don’t stop talking about body safety.
3. Build your Prevention Team by having explicit boundary conversations with anyone who cares for your child.
4. Discomfort is protective—feeling awkward now prevents trauma later.
5. Use practical tools like Off Limits and Feather’s Conversation Starter Cards to begin these vital discussions today.

This episode will leave you informed, empowered, and ready to create a safer world for children—one conversation at a time.

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