Kathryn Berkett is an insightful and dedicated neuroscience educator who has been empowering people to understand their minds and behaviours for over sixteen years. Known for translating complex neuroscientific research into practical, easy-to-digest insights, Kathryn has become a trusted source of knowledge for various sectors, from corporate environments and educational institutions to police training and judicial settings.
Holding a Master’s degree in Educational Psychology, Kathryn is also a certified Neurosequential Model of Therapeutics (NMT) practitioner, mentored by the esteemed Dr. Bruce Perry. Her expertise in interpersonal neurobiology has made her an invaluable consultant to organisations and individuals across New Zealand, providing a deeper understanding of human behaviour and stress responses. Her sessions leave a lasting impact, with many participants citing her insights as transformative.
Kathryn’s passion for continuous learning keeps her approach fresh and relevant, and her ability to convey meaningful, research-based information resonates widely. Whether unraveling the everyday mysteries of stress responses or shedding light on the intricacies of human interactions, Kathryn’s work brings clarity and compassion to understanding ourselves and those around us.
Talking Points
Trauma
When we experience highly intense, overwhelming levels of stress activation, this can impact the way our brain and body physically develop. This is especially impacting when it occurs in the earlier years of development, and can influence throughout the lifetime. Understanding the neuroscience and the physiology around the possible effects on the brain and body can help us operate in ways that create the space for positive behaviour and healing. If we don’t understand this information, we may create environments that can perpetuate and even increase the trauma that has occurred.
Trauma
Resilience
Overwhelming, intense activations of stress can be detrimental to the development of the stress response system. However, predictable, tolerable activations of stress can actually assist development of resilience. Resilience, which is the ability to activate our body back to calm following an activation of the stress response, is an essential emotional skill for life. Knowing how resilience develops gives us more ability to create optimum environments for development. This can have positive impacts on our behaviour, thoughts and health, and on these factors in those around us.
Resilience
Self-Care
We often talk about emotional burnout, emotional fatigue, we may just feel overwhelmed, or be experiencing panic attacks or bouts of feeling down and lethargic. These may all be caused via medical conditions, but we also know that how we feel can have a huge impact on our health. Our emotional wellbeing is talked about a lot, but do you really understand the way the autonomic nervous system activates in your body? Do you understand the link between how you feel emotionally and your risk of stroke, heart attack etc? This session can unpack, in a easily understood way, this information. Through a better understanding, you can develop effective coping strategies that work for you, and also help us understand those around us.
Self-Care
Anxiety
This is a word that has become a little bit dangerous in our world currently. The reason for this, is we are using the same word for a normal, biological state of our stress response system; but also using this word when we are talking about a clinical level activation in the brain that requires high levels of support and professionalism. Recognising the difference is so important, and can help towards our control of anxiety (in many circumstances, not all). Anxiety
This session will cover the neurophysiology of the anxiety activation, how it impacts our ability to learn, be empathic etc, and how we can get better at recognising it. Many learnings will come from this understanding, including helping us get more comfortable with the idea of being anxious, how we can build our stress systems up to become more able to deal with anxiety, and how we can be more supportive to those around us who have high levels of anxiety.
Impact of Devices on Brain Development
Devices have become integral parts of our modern world. They are in our lives if we like it or not. There are many positive benefits from devices, and there are many negative impacts. How can we know the difference? This session will help you recognise the impact devices can have on our development, especially during times of intense brain development (first three years and early adolescence). Through a better understanding, we can help ourselves and those around us make better choices around device use. We can’t make good choices if we don’t have the right information – this will provide you with the right information.
Impact of Devices on Brain Development
Adolescent Brain Changes
So much is going on in the brain of an adolescent. Huge physical upgrades and alterations are occuring. These changes lead to the brain working very differently to what it was pre-puberty and how it will work once the upgrade is complete. If you have been around, or are currently around an adolescent, this will be very obvious, even without any neuroscience information. Having this information will change the way you consider behaviour and help you develop much more effective strategies for interaction. It is a really difficult time for our young people, transitioning from being protected, to being the protector – that is what adolescent transition is all about. We need to be able to support them as much as possible, and this session will help with that. It will also help you work out when it is okay to just leave the situation without getting too emotionally involved – hugely useful advice for those who feel they are expending a lot of energy trying to regulate our adolescents.
Adolescent Brain Changes
Lovely style, enjoyed her humour and real life relatable examples of tolerable stress. Clear message. ... keep reading Life Education Trust
Kathryn was absolutely fantastic, we have received brilliant feedback after her session with our delegates really resonating with what she was saying and how they can take it forward in both their personal lives and professional careers.
Our people really enjoyed Kathryn’s session, especially because it was strongly rooted in science. I think more practical tips on how to manage the stress would have made the session even better.
Kathryn was excellent - presentation was engaging & connected well to content from earlier in the day. Kathryn did a stunning job in explaining the complex teenage brain and left us with many newfound information.
Kathryn presented our team with some very valuable information regarding the neuroscience of self-care. Our team commented that it wasn't hand holding fluffy stuff, it was practical, I thought I was OK at work but I can see my stress levels at home are up there, the length of the presentation was great and I really took away some good stuff from that.
