Upstairs and Downstairs

“Don’t shout down the stairs,” I ‘d tell my kids when they were young. “Come and find me.”

But until I understood about upstairs and downstairs brains, this is how I interacted with my students. In my teaching, I’d stay upstairs in the thinking brain and call them to come up to learn.

The trouble was, they couldn’t always get there.

In kids and teenagers, the downstairs brain, which houses the limbic system, is fully built and functioning. It keeps them breathing and blinking and feeling alive—full of joy and laughter and frustration and anger. And ready with quick impulse to show what they feel.

The upstairs thinking brain, on the other hand, is unfinished, still under construction until well into the twenties. No wonder many young people struggle to plan and prioritize. No wonder they make decisions without rationale.  

A stairway, made of a network of neurons and synapses, connects the two brains. But because the upper brain is not fully functioning, the lower brain flounders.

“Think!” the partially-constructed upstairs brain advises. But the message isn’t clear enough or strong enough. And the lower limbic system doesn’t get the message.

Especially when the stairway is cluttered, as it often is when a kid is stressed. The hormones released during fight and flight episodes block messages from the upper brain to the lower brain, preventing logic from modulating emotion.

Kids don’t need adults shouting down from on high, telling them to think. They need someone to clear the stairs by giving them simple strategies for regulating—counting backward from ten, putting feelings to words, and walking off angsty energy.

The more kids use the neurons and synapses that connect the thinking and feeling brains, the more passable the stairway becomes and the better the two brains can collaborate.