STRESS
Composed by: Karl Barth
How do we deal with it? Do we grab a beer or another slice
of cheesecake? Hit the slopes or run up the mainsail? Stay up at night
worrying? Head out for run or pound the treadmill? Maybe even some combination
of all of the above (not a preferred answer if your kids don’t know that
carrots have tops).
“Stress is a threat to the body’s equilibrium. It’s a
challenge to react, a call to adapt. In the brain, anything that causes
cellular activity is a form of stress.” This is a product of our fight or flight
days and the need to hunt-gather, and stay alive in dangerous times. As a
result our brain fires neurons and we react/remember, these firings cause
memories of how to get food, avoid danger, and prosper as a species. Our body
also adapted to store energy (fat most commonly) for energy stores that would
be available when we need to fire-fight-flight and especially since we did not
always know when the next energy source would be available. This was not a
great concern because our ancestors had to work to find food and live so
exercise was a plentiful and resolved the imbalance to our equilibrium and
burned of the fat stores. “Stress and recovery….The brain activity caused by
exercise generates molecular by-products that can damage cells, but under normal
circumstances, repair mechanisms leave cells hardier for future challenges.
Neurons get broken down and built up just like muscles – stressing them makes
them more resilient. This is how exercise forces the body and mind to adapt.”
The result nowadays, however, is that we have an excess of
calories compared to the scarcity of food of Paleolithic ancestors and are more
sedentary (38% of the activity) and more stressed by our daily lives (think
smart phones, social media, 24/7 news, and general flood of information). These
days the stress response isn’t just helping forge important memories but
constantly flooding our brains hormones including norepinephrine, epinephrine,
cortisol, endorphins, and dopamine. These can help focus us but also lead to
anxiety in many situations. The arousal we feel can fire us up, prepare us for
the task, and help sharpen our focus, but at some point it turns to anxiety as
we are in over our heads or there is no outlet for the buildup. Exercise is one
relief valve for this and practice can help raise the threshold where anxiety
kicks in. The cortisol also creates fat stores in our midsection where it is
related to obesity and other health issues. Exercise also creates more insulin
receptors, ANP in the heart’s muscle tissue, and a sense of control or mastery
over stress and all of these help us regulate stress.
So what does all this mean in our classrooms, can use short
term stress to increase learning while also controlling it to reduce long term
effects? Should we eliminate it completely or encourage it on a regular basis?
Can we prepare our students for more focus and learning through stress and
exercise? How can you incorporate this information?
