Chapter 3 - Stress

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?