 Hi, this is Tracy Tegahame Spinoza and this is a video about stress. So the million dollar question does stress impact learning? It's just about anybody who has ever learned anything is really, I'm sure, convinced that stress does influence learning. But the key idea here is that what stresses one person and how may not stress another person in the same way. And even things that you'd think would stress just all human beings, for example, the threat of an approaching fire or things that are experienced under conditions of war. It's actually not true either. Most of those things will stress people, but people react in different ways, either because they've been trained to do that or because they think that they have more control over the situation than other people. So we're going to look at this individualistic nature, this human variability of stress, and in particular how this influences learning outcomes. What can we do within our typical classroom situations that would reduce or reach a level of stress that's manageable for students? So we know that stress impacts learning both positively and negatively. Stress is not always bad. There's such a thing as U stress, which is a good kind of a stress and this heightens attention and helps learning. While bad stress or toxic stress is always negative. So when a student is not feeling this U stress, when they're feeling the negative stress, there's certain neurotransmitters in the brain that are released that will actually block the uptake or release of other neurotransmitters that are necessary for learning, which is why prolonged stress is always negative for the learning environment. On the other hand, a little bit of the good stress can actually be very helpful in learning outcomes. For example, just as a sprinter who's just about getting ready to start to run, has to gather up all this energy and be on edge, right, just so he can jump off the track just as soon as the signal goes off, that's very similar to somebody just being primed to have this certain level of stress so that he or she is tipped to be able to learn effectively. So U stress is sort of hitting this peak of a really sweet spot of stress in our bodies. So what happens physiologically speaking in the brain and the body? That stressor will send a signal that the hypothalamus will send two different types of information. One is that immediately there's a direct release, a certain chain of hormones, as well as a reaction to that stressor and the sympathetic nervous system will also promote adrenal release. So this chain of hormones, which include but aren't limited to things like cortisol, which is very damaging to the brain if it has prolonged exposure, together force the release of other stress hormones. There's at least 30 different varieties of this stress hormones, which get released into the blood system and carried throughout the rest of the body to prepare your body to react. And in this sense, it's really getting you ready for this fight or flight response. You're either going to react to that stressor and rebel or you're actually just going to run away. Either way, you're not being prepared to learn very well. So kids who are under high stress in our classrooms are not under the best conditions to learn at all. And it's not a psychological state of being, it's actually a physical response, your whole body response to that sensation of feeling stressed. And some more recent research that's coming out has to do with this body brain or this gut brain access. So we're seeing that when a person is stressed, it's not just what their brain says releases hormones and how a body is feeling, but actually how this has an impact on the neuro induction system, the neuro immune system, the anatomic nervous system, the antrich nervous system. And this explains basically why somebody who's been under high stress gets ill easier. For example, most of us have experienced this in moments of high pressure, high stress. It's the time when you're most likely to get sick as well. And that's because all of your body systems are involved. And you'll see that this is manifested in certain things that do happen related to the gut itself. There's also other things and some new research that's going on. It's really fascinating to see how there's this interaction might be happening in the brain, the GABA receptors, for example, and how they're reacting to this change in microbiota caused by the release of those other stress hormones we just talked about. We have spoken for years about the mind body connection, what you do to your body does affect your brain and vice versa. But we haven't gotten down to this molecular level of actually saying, well, it seems to be that this is what's occurring at the level of changes in the microbiota of the body. Also, like all other things that affect the brain, stress has multiple factors. And there's some things that are internally generated. You know, when you're ruminating about something that's bothering you, right, that can lead to stress or also externally controlled stressors. For example, you're a boss giving you a really tight deadline or something like that. So we know that both of them can cause stress. But what's so interesting is that there's no really easy answer. The things inside your head are worse or the things that come from outside are worse. What seems to be the greater tipping point from when stress becomes something manageable to something that they detrimental is when things are out of your control. Now, what's fascinating is half of that is really how you take it, your attitude towards it. If you think that you are stressed because you're just too busy in your life, and you think there's nothing you can do about it, your stress will be worse. But if you think I'm stressed because I'm too busy, maybe I better reorganize priorities or maybe I better give myself some to do lists so I feel more accomplished. If you feel that there's something you can do about it, your stress can be reduced. Similarly, if you find you're always doing a lot of negative self-talk, you're always saying, well, you're never going to be getting better at this, you're not going to be good at that or whatever it is. Obviously, that's going to be a long-term stressor. So it's not that internal or external is one is worse than the other. It's what you perceive you have control over. One of the things that we really worry about in school settings is that we know that stress impedes learning. That's just a fact, okay? So stress hormones block this natural neural plasticity, the natural connections that are made in the brain when new pieces of information are coming together and then we're going to have these new synapses. That is dependent on a certain combination of neurotransmitters. Stress hormones impede that. We need to accept or understand as teachers that when we are conducting wonderful, great lessons in our class, we spend all this time planning, if we've got a kid in our class who's highly stressed, he's not going to learn. Why is that? Precisely because of this release of these different neurotransmitters. So stress hormones block this natural plasticity and memory building. And the thing is it's not just a one-shot deal, oh, I'm going to reduce the stress in my class. It's very important to understand that because these are chemical releases in the brain and body, their effects dissipate over time. So if you have somebody who is highly stressed and you create this wonderful learning environment and all of a sudden this stress level has gone down, you'd think, okay, now the kid's ready to learn. However, he's already got this cortisol running around inside of himself and he's not going to be settled down and ready to focus immediately. This takes several minutes for this to dissipate. So one of the key takeaways that we have here related to stress and to learning for ourselves and for our students is that stress is not all bad, but the good stress points are really hard to find because they're so individually related to an individual's past experience and how they relate to the rest of the world. We technically call this the sweet spot of stress. Basically, when can you find that the person is paying enough attention? And this is a key idea here is that stress and attention are really quite married. When you're in a high stress situation, you're very, very vigilant of things that are around you. The idea there is how do we get to this point of heightened detention, being able to focus and be engaged and concentrating on the subject at hand without tipping that person to being overly stressed so that it seems out of control, that the situation is out of control. So this means going from this really very calm, you stress situation and peeking at it. This is when I'm at my maximum performance, right? But if I push myself a little bit beyond that, I get into the negative stress, which is a distressed situation and my performance goes down. And if I'm in a highly stressed situation, there's really no potential for learning at all. So we have to find as teachers, the sweet spot, we have to help students figure out how to manage that very, very fine balancing act. Now imagine that it's not just us and it's not just a student. We're talking about multiplying this by a factor of 20, 30, 40 kids in the class. And each of them is going to have a slightly different sweet spot. This is why when we talk about differentiating education, we have to really think about how we find the right balance for each of those students in our classes. It is not easy. I'd say teaching is one of the most difficult as well as one of the most satisfying professions that we have because you're trying to manage molecular level changes in a group of 25, 35 kids. Another thing to remember when a student feels like he's under attack, obviously he's going to feel stressed. The problem is that many times teachers have a lot of stress and they don't even realize how they transmit that to the student through social contagion. So we know that different types of stressors impede different memory systems. This means we as teachers really have to have ourselves under control because we do have one of the most threshold professions in society. But at the same time, unless we keep that in check, there is no learning that's going to occur within our classroom structure, as many resources as we have, or as well as we plan out that lesson, or as many different activities that we think we've got going, if we're feeling stressed, that's going to be passed on to the students. So we have to find some way of being able to manage our own stress before we work with our students. Some other disturbing information about stress is coming out of research related to early childhood. We know that kids born into conditions of very high stress are born into a very uneven playing field. You get really the short end of the stick with things because from day one, your entire environment serves as a stressor. Your caregivers may be highly stressed themselves. And this to some degree explains that there are higher levels of neglect, abuse, and measurements of toxic stress in children born into conditions of poverty, for example. So while it might be a given, you know, general plasticity, it's almost impossible for the brain not to learn. You are going to learn. That's what, you know, your brain is set up for survival in that sense. However, under extreme conditions of toxic stress, we can find exceptions there where your brain is just not going to learn. If you live in a heightened sense of tension, of stress over a prolonged period of time in the first three years of life, it's really difficult to climb back up to zero and have that even playing field once again. This is one of the strongest arguments for early childhood interventions in which we reduce the level of toxic stress for children. Toxic stress can take many forms. If you have an abusive parent who is constantly after the kids and basically a kid never knows when the father's going to come home or when that abusive parent is going to come home and always feels just about ready to run, fight or flight in that situation, that condition that bays the brain in cortisol and those other stress hormones that does damage to the future creation of networks. But it's not only the family conditions, it's also the neighborhood in which someone lives. Jack Schankhoff at the Center for the Developing Child at Harvard has a series of publications. One of the most impacting perhaps is from neurons to neighborhoods, which you can download for free online, really telling of how a child's environment can really change the biology of an individual and his or her potential to learn. So this means that the community a child grows up in not only shapes, you know, general value systems, but it also changes the threshold for stress. So you know the saying, you know, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger? Well, some kids in resiliency studies, it's fascinating to see who live with such a high level of general stress and learn to cope with it, manage to have this resiliency level and actually have a higher threshold for general stress situations. But other kids aren't so lucky. Not everybody can cultivate resilience. If you don't have that key person in your life that helps you grow and learn how to react to stress, you could be one of those people who ends up being a victim of stress rather than using it as a tool to create resiliency. So this brings us back to the very beginning point of what are stressors for you individually speaking? What are the stressors for their kids in your classroom? What are their stressors? And some of them have very rough family lives. Some of them have poor environments. Other times kids can be stressed out because they feel that they have to be perfect for their parents. Some of you kids might be stressed because they've had to move. Others might have a type of a chronic pain physically speaking in their body, right? So stressors are highly individual and part of our job as teachers is, you know, we can't do this thorough diagnosis of every single individual child, but we can help them reflect on this on their own. I always say diagnosis is half of the cure. What is really the trigger? If kids can learn to understand what the triggers are, then they can then begin to think about how can they manage that? How can they either avoid that situation or how can they respond to that situation? And this leads us to the very big idea of coping mechanisms. How do people learn to cope with stress? Some people say, I've heard adults all the time very honestly, I just haven't figured out the right coping mechanisms for my stress. And acknowledging that is really good that gets you one step further. However, it shouldn't be a lifelong search. These are skill sets that we should be able to develop perhaps earlier on in our lives so that we can have this more fulfilled way of living out our lives, not always under constant stress. So some people who just say, oh no, I'm taking off the weekend. I'm going to a spa or whatever. If it serves for their coping mechanism, it's a tool to be considered, right? Different people find ways to manage their stress. And the key is to encourage the students in our lives to explore these multiple options, to think of ways they can do it. One thing that we really want to avoid, however, is that the coping mechanism ends up being a denial or escape and avoidance type of a thing. Coping should end up being hopefully things that are more healthy in their nature that they don't do further damage. If you have denial as a coping mechanism, that doesn't work. So you need to sort of face those fears and face the problems and face the stressors and then think about how you can actually cope with those things. This goes hand in hand with this other idea that some coping mechanisms can be considered quite healthy and positive and others are just sort of a band-aid and they won't lead to long-term cures. This is sort of like saying, well, you know, the boss stressed me out today. I think I'm going to have a drink. Oh, tomorrow he stressed me out again. Oh, I'm going to have two drinks. Well, that just sort of covers up the problem. You can have a short, short bout of feel good about that and you think you've dealt with the issue and it might reduce the stress temporarily. But in the long run, it circles back to bite you because you did not really deal or find a way that makes you feel good in the long-term. So again, on this negative coping strategies, on the negative things we're talking about, you know, there's either this denial or these short-term band-aid solutions, which are not healthy in the long run, whereas most positive coping strategies do help in the long run. Why? Because they either help the individual develop a sense of resiliency or there's a different kind of perspective taking with the stressor in which the stressor itself yet becomes reduced. So highly recommended that we go the positive route where possible. At the end of the day, then, the key idea is to understand the origins of stress, how different people have different types of stressors and then understand where that sweet spot is for yourself and the people in your lives, including those students, how do we manage to hit that peak of attentional give where you're really at the height of performance because you have the right type of stress and avoid going into this downward term. I didn't mention before, but it's very important to understand, then at this end of the scale, you've got total apathy. You've got somebody who just could care less. For those people, I want you to look at the video related to motivation. So with all things that have to do with attendance, the things that have a huge range of human variants, one of the better exercises that we like to see people try to incorporate is a self assessment of what are those things in my life that help me, that protect me from those stressors? And then what are those things in my life that are real risk factors, things that I need to get rid of? If I realize that I'm in a toxic relationship and that somebody is always causing me great stress, well, can I take that in hand? Can I turn that around and decide I'm not going to be a part of that kind of a relationship anymore? For example, in other contexts for kids, just talking to the kids, you realize that this kid is totally stressed out by this bully in the class. And you've made him sit next to him for the whole semester and you realize this is one of those downturns for that kid. Can we take that risk factor of him being highly stressed and unable to learn and remove it so that we can now offer him protection? I'm the teacher. I'm a protective actor for you. I'm going to be helping you avoid those types of negative relationships, or we're going to reduce the level of bullying in the class overall, or we as a group are going to serve to keep you from that stress because we will better manage the behavior of that other kid. So a general recommendation is have you self-assessed? What are those protective factors in your life and what are the risk factors and how can you avoid them? This brings us to the concluding idea that, as we mentioned before, there are stressors that are inside of you. And then there are stressors that are outside of you and your immediate family, maybe the community, maybe in your own country that create these types of stressors. So how do we create protective factors? How can our own temperament or how can our own relationships or how can our own conflict resolution skill sets? How can we use that to our benefit? How can we use the people that are in our family as good supportive role models or to create a sense of stability? Or how can schools be places that serve as protective factors for students who might live in neighborhoods that might not be as protecting, okay? So that's a general overview of this concept of stress. I look forward to all the questions in class. Thanks.