We might as well face it. Anxiety is going to be the word we hear most for the next few years. We were already on our way there prior to the pandemic, but 2020 and 2021 have broadened the scope because more people have more to worry about. For that reason, the theme of this year's Learning and the Brain Conference was "Calming Anxious Brains." There were several speakers on this topic, so this post is my attempt to synthesize several speakers into a cohesive message. There will also be a second post on using anxiety to accomplish good because of I put all of that in one post, it will be way too long. As Andrew Watson wrote, "our students aren’t little learning computers. Their emotional systems — when muddled by the stress and anxiety of Covid times — influence learning profoundly." Anxiety will influence more than a student's personal life. It will affect his learning, so as teachers who care about a student as a whole person, we will have to address it.
Let's start with this. Anxiety isn't always bad. To neurologists, it is not considered good or bad, simply inevitable. Change, whether a good change or a bad one, is stressful. Without stress, living things die, so don't read stress as bad either. Change also bring uncertainty, and uncertainty makes us fearful.
Another important thing to note is that we call a lot of things anxiety that are not that. Anxiety is persistent fear and worry, but we tend to label any feeling that isn't perfectly calm as anxiety. The semantics of that may not seem like a big deal, but identifying our emotions is helpful in responding to them. We respond differently to anger than we do to sadness, and we respond differently to sadness than we do to fear. If we can't describe our emotions, it is difficult to choose a proper coping strategy.
It is generally only considered to be a negative thing if it is chronic (never able to take a break from it) or traumatic (severe enough to break the dams of your coping mechanisms). So, in spite of what the wellness industry tells us, our goal should not be to eliminate anxiety, but to turn the volume down on it so that we can function in our daily lives. The worst thing isn't to be stressed. The worst thing is to be numb.
Fear serves a purpose in our lives. We need only look to those with a rare pituitary dysfunction that leaves people without the ability to experience fear to see how dangerous a lack of fear is. It alerts us to danger and helps us prepare to respond to it (the well-known fight, flight, or freeze response). It's how our ancestors stayed alive in the face of bigger threats than we face. One difference between us and them, however, is too much access to fear-feeding information. A prehistoric woman who experienced fear when she saw movement in the grass, fearing a saber-toothed tiger, would return to her calm state after finding the sound was caused by a bird or rodent. A modern woman who experiences fear when she hears a sound in the back yard does not return to a calm state after seeing that it was a rabbit because she thinks about the news report she saw earlier on local burglaries, googles crime statistics in her area, reads a blog post written by a rape victim, and texts a friend who affirms her fear and tells her that she can't help her feelings (which is not true, but that's for another time). So, this thing that is meant to be a gift for our safety becomes a source of crippling worry.
So how do we turn down the volume on our anxiety and help our students turn down the volume on theirs? It's a complicated answer, so I'm not going to address everything here. I would recommend a couple of books - Dr. Lisa Damour's books Untangled and Under Pressure, are based on research with teenage girls, but the strategies in them would help anyone. Dr. Wendy Suzuki's book, Good Anxiety, has some great ideas as well. What I will talk about below are some of the simpler things we can do and possibly implement in our classrooms, but it is by no means a comprehensive list.
1. Limit News - I know we all want to be informed, but there is a difference between being informed and doomscrolling. As I mentioned earlier, the difference between the good anxiety our ancestors experienced and the ability we have to stew over a situation for hours is largely caused by our access to scary information. For them, danger was a binary situation - "tiger - not a tiger," but we find ways to turn "not a tiger" into fifty hypothetical tigers by continuously linking from one fear to another. Choose a time period in which to get your news, and be rigorous about staying to that time. Don't read the same story on three different platforms, or your brain will think it happened three times, leading to a belief in higher frequency than in reality.
2. Recognize Reality - Anything that can be monetized can be used to manipulate us. The Wellness Industry is heavily invested in our belief that something is wrong if we don't spend all of our time feeling great. Since that is not possible for anyone, we will then look for something to "solve the problem," whether it is an oil, an herb, a weighted blanket, an adult coloring book, a scent diffuser, they make billions of dollars every year by perpetuating the idea that we must always be caring for ourselves as though the biggest problem in the world right now is selflessness. (By the way, none of those are bad things, but they aren't solutions to a problem.) One of the best things I heard at the Learning and the Brain conference was when Lisa Damour said, "It is healthy to expect our emotions to represent reality. When things are bad, the healthy response is that we feel bad about it." We and our students have bought into the idea that we should never feel anything bad, and it leads us to pretty unhealthy responses. Perhaps, a good approach would be to write down the trigger of our feeling and decide if our emotion matches the reality.
3. Write it Down - One of the things our brain does when anxiety is chronic or traumatic is to over-estimate the threat and underestimate our ability to cope with it. This is due to a stress hormone called cortisol. Our brains are only meant to experience a quick rush of cortisol during the fight, flight, freeze response, so when it is in our brains long term, our brains don't respond appropriately to the degree of the threat. This is where writing is helpful. It forces us to slow down long enough to think about the threat rather than just feel about it. Write down exactly what the threat is and rate its level of danger (not everything is a level 10, but sometimes respond to everything at that level). Sometimes, the identification alone is helpful because we don't always know what we are responding to.
Second, write down any tools you know you have that you could employ in response to the threat. You will then respond with more confidence. Teaching students to do this will give them a skill they can use for the rest of their lives, so it is worth the investment.
4. Recognize the Worst-Case Scenario - We are often pumping up the power of positive thinking so much that we only allow ourselves to expect the best. The problem with that is that the reality is rarely only the best-case scenario. It seems counter-intuitive, but it is also valuable to consider the worst-case scenario. For one thing, having a mental dress rehearsal of the worst-case might give us a chance to practice using our tools and figuring out what the consequences of that case would be (I often ask kids if they think I will stop loving them if they fail a test. They giggle a no, so I remind them that their parents won't stop loving them either and that Jesus won't stop loving them even if they make a zero.) The other benefit of considering the worst-case scenario is that we give ourselves a chance to realize that it is as unlikely as the best-case. Reality is usually somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, so realizing that the worst might not happen can be calming. Talking through this with students can break a worry spiral, and rehearsing it can help them break their own future spirals.
5. Breath Control - Much of our stress response happens in the autonomic nervous system. That's difficult to consciously control, but we do have one connection - breathing. Intentionally slowing your breathing (four-count inhale, hold, four-count exhale, hold) lowers your heart rate and blood pressure. Counting the inhale and exhale gives you something to think about besides the trigger. The best part is that it can be done in any situation without anyone knowing you are doing it. Two or three rounds of breathing control during a test or a stressful conversation can be enough to turn down the volume on your anxiety to a manageable level.
6. Express and Contain - I remember an episode of Mr. Rogers in which he sang a song about expressing our anger. It was called "What Do You Do with the Mad You Feel?" and advised punching a bag, pounding some clay, playing tag, running as fast as you can. It acknowledges that you might have planned to do something wrong and tells you it is great to stop and do something else. In other episodes, he talked about drawing pictures and writing our feelings. He was a big believer in healthy expression. We need to help kids with finding healthy expression. For some, it may be talking, but for others, it might be throwing a tennis ball against a wall for a few minutes. A good cry might work for some while a nice loud, controlled scream might be what others need. It is, however, unhealthy to express all the time and in every place. Learning when and where and for how long to express leads to healthy containment. Dr. Damour defined containment as "pulling yourself together" in order to do what needs to be done. She advised that we identify what the student needs help with by observing what they are doing. If they are expressing a lot, they need help with containment. If they are too contained, they need help with expression. Both are needed.
7. Movement - Our brains were designed to operate in rhythms. Morning and evening, class periods, the cycle of a week, mealtimes, etc. keep us all in a kind of sync with one another. One of the things that happens to the brain of a traumatized person is that those rhythms are broken. They suffer sleep disruptions, appetite changes, and disruptions in their understanding of time (We've all experienced this during the pandemic). Helping students re-establish a sense of rhythm isn't as hard as you might think. Having students do some synchronized movement at the beginning of the day can bring them back into sync with their surroundings. It doesn't have to be a big involved yoga experience. It can be as simple as having everyone take a deep breath at the same time, a stretch we do together. You can connect it to your content by doing hand motions to show the particle movement of solids, liquids, and gases, having them show you the shape of a graph using their arms, or having a little chant about parts of speech with a hand clap attached. Any movement that everyone does together will be helpful.
8. Routine and Predictability - One of the best gifts we can give to our students is a predictable routine. For me, that looks like starting class the same way almost every day. I run through the plan for the day, read a scripture, and pray before we start. I continued to do that during remote teaching because it was one thing I could keep predictable. In some classes, it looks like ten minutes of reading. In other classes, it may be a quiz every Friday. Schedules may not seem like a big deal to most of us, but for a kid experiencing anxiety, it means security and safety. During the summer, I am the photographer at a camp for children in the foster care system. One of the things we do for them is to post the schedule in a lot of places and ask the counselors to carry the schedule with them at all times. Kids ask to see it frequently because it is calming for them to know what is coming next. It doesn't mean there won't sometimes be changes or that you can't surprise your kids, but those should be interruptions to a regular routine, not a constant state of upheaval.
Coping with anxiety is part of being human, and we should treat it that way. We should teach our students to treat it that way. It can even spur us to good action when it is not excessive. I'll talk about that in another post. It's hard in our culture not to feel like we are "failing at wellness," leading to an even higher state of unrest, but we should remind them that responding to reality is healthy. Bringing anxiety to a productive level, not trying to eliminate it altogether, will help our students know they are human. And that's something the wellness industry will never give them.
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