ACEs and Mindfulness

Dr. Nadine Burke Harris, the 1^st Surgeon General of California and pioneer in childhood trauma and ACEs, talks about her BIG 6 Powerful Tools for fighting an overactive stress response.

Her 6 are:

1.     Sleep

2.     Exercise

3.     Nutrition

4.     Mental Health

5.     Healthy Relationships

6.     Mindfulness

2/3 of the population have experienced significant trauma. If you score 4 or more on the ACEs you are more likely to have physical health problems throughout your life.

https://acestoohigh.com/got-your-ace-score/  This link is to the 10 questions doctors ask when evaluating your Adverse Childhood Experiences, ACEs. If you feel comfortable enough take a look and think about yourself and your score. Then utilize your heartful mindfulness and think about your students.

If we think about our students and their possible ACEs scores, we should then consider how we can help with the BIG 6 Powerful Tools. We can suggest good sleep, we can provide recess, we can talk about healthy snacks and meals, and we have social workers who aid with mental health. There are two of the six that every teacher can help with every day at school. We can form a healthy and positive relationship with our students, and we can teach them mindfulness and utilize it daily with them. We can provide 2 protective factors in the lives of our students.

Many of our students have an overactive stress response, an overactive sympathetic nervous system. We can utilize mindfulness to fight the sympathetic nervous system (fight, flight, freeze, or faint) and strengthen the parasympathetic nervous system (rest & digest).

Mindfulness strengthens the parasympathetic nervous system.

Building healthy relationships with our students creates what is called a Buffering Relationship. You do not have to be related to someone to be the best buffering relationship in a student’s life. Buffering relationships aid the parasympathetic nervous system which regulates our stress responses.

Did you know you can then help change how your students’ DNA is read in the body??? We can’t change the DNA itself, but we can change the epigenetic markers on the DNA. Dr. Burke Harris likens DNA to being a music note and epigenetic markers are the notations telling you how to play a note. You can help change how DNA is read. You can help create a beautiful melody inside your students.

You can change how stress is read on your students’ DNA. You can either add stress markers, or you can erase stress markers. Dr. Burke Harris explains that the epigenetic markers will tell our bodies to read a strand of DNA over and over or skip it all together.  

This week’s challenge is to focus on building positive relationship with your students. Welcome them back into class after a stressful incident. Provide a hand shake, high-five, or hug. Provide them with mindfulness. This week begin to change the messages on your students’ DNA.

A great mindfulness activity for this week is to take a mindful walk. Walk with your class around the inside of the building or the outside. Give them instructions to remain silent and notice the sounds around them. Remind them to take slow easy steps, giving themselves time to observe the world around them. I like to take mindful walks with students and encourage a deep breath in as they step with one foot and a deep breath out as they step with the other foot.

Once your walk is over and you have returned to class, explore the mindful findings. Ask your students if there was a sound they had never noticed before, or an object that was new to them.

Mindful walking helps us pay close attention to not just where we are going but the journey we take to get there.

If you are interested in learning more from Dr. Burke Harris check out the Podcast Experts on Experts with Dax Shepard. It is such a good listen I listened to it twice!