What level is the stress response of your students?
Dr. Robert Sapolsky wrote a book entitled; Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers: Stress and Health, in this book he shares insight regarding human stress and health. Dr. Sapolsky shares that for animals, such as a zebra, stress response hormones are only turned on for a short time. His example is a lion chasing a zebra. The zebra turns on its stress hormones only during the chase. Once the zebra is safe the hormones are shut off. The typical time for the animal to run it’s stress hormones is a few seconds or minutes at a time.
In contrast, humans turn on stress hormones for any number of things which may be reasonable or even unreasonable. Humans then leave those stress responses turned on for hours, days, weeks, months, and for some years at a time. When we leave our stress hormones turned on our bodies turn off other hormones, such as growth hormones.
If we think about this information in relations to our students, after we are done stressing about what we are doing to our own bodies, we can begin to reflect more deeply on the need to engage in mindfulness.
Remember our statistic about mindfulness reducing teacher stress by 43%?
The website Mindworks.org reports that scientific research shows a mindfulness practice conducted for a few minutes, once a day, helps students be better able to cope with stress.
Many of our students turn on their stress response hormones as soon as they wake up in the morning. Many of our students live each day with stress hormones on daily.
Dr. Sapolsky shares in his lectures, which you can watch online, that history is full of examples of people who are considered abnormally small for non-genetic reasons. His example, that he states he finds over and over again in books is JM Berrie, the author of Peter Pan. JM came from a family of tall men and yet he reached only about 5'2". As a child JM's younger brother died. The son that died was the favorite child of JM's mother. Biographies of JM share that for the rest of his childhood JM's mother stayed in bed in a state of depression. When JM would visit her, she would make comments that she hoped her favorite son had returned, however when she saw who it was she would then say, "oh it's only you."
Imagine being addressed by someone who cares, not with your name, not with an endearing nickname, but with "oh it's only you."
This has me reflecting on the email shared by Mrs. Dixon. In case you don't remember I have included the image she had in her weekly email.
I have made it my mindful task this week to not only say "good morning friend", but to say a student's name. I want them to know I care. I want to mindfully reduce stress and help their bodies and minds be ready to grow.
A great mindfulness to reduce stress is our Butterfly Relaxation, which is a card I have in my mindfulness library. Inner Explorer also has several relaxation meditation sessions. Try one this week. With parent teacher conferences we need some stress reduction too.
I have found some other helpful resources I would like to share.
https://www.rachaelkable.com/blog/increase-resilience-and-decrease-stress
Rachael Kable also has a podcast called The Mindful Kind. #129 is called Mindfulness for Stress Prevention.
I encourage us all to take some time this week to have at least one mindfulness session focused on stress reduction. It can be as simple as turning down the lights, having on calming music, and reviewing butterfly breathing, spider man breathing, mountain breathing, and statue breathing. Another good stress reduction breathing is Pink Bubble Breathing. This is another breathing technique from my activity cards. You can teach your students to place stress into the bubble, while doing deep breathing, and release the bubble and let the stress float away.
No comments:
Post a Comment