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Is stress good or bad for memory? This is a difficult question as stress is a blanket term for many different types of experiences and responses from the brain and body. Everyone has powerful memories of a time where all eyes were on them.
Perhaps it was a stressful interview for a job or a high stakes presentation, but sometimes these types of memories can persist years beyond the event itself. Why are some memories held onto by the brain for years and others, like a trip to the store, fade away nearly as soon as the event is over?
While a presentation or interview might feel more important than just a trip to the store, this idea of importance isn’t actually the factor that the brain uses to decide which memories are valuable enough to move into long term storage. The mechanism the brain uses to decide which memories are important to learn from long-term is actually based on a person’s stress response.
A more stressful event signals to the brain that this experience is pushing the person to their limits and changes will need to be made in the future to react better in the future. Similar to how putting a muscle under stress causes signals in the brain to repair the damage and strengthen the muscle for the next rep, the brain uses the stress signals it receives to do the same process psychologically. So in some ways, stress is a factor that increases the likelihood something will be remembered. However, it isn’t always that simple.
New Research on The Relationship Between Stress and Memory
A recent research study published in Current Biology found that objects connected with a stressful event were more clearly remembered. (Bierbrauer et al.) The researchers had two cohorts of participants in their experiment, one that was put under a stressful interview and one that had a more positive conversation.
The stressed group was given the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) which is a specifically designed interview that puts participants under stress due to the intimidating set up of the interview and the lack of any positive signals from the interviewers. Additionally, to better measure their true stress levels, participants gave a saliva sample after their interview to test their cortisol levels, giving an objective measure to quantify their stress response.
During both the TSST and the friendly control conversation, simple specific objects were included such as a coffee cup or tea pot. Later, the participants were asked to do a recognition task where they tried to identify which objects had been present and which had not been present while receiving a brain scan. This, however, was not the way that the researchers decided who had remembered the most.
Instead, the researchers used this information from the brain scan to identify where in the brain the specific object memories had been stored. The researchers then compared the data from these memory traces to one another. What the researchers found was that the object memory traces for the groups that had been doing the stressful interview were more similar to one another than the control group’s traces which showed more variance.
This indicates that the participants who had been under stress remembered the object more correctly as the memory looked similar in each person’s brain. The participants in the control group also remembered many of the objects from their interview as well, but the memory traces varied more significantly, showing that the memory traces were less exact when they were being formed.
Using Stress in the Classroom as a Tool to Boost Student Memory
So should teachers work more often to stress out their students? Not exactly. While stress may have some benefits for some types of memories, stress is known to have other very negative health effects and can even paradoxically inhibit some types of memory. (Schwabe et al.) Students are already under a large amount of stress and teachers don’t need to add to that load any more. Instead, teachers should learn to use stress as a mindful tool instead of seeing it as a punishment for students who are behind or who didn’t study enough.
1: Stress is not the enemy.
While stress can have many long term negative health effects, research indicates that if viewed correctly, stress can actually have even more beneficial effects. When the stress response is viewed as preparing a person to take on a challenge instead of just a bad feeling, it actually heightens focus, increases attention, and boosts motivation. It is important to remember that stress is a natural process that has simply become hijacked by the modern world and turned up past its natural levels.
If a person never experienced any thrills, any surprises, or any nervous butterflies, many would worry that they haven’t lived a very full life. These emotions also all come from this same system that ramps up the body and prepares it for some upcoming moment that requires energy.
These moments of challenge, victory and the details surrounding them are also some of the strongest memories most people have in their whole lives. Teachers should seek to create more challenges that are full of surprises, and emotional moments that students will remember for years to come.
2: Give stress a time limit.
One of the factors that can lead stress to becoming a danger is the length of time it is experienced. “A wealth of behavioral research has demonstrated significant WM (working memory) deficits in humans under a variety of long-term stressors”. (Yuan et al.) While some brief stressful and exciting times may help the brain to remember important moments, research shows that this negatively affects the person’s working memory, making them less capable of holding information in their mind and working with it.
So while short bursts of stress can be beneficial for memories around events, stress still needs to keep its bad reputation for not only it’s long term effects on working memory, but the myriad of other physical and mental negative effects stress has on a person’s life. Teachers should seek to have stressful moments rather than stressful classes.
While it can be rewarding to be nervous for an upcoming test or presentation, prepare well, and then do well, the entire class shouldn’t be a series of stressful exams and presentations that keep the student in a constant state of panic. It can be beneficial to have some stress or excitement and challenge around moments that matter so that they stick with the student, but the body needs to rest after these periods. It is also important that teachers remember that students are in multiple classes, and stress doesn’t restart between each class.
Teachers should also work to communicate with one another or have schedules built by administrators for time periods of higher stress and periods of rest for students to not have to be in stress mode. While it can be difficult to have multiple tests on the same day, a shorter period of higher stress will be better for the students rather than just constantly having a test on their plate to worry about.
3: Validate and praise student stress.
Some teachers tend to see stress as a punishment for students who aren’t keeping up with classwork. They might say things like “you have nothing to worry about if you study” or “If you did your homework each night you wouldn’t be so stressed and behind now.” While these statements might be true, they don’t help the student as they punish and teach students to avoid stressful situations rather than learn from their stress and be better prepared for the future.
Instead of giving students disappointed looks when their stress gets the better of them, teachers should smile and say they appreciate that the student is stressed and offer assistance. If a student is stressed, worried, or nervous about an exam, that shows they care. The student wants to do well and that is something a teacher should always appreciate.
When teachers respond to stress with a “thank you” and “how can I help”, it teaches students two important lessons. Firstly, that their hard work is something the teacher appreciates. This will motivate them to work harder as any worker will do a better job if they feel appreciated by their boss. School is no different and teachers should seek to be encouraging good results rather than demanding them.
Secondly, if teachers reach out to students they notice experiencing stress, this will teach students to reach out when they start to feel the need for help. Making students better at advocating for their needs is an important skill for any independent learner and if teachers can help students gain a better understanding of when they should reach out for help, this will set up habits for success in their future when they face even greater challenges.
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References
Bierbrauer, Anne et al. “The Memory Trace Of A Stressful Episode”. Current Biology, 2021. Elsevier BV, doi:10.1016/j.cub.2021.09.044.
Schwabe, Lars et al. “Stress Effects On Memory: An Update And Integration”. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, vol 36, no. 7, 2012, pp. 1740-1749. Elsevier BV, doi:10.1016/j.neubiorev.2011.07.002.
Yuan, Yiran et al. “The Effects Of Long-Term Stress On Neural Dynamics Of Working Memory Processing: An Investigation Using ERP”. Scientific Reports, vol 6, no. 1, 2016. Springer Science And Business Media LLC, doi:10.1038/srep23217.
