Table of Contents
Stress is an ever present and unpleasant part of daily life in the modern world. While full of luxuries, convenience, and thrills, life today seems to be steadily increasing the amount of stress one needs to endure to reap these rewards. Students especially are put under a great amount of long and short term pressure to perform well over the course of many years with grades and in intense short bursts during tests and presentations.
While schools are starting to be more mindful of the amount of stress put on students for their mental health, a recent research study may hint at stress management itself being an important thing for students to learn to create a healthy stress response and prepare them for life after school. Long term stress is associated with a host of negative health effects, but could there be some benefits to stress in small amounts?
The stress response is an adaptive evolutionary trait designed to not only keep the body safe from danger, but also as a way to invigorate a person for a coming challenge. It is important to not paint all stress the same way as the body and brain react differently to the various types and durations.
Research shows that there may even be a reason to introduce some stress into a person’s life in short bursts in a safe and supportive environment to develop the part of the brain that handles stress. Stress is inevitable, but teachers can help students develop a resilience to life’s challenges through the benefits of short term stress.
New Research on Managing Stress
Research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America conducted experiments on macaques and their decision making abilities at different levels of heart rates while monitoring their neural activity. The results showed that there is a complex system in place for monitoring stress, managing decisions, and how stress levels are incorporated into the decision making process itself. The scientists found that slightly increasing the heart rate and therefore the stress response of the macaques increased their reaction time for making a decision (Fujimoto et al.).
Interestingly, however, after a certain threshold, different for each individual, increasing the heart rate further only slowed reaction time as the stress management system became overloaded. The scientists noted that there was actually a U shaped curve in how heart rate affected the speed at which the macaques made their decisions.
Too little arousal also slowed the speed at which they made their decisions showing that there is a zone in which the brain’s activity levels increase the speed at which decisions can be confidently made, but too much overwhelms the system causing it to struggle to come to efficiently make a good decision.
Two areas of the brain were implicated in helping to modulate the effects of stress on decision making: The Amygdala and portions of the Dorsal Anterior Cingulate Cortex (dACC) which is usually more connected to reward incentive processing than stress. The Amygdala is an emotional center of the brain which is often most connected to the fear response. It helps to modulate the effects of emotions on action, and so it’s presence here isn’t surprising.
The new finding in this study is the fact that when the scientists damaged the amygdalas of the macaques, the dACC, took over the role of monitoring heart rate and providing input to the decision making system based on the stress response (Fujimoto et al.). This shows an incredibly complex relationship and balance in the brain’s stress management systems and can give insights into how stress levels are important in making decisions. While many areas of the brain work in tandem to help a person make good decisions, this research shows that the system is plastic and can be modulated and adapted.
Some Short Term Stress has Benefits
While long term stress is connected to higher health risks and mental health problems, a small amount of stress may actually help students to stay alert and make good decisions. While a student stressing over weeks about their slipping grades or inability to complete work is unhealthy and requires intervention from the teacher or other school staff, this study highlights that not all stress is bad.
Short bursts of stress like those associated with competition in games or last minute pressure to complete work can actually be beneficial to the speed and effectiveness of decisions made as any procrastinator will attest. Teachers should normally seek to have their classrooms a stress free and fun learning environment, but adding in some competitive class activities or putting a time challenge on work may actually help students to not only work more efficiently under that pressure, but teach their brain how to modulate stress’s effect on their work.
In other contexts, this research already makes perfect sense. Jobs requiring quick thinking under stressful situations such those performed by soldiers, doctors, or firefighters often train new recruits by putting them into stressful challenges and simulations to prepare them to work under those conditions in the future.
If someone hasn’t been put into stressful situations before, even if they are prepared with the knowledge of what to do, stressful situations make it difficult to apply what a person knows. In addition to this, things look much different in practice than they do in theory. Helping people to get used to stress allows them to cope better with how to manage it and make it less likely that they will freeze up when the real moment comes.
Teachers similarly should not entirely shy away from stressing out their students in small and challenging bursts. The students just need to understand exactly why the stressors are being put in place and feel that they will be supported through the process. Teachers can actually help make stress less damaging by helping students to mindfully manage their stress. This is the first of the benefits of short term stress: Resilience.
Revaluating Stress Creates Biological Changes
Stress has long been used as a blanket term for arousal in the body activating the sympathetic nervous system, the survival mechanism connected with a person’s drive to fight or flee from a dangerous situation. Research shows that all stress does not manifest the same way in the body however and different types of stress can actually be beneficial despite others being harmful.
Research from the Journal of Experimental Psychology found that helping a person to reevaluate their stress response as a positive adaptation of their body preparing them for a challenge, rather than just a negative feeling, caused them to experience both physical and psychological benefits of short term stress (Jamieson et al.).
First, the researchers discovered that those who had been coached to embrace their stress response had less constricted veins even when their heart rate increased. This is beneficial in long term heart disease and other conditions, and shows that just changing the way a person thinks about stress can cause physical changes within the body. This increases the effective blood flow, which fuels the body better for the increased needs it has, and prevents the long term damage from the chronically constricted veins and arteries exacerbating the increased pressure when heart rate increases.
Additionally, however, the researchers found that not only was the physical stress response improved, but the mental response was healthier as well. Participants who had gone through the coaching showed a decreased “attentional bias for emotionally negative information.” (Jamieson et al.)
When put into difficult situations, not only can the body be trained to respond more calmly and rationally, but so can the brain. These participants, when put under stress, were less likely to view the situation or challenge negatively and were able to more calmly and confidently respond.
Supporting Students Stress Management in School
Teachers can similarly help to coach their students to view the challenges in their classroom with a level head and calmed stress response. If teachers can mindfully prepare students for coming challenges, and help guide them with strategies to not get overwhelmed, not only will they be better able to perform better in class, but their physical and mental health might be improved as well. Students can often be quite negative, especially older students. This research encourages teachers to give their students more small challenges to overcome so that they are more resilient and less negatively biased.
Students often get frustrated when they aren’t good at a subject in school and it can affect their mental health and self image. If teachers can guide these students through coping strategies, they will be less likely to be negatively biased and use their inabilities as evidence of their worth.
Even students who excel benefit from these coping strategies as those most capable are often put into the most challenging situations. High performing students who are prepared with these coping strategies, even if they don’t need them at the time, will be better able to handle increasing challenges as they move to higher education or the workforce.
Conclusion
Every student is going to face challenges and stressors in their future, and so stress management is a fundamental skill every teacher should be working on with their students regularly. Teachers can start to do this by actively changing the way they speak about stress and encouraging students to view nerves before a presentation or stress during an exam as their body preparing them to be successful, rather than a sign they didn’t prepare well. By utilizing the benefits of short term stress, teachers can make students more resilient as well as confident.
Want more like this? Make Lab to Class a part of your weekly professional development schedule by subscribing to updates below.
References
Fujimoto, Atsushi et al. “Interaction Between Decision-Making And Interoceptive Representations Of Bodily Arousal In Frontal Cortex”. Proceedings Of The National Academy Of Sciences, vol 118, no. 35, 2021, p. e2014781118. Proceedings Of The National Academy Of Sciences, doi:10.1073/pnas.2014781118.
Jamieson, Jeremy P. et al. “Mind Over Matter: Reappraising Arousal Improves Cardiovascular And Cognitive Responses To Stress.”. Journal Of Experimental Psychology: General, vol 141, no. 3, 2012, pp. 417-422. American Psychological Association (APA), doi:10.1037/a0025719.
