students with Asperger’s<\/a>, and we see its impact on their efforts to learn and live successfully.<\/p>\nStress is the result of our brains trying, with imperfect success, to make sense of a world in which things don’t always go our way.\u00a0 Most of us live with a baseline of stress that comes from everyday existence.\u00a0 Our students, though, often live with a higher baseline, meaning that the daily hassles of life can push them beyond a manageable point.\u00a0 Why is that?<\/p>\n
Imagine a person with a mobility impairment, trying to navigate in a community that cares little for their challenges.\u00a0 There are no cut curbs or ramps, doors are too narrow, elevators don’t work.\u00a0 The stress that results from such a daily experience would be harrowing (and sadly, is not uncommon for people in wheelchairs).\u00a0 Now imagine that same person in an environment where their needs are taken into account with every structural decision.\u00a0 Elevators always work and every door has an automatic opener.\u00a0 That person’s baseline stress would drop, and make it easier simply to live in the world.<\/p>\n
Our students live in a world that is not designed for their learning differences.\u00a0 The stress they feel when they encounter classrooms and campuses that lack the equivalent of ramps and elevators to assist them is part of their daily lives, and can impede their goal of successful learning.\u00a0 For this reason, we spend a lot of time discussing stress and its origins in the brain.\u00a0 We know, for example, that the stress response originates deep in the brain, in the amygdala.\u00a0 The amygdala is involved in processing emotions and “fear-learning.” \u00a0It links areas of the cortex that process “higher” cognitive information with the systems that control “lower” responses (e.g., touch, respiration).\u00a0 When stressed, a person’s amygdala gets in the driver’s seat, and reason and rationality get shoved to the backseat.\u00a0 The gas pedal slams to the floor and the stressed person starts driving erratically.\u00a0 Learning?\u00a0 Not going to happen under those circumstances.<\/p>\n
Among the strategies we teach to respond appropriately to stress are mindfulness, deep breathing, yoga, listening to music and going for a walk.\u00a0 We know that physical exercise is among the best antidotes to stress, and that a 20-minute walk will significantly reduce a student’s stress level.\u00a0 We also know, thanks to the recent work of Gregory Bratman at Stanford, that walks in nature can reduce the stress associated with rumination and obsessive thinking, which is why we encourage our students to walk in the nearby woods or down by the waterfront.<\/p>\n
All of us can use these strategies to reduce our stress level and improve our cognitive output.\u00a0 For our students, that reduction may be the difference between academic success and failure.\u00a0 Too often, we accept the negative consequences of stress because we believe it’s the price we pay for living our hectic lives, or because we live in a world that doesn’t support our learning styles.\u00a0 We hope our students come to understand, through our work with them, that they have more control over their response to a stressful environment than they might have ever known.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Stressed? If you answer “no” to that simple question, you are in the tiny minority of people who are not afflicted by the great epidemic of our time.\u00a0 All of us feel the weight of responsibilities, the unsettledness of modern life.\u00a0 At Mansfield Hall, we see it writ large in the everyday lives of our […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":8452,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27,28,29,34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2361","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-academic-skills","category-college-integration","category-social-skills","category-stress"],"blocksy_meta":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mansfieldhall.org\/dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2361","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mansfieldhall.org\/dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mansfieldhall.org\/dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mansfieldhall.org\/dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mansfieldhall.org\/dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2361"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mansfieldhall.org\/dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2361\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mansfieldhall.org\/dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8452"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mansfieldhall.org\/dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2361"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mansfieldhall.org\/dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2361"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mansfieldhall.org\/dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2361"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}