September 2024 Founder’s Corner: Back to School: Optimal Stress Management
September is often the month of seismic transition for many families with school-aged humans. Kids are entering into new classrooms, schoolyards are filling up with new faces looking for places to belong, parents are saying goodbye at college dorms, and students are saying farewell to lifelong friends. Day to day in this season can feel like we’re eating one of those fat, stress sandwiches: an inch slab of pressure, a few slices of anticipation anxiety with a drizzle of sleeplessness, all nestled between two slices of overthinking.
With school beginning, performance on classwork is certainly on the minds of many. Proactive parents hope to create an environment that fosters healthy task completion. Adolescents experience the pressure of managing multiple tasks (academics and extracurricular activities). Teens and college students alike tread into acres of grinding and absorbing. Seeking to find optimal performance amidst this mounting pressure can become a tightrope walk, especially when you consider the way everyone metabolizes emotions, particularly stress.
As a psychologist for more than 16 years working with kids and young adults, I’ve come to realize that there are two general ways our younger folk deal with stress. First, there are those who feel their emotions with intense clarity. These are the kids whose emotions are wildly streaming out of their bodies without reason or pause, pure feeling without restraint. These are the kids who let emotion play openly on their faces, speak freely of their emotional state, and, at times, lack the ability to self-regulate.
On the other hand, there are those kids who tend to hold their emotions close, pushing the vibration of feeling down and into any crevasse that the body will allow. These are the kids who socially withdraw, bite back tears, and avoid any kind of battle with feeling too much. This form of emotional avoidance is a version of shrinking, numbing, and retracting until the vibration of stress ceases to rattle. It can be likened to a form of ‘emotional assassination’: take the feeling out before the feeling has a chance to harm you.
Of course, we all tend to have a mix of emotional responsivity. Interestingly, emotional processing can be wildly different between parent and child, even from child to child raised within the same home. Often trouble can arise when there is a mismatch between how a parent works through his/her own emotions and to how their loved ones metabolize feelings, potentially creating an environmental pressure cooker. Moreover, the greater the pressure and stress, the more we tend to lean in one direction of emotional processing: either restricting emotion (avoid eating that fat, emotional hoagie), or over-relating with emotion (grab that 6-inch sandwich with both hands and eating like we’ve been starved on a desert island for a week). Neither style of emotional processing has an advantage over the other because each style neglects a crucial ingredient in stress management: the ability to assimilate or metabolize the emotion before it becomes toxic.
Most of us agree that we would like to avoid feeling stressed. However, some forms of stress are considered beneficial. In fact, a certain amount of stress can increase our motivation and overall performance on day-to-day tasks. If you take into consideration the Yerkes-Dodson curve, optimal states of arousal (stress) can create optimal levels of performance.
Yerkes-Dodson Law Bell Curve from healthline.com
Paraphrased, the Yerkes-Dodson theory proposes, “you reach your peak level of performance with an intermediate level of stress, or arousal. Too little or too much arousal results in poorer performance.”[1]
Learning to manage stress is something each of us must learn, not a gift we are inherently born with. I offer myself as an example – while I have years of professional experience in helping kids and teens with stress management, my personal skill with stress tolerance took years to develop. Picture my smiling face here because honestly, emotion regulation for me as a young human was a bit rough.
I was 12 years old when I had a very stressful event. I was among a group of 20 kids who had traveled abroad to Spain in a student exchange program. Hoping for an immersive experience with the language and culture, our teachers planned a rigorous travel itinerary. Thus, one afternoon along the 14-day trip, we were scheduled to attend a town festival, one at which a local dignitary would be speaking. My Spanish teacher, aware of my fear of public speaking at the time, and hoping to improve my skills, chose me to be the ambassador for our group and asked me to give a short thank you speech in Espanol. “No, not me!” I recall cringing internally. “I’m terrible at Spanish!” I could hear my mind play on repeat. Despite my mental battle, the teacher handed me a piece of paper and asked me to memorize the paragraph. Blinking with horror embedded in a shy smile, my young brain soaked in the reality that I’d not only be presenting to this influential politician but also speaking in front of more than 100 people, including the judgy faces of my peers. To say I was terrified to speak a foreign language in front of a crowd, let alone to a local celebrity, was an understatement. Every fiber of my body trembled from head to toe as my mind conjured up all the reasons I would surely fail.
On the day of the event, I cannot tell you one thing about the day’s festivities or one detail about the town itself. Every second between arriving at the oceanside village was spent rehearsing the words I had pledged to share. As the moment arrived, cheeks blazing, heart thudding, I leaned into the microphone and stared out at the crowd. Paralyzed. Tongueless. You could have asked my name, and I only would have nodded. The words burned my throat as I stood frozen for what felt like an eternity, until I finally glanced at the dignitary standing to my left. The round, warm-faced man smiled at me and I cringed with embarrassment. From somewhere deep within, I let the few, broken Spanish words I could string together slip from my mouth, before pushing off the stage, tears slamming my eyes, the horror rushing through me like a flash flood.
It might be obvious where I was along the Yerkes-Dodson curve. Clearly far from optimal performance. Clearly so far from a healthy stress reaction that I could just as well have been on Mars and not the sweet bay town of Catalonia, Spain. A self-described over-feeler, I was crawling within my emotions: afraid, embarrassed, ashamed, terrorized by my own inner self-doubt and emotional vortex. Thus, my performance – marginal at best.
I suspect we have all experienced moments of performance that felt painfully exposing. If you are a parent of an athlete, musician, or vocalist, or you yourself are a performer, you know my story well. Pretty much anyone who struggles with speech anxiety or takes on leadership roles of any kind can relate. It takes courage to put yourself out there, even if that’s a new student walking up to a stranger in the schoolyard, or it’s a first week on a college campus, living with new roommates – all familiar places of refuge yet to be established. Stressful. Overwhelming for some.
So, how can we manage stress differently? Rather than consume or restrict our stress, what does a healthy response to stress look like? Before your student drifts into one of these extreme states, or before you, as a parent start building your own stress diet, there are a few important ways to engage.
First, know your emotional style, and/or identify your child’s emotional style. Are you more the emotional Restricter/Avoider type or more the Over-Feeler type?
Second, look for the signs that stress has begun to exceed optimal levels. The American Psychological Association has identified the following symptoms associated with stress:[2]
- Irritability and anger: Children don’t always have the words to describe how they are feeling and sometimes tension bubbles over into a bad mood. Stressed-out kids and teens might be more short-tempered or argumentative than normal.
- Changes in behavior: A young child who used to be a great listener is suddenly acting out. A once-active teen now doesn’t want to leave the house. Sudden changes can be a sign that stress levels are high.
- Trouble sleeping: A child or teen might complain of feeling tired all the time, sleep more than usual, or have trouble falling asleep at night.
- Neglecting responsibilities: If an adolescent suddenly drops the ball on homework, forgets obligations, or starts procrastinating more than usual, stress might be a factor.
- Eating changes: Eating too much or too little can both be reactions to stress.
- Getting sick more often: Stress often shows up as physical symptoms. Children who feel stress often report headaches or stomachaches, and might make frequent trips to the school nurse’s office.
Third, begin developing skills for tolerating difficult emotional states. Tolerating stress often means creating mental flexibility, softening your sense of reality, having a gentler approach with your mind and what it’s trying to tell you. A common practice to accomplish mental flexibility is called dialectical thinking. As elegantly explained by Diana Partington, “Dialectical thinking recognizing that two opposing truths can be truth at the same time. It’s the opposite of black-and-white thinking or all-or-nothing thinking. I think of it as brain yoga because it makes your brain more flexible.”[3] Practically put, this dichotomous thinking is the ability to have a conversation with your thoughts, “I like this,” and “I don’t like this” at the same time. “I can do this,” and “I can’t do this”. Both statements can be true if you allow the perspective. Our brains respond to what it’s hearing, not what is ‘true’. Teaching our kids (and ourselves) to notice black-and-white thinking patterns can help create just enough space to tolerate tough emotions and let them metabolize.
And finally, and maybe my favorite method of managing stress, is getting into nature.[4] Maybe this is obvious, but when was the last time you (or your child or teen) walked among the trees, or trailed up a hillside? Often with endless attachments to technology, we spend too much time staring at stress-inspiring focal points. Our gaze is limited to the foot or two from your computer. Managing stress requires shifting our focus, especially our gaze, to greater horizons. Neurotransmitters that help regulate stress hormones (such as dopamine and serotonin) release when we get outside and into nature. The breeze, the woodsy scent, the crunch of leaves underfoot, the sparkles of light between trees, all these sensations are potential dopamine releasers. And good news: Fall is a spectacular season to get out under the canopy of the trees and trip around in Nature’s color-filled garden.
While stress cannot be avoided, we can be good custodians of our emotions and learn to live more confidently with emotional intelligence. We need to strike a balance between falling face-first into emotions and avoiding feeling altogether. Explore your emotional landscape, help your child identify and sit with tough experiences before stemming off the flow of stress. Pressure and change cannot be avoided. However, having a diet rich in healthy emotional processing is something we all have power to create.
[1] https://www.healthline.com/health/yerkes-dodson-law
[2] https://www.apa.org/topics/children/stress
[3] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/dbt-for-daily-life/202406/how-marsha-linehan-created-dbt-and-how-it-can-help