SECONDARY STRESS IS NO JOKE

According to an article by Jessica Lander called “Secondary Traumatic Stress for Educators: Understanding and Mitigating the Effects” roughly half of American school children have experienced some form of trauma, neglect, abuse, or violence. The effect this has on teachers, counselors, and other primary caregivers is far reaching and goes by several names. Secondary traumatic stress, vicarious trauma, and compassion fatigue are just three of them.

When nearly 50% of your students are dysregulated to some degree, sitting in your classroom every day, it is a pretty safe bet to say that you are likely to be suffering from chronic stress.

Symptoms include:

• withdrawing from friends and family

• feeling irritable, angry, or numb for no apparent reason

• inability to focus, blaming others

• feeling hopeless, isolated, or guilty that you are not doing enough

• struggling to concentrate, unable to sleep, overeating or not eating enough

• continually and persistently worrying about students

• burn out and leaving the profession

   

FACTS ABOUT STRESS- FOR YOU AND YOUR STUDENTS

Fact 1: Your body doesn’t care if it’s a big stress or a little one.

The human body doesn’t discriminate between a BIG stress, or a little one. Stress affects the body in predictable ways. A typical stress reaction, which most of us have dozens of times each day, begins with a cascade of 1400 biochemical events in your body. If these reactions are left unchecked we age prematurely, our cognitive function is impaired, our energy is drained, and we are robbed of our effectiveness and clarity.

Fact 2: Stress can make smart people do stupid things

Stress causes what brain researchers call “cortical inhibition.” When highly emotional people say something in the heat of the moment that they later regret after calming down, they know exactly what cortical inhibition is, even if they didn’t know what it was called! We all have that one student who pushes our buttons and makes us want to pull our hair out, who we sometimes lose our patience with and say things that later we wish we had not said.

Fact 3: People can become numb to their stress

We can be physiologically experiencing stress yet mentally numb to it because we are simply used to that level of stress, it has become our normal. Just because you don’t think you are stressed doesn’t necessarily mean that you are not experiencing the physiological responses of stress.

Fact 4: We can control how we respond to stress

We don’t need to be victims of our own emotions, thoughts, attitudes, or environments. We can learn to respond to stress in a more efficient and effective manner, building our capacity for resilience. We can literally rewire the way our brain and body responds to stress, and it is FAR EASIER THAN YOU THINK.

Fact 5: The best strategy is to handle stress in the moment

The best way to manage stress is to deal with it the very moment you feel it come up…not 10 hours later. Teaching is stressful. Students are stressful. You can’t just leave your classroom to go “chill out with a glass of wine”. You need tools to help you right then and there, while you are marching across the room to redirect the little darlings for the thousandth time that day.

Clearly we all experience stress in to one degree or another. The question is, “What are you going to do about it?”