|
Race to Nowhere
, raises awareness about the
potential long-term impact of unhealthy school stress, how this chronic stress is
linked to alarming rises in teenage anxiety, sleeplessness, and depression, and
what we can do about it. She believes our achievement-obsessed culture is
creating a new form of childhood adversity that’s gone unnoted and untreated.
“It’s plain to see the harm that our achievement-obsessed culture is doing to
kids,” she says. “Teens nationwide are routinely grinding through twelve-hour
days of school, sports, and homework, striving to reach society’s impossible
image of success.” Abeles believes this “high-stakes grind in school throughout
the formative and fragile teen years leads, like every form of childhood
adversity, to a stew of stress hormones flooding our kids’ still-growing brain and
body—setting teens up for a lifetime cycle of anxiety and depression, weakening
their immune systems, and making them far more vulnerable to infections and
cardiovascular disease for the rest of their lives.” Kids are facing excessive
societal pressure to perform during the teenage years; they’re caught up in this
crazy modern race to get the grades to get into a top college—and are
overwhelmed with the fear of failure if they don’t, Abeles says. “They are
ticking time bombs for later ill health.”
Recently, the American Psychological Association released a nationwide
survey called Stress in America, which found that American teens now report
that their stress level during the school year is nearly 6 on a 10-point scale—a
level considered emotionally unhealthy, and far higher than that cited by most
adults. In this survey of more than one thousand teenagers ages thirteen to
seventeen, many teens reported being overwhelmed or depressed because of
stress. Eighty-three percent of teens said that school was “a somewhat or
significant source of stress.” More than one in four reported “extreme stress”
during the school year. Forty percent of teens reported feeling angry or irritable
during the prior month of school. Almost one in three said stress made them feel
as though they could cry.
In summer, stress levels dropped strikingly.
Many kids are so anxious about measuring up that doing well involves far
more than learning to grind through the kind of normative stress that is a given
in growing up—coping on a bad day when they get a disappointing grade, or
getting through a really tough week when exams or SATs loom. The stress
response stays activated for prolonged periods of time—in many cases, from
September to June. That’s chronic stress.
Think of how researchers induce a high-stress state in lab settings. They ask
study participants to do math problems or give a short speech—while
researchers evaluate them—perfectly mimicking school stress. In other words,
researchers re-create a stressful school-like environment to get individuals’
cortisol responses to spike. Our high school and college admissions systems may
be turning high school into a potentially toxic laboratory, where students’ heart
rates, blood pressure, blood sugar, stress hormone levels, and immune systems
are too often activated.
Yes, for short periods—like when taking an exam—that’s good, it helps a
young person experience that sense of urgency to get through it and do his
utmost best. But when it’s a day-in and day-out state of being, when it becomes
“the way life is” for students, chronic stress will disrupt brain architecture, cause
epigenetic changes and a greater stress response, inflammation, ailments,
depression, and disease. It will also disrupt the brain circuitry that plays a role in
learning and achieving academic success. When the amygdala is always in a red
alert state—
What happens if I don’t perform well enough on this test? Will any
college want me?
—it’s harder to do well. It’s not surprising that, in the past
decade, rates of “test anxiety” have risen, along with rising teen stress rates and
rates of chronic pain and illness, including migraine syndromes and back pain.
No wonder many competitive public and private schools are dubbed “stress
mills.” We might think of many teens’ school stress today as “adverse academic
experiences.”
By the time teens enter college, even those from that one-third of happy-
family homes, they may have become accustomed to day-to-day pressures that
precipitate an amygdala-reactive stress state that will shadow them throughout
their academic and work careers. For those who face their share of adversity at
home, there may suddenly be no safe haven.
More tests, more pressure in school and in sports and in the race to get into a
good college—more chronic unpredictable stress—and on little sleep: this is not
a recipe for being resilient, or developing grit, or building up the brain. It’s a
recipe for breaking down the brain.
It doesn’t really matter what the stressor is, whether it’s poverty or chronic
abuse or the bully on the bus—stress impacts how the structure and architecture
of the brain form.
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
