Stressed?

Your brain may be hard-wired to focus on the negative, but you can reprogram it.

Stress happens, especially in the classroom. A packed schedule, an insensitive comment from a student, a new request from administration, papers to grade, lessons to plan, spilled coffee . . . your head pounds, your shoulders tense, your eyelids droop. You feel stuck. How can you get a better handle on this?

I wanted to find out. As an education writer, I’m always trying to find and communicate workable solutions to problems that feel large or maddeningly amorphous. “Beating stress” is just such a problem — both for teachers, who constantly have to manage competing priorities and the pressure to do more with less, and for teenagers, who are still developing the core skills they need to tackle their many responsibilities.
 
Thankfully, research offers a comfortingly low-tech answer. One valuable, often overlooked, and durable way to manage stress is to build positive habits, slowly and over time. Our brains are hard-wired to focus on the negative, but by practicing mindfulness, we can reprogram them — teach our brains to accentuate positive experiences and maintain serenity.

Habit and the Brain

The human brain evolved with a “negativity bias,” says mindfulness expert Metta McGarvey, a lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (Harvard Education). Negative events and thoughts have a proportionally greater impact on our memory and psychological state than positive ones do. From a survival standpoint, it makes sense — strong recollections of bad experiences means we’re more likely to learn from mistakes and avoid a life-threatening situation.

This negativity bias also means that smaller, day-to-day stressors tend to take precedence in our thoughts, leaving less room for positive framing or constructive action planning. But it doesn’t have to stay that way.

Our brains can change, physically, as a result of learning, says McGarvey. In a process called “experience dependent neuroplasticity,” neural connections grow based on what we’re learning. Repeating the same thoughts, feelings, and behaviors increase synaptic connectivity, strengthens neural networks, and creates new neurons through learning. In other words, practicing a positive habit can predispose our thoughts to be more affirmative.

Brain Training for Teachers

The key to developing these positive habits? Mindfulness.

According to researchers at the Greater Good Science Center, a project at University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley), mindfulness has two core components: maintaining an awareness of our immediate thoughts, feelings, and surroundings; and accepting these thoughts and feelings without judging them. McGarvey explains it as “single-tasking,” or approaching any situation with your undivided attention and keeping that attention on the present moment.

By approaching your work with mindfulness, you decrease the amount of energy you spend worrying about the past or the future, and you increase the amount of attention you give to present and positive experiences. But because stress and worrying can be so ingrained, McGarvey explains, you need to practice (and keep practicing) the skills and habits you need to train your brain to bring and keep your attention on the present.