Stress Inoculation Is the Key to Greatness. So Why Are We So Afraid of It?
If you have any friends who are active or current members of the military, ask them about “the gas chamber.” It’s one of those experiences that old jarheads and grunts will laugh about with each other well into old age. Want to make fun of Uncle Dave at the family cookout? Show the photo of him keeled over, drooling and crying from CS gas during basic training (oftentimes, an embedded military historian will take pictures of recruits hacking up their lungs, and sell the photos back to them after basic…amazing!). The general consensus is that it hits the right amount of suckiness. No one enjoys it, mind you. Recruits stand in a room and are forced to remove their gas masks as a drill sergeant fills the room with the active ingredient found in Mace, all to instill trust the mask’s functionality. Recruits learn how to handle the mask under duress, and they are exposed to what happens if they don’t (spoiler: it’s gross).
It sucks the right amount because it’s unpleasant — your face just generally…leaks—but also very effective. People don’t tend to forget how irritating CS gas is after the drill. It’s also a rite of passage, a bonding experience, a common touchstone that all veterans can weave into their common experience. Honestly, a lot of military training is like this: drown-proofing, live-fire exercises, and a dozen other “hellish” stories are part of becoming a professional soldier in any part of the world. Military instructors know that most book learning evaporates once there’s an adrenaline dump or real danger in the room. So instructors have to introduce these elements in repeatable, controlled ways in order to give would-be soldiers a taste of what the real world is like. And it’s pretty effective; say what you will about the insane amount of money the United States spends on its military, its training systems provide a basis for many of the world’s armed forces. A lot of the stuff works.
A significant amount of military pedagogy rests on the concept of Stress Inoculation Training (SIT), a cognitive behavioral therapy that exposes a learner to stressful situations while teaching them important concepts to help them manage their reaction to relevant stressors. The theory is that this exposure will help them perform the concepts better. Within it lies an implicit understanding that a person’s biology has a decisive impact on how that person can absorb learning and apply it. It’s also an inherent argument that simply providing access to information is not sufficient to learn the harder things we do in life, and creating the most comfortable or frictionless learning experience is often at odds with actual results. SIT is effective in both tasked-based learning (e.g., dealing with a broken SCUBA rig) and high-order activities (e.g., teamwork or high-pressure decision-making), and has noted results in areas like addiction relapse or PTSD. But to bring it home…think of a time in your life that was high-stress and high-structure: basic training, medical residency, finals week, hackathon, first pregnancy, etc. Did it make you less skilled and resilient? Did the pain outweigh the benefits? I’d wager that a huge majority of people view SIT favorably, when viewed through their own contextual lens.
INOCULATION VS. INSULATION
But here’s the issue: young adults are doing everything they can to avoid stress. They’re not simply trying to reduce it in their lives; they are evading the critical life milestones, of which stress is a natural companion. Now, I really really really don’t want to delve into get-off-my-lawnisms about how Millennials are soft, or the double-hilled walks to school of my youth. So we can start this discussion by noting that young people, for complex and myriad reasons, are incredibly stressed already, and that trend has been increasing for almost a century. It’s not that mysterious why young people are having trouble coping with adulthood. What’s more frustrating is that institutions — from the family unit to universities to the workplace — are catering to these impulses by designing learning environments that do a disservice to their charges. We are insulating young people from stress, not inoculating them.
With a decade in HigherEd teaching, I experience this on a daily basis. I know, for instance, that I’m likely in for a prolonged discussion (at minimum) with a student if I give them anything lower than an A- in a graduate-level course. I’d say that easily a quarter of group projects will result in me having to step in to resolve interpersonal disputes. A very significant amount of group discussion on student work will devolve into personal attacks, often around the subject of identity. Absenteeism and tardiness are not only de rigeur, but baked into expectations (apparently, people only learn about the Los Angeles traffic on the 405 and the 10 in their late twenties). These are irritants, nothing to fling oneself to the ground about, but this anecdotal experience is backed up by larger, more troubling trends...
On a national scale, grade inflation is actually hyperinflation, and it’s rampant on college campuses. Yet the U.S. is mired in a higher education dropout epidemic that can cripple entire family systems (with stress affecting freshmen disproportionately). A rash of overparenting leaves many young people highly anxious about the lack of control over their lives, creating damaging ripple effects at school and work. In the working world, The American Age of the Entrepreneur is in deep peril, and fear of failure is the top reason why young people don’t start businesses. Young people are not having sex, they are not going out, they are not having kids, and they do not feel happy in an era of rock-bottom crime, low unemployment, and breakneck innovation. Some people argue this is evidence of their more pragmatic, reserved nature. Digging more deeply into this evidence shows an age cohort that is deeply pessimistic about their future, and lacking the coping mechanisms to deal with the world outside their doors.
This is precisely what SIT was created to do, yet while our educational systems didn’t really start this problem, they are blanching at the challenge to confront it. It is harder and harder, for instance, for children to experience the benefits that come from competition and teamwork, in sport or in academia. Under the guise of “words are violence” and emotional well-being, college campuses are acceding to student demands to cancel speakers and exhibitions that run counter to their positions. The controversial “trigger warning” — which doesn’t appear to be all that effective — has moved from the campus to the workplace, where they can be used as a bullying tactic to silence others. There are many other examples, but we can chart, from K-12 to the workplace, how education spaces are taking the path of least resistance and simply trying to erase stressors from their learners’ lives, instead of fortifying them against those stressors.
STRESS IS BAD. THAT’S NOT THE POINT.
What we are not advocating is that young people need to be exposed to stressful situations because “that’s the way it’s always been” or it “puts hair on your chest” or some other nostalgic nonsense. Too often, rites of passage are hijacked for weird, sadistic purposes, so that a new generation is forced to experience the same pain as the ones before them, for the sake of the pain (I remember high school basketball practices where we weren’t allowed to drink water, for some bizarre reason). We’re not even arguing that stress is good for learning, because it most definitely is not. “Stress” is quite different than “challenge,” and things that cause stress in a person’s learning — lack of sleep, poor nutrition, threat of violence — degrade learning capacity almost universally. Challenges, however, not only affect the body in a completely different way than stress, but are the building blocks for real-world readiness. Quite simply, a stressor that is transformed into a challenge through instructional scaffolding is the most powerful learning opportunity one can create.
The point of SIT is not to make people learn under duress. The point is to “raise the floor,” so to speak, so that people find less things stressful in the first place. They can have a difficult conversation without shutting down or blowing up. They can absorb early failure and persevere to subsequent successes. They can hear useful criticism, and deliver it. They can process and cope with the inevitable stressors that line the road to adulthood, which will allow them to participate in adulthood more fully. Educational institutions (who don’t tend to deal with internal stress themselves very well) don’t have a lot of short-term incentives to take this increasingly difficult job on. Tuition-paying parents complain. Accusations of being insensitive, racist, and sexist are never far behind. There is always the possibility that something insensitive or harmful is taking place, and therefore due diligence is required. But virtually no worthwhile education or training is a short-term value proposition. Educators should be looking to introduce SIT activities into their learning spaces — to create challenges out of stressors — so that learners can take on anxiety-inducing activities in a structured, repeatable way.
If you are going to bring SIT into a learning space, below are few housekeeping rules:
- Have Clear Learning Objectives: Again, unfocused challenge is usually interpreted by the body as stress. What are you trying to teach, and what are the metrics that will tell you if you’re making progress? How do the learners know that’s what you’re doing?
- Build a System for Communication: Just like in therapy, it’s never a free-for-all. The educator is also the moderator of discussion, and it’s critical to have rules of engagement. There are many systems to do this…we’d of course suggest the Saturn™ C.U.B.E. for Conflict method, because we made it! But choices abound…
- Attack the Problem, Not the Person: In stressful situations, people tend become defensive more quickly. By organizing and evaluating around the subject or problem-to-solve, it’s less liable to succumb to missed interpretations.
- Participation Certificates, But No Participation Trophies: Learning in these spaces is, by definition, challenging. And that should be acknowledged. But SIT works well with concepts in which learners can succeed or fail. Failure is not a terrible thing — in fact, it should be expected for most high-order learning — and it’s best to introduce failure while building resiliency for long-term objectives. SIT does that!
- Nutritional Conflict: Because we are about two decades into an information ecosystem that thrives on allconflictallthetimeforeverything, many of us feel a need to limit conflict (and it’s cousin “drama”) in our lives. But (the right kind of) conflict is wonderful for growth. Don’t shy away from it, lean into it with intention, facilitation, and planning.
Hopefully, the above can help you integrate SIT-based pedagogy into your learning spaces. Maybe bring a gas mask for effect. Good luck!
Justin Wolske runs CASEWORX and is the Co-Founder/EIR at GRID110. He also teaches at the Cal State LA Dept. of Television, Film & New Media. He used to sleep under his editing table in film school, thinking it would toughen him up. That was dumb.
