Mindfulness Fundamentals

Healthy stress is a natural part of life, including infancy. Adults as much as children must be challenged in order to grow and develop. However, in today’s education system and in modern life, healthy stress is often replaced by toxic stress. Toxic stress happens when life’s demands consistently overtake our ability to meet those demands.

Toxic stress affects focus, emotions, regulation of mood, sleep and preparation for daily learning in the classroom. Even more worrying, prolonged exposure to toxic stress in childhood has lifelong impacts on physical and mental health.

/ Educators

Toxic stress starts with a decrease in productivity and creativity, and it progresses into more serious symptoms like frequent anxiety, dissasociation, frustratation and finally exhaustion.

/ Parents

Toxic stress can lead to a parenting style which looks more like a “to-do list” instead of an empathetic relationship centred around being present with the developing child.

It has been shown that exposure to parents’ stress in early infancy affects gene expression years after adolescence.

Even children that have not suffered adverse experiences in childhood can have problems with frequent “imbalances” between the severity of a stimulus (a routine surprise exam) and their reaction (loss of peripheal vision, sweating, nausea, fear, inability to move).

For children who suffer trauma, these “imbalances” become chronic and frequent. As toxic stress has it’s roots deep in the nervous system, we need tools which go further than the conceptual mind, so we can directly target the nervous system. In order to transform our habitual responses, we need to practice our skills regularly when we are not in “fight-flight-freeze” mode.