Stressed By Learning: How Learning Struggles Hijack the Brain
Learning struggles are a primary source of stress for kids. While you may think that they’re just “not trying,” are “lazy” or are just behind because of the state of schools, there are real biological reasons that kids who struggle in school feel inept and unprepared for what their days require of them. Building your child’s resilience is the key to unlocking this vicious cycle of feeling stressed and overwhelmed, falling behind, and feeling like they just can’t do it any more.
How Does the Brain Respond to Stress?
When your brain senses stress, it resorts to one of these responses: fight, flight, or freeze. Biologically, our bodies are made to respond to threats in ways that will best support our survival. But for the world we live in, stress is constant. The inputs of “danger” hardly ever stop, and we are paying the price.
When your body senses danger (whether it’s real or perceived), it begins a hormone cascade that impacts every area of your body—including your brain. While you may feel that you start sweating, your heart rate increases, your hair stands on end, or your body freezes, internally there is even more going on.
In your brain in particular, there is a battle that begins the moment you perceive stress. When your body releases cortisol (the stress hormone), it produces other chemicals in the brain that damage or kill off existing brain cells and prevent the hippocampus from producing new neurons.
Additionally, cortisol impacts the function of your amygdala (the emotional regulation center of your brain), which means you are not able to reason through problems any more. Instead, you react (often irrationally) and deal with greater fear, anxiety, depression, and even anger as a result of this chronic stress.
You literally, biologically, cannot learn when you’re in a state of chronic stress.
You can’t problem-solve. Reasoning through a question or test is out of the question. Emotional reactions take precedence over logical actions, and your brain can’t form new memories.
Does this sound familiar for your struggling learner?
For many kids in school, this looks like anger, aggression, avoidance of schoolwork, and what appears to be a lack of focus or memory… but it goes deeper than that. Learning struggles act as a constant stressor on the brain that depletes resilience.
How Learning Struggles Act Like Stress and Trauma
Kids (and adults) with learning struggles are living in a state of chronic stress. Think about it… when you’re pushed to do something you’re not good at, how do you feel?
Now, imagine doing that all day every day, being tested on it, being compared to peers or siblings, and being told that you’re “behind, slow, stupid, or out of it”… when you’re only trying to keep up.
It’s no wonder that many kids with learning struggles have low resilience and a low self-esteem that wrecks their confidence and keeps them back.
Learning struggles act as a constant stressor in the brain, preventing rational thinking and memory formation—unless you address them by building cognitive capacity.
Ways to Build Resilience and Overcome Stressful Learning Environments
Ultimately as a parent of a struggling learner, what you want to build in your child is resilience. This is their ability to handle stressful situations and pull themselves out of a fight-flight-freeze response and get back to normal functioning.
Just saying “calm down” or “try again” isn’t enough to stretch your child’s resilience. You need to proactively look for ways to build these skills in your family. Some strategies to build resilience include:
- Connection. Get face-to-face, 1-on-1 with your kids daily doing something that they love. This will communicate security and safety to their brain and have that as a place to return to in stressful situations.
- Coregulation. Learn how to help your child manage their emotions through your steady, constant support and presence. Even when they are in school or away from you, this time commitment to help them regulate their own emotional turmoil will pay off.
- Competence & Joy. Find the things your child is good at and that they love to do, and do it daily! Building resilience can look like going on a bike ride with them, playing their favorite game, baking something delicious, or any other task that brings them joy and confidence.
- Cognitive skill strengthening. Your brain is wired a certain way, but that doesn’t mean you’re stuck with learning struggles for life. Building cognitive skills can help your child grow their capacity for learning, focusing, reading, and remembering by strengthening the neurological connections that govern these processes.
Brain Training for Learning Struggles
Brain training is a great tool for many families who are looking for ways to build their struggling learners’ abilities to handle stressful school environments. The reality is, the pressures of time, distractions, and overwhelm are not going away in the real world. Instead of accommodating these issues, it’s important to support and build the skills they need to thrive in these—and any—learning environments. And that is what brain training does!
Many clients report less aversion to schoolwork, greater confidence, and less oppositional behavior as some of their biggest improvements as a result of brain training.* This is likely because we are helping struggling students get out of their fight-flight-freeze brain and find ways to stay in control of their cognition by strengthening the key learning skills they need.
While all results will vary, we’d love to partner with your family to find ways to build your child’s capacity for learning and to help school become less stressful and overwhelming. Call us today to get started!
*Results based on surveys of past clients. You or your child may or may not achieve the same outcomes.
