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Spot on Science: Stressin' Out!

Stressing out over an upcoming test or a big game at school? Dr. Lisa Rameriz explains how stress can actually be a good thing and what to do when it turns toxic.

This video is funded by Ohio's Broadcast Educational Media Commission.

Class Discussion Questions:

1) How are good and bad stress different?

2) Create a plan to help manage stress in your life.

Educator Resources:

Social/Emotional Learning topics are often difficult to surface in the classroom. When discussing topics of this nature, we recommend that you consider the needs of your community, seek any needed support from reputable organizations or colleagues, such as a guidance counselor or school psychologist. In order to support you, we have found the following resources to be of interest on the topic of stress:

Read the Script:

[Margaret] Confession. Whenever I have to film one of these, my hands get a little sweaty, my breathing gets funny and my heart starts racing. Basically, I get a little stressed out, but luckily that stress has some science behind it and stress can even be a good thing. To learn more about it, I called up Dr. Lisa Ramirez from Metro Health. She's a child psychologist. I started our call by asking her, "What exactly is stress?"

[Lisa] So, stress is actually a good thing. Stress is really meant to help us understand when something is wrong or we need to do something just a little bit differently. And so stress might be realizing that you have a task coming up the next day, it might be realizing that maybe you hear somebody opening the front door and nobody's supposed to be coming over at that time. And so your body starts to realize, "Okay, we need to do something differently to either get us out of danger or do something to study for that test that we do well." And so, our bodies are really, really familiar with stress and it is often a good thing. Sometimes though, stress can get to be too much and that's when it becomes a problem.

[Margaret] And can you tell me a little bit about that and what's going on with your body when maybe the stress is too much?

[Lisa] Sometimes I'll think of it kinda like a swimming pool. You know, so positive stress is like, when you jump into the shallow end, your feet touch the ground, maybe you swallow a little bit of water, you know but you get right back out and you're jumping back in again. Tolerable stress is that point between the deep end and the shallow end where your feet are not quite touching the bottom but you're close enough where you can get back out especially if there's someone to kind of help you, give you a hand and say, "Come back into the shallow end." Toxic stress is that point where we are in the deep end of stress, our feet are nowhere near the bottom and there's really not a lot around us to help us so we feel like there's not a lot to grab onto.

[Margaret] And our brain is releasing kind of chemicals, right?

[Lisa] Yeah. There's a little part of your brain called the amygdala. That's the alarm system. And so it sends out something called cortisol and it's actually a steroid. So imagine, you know, somebody's running at you in the park and your brain sends out alarm system, that cortisol, that steroid it's kind of telling your body, "We've gotta run fast. We got to scream loud. We got to listen to everything, you know, make sure." So it makes everything sharper which is great when we have to get out of a dangerous situation or a stressful situation. But if we're so long in that state, again, it takes away from all the other parts of our body. We can't focus very much because we're still worried about paying attention to everything around us. And so, you know, there are ways to shut off that cortisol and that alarm system that we call coping.

[Margaret] And can you share some of those coping tips that you have?

[Lisa] Yeah, sure. So one of the best ways really that we know is by leaning on important and meaningful people in your life. Being able to talk about the things that stress us out is really important. If we don't have that, you know there are ways of trying to take care of our health 'cause the healthier bodies are then the better prepared it is for stress. And we could eat healthy, make sure we're getting our sleep do a little bit of movement, you know, and try and keep ourselves healthy that way. Also, a really basic way that we can do any time is trying to calm our bodies down. And I'm sure you've heard people recommend things like yoga or deep breaths, things like that to calm down.

[Margaret] Yeah. And I hear a lot of the times people, if you're kind of freaking out, they say, take deep breaths. So, kind of what's up with that? Does that actually help?

[Lisa] Yes. So, yes and no. So I will say deep breaths are amazing and they're like doing a correct deep breath, is really powerful and it can calm you down even in the most stressful situation. But most people don't do deep breaths the right way. People focus on filling their lungs but actually don't realize that the more important part of deep breaths is emptying your lungs. So do it with me, Margaret. We're gonna take a deep breath in and then I want you to see how long you can have a nice deep out-breath. And when you're blowing out, imagine that maybe you're blowing out a birthday cake or blowing bubbles, okay? So let's do it together. Let's take our deep breath in, let's blow out as long as we can. We did a little. What was that like?

[Margaret] I feel my shoulders relax and I just feel a lot more comfortable.

[Lisa] Yeah. Emptying your lungs really helped your body realize, "Wait a minute, we don't have to stress out so much. We can actually relax a little bit." And doing that deep out-breath tricks that amygdala part of our brain and turns the alarm off even it's just for a little bit, right? One more thing you can imagine is if you're doing your bubbles you can imagine some of your worries even going into them floating away and popping away from you. You know, so that's kind of visually that see if you can get rid of some of the stress.

[Margaret] I love that. I already feel a lot more relaxed. Thanks so much, Lisa, for chatting with me today.

[Lisa] Yeah, me too. It was great. Thanks for inviting me.