The Antidote To Everything

The American Psychological Association recently released its annual "Stress in America" survey. Unsurprisingly, it finds that we are very stressed out. The Covid-19 pandemic remains a stressor, but has been surpassed as of February this year by the less exotic sources of anxiety like money and war. Parents are particularly anxious, with the bonus stress of worrying about their children, particularly when it comes to social-emotional and academic development.

This particular survey has only been around since 2017, so it doesn't have the track record to indicate whether or not these are the proverbial highest levels of stress ever, but there are other surveys with a longer track records that seem to indicate that we're certainly, as Americans, freaking out at much higher levels now than in the recent past, and definitely doing so to a degree that it is damaging our mental health.

With all due respect to pestilence, famine, war, and death, the most obvious causes of stress, it's the stress itself that is in many ways the most worrisome, emerging in our modern world as a fifth horse of the apocalypse. When I was a boy, we were convinced that the world would end in a giant nuclear fireball, and recent events are rising that specter once more, but the real death of our species, I fear, will be a long agonizing decent into all-anxiety-all-the-time.

All animals feel stress, of course. It is the natural response to danger, inextricably tied up with the emotion we call fear. The problem with us humans is that while other animals respond to their fear by fighting or flying or hiding, they, as more instinctive creatures, have also developed the the ability to turn it off once the object of their fear is gone. I watch the rabbits in my neighborhood, for instance, dash into the shrubbery when I pass with my dog, but when I look back over my shoulder they're already back out there on the lawn. 

Humans, on the other hand, with our big, imaginative brains capable of considering the past, present, and future in great and catastrophic detail, can keep ourselves in a state of heightened alertness pretty much 24/7. Added to that is our interconnected world in which all the pestilence, famine, war, and death is brought home to us day-after-day, even if on this day, in our nook of the world, there is nothing particularly stressful happening. The sun may be shining, the children may be romping in the grass, our bellies may be full of home cooking, and the air may be perfumed with the scent of citrus blossoms, but there is still that damned supply chain to plague us with worry.

One of the things I've learned about stress from working with young children is that each one of them responds differently. Loud noises stress out one kid, while the other is stressed out by silence. One is afraid of pinecones, while another is afraid of spiders. It's led me to conclude that the main difference between my anxieties and your anxieties is that mine make sense. 

And therein lies the solution to stress run amuck: other people. Children count on us to sooth them when they are afraid. They count on the fact that we aren't afraid of the boogyman and our presence, our calm in the face of the boogyman, our assurances that we will protect them, are the stress reducers they need. So much of what passes for discourse these days involves people yelling at one another over what we should be most afraid of, be it immigrants or racists or disease or war. Your fear is wrong! My fear is right! I hate you because you don't fear the way I do! That, of course, is the opposite of what we ought to be doing.

With children, we listen, we strive to understand, and then we use that understanding to sooth and assure them. Our species has evolved a mechanism for dealing with stress: it's other people. We've evolved to not be afraid of the same things at the same time. To be fully human means that others count on us to be the strong ones when we are not afraid and for us to count on others when we are. With young children we say through our words and deeds, "I am here with you while you're afraid."

This is what we could be doing for one another. The antidote to stress is connection. Of course, as the children have taught me, that is the antidote to everything.

******

  

"I recommend these books to everyone concerned with children and the future of humanity." ~Peter Gray, Ph.D. If you want to see what Dr. Gray is talking about you can find Teacher Tom's First Book and Teacher Tom's Second Book right here. 

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!