Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired: Dealing with Toxic Stresses on Campus and in our Classrooms

These stressors are not just individual incidents but they really accumulate in our bodies over time
Tina Sacks

Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired: Dealing with Toxic Stress | Teaching in Troubled Times

Topics

Event Description:

This has been a difficult year for many Berkeley students and faculty. At the national level, we have seen an increase in hateful rhetoric and exclusionary policies directed at many identities and communities. And, here on campus, we have been deeply challenged by tensions around recent speaker events, as well as by increased policing, painful intergroup dynamics, and repeated instances of bias and harassment. All of this has led to an increase in individual and collective stress, trauma, and anxiety, which research shows can negatively impact learning, memory, and emotion.

The panel discusses these key questions:

  • What does it mean to teach at a time when so many people are struggling with these issues?
  • How do we understand the collective stresses and traumas affecting our students? What is the impact of these stresses on their experience in the classroom and on their learning more broadly?
  • How do we respond when new stressful or traumatizing situations arise – either on campus or in the national context?
  • How do we manage our own stress, trauma, and anxiety in these times – both for the sake of our students and for our own well-being?

Speakers:

It’s one thing to think about these concepts intellectually. It’s quite another to experience every day on the campus where you’re walking in and out of classrooms with people who do and don’t look like you, who do and don’t think like you.
Amani Nuru-Jeter

Considerations to Help Identify and Manage Stress

Understand disparity isn’t just difference.

Disparities and inequities are differences from injustice. It is a non-random distribution of risk and trauma in a certain population, usually in low-income neighborhoods or communities of color. (00:15:53)

Recognize diversity within identity

We use pan-ethnic terms like “Black,” “Asian,” etc., without recognizing and acknowledging the tremendous diversity within these groups. Understand the complexities within race, and how identity is at the intersection of race, gender, neighborhood, and other aspects of identity. [17:54]

Defining Stress

Stress is a process where an environmental demands and tax or exceed the adaptive capacity of an organism that may place a person for risk for poor states of wellbeing. Distress is the negative form of stress. Chronic stress is repeated stress.

Toxic stress is a persistent change that requires us to adapt so regularly that an individual experiences chronic upregulation, overproduction of stress hormones in our bodies that create an environment that leaves us more susceptible to a variety of poor health outcomes. 

Refer to these slides from Dr. Nuru-Jeter (link unavailable) [20:30]

The frequency of stress determines our reaction to it.

An analogy from Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers by Robert Sapolsky:

Zebras get chased by lions daily, but they don’t continue to think about these stressors as threatening. They don’t think about it afterward or keep wondering why it happened to them or why their life is spent running from lions every day. [24:59]


The more we encounter a stressor, the more we praise a stressor as threatening. Repeated encounters decrease our capacity to cope with or manage these stressors, which leads to the kind of toxic stress that begins to affect our lives. [25:50]

Questions to Consider

What is our reserve capacity for handling and managing the stressors that we know we will encounter on an everyday basis?

  • The Reserve Capacity Model posits that in addition to their mediating contribution, resources could moderate associations among SES, stress, and health (Pathway Q). From a resilience perspective, low SES individuals who maintain a bank of adaptive personal and social resources could exhibit resistance to disadvantage. Defined by Socioeconomic Status and Health: What is the role of Reserve Capacity?

Recommendations

Self-care: Resistance and personal health is a form of activism, and can help you be there for students. Center and find spaces for yourself. 

Discriminative Facility

Discriminative Facility:refers to an individual's sensitivity to subtle cues about the psychological meaning of a situation. It is defined by Discriminative Facility and its role in the perceived quality of interactional experiences

  • Understand what is under your control and isn’t. For example, there is little you can do if there is a government shutdown except to accept it as a condition that you cannot change.

In situations where an individual does not have much control over the situations, below are three coping mechanisms discussed by Dr. Rudy Mendoza-Denton.

Note: Dr. Mendoza-Denton recognizes that life is complicated, but that these mechanisms are something to think about and consider in these situations.

Distraction

Find time to read a book, walk around in nature. Find ways of expressing gratitude. Try to limit media consumption. Even through stressful times, remind yourself that there’s a community to rely on, things to look forward to. Take time from your day to do even little things so that you aren’t constantly thinking about the stressor. [37:40]

"Planfulness"

Try to segment your day to set times when you do certain tasks. For example, schedule a set time to check emails, rather than constantly reflexively checking and indulging that stimuli. Allowing yourself to spend too much time focused on something that causes stress can lead to rumination and rumination, when you can’t do much, keeps up chronic stress levels. Setting up plans can also reduce stress and give you control and structure in your life.

Dr. Mendoza-Denton discussed his experience during free speech week and how he was panicking about what to do to honor the students’ sense of importance at certain times. Once he figured out his plan, he was able to calm down and get through the week.

  • It’s equally important to set up schedules but also be flexible with your plans. [41:34]

Relationships

Reach out to your community. We share the reality that is today within our community, and sharing, thinking, and relating to one another can give you stability and assurance in your life during troubling times. [43:54]

Find restorative space for yourself.

It is difficult to always be there for your students, and trying to be can cause burn out. It’s important that instructors and staff take care of themselves so that they can be there for students and others. Find restorative space for yourself by taking a walk on campus, walking your dog, going to your child’s student-parent meetings, etc., and find small things to center yourself with. [31:11] 

    • Individual strategies don’t have to be mutually exclusive to also aid in group coping. For example, walking your dog can be a restorative space for you, and you can let others pet your dog. [51:50] 

Examples of established restorative spaces currently on campus:

  • Ula Taylor from African American Studies has gathered black female faculty and staff to talk and build community. [32:53]

  • Abby Rincon, Assistant Dean at Office for Graduate Diversity, Division of Equity and Inclusion, leads a group for faculty interested in making a difference on campus in the form of a lunch series. [44:30]

  • Abby Rincon has gathered a group to deal with structural inequities we are aware of for students [54:34]

  • Abby Rincon leads a series of town hall-style meetings on racism, power, and privilege. [1:00:50]

  • Mahasin Mujahid from the School of Public Health brings together groups of faculty and students of color to get together at the end of the semester. [53:30]

Don't try to address every single social ill.

Don’t try to address every single social ill. It’s impossible to solve everything, and even one problem can outlast your entire career and lifespan. Be engaged with your community and our students, but understand it is not your job to address everything. [53:03]

  • You don’t always have to be one to have these conversations. The Division of Equity and Inclusion have expertise in these areas like and Amy Scharf from the Division of Equity & Inclusion, who can come to a space that you provide to speak and address these issues. [1:00:50] 

  • You can also reach out to one another. Organize interest/community groups. Plan for these things and situations together, moving forward. [1:01:38]

Questions to Consider

  • How do you keep engaged but keep personal practice to keep ourselves okay as well?
  • How can we create community sustainability, both inside and outside of the classroom?
  • How do our individual actions aggregate up into a larger collective action?
  • At what cost and what toll is the cost of coping?

Actively seek professional and personal relationships.

Remember that you are not alone. Speak to other scholars and colleagues on campus about these issues or to build community. Create those moments where you are reminded of why you are glad to be at Berkeley, doing your work. [35:50]

Have the courage to speak out

Even if you’re the only one on your side in a room. Empower and educate our students to do the same and serve as an example of how you can take control of your environment. [32:15] 

Questions to Consider:

  • What does it mean to be resilient? 

  • Is resilience a good thing? 

  • To what degree is it our shared responsibility so that we can exist in an environment where we’re not forced to be resilient?

Share resources and information

Work together across departments, schools, and colleges to ensure that it isn’t just one or two people doing the work. Build a sharing community to build these resources. [1:34:10]

Questions to consider:

  • What are the tools we have? 

  • How can there be more transparency within the institution?

  • How do we connect different departments and schools and their work with others who wish to solve their struggles with their own challenges as well?

  • Could Equity and Inclusion be the starting place and a hub to process these resources?

Classroom Strategies: how can instructors bring these coping and reflective strategies to students?

Understand your role to acknowledge and create spaces to talk about a topic

Students don’t need us to say the right thing, but they want us to acknowledge conditions. Step into the void, step off the ledge and be afraid with your students. Be vulnerable. Be a human being. Model these safe spaces and what it looks like to acknowledge by stating that we, as staff and faculty, are also affected, and how we also don’t know what will happen. [1:03:20]

Questions to Consider:

  • How do we, as educators, create a space that welcomes the opportunity to have those conversations especially given the kinds of things we may teach? 

  • Given a curriculum that we must cover, how can we also bring in the world and address outside stressors in the classroom? 

  • When do we need to focus on curriculum vs. life and the reality of it?

  • How can we keep this on track without shutting down students?

Create spaces outside of the classroom

Try to interact with students in general. Break down the hierarchy and have conversations to build relationships with students. Don’t present yourself as a professor, but as another human who relates to your students and shares identities with them.  [53:30]

Ask students "what’s on your minds?"

In smaller classrooms, have reflections for students to share their academic, intellectual and lived experiences. Make time for “thinking and sharing” exercises, where students can have the opportunity to set the discussion topics or current events to cover. [1:06:16]

“Students don’t care what you know until they know that you care.”

Actively try to learn names, even in large classrooms. Build an emotional relationship with and between students. Acknowledging their presence and humanity and having them see you as a way of allowing others to recognize that you might not have an answer to the problem of the week. [1:11:58]

Begin your classes with a moment

Spend a minute or two just letting students arrive, settle, and be present in the classroom. Take time to meditate and let the students breathe. [1:10:06]

Don’t underestimate the power of social relationships and of your family, of your friends, of your kids, of your pets.
Rudy Mendoza-Denton