Stress is Not a Brain-based Learning Strategy!

I was listening this afternoon to a teleseminar with Dr. Carla Hannaford, a biologist and the author of Smart Moves: Why Learning is not All in Your Head. She was talking about why kids who are stressed out have trouble learning. Not exactly a new idea.

But I sure didn’t know that 75 percent of your frontal lobes shut down under stress including your non-dominant side completely. In other words, if you’re left-brain dominant and stressed out, your entire right side will stop functioning as will most of your left side. The frontal lobes control thinking and reasoning, not to mention communication.  

Now there’s a mind boggling statistic. No wonder I botch things up when I’m feeling stressed out. And no wonder kids under stress don’t succeed in school, flunk tests, and struggle with learning.

If you’d like to manage your stress around your kids’ homework or their test scores in the classroom and help them manage stress, register today for “Kids + Learning = parent and Teacher Pressure: How to Lower Your Stress While They Learn. It’s a TeleChat at 6 pm mountain time Wednesday night (Oct. 11) and comes with lots of handouts.

Register even if you’re busy since the audio will be posted on the Web site so you can listen later. And while you’re at the registration Web site, be sure and take the “Stress Quiz.”  Discover how much you really know about stress and learning.