How are we doing? It would seem not so well. Everywhere I turn, colleagues, friends, my students, my family, commentators, comedians, anyone with a voice are stressed and one edge. Teaching my undergraduate and graduate courses this past term was the most challenging term I’ve had in all years at Bemidji State University. I had more students struggling to get work done, keep up, or even finish the courses than I’ve ever had. What’s going on?

I watch the news, listen to commentators, talk to friends and family, and everyone is struggling to process, to make sense, to keep moving forward. At times, it feels like individually, and collectively we’re stuck, treading water, even drowning.

I want to share with you this five minute video from Edutopia titled Learning Brain vs. Survival Brain. It is geared toward teachers and understanding what trauma and stress does to the brain chemistry and how that impacts the ability to learn, to even take in information and make decisions. Watch it, not thinking about teaching, but thinking about yourself and what you are observing in society around us.

How does what you saw in this video apply to yourself and how you are experiencing your workplace, the news, the events, politics? How does it apply to those who are leading us, those that have prominent voices about current events? It seems to me that as a society, we are collectively the students in survival brain. If so, how is that impacting our ability to process news? To change our mind about things? To solve problems in a creative manner?

An individual makes sense of the world the best they can with the information they have, creating their worldview. New information enters the system of our brain via one of the lobes of the brain (occipital, temporal, and parietal) and goes to the limbic system. Here, in a split second the limbic system decides where to route that information. Preferably, it goes to the prefrontal cortex (the upper brain) where it is processed and incorporated into an existing schema in our brain and added to our worldview, confirming an idea, challenging an idea, shifting a perception, etc. This is the work of the upper or thinking brain. However, if the hippocampus or amygdala in that limbic system is on high alert due to trauma or stress (“real” or perceived is the same thing) then instead that sensory input is interrupted and sent to the lower brain for fight, flight, or freeze response. Survival comes before thinking.

What if the constant onslaught of uncertainty all around us is creating a constant state of stress and if then when sustained long enough this creates individual and collective trauma? Whether the risk is “real” or “justified” or only perceived is irrelevant. The brain doesn’t know the difference. Once in this state, the upper brain is not engaged until out of fight, flight, or freeze mode. If this is our collective state, how do we get out of this? Who will be the prophetic voice, the inspirational leader to lead a society through and out of the (it seems to me) largely self-imposed state of ongoing stress resulting in shared accumulated trauma? Or are you listening to leaders and voices that increase the stress and keep us in fight, flight, or freeze mode. Embrace the former. Reject the latter.