Anxiety and Fear in Schools

For the individual fear and anxiety are loathsome occupiers. Each one we will experience many times in our lives. The cause may not be easy to understand, lying buried in early childhood experiences. Often proxies are blamed. At the time of experience, they feel incredibly real. This article is not about those individual experiences but relates to the professional realm of schools. But perhaps that is where they begin?

Me a name I call myself..... is that where it all starts?

Anxiety and fear seem to rack the education system like two great immovable colossi. 

But where did they come from? Who left the school door open to allow them in?

Anxiety is an unspecific response to a perceived threat. It is induced when there is an extreme variation in the norm. It may be real, or it may be in our minds.

Anxiety can have physical and mental manifestations. It is part of our survival mechanism and as such is useful when imminent danger threatens. However, it becomes self-destructive when over-fired.

It is an autoimmune response accompanied by the release of stress hormones. 

Fear is a more extreme adaptive response. The chemical release in such a case causes amygdala override, forcing either freeze or flight/fight response. The latter have similarities in the way the cocktail of chemicals affect heart rate, muscle readiness and impair other functions in anticipation.

In the distant past, such mechanisms were fired once or twice a week. Memory became formed and we adapted to new knowledge and patterns. Thus, the response could be downgraded by our natural rhythms. More recently, and at least partly due to the proliferation of electronic devices, the firing has become much more frequent.

Overuse of this facility leads to over-generalised memories and can lead to elongated senses of fear. 

For the individual, this becomes very difficult to deal with and can extract a huge mental and physical toll. Sarno claims that 99% of back pain and sciatica are mentally induced through this mechanism.

Collective anxiety and fear

Again, this is a perfectly natural survival mechanism. The old joke about the man lost in the woods with his friend when they hear a bear carries not the natural reaction. Instead of lacing his boots to outrun his friend, we are far more likely to work together. We naturally warn one another through voice or body language, as do all pack animals.

The belief of imminent threat spreads and can grow to the point that distorts reality.

Mad Gasser of Matton was one famous example in the 1940s when many people believed their houses and lives were under threat. Yet investigation could find no evidence of a perpetrator. A similar incident, different town, in 1933 yielded similar mass hysteria.

And so, when School inspectors call or school leaders feel examination results are under threat or groups of pupils won’t behave in the way that meets our expectations similar results are easily evoked.

Towards a solution

Logic and emotions make strange bedfellows. Yet the head and heart supply them both.

We live in a dualistic state. We constantly use words to define ourselves and our actions. Each one of these becomes, by its very nature, self-limiting, we are just labelling ourselves. What we think we want gives us a moment of pleasure until natural diminishment clicks in and we move onto the next grasping thought.

All this is a perfectly natural use of our intelligence. We survive. But as the game of survival plays out so we become more anxious. And for what?

Every human has limitless potential. The commonalities we share amplifies the potential to boundless energy and space. Yet we spend our time sharpening our intelligence only to cut ourselves on our own paranoia.

Solutions

Worrying doesn’t work, telling someone to stop worrying is just as ineffective

Counterintuitively the solution lies in raising our awareness of the nature of anxiety and fear. Realising they are innate. 

Added to that are the following actions. Embracing our humanness. Thinking with our heart rather than our head. Showing compassion. Building loving relationships without a thought for reciprocity. Working together.

In more acute cases we may need psychotherapy to help unpick those sub-conscious patterns, buried deep and mainly built up in us before the age of six.

But most of all we should become aware when it is our fears and anxieties that we are passing onto others in an echo-chamber of emotions.

Sounds simple. Less so in reality.

For more information managing fear and anxiety, contact [email protected] or visit https://osiriseducational.co.uk/.