How is long term stress effecting my learning part 1 of 2
How does constant long term stress effect my learning?
Our daily lives are full of emotional experiences, ranging from small annoyances to major life events both happy and sad. All together, these potential threats to our equilibrium are referred to as ‘stress’. Stressful events (‘stressors’) can be physical or mental, external or internal.
During the last year we have been living with numerous stressors both external and internal, from financial to health and mental health.
I have noticed this has had an affect on my memory – specifically my sight reading. My learning of new repertoire has slowed and I require more short frequent breaks to maintain my concentration levels.
My sight reading though was an issue that started in around October 2020. My speed and accuracy started to decline, despite my efforts to practice it and really quicken it up, it remains stubbornly slow and depending on the time of day inaccurate.
Sight reading brand new never before heard or seen music is its own skill that has to be practiced. It involves a lot of memory retrieval under stress. You see patterns of notes and rhythms and harmony and your brain retrieves familiar patterns from memory and gives you the answer. While playing and sight reading you are keeping account of the melody, harmony, rhythm, dynamics putting a puzzle together in real time based off information you’ve seen before and is in your memory. I was amazed at how much this process was effected by the current outside threat we are living under.
Recent studies with rats underline an important principle regarding stress and memory: increases in stress hormone levels, particularly of corticosteroid hormones, within the context (and around the time) of the learning situation help to remember that particular event.
In context, playing in front of your teacher each week involves stress, but you learn as you play under the stress, you adapt your memory with the new information from the stressful event, which helps you perform the piece for an audience or an exam.
Memory is not fixed, it is malleable which allows us to have creative learning and problem solving. Think about how you approach a task that is brand new to you. You base the approach on prior information in your memory, this may result in a good outcome or a bad one, but you learn then from that process, don’t do that again or it kinda worked and more information is needed to be successful.
This means that only moderate stressors improve memory before a task or a considerable time after learning, whereas severe stressors do not.
Now we get to the core issue of 2020 and 2021:
Constant Stressors
The beneficial, adaptive process of forming memories, recalling them and allowing new information to be added or cross adapted from another experience, is fundamentally different from the situation in which the brain has been exposed for a long period of time to uncontrollable stressors and then is tested for its ability to learn and remember.
Stress has a visible affect
- It impairs memory retrieval:
The risk of forgetting information in exams or performances.
Stress may hamper the updating of memories in the light of new information and induce a shift from a flexible, ‘cognitive’ form of learning towards rather rigid, ‘habit’-like behaviour. Together, these stress-induced changes may explain some of the difficulties of learning and remembering under stress in the classroom for adults and children.
It hinders the integration of new information into existing knowledge structures: This can prevent the updating of knowledge by new facts or a deep multidisciplinary understanding of concepts – which is why I broke sight reading into basic concepts (described below) need to be automated into my memory before I can make larger steps with full sight reading piano music at speed.
By altering the balance between memory systems, stress may lead to strong, rigid memories and the retrieval of habits rather than creative and complex solutions to new problems. This is why my usual approach of going down a few levels and back up no longer yielded the same results.
In other words:
If your feeling under constant threat of something bad happening for whatever reason, the current pandemic, finances, job security, wellbeing, health, wellbeing of family etc, it all translates to stress hormones being released.
This will slow down the learning process if we are not aware of it and adapt.
So how do we adapt, when the threat is beyond out control and seems ever present?
Well do not worry you are learning its just taking more time for you to make connections and cross apply knowledge. Its taking you longer to retrieve memories and the memory retrieved my not have been updated correctly and is now wrong.
First of all do not stress more, accept it as it is, you need to take smaller steps and make smaller connections, on a daily basis. Little steps everyday will get you there in the end.
For example, my own sight reading issue. How can I break it down?
I started with going back down the grade levels and working my way back up, usually works a treat. This time it didn’t.
Hmmmm………..I need to break it down more, I’m not getting better because I’m not making connections or processing things fast enough. Why? Memory retrieval and my ability to adapt memories with new learned information. My memories aren’t being correctly overwritten as they had been in the past, interesting. I could blame it on motivation, brain fog, tiredness etc but I’m curious now and I ran out of things to watch in December so I had a long think.
So I broke it down even further, I’m now doing rhythm only sight reading and sight singing daily for 15mins each. I started at the grade 1 and I’m currently working from there. I found an app that offers all types of sight reading and tried it out.
It does let you adjust the tempo so you can really test yourself at each level before moving on. I will have to think of something else to get to the higher stages, like recording my sight reading sessions to increase the stress or pressure of real life, then moving onto livestreaming.
You can take the same approach - is having the name of the note quickly a problem - flash cards just a small selection 3 times a day for 5 mins and youll be a whiz at all the notes in no time. Next is rhythm - clap out the left hand and right hand of the music slowly at first with a metronome very slowly and build from there, all the music you have from the beginner tutor books all the way up to your current level. There are apps or videos on you tube with basic rhythm clapping exercises to get you started rhythm reading under pressure.
I hope some of my advice can help those who feel their learning has been impacted by the current situation more advice to follow in part 2 . As always have a musical January and I will see you in February!
