Retraining The Brain to Learn
On what to do with emotions that block your learning.
Look:
Most of the work I do as a personal tutor is emotional, not technical.
Does it surprise you? Think about it:
I get called in to help support stressed out kids, who feel like failures at math. The call is usually made by a stressed out mom who feels like a failure in attention or nurturance or structure or motivation. How could she let this happen? She wonders. What kind of a mom would let her kid fail like this?
Sometimes, the “failure” is actually just an unexpected B. The first B the kid has ever seen. Sometimes, there’s a big fat F written down somewhere in cold hard ink, PROVING that there has been literal failure. It burns! There is shame, there is insult, and there is FEAR! What doors are slamming shut thanks to this big fat F (or B, or whatever)?
And of course, OF COURSE, for the B and for the F and everything in-between, I’m going to address the missing knowledge. I’m going to build whatever needs building. I’m going to teach whatever takes teaching, and the grades are going to improve with time as understanding deepens and strategy develops. But in the meantime, none of that growth or achievement can happen if the poor student is spinning out with stress or anxiety.
Most of my work as a tutor is unravelling the tangled knot of freak-out to let the information in. The information might be the math, or it might be the organization and strategy of study, or it might be the state of mind around test-taking. Whatever needs fixing, we can’t get to it until we settle into ourselves and relax into this moment, right here, right now, with this pencil and this piece of paper on this desk.
In the classroom, I find that a lot of parents, especially those who were high-fliers at math themselves, can be a little put-off by my use of mindfulness. And cutthroat children of cutthroat parents tend to think I’m nuts or “wasting time” when I dedicate 10 minutes of our class week to meditation and mindfulness practice — but I stand by it. This isn’t tangential to learning, it is CENTRAL to learning.
The better you know yourself, and the kinder you can be towards yourself in challenge, the more you can learn about ANYTHING, including math.
If any of this resonates with you, if you feel panic and avoidance around learning math (or anything else), I want you to start right here with a quick body scan.
Why the body? Because when we learn to locate EMOTIONS in the PHYSICAL BODY, everything changes. It takes time and practice. At first, you may not be able to connect your emotions to physical sensations, but keep at it with curiosity and openness, and you will begin to see the patterns.
Ask yourself, what do I feel in my body? Scan from head to toe and just notice. Whatever you find, ALLOW it. Don’t kick it out or make it wrong. Open yourself up and invite that feeling in. YES constriction in the throat. YES tightening in the stomach. YES cold hands and feet. There is room for you here. You are allowed.
Repeat this exercise as often as you like throughout the day, at least once a day when you are calm. Then repeat again each time you feel like you’re freezing in the face of your math. Close your eyes and turn inward. It won’t take long. You can always afford the time for this scan, even if you are taking a timed test.
You will know when it is time to open your eyes and face what’s next. And you may be surprised at how much ALLOWING the hardship opens you up to your next brave step.
Why does this help? We are retraining your brain. Making a new habit of gentle, compassionate response. We are giving your feelings somewhere to go that won’t totally undermine you. When you let your feelings be right, when you find them in your body, you make yourself feel safe enough to relax into learning new, hard things. Like all new habits, the more you practice, the sooner it will become reflexive. Reflex is effortless.
I invite you to share what you notice in your body. What physical feelings do you find when you go looking?