Managing the Home Stretch to Summer

Summer is almost here. Has your mind already started to go somewhere like this?

Students, parents, and teachers find it pretty hard to remain fully focused with the end of school on the horizon.

How do you reduce the end-of-school-stress and reign-in the wandering attention of students? Try this simple Heart Breathing Strategy:

There is a simple, healthy, and well-researched technique that can help counteract, and in fact, reverse the impact that anxiety and stress have on our immune system. It restores emotional balance and clear, efficient thinking, and it is as effective for children as it is for adults.

• Breathe in and out slowly, imagining the breath flowing around the area of your heart.

• Repeat three times.

• Continue the heart breathing and “think a happy thought.” Guide students in remembering a time when they felt deeply appreciated or have them imagine a place or event that makes them feel really calm and good.

Heart breathing is an excellent technique for reducing anxiety and controlling stress. It provides a strategy for consciously slowing down one’s heart waves or heart rhythm, which also slows down brain waves to produce a calmer, clearer state for thinking, learning, emotional balance, and decision making.

In the Learning Academy at Chatterbox we use Heart Breathing in conjunction with a device called an Em-wave to help students actually see their progress in slowing down their heart rhythms and gaining a sense of calm and focus. Learning to self-monitor and control stress reactions supports clearer thinking for learning, attention, relationships, and problem solving.