Reflection by Reframing Stress Behaviour with Gray Brain Science learner, Natalie

My oldest son is 12. He struggled a lot with sport induced asthma when he was little. At one point, around 8 years old he was on puffers many times a day. He’s a strong athlete, loves hockey so much! My son hated school, we had a psych assessment and realized he is 2E, both gifted, and SEVERELY dyslexic. Ill be honest, I knew his reading was not great, but he answered comprehension questions, and did a great job of looking like a reader, using context and strong vocabulary. He was an A student in public school, but literally could not notice the difference between ‘of’ and ‘at’.

We were very fortunate to find a private school, meant to teach children with dyslexia literacy from the bottom up. Immediately his need for puffers waned. Even before and during hockey he rarely needed a puffer, and by a year later he had gained 5 grade levels in reading and we did not even have a puffer in our home. We sort of forgot about his asthma!

This year we have returned to the public system, and he is doing well. Sadly, he is on a hockey team that is very high stress, and the approach is to push beyond your limits. There is a lot of yelling, and blaming, and benching, and unfortunately shaming of kids. There is a lot of senseless physical aggression (mostly from our team) and as we are going through the Gray Brain Program modules I’m watching how imbalance begets imbalance, begets imbalance. At a tournament our coach found out he did not get the team next year, and decided to take a very hands off approach. Our team played incredible, trusted each other, got very few penalties and won games by a huge margin. The kids were having fun! At the finals, in the first 2 minutes we got scored on… from across the ice you could hear our coach laying into kids, swearing, screaming. We then began to take senseless penalties and unraveled so fast. I thought of the coach himself, and his stress and how deep it all goes. I’m sad for everyone.

My son was in a playoff game last week. He plays defense, and had been on for 2 goals (with the coach’s son as his defense partner). I saw my son get screamed at when he came off his shifts. I could see his body language change. Head down, not thinking about plays, just trying to get off the ice as fast as he could. Minutes later we got called over by the trainer asking us for a puffer (which we have not carried for 3 years!). Immediately I thought about overriding our stress, but how our bodies know.

While I have no proof that supporting his cognitive stress helped him overcome asthma, I am highly suspicious, just based on the social and emotional growth I’ve seen in him these last few years. Seeing it come back in such a fierce way makes me very sad at how this year of hockey has played out and how long we have been overriding this stress until its an asthma attack. The end goal becomes seeing the stress starting so it does not play out in such a physiological way. I think of athletes who play through concussions and broken arms and I just think of how incredibly important Self-Reg is, and how valuable it would be to coaches wanting to see teams come together in a low tension, high energy state!