My name is Lydia Williams and I am a senior at Dunlap High School. I want to attend the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee and study Diagnostic Medical Sonography. Another interest I have is dance. I am very passionate about being a Dunlap Eaglette dancer. I have been on the dance team all four years of high school and love it. However, I am also very family oriented. I live in a family of five and yes, I am the middle child. I have an older brother, Braden, who attends and plays golf for Monmouth College. My younger sister, Larissa, is in seventh grade at Dunlap Middle School. She is a cheerleader and a cross country runner. To survive in my family, you must have tough skin and a good sense of humor. I have acquired these attributes throughout the years. My blog will reflect my interests, memories and events that have recently happened.
Blog 1: Wow, senior year flies by! This coming Friday's football game is senior night. This whole season makes me sad because it reminds me that everything I do is my last in high school. This will be the last time performing on the football field. The last time I have the lights reflecting off my poms and hearing the crowd roar. Lasts provoke both happy and sad emotion. It can be happy because once something ends it reminds you that you have another chapter of life ahead. It is sad because a fun part of your life is over. Dancing for the last time on the football field makes me feel both of these characteristics.
Dancing has always been a huge part of my life. As a high school dancer, I get to perform at the home football and basketball games. During basketball season my team and I get to compete against other local high schools through IHSA. This will be my last year dancing because I will not continue dance in college because it is a very big commitment. This makes me cherish every performance because I know that I will not get to perform again after this year.
Football season is my favorite season to perform at. I love the atmosphere of the cold weather, the dark sky, and the huge crowd ready to cheer on their eagles. I like the cold weather because the team wraps each other in blankets and it makes me want get out on the field and dance. I like the dark sky and the bright lights because when I am dancing the lights make our poms shine and sparkle. The lights help blur the crowds faces making me less nervous when I am performing. I love hearing the crowd cheer because it makes my adrenaline pump which causes me to dance harder.
As a member of the dance team, I stay after school and get ready with my fellow dancers. Getting ready for the game is always fun because we get time to relax, listen to music, and eat before practicing. Every game we have a set of parents bring in food for us to eat while we are getting ready. The meal that I will miss the most is "Qdoba". Once we are finished eating and getting ready it is time to practice.
Practice is a huge thing on my team. I attend practices five times a week for two hours at a time in order to get the movements looking clean and together. Practice is the reason why my team and I are so successful with our dances. Because of our performances I have had people comment on our success and dedication to the team.
Dancing as a senior has made me realize that not everything will last. I am teaching myself to savor the good moments, like performing, and embrace every second of it because this year is my last. This Friday is my last performance on the field and I am going to make the most out of it.
Blog 2: Happy Halloween!
Halloween is one of my favorite holidays because it means going to haunted houses, dressing up, and getting free candy! Halloween has changed for me as I have grown up. I did not always think of Halloween as going to haunted houses. I used to think Halloween was scary but I still liked it because I was given free candy. When I was a little I loved the halloween parties at school and dressing up for the school parade. As a student in middle school dressing up and walking around with your friends was the cool thing you did at that age. Now as a senior in high school, I do not participate in trick-or treating because I feel that I am to old. Though, I still celebrate Halloween by going to costume parties, haunted houses, and passing out candy to the young kids.
As a toddler, my mom loved dressing me up for Halloween. I got to show off my costume to everyone in preschool and then go trick-or-treating with my parents in the evening. When I was in preschool my mom couldn’t wait to dress me up and take a bunch of pictures of me as Aurora, my favorite princess. As mom took me to school that Halloween day I wouldn’t stop bouncing around because I was really excited to show everyone who I was for Halloween. I was also eager to walk around at night and stuff all the candy that I could into my tiny pumpkin.
Personally, I think that the last two years I was in middle school was the most fun to trick-or-treat because I was given more freedom. I was allowed to go trick-or-treating with a group of friends and not have adult supervision. I felt invincible. I could go walk around the whole neighborhood gathering as much candy as I could fit in my bag and pockets. After my friends and I were done gathering our candy we would dump all of our candy on the floor and trade with each other hoping to receive our favorite candies. Of course, being a middle school students my friends and I had to match our outfits so, my seventh grade year my friends and I dressed up as characters from Pooh. I was Piglet.
Now that I am a senior in high school, Halloween isn’t as fun as it used to be. I no longer get to dress up with my friends and walk around to different houses and get free candy. Though, I still enjoy Halloween. I celebrate Halloween by going to haunted houses, costume parties with my friends, and passing out candy. I love going to haunted houses, especially Spook Hollow, because I am easily scared, so haunted houses are always really fun. Parties are fun to attend because it’s always interesting to see what creative costume everyone came up with. I no longer feel the need to go trick-or-treating so I help my mom pass out candy. I like passing out candy because I like seeing the cute little kids in their outfits.
Blog 3: To me, Thanksgiving is a time to be with my family, eat lots of food, and of course be thankful! I love Thanksgiving because it is one of the few times a year that all of my family is together. During the week of Thanksgiving my family plays lots of competitive kickball and football and we shop till we drop on Black Friday.
On Thanksgiving day it is a tradition that all my family workout at 6:00 am in the morning before we stuff our faces with food. So we all woke up at 5:30 and went to workout. After we all worked out we came home and got ready for our family pictures happening in a couple of hours. It was freezing when we took pictures but we all put on a fake smile for the photographer. Towards the end of the photo session the photographer said she wanted us to form a half circle and pray together as a family. Since there is so many of us it took us a while to form a perfect half circle. After the prayer circle my cousins boyfriend, Brady, got down on one knee and asked my cousin, Hayleigh, to marry him. The photographer got the cutest pictures of all of us reacting and cheering and of course got Hayleighs reaction to Brady popping the question. It was so cute!
Soon after the excitement of the new engagement ended my family and I decided to play kickball! Since there is normally twenty of us playing we pick team captains and then they choose who they want on their team. As shocking as it is, I always seem to be the last one picked! Even though I am not very good at playing kickball I still enjoy spending time with my family.
Once the kickball game is over grandma calls us all in to eat the food that she has been preparing all week! We all try to shove to the front of the line in order to get the delicious turkey. After stuffing my face with turkey, mashed potatoes, and salad it is time for dessert. I am not a fan of pie so grandma always makes me a batch of her delicious apple cake.
Soon after eating our late lunch we start looking through the catalogs seeing who we can get the best Black Friday deal from. After deciding what we are going to get and where we are going to shop my family and I create a plan. We have a few people go to certain stores and buy everything we wanted from that store and then another small group of people go to a different store. After we finished shopping we all met up at Steak N Shake for a midnight snack. It took over an hour to receive our food so we were all grumpy and hungry. When we finally got our food my sister ate a couple of bites out of her burger and then suddenly spits out her food. We found out she had a piece of broken plate in her burger. We were all shocked and my mom was really mad so we complained to the manager and got our whole meal for free.
Overall, Thanksgiving was a success! I enjoyed playing kickball, eating, and shopping with my family.
HOW STRESS EFFECTS THE BRAIN
As a student in high school, I have constant pressure on myself to exceed in school and dance. I have had to learn to balance everything from schoolwork to volunteering with the two and three year old's on the weekends. Unlike most sports teams, my team practices year round. We have practices in the summer to help prepare us for our summer competition, then we start getting ready for football season, then short after we start preparing for our competition season along with basketball. I am also a captain on the high school dance team so I have to help choreograph our dances on the weekends. As you can see I am a very busy person and because of having no down time I am always stressed. I decided that I wanted to do my research paper on how stress affects the brain and ways to avoid stress.
“The dangers of chronic stress and cortisol are acute and chronic stress. Acute stress is the reaction to an immediate threat, commonly known as the “fight or flight” response. Once the threat has passed, your levels of stress hormones return to normal with no long-lasting effects. Epinephrine is a stress hormone produced on an as needed basis in moments of extreme excitement. They help you think and mover faster. Cortisol, on the other hand, streams through your system all day long, and that is what makes it so dangerous. This stress hormone is known as the “public enemy” (Alban).
I have found twelve ways that chronic stress affect the brain. The twelve effects of chronic stress on your brain are “stress creates free radicals that kill brain cells, chronic stress makes you forgetful and emotional, stress creates a vicious cycle of fear and anxiety, stress halts the production of new brain cells, stress depletes critical brain chemicals causing depression, stress puts you at greater risk for mental illnesses of all kinds, stress makes you stupid, chronic stress shrinks your brain, stress lets toxins into your brain, chronic stress increases your risk of dementia and Alzheimer’s, stress causes brain cells to commit suicide, and chronic stress contributes to brain inflammation and depression” (Alban).
As you can see there are no benefits of stressing. Stress only causes harm to ourselves in the future. Ways to avoid stress are:
Find a balance between personal, work, and family needs. .
Have a sense of purpose in life. Many people find meaning through connections with family or friends, jobs, their spirituality, or volunteer work.
Get enough sleep.
Adopt healthy habits.
Exercise.
“Adopting the right attitude can convert a negative stress into a positive one” -Hans Seyle.
Blog 2: The Development of the Brain: In order to understand how stress affects the brain one must understand how the brain grows and functions throughout one’s lifetime. There are five main stages on human brain growth:
Stage 1: 0-10 Months “By the end of the third week of conception, the embryo is sent through a set of processes that is known as gastrulation into a three-layered structure. This is where neurons and connections start growing along with the formation of a neural tube” (Guberti).
Stage 2: Birth to 6 years old This stage starts the development of voluntary movement, reasoning, and perception. The frontal lobe becomes active in the development of emotions, attachments, and memory. The individual will begin to gain life experiences that will lead to the shaping of the emotional well being of the child. “As the child reaches age six the brain is 95% its adult weight and there is a peak of energy consumption” (Guberti). The guardians should provide a caring environment with lots of communication to help further the brain's development. Harsh treatment could potentially lead the child to an increased emotional state in the future.
Stage 3: 7 to 22 years old Development is still taking place in the individual as the neural connections are still developing. “The fatty tissues surrounding neurons or ‘white’ matter increases and assist with speeding up electrical impulses and help stabilize connections” (Guberti).The prefrontal cortex controls impulses and the decision making process in teenagers which causes them to be more reckless, irrational, and emotional.
Stage 4: 23 to 65 years old One’s memory for recalling events start to decline at this age. Processing or learning new information is difficult because your brain slows down and your memory is storing less information.
Stage 5: Older than 65 years old Once an individual has approached this age their brain starts losing cells in critical areas such as the hippocampus which is responsible for processing memories.
Blog 3: March 9, 2018
How does stress affect an individual's memory?
During times of stress, the body reacts by creating dangerous amounts of stress hormones flooding into the bloodstream. Overproduction of these hormones causes an increase in emotional memory. Increased levels of stress, whether it’s chronic or acute, has been shown to dampen memories and retrieve information. It can negatively affect both working memory and long-term memory. According to medicinenet.com the definition of working memory is, “a system for temporarily storing and managing the information required to carry out complex cognitive tasks such as learning, reasoning, and comprehension.” Long term memory is defined as “a system for permanently storing, managing, and retrieving information for later use. Items of information stored as long-term memory may be available for a lifetime.”
When under a lot of pressure stress makes it harder to learn. It causes a failure to remember basic things. “Research published in The Journal of Neuroscience and elsewhere (by Robert Sapolsky and others) has shown that repeated exposure to cortisol can lead to physical damage of brain cells in the hippocampus.” The hippocampus is the main location for memory formation and retrieval. People that experience high stress tend to have for memory loss because their hippocampus functions poorly and becomes susceptible to brain cells dying. More studies have shown that stress can harm one’s working memory, which occurs in the prefrontal cortex of the brain. Working memory is very similar to short-term memory. An example of someone using their working memory is when you use your brain to manipulate a problem in order to solve it.
Now that you have been informed of the anatomical side of how stress affects your memory, I will provide information on the physiological side. The physiological side of the body reacting to stress is when the body begins to create adrenaline. Adrenaline acts as a catalyst for a life or death situation, it is an automatic response of the nervous system to tell the body to quickly react to the situation. This response can trigger an increase in heart-rate and blood pressure. Blood is redirected to the brain and temporarily stops functions unrelated to survival for a given time.
Overall, the body reacts to stress in many different ways like, impairing one’s memory. Everyone has experienced this sometime throughout their life, whether it be a student suffering from test anxiety or an adult forgetting the names of their company when giving a speech.
Don’t be alarmed! Here are some ways to improve your memory: sleeping, exercising, multitasking, healthy eating, writing things down, and reading more.
Blog 4: April 13, 2018 The brain is an amazing organ. It controls our motor control, body awareness, coordination, etc. Major parts of the brain are the prefrontal cortex, amygdala, midbrain, hypothalamus, etc. These major parts of the brain can be easily affected by stress.
While stress can shrink the prefrontal cortex, it can increase the size of the amygdala, which can make the brain more receptive to stress. According to Psychology Today, “Cortisol is believed to create a domino effect that hard-wires pathways between the hippocampus and amygdala in a way that might create a vicious cycle by creating a brain that becomes predisposed to be in a constant state of fight-or-flight,” Several studies have found that chronic stress impairs brain function in multiple ways by disrupting synapse regulation. This can result in the loss of sociability and lead to avoiding public interaction.
Stress is also prone to killing brain cells and reducing the size of the brain. Chronic stress leads to impaired cognitive function but also has the capability to lead to other significant problems, such as increased risk of heart disease, high blood pressure and diabetes. Other systems of the body stop working properly too, including the digestive, excretory and reproductive structures. Toxic stress can impair the body’s immune system and exacerbate any already existing illnesses (Bernstein).
The blood brain barrier protects your brain and central nervous system from viruses, drugs and chemicals that enter your bloodstream. Multiple studies, including one printed in the British Medical Journal suggests that extreme stress compromises the blood-brain barrier, making it more permeable. This makes the brain more susceptible to infection and dangerous changes in brain chemistry (Frazier).
If certain chemicals can easily permeate the blood-brain barrier, you may be more susceptible to nerve damage or even brain damage.
The brain is central to stress and adaptation because it has the ability to perceive possible danger and determine behavioral responses, ranging from fighting or fleeing, to concentration and anxiety. The brain also determines health damaging behaviors such as eating too much, smoking or drinking, and sleeping badly. Through the nervous system, the brain also regulates the body’s hormonal, immune and metabolic processes that can affect many body processes at once. In turn, the hormones responsible for stress, sex, and metabolism affect the brain; they can alter the structure of neurons and their connections, influence behavior and even change the hormonal processes themselves. For example, chronic stress can increase anxiety and decrease memory and cognitive flexibility. Fortunately, these changes in neuronal circuitry are reversible in a healthy, resilient brain.
The best way to manage your stress is to learn healthy coping strategies. It may help to write about things that are bothering you. Write for 10 to 15 minutes a day about stressful events and how they made you feel. Talking with friends, family, or a counselor, about your feelings is a healthy way to relieve stress. Make time to do something you enjoy. Receiving regular exercise is a great way to settle down.