Stress Awareness Month: Dyslexia and Stress

Stress is a bodily reaction to things and situations we identify as having the potential to be harmful to us. It’s one of the basic building blocks of our survival instincts as a species, and although we often think of it as a negative thing, there are actually good kinds of stress and bad kinds. The stress response is our body’s knee-jerk reaction to keeping us safe, and it’s responsible for everything from diving out of the way when a cricket ball comes flying at us on the field to how we respond under test and exam conditions.

Good stress is the first kind, the kind that tries to keep us out of harm’s way. We respond biologically and physically to stressful stimuli in our environment and it’s generally a mechanism that allows us to change the outcome of a situation in our favour- from being hit in the head with a cricket ball to not being hit in the head by a cricket ball, for example.

Bad stress, however, tends to occur in situations where we don’t have all that much control on the way things are going to proceed. These are situations where the cricket ball- whether physical or metaphorical- is going to hit us no matter what, and there’s little we can do about it. Body and brain chemistry end up on high alert and our flight-or-fight response can be activated, meaning that we either feel the compulsion to flee or even respond confrontationally. Often this makes us feel mentally uncomfortable and sometimes even unable to deal with the stressor at hand, and it creates a pattern: a tricky little bit of the human brain called the amygdala learns what stimuli it associated with the imminent danger, and then remotely triggers a stress response when encountering that stressor in the wild the next time. Which is great if the stressor at hand is a low-flying cricket ball, but not ideal when it’s an important English exam.

When you’ve got dyslexia, there’s quite a lot of potential for stressful situations that you’ve got no control over to occur – reading in public, reading in front of your peers, sitting an exam- and they’re likely to be sites of previous stress responses too, which makes a further stress response likely. The early years of school focus primarily on the subjects that have the potential to cause someone with dyslexia the most anxiety- reading, writing and spelling- and progress can often be slow and frustrating, especially if they’re undiagnosed or haven’t been linked up with the right support and assistive tech yet. Many people you might encounter in your class don’t understand dyslexia with any particular degree of accuracy either, and learners who do have dyslexia might feel like they’ll be perceived as less able than their peers if they demonstrate weaker reading skills in front of people. There’s a fear of ridicule involved for many, as well as a fear of sanctions from teachers and leaders who might be perceived as likely to punish them for weaker reading performance, and perhaps a more long-term fear of not achieving academically and not achieving their potential. So stress sites are commonplace during this period, and being faced with them on a semi-regular basis can trigger long-term stress associations in people from a relatively young age. It may also leave you feeling like you’re not able to perform your best during important scenarios like exams and interviews as it’s noted that stress and anxiety can have a profound impact on learning.

The same scenarios we might find in education can trigger stress responses as an adult when you’re in the workplace. It can feel even more intense as the stakes are higher- demonstrating reading difficulties might mean your career potential feels limited to you, or even that your job could be on the line. Many people still worry about a social stigma too, and are anxious about their peers mocking or thinking differently of them if they reveal their dyslexia, and work hard to keep it on the downlow. We live in a world where there’s more dyslexia awareness than ever before and slowly, the worlds of education and work are shifting to accommodate and support those who have dyslexia in more and more ways, but it’s still nowhere near fully understood and supported across the board, and not many situations people run into on a daily basis are optimised for the dyslexic experience yet.

So stress responses are, unfortunately, able to triggered by a lot of pretty everyday situations for people with dyslexia and literacy differences. And this level of constancy can lead to stress’ shadow side, too: anxiety.

What Can Stress Look Like?

Stress looks different in everybody- it’s an aggressively personal response, and not everyone who’s suffering from stress will even look like it. It’s pretty difficult to spot- and that means in yourself, too, as well as your peers. It might be as simple as…

• Low energy
• Headaches and migraines
• Body aches and neck pain
• Sensitivity to physical pressure
• Upset stomach and gastro-intestinal symptoms
• Chest pain, rapid heartbeat and palpitations
• Excessive sweating
• Inability to sleep (Insomnia)
• Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (Myalgic Encephalomyelitis)
• Clenched jaw and tooth grinding
• Becoming easily frustrated or feeling agitated
• Feeling overwhelmed or hopeless
• Having a hard time relaxing and ‘switching off’
• Increase or loss of appetite
• Constant worrying and racing thoughts
• Forgetfulness and an inability to focus
• Feeling dazed and detached
• Avoidant behaviours such as truancy or not answering calls
• Feeling alone, isolated or unheard

What’s the difference between anxiety and stress?

According to The International Dyslexia Association, stress is a reaction to what is happening. Anxiety is a worry response about things that may or will happen in the future. Both stress and anxiety trigger the same chemical responses in your grey matter, so they often have the same or similar physical symptoms, and although there are different schools of thought on the matter, most people agree that it’s difficult to pinpoint where one ends and another begins.

So… what can we do?

Stress is a natural part of life. Situations we encounter will be stressful, and they’ll trigger these uncomfortable stress responses on occasion – it’s part of how our bodies work. But when these responses become constant or start interfering with how we live, study, work and relax, they can be dangerous for our short-term and long-term health, as well as have a potential impact on how we act and perform in these scenarios – which can be tricky when we have stress responses to things like exams, using a certain computer programme, presenting our data or reading in class.

What matters the most is feeling equipped to deal with them, and dealing with them successfully can help allay feelings of stress and anxiety by beating the stress response with a recall-able positive resolution.

• Bolstering. Try to create safety nets that make you feel supported in situations where stress commonly takes hold, such as adding assistive technology into your reading, working and learning. Taking the pressure off and preparing for difficulties often helps people move past the stress response as they’re more sure they’ll be alright even if they do struggle with something written, as the assistive devices can step in to make sure everything gets across clear and correct.
• Opting Out. Some stress scenarios are unavoidable in life, but others aren’t. Reducing stress triggers is a good way of lowering stress levels across the board – can you ask your manager to let you present your data without reading off the PowerPoint presentation, or ask someone to check your figures before you send them off? Or think about asking or your teachers to skip over you when it comes to your turn to read in front of the class – if we reduce the triggers, we reduce the potential for stress responses, and take out the stressor at its source.
• Connect with people. It’s often a good idea to be open about dyslexia stresses with your peers, as people like teachers and managers –not only will they be aware of why you respond to some scenarios differently to other people, they might be well-placed to alter them for you, or to step in to make your day-to-day a little easier.
• Stay healthy. When we’re extremely stressed, we tend not to take the best care of ourselves- quite literally, getting the right vitamins and minerals is the last thing on our minds. But try to stick to healthy food choices, and get a decent amount of sleep at night if you can – they might not have an impact on the stressors in your life, but they do have the potential to create an upward trend in your wellbeing that might make you feel better able to deal with them.

But it’s not usually that simple, as anyone who’s ever suffered from stress can probably tell you. Stress is a silent illness, and many people say that you’re the last person to work out that it’s stress you’re suffering from. It can fly under the radar for months or years, and become a chronic condition from early on in life when stressors are constant, like you might find if your own are related to the classroom or the workplace – and many people don’t want to admit that that they’re suffering from stress at all.

Stress is one of those co-occurring conditions that can sometimes happen alongside dyslexia- but it’s not one that we talk about enough. Reaching out for professional help to deal with stress is an important step for a lot of people, and can have a big impact on how we combat stress in our lives. There are a number of options you might want to try pursuing: counselling and mentoring, therapy, medical assistance via a GP or referral, or peer-to-peer arrangements such as support groups and communities. If your stress levels are having an impact on your emotional and physical wellbeing, it might be time to reach out and see if there’s something more that can be done, and seek some professional guidance that could make the change you’re looking for a little easier to enact with somebody along the way with you. The same goes for parents and guardians of children and young people, too – often younger people are the last ones to reach out when they need this kind of support, so it’s important to check in and establish good practice when it comes to talking about their mental health, especially when it comes any effects on this that they might feel that their reading differences could be having.

You can find more support for adults and those of us feeling stress in the workplace at The Stress Management Society’s Stress Awareness Month. For a more targeted perspective on how dyslexia, anxiety and stress interact, we’d suggest taking a look at The International Dyslexia Association’s article on the Dyslexia-Stress-Anxiety Connection.

There’s also some targeted information that parents of children with dyslexia might find helpful at Understood.org’s in-depth article on Dyslexia and Anxiety in Kids.