Is stress affecting any aspect of your brain processing or developmental functioning? Here's how to find out. Remember these are 'before and after' tests because these are things which should get better on the Edutherapy Programme. Make a note of your performance so that you can check on progress.

BALANCE - The Vestibular System in the Inner Ear
We talk about being 'knocked off balance' if we are hit with some kind of trauma. What we don't realise is that a lot of us are carrying these effects around all the time. Answer these questions and then try the tests:

Do you:
Suffer from motion sickness?
Have hearing problems?
Have problems with vertigo?
Find it hard to walk on uneven ground?
Tend to move or rock when listening?
Feel sick or dizzy when watching things move?
Avoid fairground rides, swings?
Find it hard to maintain static balance?
Find it hard to write in cursive? 

Now try the tests:

Standing on one leg 

1. Take your shoes off and find some space. Put your hands by your sides and look straight ahead. Lift up one leg behind you so that the sole of your foot is pointing backwards. Can you hold this position without compensatory movement for 30 seconds? Now try the other leg.
2. Do the same thing again, but this time with your eyes closed. This will be a little harder, but if it is very much harder you are using you eyes to compensate for poor balance ability.

 One foot in front of the other

1. Take off your shoes and find some space. Put your hands by your sides and look straight ahead. Put one foot in front of the other, heel to toe, to form a straight line. Can you hold this position for 10 seconds without much compensatory movement?
2. Do the same thing again, but this time with you eyes closed. This will be harder, but if it is very much harder you are using you eyes to compensate for poor balance ability.

  

SHORT-TERM MEMORY

Another thing that tends to suffer when we are stressed is our short-term memory. We don't have any trouble remembering things that happened a long time ago, but we find it really hard to remember what someone has just said. This can make us quite inefficient and unreliable and lead to a lot of frustration. We might also find it hard to visualise where we left things, so we can end up rather disorganised!

Try this test for short-term auditory memory:

You need someone to help you with this. You must repeat the numbers you hear in the correct order. Your helper must say the groups of numbers below at one second intervals, one line at a time, in a monotone. If their voice goes up and down it is possible to cheat by remembering the musical shape of what they have said, and they will be testing something different. If they say the numbers quickly it is easier to remember them. You need to be warned each time how many numbers to expect. You must wait until your helper has finished speaking before you start to repeat each group of numbers. Use the two practice items to make sure you both know what you are doing.

Practice Test

Example
                       5 - 2 - 7
                       6 - 1 - 8

Test
                       2 - 7 - 9
                       5 - 6 - 4

                       2 - 4 - 5 - 9
                       4 - 8 - 2 - 3

                       7 - 5 - 8 - 4 - 6
                       1 - 7 - 2 - 5 - 3

                       8 - 4 - 2 - 5 - 9 - 6
                       5 - 2 - 1 - 6 - 4 - 3

                       9 - 3 - 1 - 4 - 8 - 6 - 1
                       4 - 1 - 6 - 9 - 5 - 3 - 8

                       6 - 2 - 9 - 3 - 5 - 4 - 8 - 1
                       6 - 9 - 3 - 7 - 1 - 4 - 5 - 2

                       1 - 3 - 9 - 5 - 4 - 8 - 6 - 7 - 2
                       2 - 3 - 6 - 9 - 4 - 5 - 1 - 8 - 7

Most people can manage about 7 digits accurately. Ask your helper to tick the lines you got completely right. You can try this again after a few months to see if you have improved!

 

WORKING MEMORY

This involves much more complicated brain processing than basic short-term memory. You have to be able to hold bits of information in short-term memory while you think something through. This requires you to connect up information in both sides of the brain - brain integration. This also tends to suffer under stress. Problems with working memory will make it hard for you to work out things in your head and organise information. Any complex processing is made more difficult if your working memory is letting you down, particularly anything which requires sequencing.

Do this test after the short-term memory test because it is a bit more difficult. The basic instructions are the same.

Ask your helper to say the strings of numbers as before. This time you have to repeat them backwards. So, for example, if your helper says '8 - 4 - 1', you say '1 - 4 - 8. Use the practice items to make sure you both understand what you are supposed to do. 

Practice test

Example
                        3 - 4 - 2
                        7 - 9 - 5

Test
                        8 - 5 - 4
                        6 - 9 - 1

                        7 - 2 - 1 - 6
                        3 - 1 - 8 - 9

                        5 - 8 - 4 - 7 - 9
                        4 - 3 - 8 - 5 - 8

                        8 - 6 - 5 - 3 - 2 - 4
                        5 - 3 - 6 - 8 - 2 - 7

                        6 - 1 - 7 - 3 - 8 - 4 - 9
                        3 - 2 - 7 - 4 - 1 - 9 - 5

                        8 - 9 - 5 - 3 - 6 - 4 - 2 - 7
                        1 - 6 - 9 - 3 - 4 - 2 - 8 - 5

Most people can remember 5 - 6 digits reversed. Ask your helper to tick the lines you reversed correctly and check your progress in a few months.

HYPERSENSITIVITY

One of the most common reactions to extreme stress is to become hypersensitive in one or more sensory areas, or to become emotionally hypersensitive. This is often seen in very young children as a result of a difficult birth, early illness or problems during the pregnancy. Unless there is some therapeutic intervention the effects can remain for the rest of their lives. It is also quite common for children to become hypersensitive as a result of an inappropriate early environment, such as problems with early schooling or excessive stress at home. We can also become hypersensitive later on as a result of emotional trauma or a physical stressor, such as a virus.

It is important to distinguish between a highly developed sense and hypersensitivity. For example, someone may have an exceptionally good ear for music without being so over-sensitive to sound that in certain circumstances it upsets or distracts them. Equally, a parfumier who spends his life developing new scents will have a very highly developed sense of smell, but if he is not overwhelmed by it there will be no problems. Stress is caused by an over-reaction to a stimulus instead of a balanced response.

Try answering these questions:

Hypersensitivity to Smells

Do you:
Appear to be more aware of smells than other people?
Tend to be overly emotional?
Change your behaviour when exposed to certain smells?
Suffer from sinus infections?
Suffer from upper respiratory infections?
Have hay-fever?
Tend to have a constant runny nose?

Information that comes into the brain from our sense of smell is processed differently from other information. Instead of being filtered first through a part of the brain called the thalamus, it is processed immediately, but subconsciously, by the emotional parts of the brain through the amygdala. If you are hypersensitive to smell your behaviour can be affected by odours without you having any conscious knowledge of what is going on and you may sometimes seem to over-react. You may also reject certain foods on the basis of their smell, which may result in you having an unbalanced diet.

Hypersensitivity to Taste

Do you:
Eat only a restricted range of foods?
Seem generally oversensitive to taste?
Have difficulty swallowing pills or some foods?
React to foods sometimes by gagging?
Suffer from excess saliva?

It is often difficult to be sure that you are reacting against something in your mouth on the basis of how it tastes rather than how it feels or how it smells. If you are forced to adopt a restricted diet on the basis of your hypersensitivities it can result in a deficiency in important vitamins and minerals.

Hypersensitivity to Touch

Do you:
Write with the tip of your thumb off the writing instrument?
Have food preferences based on the texture of food?
Dislike tactile sensations such as sticky fingers, sandy feet, getting dirty?
Find it hard to resist touching people, objects?
React to synthetic fabrics?
React to the application of creams, lotions etc?
Prefer loose and soft clothing?
Need to have tags removed from shirts etc?
Resist hugs, being held?
Have a low pain tolerance?
Have one or more areas of your body which seem oversensitive?

Our thumb tips and tongues are the most sensitive parts of our anatomy and there is a large area of the brain devoted to analysing information from these locations. For that reason hypersensitivity to touch is very likely to be experienced as a problem with pencil grip or rejection of foods on the basis of how they feel in your mouth. A more severe hypersensitivity can make you feel physically very uncomfortable. Often certain areas of your body are affected more than others, and there may just be one spot that you hate people to touch.

Auditory Hypersensitivity

Do you:
Seem to be oversensitive to certain sounds?
Have difficulty staying focussed when there is background noise?
Get distracted easily?
Overreact to loud noises? 

Auditory hypersensitivity is usually divided into two different types of reaction. The most common is to be so sensitive to sounds around you that you find it quite difficult to concentrate in background noise and find yourself very easily distracted. For children this can be regarded as 'attention deficit', but actually what is happening is that you are forced to attend to everything you hear and you are perceiving background noise as far too loud and intrusive. In the second type of reaction people experience auditory hypersensitivity as 'painful hearing' and may put their hands over their ears to block out the noise.

People affected by auditory hypersensitivity are particularly likely to react under stress by 'turning down the volume', using a reflex called the middle ear reflex. This is designed to protect us from very loud noises. If it is used as a reaction to sound sensitivity it can make you quite deaf and you may be accused of not listening when in fact you did not hear what was being said. The main problem with auditory hypersensitivity is that it affects your ability to listen effectively. Often people have very acute hearing and excellent pitch discrimination, so it may be assumed that you are deliberately not paying attention.

Hypersensitivity to Light

Do you:
React to bright light?
Suffer from sore or itchy eyes?
Choose to read in dim light conditions?
Lack reading stamina?
Find that the print becomes less distinct when you have been reading for a while?

A hypersensitivity to light is not always very obvious. Often people can use their eyes perfectly well in the distance and only have problems when they are reading and writing. You may have trouble with the glare produced by black print on a white background. After a while it can cause a visual disturbance on the page. This can make it very hard to read for long periods, or slow down your reading speed considerably. You may find that you have to constantly re-read passages because you did not understand everything on first reading.

BRAIN INTEGRATION

The brain is formed in two distinct halves with a bundle of nerve fibres, the corpus callosum, connecting them together. The left hand side deals more with logical, sequential processing and the right hand side with visual and emotional processing and an intuitive response. Most of our processing requires a lot of interaction between the two halves of the brain. Emotional trauma and the effects of toxicity are thought to have significant effects on the functioning of the corpus callosum. This can interfere with the flow of information from one side to the other. This may cause processing difficulties and people sometimes describe the feeling as 'brain fog'. Sometimes it causes us to use one side of the brain more than the other. In extreme cases this may force someone into very logical, rule-based behaviour without the ability to feel the emotion or see the big picture. Conversely, they may be extremely creative and intuitive, but lack the ability to use a sequenced, reasoned approach, to organise themselves and 'play the game'.

Do you:
Find it hard to understand directions?
Have difficulty with reading for long periods?
Have difficulty with word finding?
Have difficulty leaving one activity for another?
Have difficulty with organisational skills?
Have a diminished concept of consequences?
Did you have trouble with tying shoelaces when you were young?

Visual integration seems particularly sensitive to stress. The two eyes send two slightly different images to the brain and it has to overlay them in the central visual field to form one clear, crisp image. This is known as binocular fusion. If this is not achieved you have to find some way of overcoming seeing double at the neurological level. Sometimes people actually experience seeing a double image when their eyes are tired or tend to rely on just one eye. Generally they are unaware of any physical difficulty although they often do not choose to read for long periods.

Try this test:

You need a pair of 3D glasses for this - the sort with a red lens on one side and a blue or green lens on the other. We supply 3D glasses if you join the Edutherapy Programme.

Put on the glasses, over your own glasses if you wear them for reading. Put a black dot in the centre of a sheet of white A4 paper and hold it in landscape mode at arm's length in front of your eyes. Focus on the black dot but be aware of the shading on the whole of the white page. You should see a background of just one colour, usually grey. If the page goes red for a few seconds and then changes to blue/green you are using one eye at a time and have a problem with visual integration. In this case you may be a good reader, but have relatively poor comprehension on first reading, or you may not want to read for long periods because the brain is forced to work far too hard at the reading process.

If you see red on one side and blue/green on the other, you have not found an effective way of overcoming double vision and you will probably find reading and spelling hard unless the problem occurred quite recently. If you see only red, or only blue/green, you are using just one eye. If it is the left eye this may cause you to miss out on some factual, logical, sequenced processing in the left hand side of the brain. If you are using just the right eye you may not process the emotional content fully and fail to see the big picture. You may see a different sort of colour effect, but if you have mature binocular fusion you will always see just one colour which is slightly different from the red, blue or green shade in the glasses themselves.

CHILDREN

If stress causes a young child to become hypersensitive, or if their balance, memory or brain integration is affected, a number of other important developmental building blocks are also likely to have suffered. This is important, because all these early skills are hierarchical, each step being built on the step before. If a child has a problem with their sense of touch, for example, their 'body in space' awareness is likely to be immature. They may be a bit clumsy, fear the dark, avoid team sports, find it hard to get to sleep. All these developmental areas are important for future intellectual functioning. For example, a child with poor 'body in space' awareness may have visual spatial difficulties which are likely to cause problems with such things as maths concepts, map reading and visual motor skills.

If you have concerns about a child you can find out more in our Edutherapy Workbook. It is really important to go through this carefully with your child. It will help you to understand them better and meet their needs and periodic reviews will provide a good measure of progress on the Edutherapy Programme.