Student Resilience – The New Code-Word for Discussing Amygdala Atrophy

A reader emails an article on “Student Resiliency”

I have done a considerable amount of reading and research in recent months on the topic of resilience in college students. Our students are no different from what is being reported across the country on the state of late adolescence/early adulthood. There has been an increase in diagnosable mental health problems, but there has also been a decrease in the ability of many young people to manage the everyday bumps in the road of life.

If you can understand the concepts of stress, the amygdala, and how they combine to produce resiliency, you will understand everything about subjects from politics, to psychology, to the cycles of civilizations. Everything is contextualized in it.

Less resilient and needy students have shaped the landscape for faculty in that they are expected to do more handholding, lower their academic standards, and not challenge students too much.

Exactly the wrong solution. In studying the amygdala you will come across a study where animals were exposed to mild electric shocks, and these triggered their amygdalae. For a minute the animals grew increasingly freaked out. Then those animals for whom the shocks continued saw their amygdala adapted to the presence of the shocks, and the animals began to ignore them. The animals in whom the shocks were stopped prior to the hardening off, and then restarted later never hardened off. They freaked out even worse at the subsequent shocks.

I have seen this in myself. As stress increased, I initially didn’t like it. But I watched as I became more energetic, physically stronger, and more adapted to the stress. I came to welcome the sensation as a sign my mind was hardening off, like the burn of a set of curls in the bicep. I suspect if I desperately tried to turn it off, or even worse, succeeded, perhaps I could have been conditioned to become a neurotic, anxiety-prone individual.

I suspect this means that once the apocalypse starts, it will take a few months for most individuals to acclimate to the stress of economic collapse and criminal threat, develop their amygdalae, and become more rightward-leaning.

The piece ends with an interesting theory on how these things could become exacerbated over time. The author postulates increasingly neurotic parents begin trying to clamp down control on their kids to shield them from angst, and this makes the kids even more neurotic. If so, I hesitate to imagine what today’s Social Justice Warrior’s would do to their children, if they were reproducing. Perhaps declining birthrates among the neurotic left are a sign the problem is somewhat self-limiting at the societal level.

Apocalypse cometh™ and it will be worse for the younger, until they adapt.