Samuel Oluwagbami

Here is one way to know how stressful encounters as a child could adversely affect your health as an adult? And what can you do to solve these effects? We all have experienced hurtful incidents during childhood and they just have a way of sticking to our memories. It could range from something as traumatic as losing one’s parents, getting involved in accident to losing a pet. Actually, these experiences are a customary part of growing up. And they make us into strong and healthy adults. However, these encounters should not become overly stretched. This article will analyze how some children who have Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) are vulnerable to future physical and psychological problems. Fortunately, there are solutions to this issue. By understanding how stress works and our how bodies respond to it, we can become better parents and also help our kids get the best out of childhood and grow into happy and confident adults. This article will teach us  how the body responds to stress;  why forgiving people is so vital;  how you can sharpen your brain function even when you’re stressed We experience physical stress in two stages While some of us encounter stress just once in a week, others may experience stress every day. In any way it comes, stress still remains stress. However, we have inbuilt capacities to manage it. Our bodies respond to stress in two different ways: preparing for it or claming after it. When you encounter a stressful occurrence, your body gets you ready for it by sharpening your readiness. This occurs as a result of the hypothalamus on the brain activating the adrenal and pituitary glands as contained in your body. Your immune system gets triggered, your pulse races fast and your body muscles are on edge. Here, you are wired to hit or get hit. Imagine you being in bed at night and you hear a clatter in the ypur study. Your mind comes alive immediately; your ears are perked for the slightest sound, your heart pounds against your chest and your body is still. Your body prepares you for the slightest danger. And then, some seconds later, you get to know that it is your pithuahua crashing through some stacked cartons in the kitchen. You become very relaxed and those glands as well as the hypothalamus reduce their functions and the body ceases to produce stress hormones. These quick reflexes reveal how our bodies are wired to deal with stress. Despite this, it is believed that stress in any form is essentially bad. As such, most of us do anything to avoid stress. The real truth is that mild stress can actually heighten our ability to manage stressful encounters in the future. While prolonged stress is weakening, mild stress can in fact make a stronger you. Were you parented by people who were overprotective of you and who tried to keep you away from many things? That format of parenting is not recommended in this today and it is quite valid. Although, it still would suffice to add that the inclination to keep your children from stress is sensible. Children respond very quickly to stress. And as a result, stressful encounters at childhood can result in chronic stress at adulthood. Remember the two processes of stress? It is this chain of process that gets broken when a child experiences more stress than he can take in or process. For example, a child who grew up in a domestically-violent home and who was a constant victim of verbal attacks would find it more difficult to handle stress as an adult. Nonetheless, not every stress experiences damages a person after all. A study at the University of Buffalo researched on people who suffered back pain. It was discovered that those who experienced healthy and stress-free childhood had the same tendency to be affected equally by back pain as those who had traumatic childhoods. But only participants with a moderate stress at childhood had could easily handle back pain of all the three groups studied. This is because the participants in this class had been toned to become strong and formidable in the face of stress. It is however of note that there is a marked difference between stressful experiences which are formative and those which are traumatic. But pointedly, only the negative experiences tend to impact our adult lives majorly. Harmful childhood encounters can have major impacts on our adult health What we experience at childhood influences our personal development directly. Encounters with harmful stress situations can do a lot of damage to children in their formative years. These situations are what psychologists call Adverse Childhood Experiences i.e. ACEs. ACEs are circumstances in which a child is exposed to recurrent, harmful and impulsive stressors. In these circumstances, the kid lacks the support of an adult in dealing safely with the situations. Janet, for example, was just six when she saw her mum die in accident which she survived. Caleb, on another instance, is a child of two lawyers. They expected him to be outspoken and verbally expressive even at a young age. And when he couldn’t do any of these, they belittled his inherent and budding capacity to talk well. While these instances may seem pointedly different, they have similar impacts in adulthood as a result of the ACEs they spurred. Janet has terrible blisters on her skin as well as terrific body pains. Her joints were bloated and inflamed and she had very low counts of white blood cells. It seems at first that she had deficiency in bone marrow. But close to her 33rd birthday, her doctor discovered a correlation between her severe childhood experiences and her chronic physical pains. Caleb, as an adult, suffered depression as well as attention deficit disorders.in addition to all of these, he tended to be extremely anxious when there are high expectations of him. He kept to himself, didn’t hang out with friends and even developed an immune sickness which made him bald prematurely. His experiences as a child kept on plaguing his mental and physical health as an adult. ACEs have even been discovered to be capable of decreasing the size of a human’s brain ACEs can shrink the brain and its capacity to handle stress. As a condition, ACEs don’t just cause health problems-they couyld also affect a human’s cognition. Through the application of magnetic resonance imaging, science has uncovered that the greater the ACE experience, the smaller the brain becomes. Precisely, the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex are distinctly smaller in people who suffer from ACEs. And these areas determine how much we process fear and they inform our decision making. They also greatly help us manage and coordinate our emotions. So the smaller they become, the harder it becomes for us to handle stress. ACEs are also known to be rapid killers of neurons. This as expected would result in distorted brain development. Let’s take the instance of two boys who start out their life with 90,000 neurons (this is just an example; the human brain has billions of neurons, of course). And let’s say one of these children suffers no ACE unlike the other. The other child must have had his brains cells halved at age 14, i.e. he would be left with roughly 43,000 neurons. While this may seem enough for functioning at this age, adolescence would mark a significant change in their brain development. At that stage, they both will lose close to 10,000 neurons- a normal part of this growth stage. The first boy is left with 80,000 neurons while the other would be left with just 33,000! At this stage, . this difference will influence the way both of them will think. Wjile one will be looking towars a happy future, the other will wallow in depression and anxiety as well as eating disorders. Childhood stress and the ACEs greatly affect the brain but it is proven that women are at a greater risk of these. Women tend to suffer ACEs more than men. While research may support the above , the question would still be: “Why ?” There is a sundry of opinions on this subject matter. Nut a widely accepted one is the difference in the hormone structure of the females. Women have much more glucocorticoids and estrogen than males. Estrogen which helps the production of antibodies is also capable of increasing the presence of autoantibodies which could ravage the body’s physical systems. Glucocorticoids (GCs) such as the cortisol regulate swellings which are triggered by these autoantibodies. When girls suffer ACEs, they have an extremely low GC count which puts them at the unprotected risk of inflammation. …. Estrogen is still high, especially in puberty. Subsequently, autoantibodies can begin to attack the body without any control. This unfortunately leads to debilitating autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis, lupus or thyroiditis. Moreover, females experience more stress than their male counterparts as they grow into adults. Not only do women and girls constantly have to be on the watch for not being too fat or too flat, or not being sexy or attractive enough, but they are also paid less for the same work and have more responsibility and less security while having children. These societal stressors place an incredible burden on the female system, which just isn’t built to cope with such huge amounts of stress. So, whether you have a daughter or a son, it’s clear that as a parent your role in minimizing the amount of ACEs that your child experiences is incredibly important. At the same time, it’s a daunting task. So how should you approach parenting? Find out next. Children are highly sensitive to the stress of their parents. Stress, as most of us know, is highly contagious. Think of how agitating it can be to sit near a nervous colleague! This phenomenon is experienced even more powerfully by children, as a study at the University of California confirmed. In the study, mothers and babies were first checked together to get a baseline state and then separated. Then the mothers had to give a prepared five minute talk to an audience and afterward answer their questions for five minutes. There were three groups. The first group received positive feedback from the audience, the second received negative feedback and the third had no interactions with the audience at all. After the speech, mothers from the negative feedback group showed more cardiac stress and reported feeling more negative. When the mothers from the negative feedback group returned to their babies, the babies' heartrates rose, showing that they immediately picked up their mother stress. The emotional state of the parents can also impact the development of the child. If a parent is depressed or anxious, their children are likely to experience physical pain like headaches or stomachaches by the time they are aged five to seven. Why does this happen? Often it’s because depressed parents are too overwhelmed with their own struggles to support their children through their emotional problems and anxieties. In a child, unresolved worries can turn into chronic stress, leaving the body in fight-or-flight mode long after a stressful situation has passed. Though many adults suffer the consequences of chronic stress, there is hope. Find out in the next blink how a recovery from ACEs is possible. Recovery from ACEs is possible with meditation and forgiveness. The impact that ACEs have on our health may be dramatic, but it’s not irreversible. Fortunately, there are ways to repair the damage that stressful childhood experiences have caused our minds and bodies. The first of these is meditation. We often hear about the benefits of meditation and mindfulness, but does it really work? In the case of ACEs, studies have shown that meditation can be incredibly effective. One study showed that participants in an eight-week mindfulness program suffered less anxiety and depression. What’s more, they showed an increased density of brain tissue in the hippocampus at the program’s conclusion. From an emotional and physiological standpoint, eight weeks of meditation training was enough to create significant progress. So what makes meditation so powerful? By focusing on your breath, letting go of your thoughts and relaxing your body, meditation allows you to stay in the present moment, rather than worrying about the past or the future. But for beginners, this is no easy feat. You can make meditation easier by performing it in the same space, at the same time of day. Choose somewhere where you can get comfortable, but also remain awake and alert. Another tool that’s equally helpful in recovering from ACEs is forgiveness. Despite what you might think, forgiveness isn’t something that benefits the person forgiven – it’s something you do for yourself. In forgiving, we let go of things in the past that cause us to suffer in the present. Forgiveness is also something we can train ourselves to do alongside meditation. There are many forgiveness systems and practices available today online. The author recommends the four-step forgiveness meditation by James Gordon. As adults, we have the opportunity to heal ourselves from the damage of ACEs. But as parents, we also have the chance to prevent our children from experiencing such damage in the first place. Or do we? Find out next. Positive associations and personal growth are central to safe and healthy parenting. Parenting is one of the hardest jobs on the planet. There’s no such thing as a perfect parent, so why strive to be one? Instead, focus on recovering and growing from mistakes or difficulties that you might have experienced yourself. This way, you can make room for new positive memories that will stay with your children for the rest of their lives. The author herself suffered from several autoimmune diseases, which led to a difficult period for the whole family. Despite this, her children are now able to replace the negative associations they had with their mother during this time with positive ones. Instead of associating their mother with gloomy trips to the hospital, the children have new, positive associations with their mother from family hikes, beach holidays and baking together in the kitchen. When parents confront their own issues and begin to make a positive recovery, children will begin to see them more positively too. As a parent, it’s also important to remember that healthy challenges help children to develop new strengths. When your child faces a minor challenge, such as forgetting to study for a test, don’t rush to solve the problem for them. Certainly don’t make pessimistic remarks about their mistakes either! Instead, a response along the following lines works best: “You do have a problem, but I’m sure you can handle it! How could you solve this?” In this way, you’ll show your child that you have faith in them to solve problems, boosting their confidence and self-esteem. Furthermore, you’ll allow them to experience tricky situations themselves, so they’ll learn and grow. Just as children benefit from learning to solve challenges in the present, parents benefit from learning to solve the problems of their past. By understanding your ACEs and taking steps to recover from them, you can avoid passing them on to your children, ensuring you and your family are happy and healthy in the years to come. Final summary The key message in this book: Stressful childhood experiences have a powerful impact on an adult’s health, both physically and mentally. But recovery from ACEs is possible, and a healthy approach to parenting ensures children experience challenges that help them grow.