Continued Care of the Brain-Meet Some Key Players

We certainly do not have time to delve into a deep study of the brain in Guidance, but we can meet some key players involved in our attention and focus as students in school.  The amygdala is a pair of almond shaped structures that reacts to fear, danger, and threat. The amygdala regulates our emotional state by acting as the brain's gatekeeper. When a student is in a positive emotional state, the amygdala sends incoming information on to the conscious, thinking brain. When a student is in a negative state, the amygdala prevents the input from passing along, basically blocking higher level thinking and judgment. Therefore there is an automatic response of flight, fight, or freeze from the brain. Examples might be, "I can't do this" or " I won't do this".
The hippocampus assists in managing our response to fear and threats and is a storage vault of memory and learning.Information is fed to the prefrontal cortex-the learning, reasoning, and thinking center of the brain. This area of the brain controls our decision making, focuses our attention, and allows us to learn to read, write, compute, analyze, predict, comprehend, and interpret-phew, that's alot to do.
If the amygdala triggers an alarm we go into fight, flight, or freeze without letting the parts of the brain that think about something  do their job. We also are unble to send information into the storage banks , the hippocampus and the the prefrontal cortex. How do we calm our brains in a stressful situation so we may store information and make good decisions? Stayed tuned as we next develop a toolbox to help our brains to work as best as they possibly can.