How to Use Yoga as a Safety & Self-Regulation Tool During School Lockdowns

For kids in the United States, lockdown drills have become as standard as tornado, hurricane, or earthquake drills. These drills are terrifying for most kids. They are also terrifying for teachers, who must get their students to “safety” and remain calm all while knowing that they may ultimately be a human shield. We recognize that there is nothing that can make a teacher or child truly safe during an active shooter event. Prevention is key — to that end, we encourage everyone to support Moms Demand Action and their advocacy for responsible gun legislation.

In the meantime — while students run drills and unwell members of society enjoy access to military-grade firearms — yoga offers some tools that can improve students’ adherence to safety procedures and enhance self-regulation. Let’s look at those tools now.

1. The practice of pranayama (breathwork) helps you stay calm and conscious.
   
   When you feel threatened, your body releases cortisol (a stress hormone) which triggers the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) to move into survival mode: a surge of epinephrine pushes blood into the muscles, and its pal adrenaline ramps up the fight, flight, freeze, or fawn response. Stress triggers happen to the average human being about 50 times per day — which means our bodies have a lot of practice with this automatic chain of events. Think of this as a good thing: With practice, we can teach our bodies to respond to stress differently — and more consciously. Studies show that purposeful breathing — inhaling deeply and exhaling slowly — activates the vagal network of nerves, which govern “rest and digest” functions (the housekeeping your body does when it feels safe). In practice, long exhales make the body feel safer. This, in turn, downshifts the activity of the amygdala (the brain’s emotional “fire alarm”) and equips the prefrontal cortex (the brain’s reasoning center) to dictate what comes next. So, instead of having the chaotic, automatic response triggered by the SNS (flight, fight, freeze, fawn), deep breathing can make your brain and body more responsive: “This is scary. I will follow my teacher’s instructions right now.”
   

2. The practice of meditation helps you process what is happening in realtime.
   
   There are a million definitions of meditation, but for this context we’ll keep it simple: Meditation is mind awareness. In class, on any given day of the week, you can practice this with your students: Close your eyes and notice your thoughts drifting like snowflakes. Watch them come and watch them go. Let them melt away. You can do any number of variations: thoughts like clouds, thoughts like sleds on a hill, thoughts like raindrops, thoughts like dandelion fluff. And you can practice it for any duration: 1 minute on up — build up gradually. The goal of this style of meditation is to release our false sense of control and sink into the present moment fully. To feel it and release it, without attachment. This makes worry impossible, because the next moment is not available. Only this one. And yes, it means you will feel hard and difficult feelings; it doesn’t make the bad feelings go away. Instead, meditation teaches you to feel it and be aware of it — to process it in the here and now so that it doesn’t become a trauma for later. This may feel lofty, so start small. Next time your students run a drill, cue them to notice their breath, and then their thoughts. Notice, release. Notice, release.
   

3. The practice of physical movement helps you release tension.
   
   During a lockdown, postures and flows are not feasible. So that’s not what we recommend. Instead, we recommend purposeful engagement of the musculature through tense and relax exercises. In the book Burnout, researchers Emily and Amelia Nagoski call upon new research to illustrate that stress is a tunnel and you have to move through it — you have to respond to the physiological changes your body undergoes when it is stressed. Why? Well, as we mentioned before, when a threat is perceived and cortisol hits the bloodstream, the SNS cues up epinephrine and adrenaline and now your body literally needs to process, metabolize, and flush out these chemicals. Tense-and-release exercises accomplish this: they give the body a healthy way to move the chemicals catalyzed by the stressor. This means that — if it’s just a drill — teachers have a higher probability of getting students back to class and on task. And if it’s a true lockdown, fewer stress hormones are concentrating. In practice, it’s pretty simple: prompt students to squeeze and release their ears, eyebrows, noses, mouths, etc. until they’ve scanned their entire bodies. Or, have on hand some play dough or silly putty. Let them squeeze and release.