10 MAR 2019 by ideonexus
The Chess Stress Response
Another aspect of chess as a sport is the intense psychological and physiological exertion involved in a competitive chess game, and the crisis after the game. What sports science calls the "stress response process" is at least as powerful in chess as it is in more physical sports. When I say exertion, I am not referring only to the mental gymnastics of moving the pieces in our minds, but also the huge nervous tension that fills you before and during the game, tension that rises and falls wit...
1 24 DEC 2013 by ideonexus
The Cost of Irrational Fears
Imagine the typical emotional reaction to seeing a spider: fear, ranging from minor trepidation to terror. But what is the likelihood of dying from a spider bite? Fewer than four people a year (on average) die from spider bites, establishing the expected risk of death by spider at lower than 1 in 100 million. This risk is so minuscule that it is actually counterproductive to worry about it: Millions of people die each year from stress-related illnesses. The startling implication is that the r...
1 Garrett Lisi explains how the stress caused by many of our fears of statistically-unlikely events is more likely to kill us.
22 NOV 2013 by ideonexus
Stress is Healthy
Your heart might be pounding, you might be breathing faster, maybe breaking out into a sweat. And normally, we interpret these physical changes as anxiety or signs that we aren't coping very well with the pressure.
But what if you viewed them instead as signs that your body was energized, was preparing you to meet this challenge? Now that is exactly what participants were told in a study conducted at Harvard University. Before they went through the social stress test, they were taught to ret...At least it can be, if we don't think of it as being detrimental. If we don't stress about stress, but rather think of it as healthy reaction and seek social connections as a coping mechanism for it, then stress is good for us.
Additional Note: Could this be why parents have longer lifespans? The oxytocin response tempers the detrimental effects of stress, leaving only the beneficial?
28 JUL 2011 by ideonexus
Benefits of Open-Ended Playtime
Studies show that, compared with controls, kids allowed a specific type of open-ended play time were:
• More creative. On average they came up with three times as many nonstandard creative uses for specific objects (a standard lab measure) as did controls.
• Better at language. The children’s use of language was more facile. They displayed a richer store of vocabulary and a more varied use of words.
• Better at problem solving. This is fluid intelligence, one of the basic... 1 
notes
notesLots of boosts to a child's creativity and cognition when they are allowed free playtime.
