Playtimes, Football Chants and Vagal Tone

 

      Playground Originale    Bjorn Lie

Playtimes, Football Chants and Vagal Tone

Cat Jolleys      www.catjolleys.com

Hear the whistle blow, freeze, it blows again. Calmly stop the Y6 FA cup final at 89 minutes and walk to the line, harmoniously, alongside your biggest rival who's just outrageously fouled you and said something about yo mum. Stand silently in register order, then walk inside peacefully, feeling completed self-regulated and calm. Then sit down, ready to learn.

Easy peasy.

Only, for the vast majority of Primary aged children, we know it isn't that easy, yet this is still how a lot of playtimes end. The transition from running, screaming, wind in their hair and heart beating at 200bpm to absolute silence, stillness and full self-regulation, would be a big ask for most of us, yet we often expect that from young children and feel frustrated when they just can't do it.

I remember being at my wit's end a few years ago, after another playtime when the Y6 boys football match took over the playground, leaving the girls, non footballers and younger children pinned to the edges of the playground wide eyed and terrified (another story for another blog!) and me moaning and threatening to ban football for evermore, when the world's best Educational Psychologist (Tricia Euston from OneEducation) told me about vagal tone.

I sat mesmerised as Tricia described how the vagus nerve is not responsible for 24/7 gambling and Celine Deon extravaganzas in the Nevada desert, rather it's the foundation of our nervous system. As part of the parasympathetic system, the vagus nerve affects the sympathetic nervous system’s threat-defensive systems (flight, fight, freeze). The vagus nerve starts at your brain stem and partly controls your respiratory and digestive systems, heart, throat and facial muscles. The healthier the vagal tone, the better our ability to emotionally regulate ourselves and the better our executive functioning and the easier we'll find it to go from frenetic football match to calm lining up, ready to learn.

In 2010, researchers discovered a positive feedback loop between high vagal tone, positive emotions, and good physical health. In other words, the more you increase your vagal tone, the more your physical and mental health will improve, and vice versa. “The vagal response reduces stress. It reduces our heart rate and blood pressure. It changes the function of certain parts of the brain, stimulates digestion, all those things that happen when we are relaxed.” — Dr. Mladen Golubic, MD, Medical Director of the Cleveland Clinic. 

In other words, your fight or flight response is important when you're actually in some kind of physical danger. But, when it leaps into action in situations which aren't life or death, that can be confusing. Activating your vagus nerve and the rest of your parasympathetic nervous system, is a cue to your body that it's not in mortal danger. This then allows you to calm down, relax and have more control of your words, actions and responses.

Fight Anxiety With a Strong Vagus Nerve – Cleveland Clinic

Once I understood this, it seemed obvious that the silent line-up, minutes after these children had been coordinating their physical, communication, language, motor and teamwork skills in something as demanding as a football game, was always going to fail. Particularly as many of these children had experienced adversity, trauma or had early life experiences which meant their vagal tone was poor and they were often operating not far from a fight or flight response a lot of the time. Therefore, a whistle blowing and teacher shouting to line up was all it took to push them into this response, with a not great outcome ensuing and me muttering about banning playtime football. Again.

However, Tricia then mentioned chanting. Initially, I thought she was about to lose her position as the WBP (World's Best EP), but as she explained how the communal act of singing or chanting together could have the effect of improving vagal tone for these footballers, which could then gradually develop their emotional regulation and possibly nudge them out of a fight, flight, freeze response. I began to feel more hopeful. I'd heard about the positive effects of communal singing and my weekly KS2 singing assembly saw even the twitchiest of customers managing to stay put in the hall for over 30 minutes each week. So I understood the benefits of singing in terms of community and belonging and felt optimistic this might change the, currently chaotic, endings to our playtimes.

So, if we ended the football match with some chanting and singing, whilst moving, these children's heart rates and breathing should gradually slow down, their nervous systems calm and they should recover from the stresses of the football match, quicker, over time. We decided to give it a bash.

The first battle was finding some chants and songs which struck the delicate balance between being appropriate and non-sweary/homophobic/racist or sexist (not easy, sadly) and non-partisan so the City and Utd fans could chant in harmony. Once we'd involved the children in finding suitable chants, explained some of the science and rationale behind it and chose some leaders (a couple of Y6 boys with generally great emotional regulation and who usually found the transition between play and line-up, not too challenging and who had some kudos amongst the others) to listen out for the whistle, lead off the run (2 laps around the perimeter of the playground) and starting off the chant. 

I'd be lying if I said we had all 60 Y6 children sitting calmly opening their maths books, 4 minutes after the whistle blew, that first week. But, after being consistent and giving over some ownership of the route and the chants and repeatedly explaining the science and how their brains and nervous systems just needed this practice in order to feel calmer and able to recover from the stress of playtime more efficiently, we did start to see success which we could then build on.

Additional evidence I had that this strategy was having wider impact, was when I had a meeting with a Dad of 4 boys in school. All 4 were blessed with high energy, extensive vocabularies, an eagerness to experience everything life has to offer and an ability to make their Dad look like he needed a week in a spa. As our meeting neared the end and one of the younger brothers was getting a tad fractious and the Dad began to utter some X-box related threat, the Y6 boy quietly reminded his Dad and younger brother to 'breathe and try and calm your vagus nerve down.' To my amazement, both Dad and brother obeyed him and began to  breathe deeply and we finished the meeting calmly and respectfully.

Now, most children understand some of what is happening to their bodies and are developing that emotional literacy as well as regulation, as part of wider, whole school Trauma-Informed practice. Some children have reasonable adaptations to their playtime endings, which they too understand the rationale for and are created with them, rather than done to them. The outcomes are; less time lost to learning in the lessons after breaktimes, less conflict to resolve and better relationships and far fewer manic football banning threats from SLT...to date...