“Understanding Stresses and Strains”

How much did teachers worry about screen time in my childhood classrooms? Not much. The bigger consideration was things like having access to the projector, because I am old enough that it required hauling out an actual projector. I have threaded film before, in the last few years before film was replaced by VHS in the schools. I also suspect that part of the reason it took a while for the transition to happen was that the California schools were fairly broke and it took a lot to replace the films and film strips. Still, yes, this is the sort of thing we’d watch when I was a kid, though I don’t know about this specific one.

Despite search results trying to convince me otherwise, this is a short about emotional stresses and strains. It’s from the same series as the one we previously covered about alcohol. As with that one, it’s a combination of solid advice and outdated medical advice that is a bit short on nuance by necessity of being ten minutes long. It talks about the biological origins of mental stress, how it initially helped with hunting or avoidance of predators and how the biological imperatives of thousands of years ago don’t help much with the stress of, for example, an office job.

What I’m curious about is the short’s detailing of how stress can lead to diabetes. It suggests that stress causes the liver to flood the system with sugar beyond the ability of the pancreas to deal with it, and that over time this can lead to diabetes. Is that true? I don’t actually know. The Wikipedia pages about diabetes are not helpful. It’s entirely possible that it’s the same kind of outdated information as the explanation of how stress causes ulcers. Maybe it was garbage at the time. I have no idea.

You would think it would be more important to school-aged kids that stress can be bad for your personal relationships, say, or weaken your immune system. It’s also an awfully adult example of stress to show some guy in an office job fretting about whether his boss hates him or not. I’m not sure what age these were aimed at, because everyone online seems to have copied one another’s stub of an article, and not even D23.com has more than a sentence. It still feels aimed at maybe junior high while still suggesting that the kids would have adult causes of stress.

My kids have told me they don’t watch this sort of thing in school anymore. The most they’ve seen educational shorts is through Mystery Science Theater 3000 or RiffTrax. The world has changed since 1968, when this was the first of the series to be released, if I’m reading everyone else’s articles correctly. It’s easy to see shorts about stress online that don’t have a corporate sponsor, and it’s not as though the animation is good enough to make this noteworthy in any real way. Still, you know, let’s not stress about it.