Anda Culișir

Anda Culișir is, as she loves to describe herself, a creator of learning contexts for other people. As a Biology teacher for highschool kids, the pandemic has generated many stressful moments for her and her teacher colleagues.  Half of her teacher colleagues became desperate and blocked and the other half, like her, started to get really creative. When mentioning to other people her profession Anda usually gets three types of questions:  “The first question is < but why? > With such pity in their eyes, like you had so much potential. . The second type of question is …like they would expect me to start debriefing myself and for them to help me out in some way of dealing with the kids today which surely are horrible. And obviously that’s not true. The kids today are just brilliant. They’re completely different from the kids three years ago. But that’s a good thing. They cannot be the same as the generations before, because that means we would still be stuck in the neanderthalian  level, we would have not evolved as a society. And the third question they ask me is <How do you do it? How do you get stressed out?" In this beautiful talk, we explored with Anda the biological-evolutionary perspective of stress, the relation between stress and emotion, but also we shared some of our ingredientes for de stressing - because each one of us have to find our own recipe. And, as she mentioned, even the etymology of the word stress (distringō = “to stretch out”), we need to stretch out who we are and our resources, to have an adaptive response - that is when stress becomes an action emotion, a positive emotion.  "you do feel fear, but you love a friend, you want to help a friend. you combine the two you end up being really brave and courage is born which is the best thing you can do in order to be creative. you feel fear but you feel enthusiasm at the same time. creativity and curiosity sparks up. I think that if we combine these three and we know to identify exactly in a context which sparks up we would know better how to combine them in order to get past the stressful situation. "