How Stress Affects Your Brain....

From an engineering standpoint, stress can be defined as the amount of resistance a material offers to being reshaped and reformed. When you place a load on a steel beam, the beam resists, keeping the building from collapsing. If the load is great enough, the beam gives way and the structure suffers damage or collapses. Psychological stress is similar. When we can no longer resist forces that are trying to shape and mold us, whether they are our spouses behaviour or our nation's economic decline, we break down, becoming anxious and depressed, unable to cope.

Psychologists have identified two kinds of stress : acute and chronic. Both affect the health of our cells and thus our general well being. Acute stress is relatively short lived and often has a positive side to it in that it encourages you to be your best. Examples of acute stress include sitting exams, sporting events and associated business events.

Chronic stress is long lasting and potentially more damaging to your health and well being. It occurs when you worry all month about how you are going to meet your next mortgage payment, or when you dread going in to work because of the pile that is accumulating in your inbox and demanding your attention, or even when you dread waking up next to the person you once loved. It can even be when the cells of your body are so burdened with eliminating toxic wastes and are deprived of the vitamins and minerals that would help them complete the task. 

Your body has a system in place to help you deal with stress. The HPA axis - which refers to three major glands, the hypothalamus, the pituitary and the adrenal glands - regulates our ability to deal with stresses of all kinds. Your response to stresses of all kinds is dependant on the proper function of these important glands. They combine to orchestrate the release of adrenalin and cortisol into our blood stream which give us quick energy, increase our heart rate and increase blood flow to our muscles so we can fight or flee. The advantages offered by the rapid response of our HPA system are clear. Just as primitive man as able to avoid being attacked by an animal during a hunt, we today can quickly move out of the way of an oncoming care or an angry colleague.

In times of danger, this chemical influx is necessary to help us fight or flee, but we can get locked into a state of chronic stress when the adrenal glands don't receive a signal to stop producing their anti-stress hormones.

Unlike acute stress, which can serve a positive purpose, chronic stress is very destructive.

In Colonial times, the legendary pirates of the Carribean learned that citizens in a city under seige were more effectively worn down by the sound of cannons firing than by the actual damage done by the cannon balls. This was because the sounds of the guns kept the townspeople in a state of chronic stress, unable to fight or flee, or get a good night's rest. Long term exposure to stress has very profound consequences. 

Stuck In A Rut? Here's Why...

As already stated above, one of the primary stress hormones secreted by the adrenal glands is cortisol. This hormone helps you deal with stress but it was only ever meant to be secreted as a temporary measure. However, as cortisol is produced in excessive amounts when the HPA axis is locked in a state of continued chronic stress, it increases the damaging effects of free radicals in the cells in a part of your brain called the hippocampus. This causes damage to the energy producing function (mitochondria) of the cells which causes even more free radical damage resulting in the death of the cells hippocampus. The thing is, when hippocampal neurons die, learning and creativity become almost impossible and brain synergy is out of the question. Our ability to think and feel creatively becomes paralyzed, our behaviour alters and as a result our personality changes. If we remain under chronic stress long enough, our adrenals eventually give out and we become drained and exhausted.

In a recent study, Eduardo Dias-Ferreira and his colleagues at University of Minho, Braga in Portugal, demonstrated that chronically stressed rats lose their ability to break out of repetitious behaviour patterns and become less creative and less cunning. Essentially, stress changes the rodents behaviour, predisposing the animals to doing the same thing over and over. In commenting on this study, Robert Sapolsky, a neurobiologist who studies stress at Stanford University School of Medicine, remarked, "this is a great model for understanding why we end up in a rut, and then dig ourselves deeper and deeper into that rut...we're lousy at recognising when our normal coping mechanisms aren't working."