Prolonged exposure to stress can take a toll on your body and brain. Help maintain brain size and function as you age with these tips.
And somehow, we all actually believe it. Think of the last prolonged stressful situation you were in. During that time, did you eventually find it harder to make simple decisions, remember the right word for something, or just keep track of your car keys? At the time, it might have felt like the universe was conspiring against you. Cortisol has the power to lower your blood pressure, manage your blood sugar, and reduce inflammation within the body.
Over long periods of time, elevated levels of cortisol can push you further down the road toward obesity, heart disease, depression, high blood pressure, and unhealthy lifestyle behaviors. Janette Nesheiwat , a board-certified family and emergency medicine doctor in New York City. In a recent study published online in the journal Neurology , researchers checked cortisol levels in the blood of 2, healthy middle-aged people. They also assessed their memory and thinking skills and took images of their brains.
What they found was that participants — particularly women — who had high levels of cortisol in their blood did poorer on memory and cognitive tests. Over time, they also appeared to lose brain volume. For now, your best bet is to simply protect your brain from stress as best as you can.
To do that, it helps to know what stress looks and feels like. Change your attitude toward stress. So, rather than striving for no stress, strive for healthier responses to stress. There is evidence that chronic persistent stress may actually rewire your brain, says Dr. Scientists have learned that animals that experience prolonged stress have less activity in the parts of their brain that handle higher-order tasks — for example, the prefrontal cortex — and more activity in the primitive parts of their brain that are focused on survival, such as the amygdala.
It's much like what would happen if you exercised one part of your body and not another. The part that was activated more often would become stronger, and the part that got less attention would get weaker, he says. This is what appears to happen in the brain when it is under continuous stress: it essentially builds up the part of the brain designed to handle threats, and the part of the brain tasked with more complex thought takes a back seat. These brain changes may be reversible in some instances, says Dr.
Ressler, but may be more difficult to reverse in others, depending on the type and the duration of the stress. While stressful childhood experiences seem to take more of a toll on the developing brain, some research has found that people who demonstrate resilience in the face of past childhood trauma actually appear to have generated new brain mechanisms to compensate. It's thought that these new pathways help to overcome stress-related brain changes that formed earlier in life, he says.
While the effect of stress on the brain is well documented, it's less clear exactly what type of stress will prove damaging and raise the risk of memory problems later in life.
Do brain problems occur when you are under a small amount of stress or only when you experience long-term stress? The stress you might experience before you take a test is likely very different from the stress of being involved in a car accident or from a prolonged illness.
The stress is unpredictable. Animal research shows that animals that could anticipate a stressor — for example, they received a shock after a light turned on — were less stressed than animals that received the same number of shocks randomly.
The same is true in humans, says Dr. If a person can anticipate stress, it is less damaging than stress that appears to be more random. There is no time limit on the stress. If you are stressed about a presentation at work or an upcoming exam, the stress you are experiencing has an end point when you know you will get relief. If the stress has no end point — for example, you are chronically stressed about finances — it may be more challenging to cope with.
You lack support. If you feel supported during your stress, you are likely to weather it more successfully than if you don't. As a service to our readers, Harvard Health Publishing provides access to our library of archived content. Please note the date of last review or update on all articles.
No content on this site, regardless of date, should ever be used as a substitute for direct medical advice from your doctor or other qualified clinician. Thanks for visiting. Don't miss your FREE gift. Sign up to get tips for living a healthy lifestyle, with ways to fight inflammation and improve cognitive health , plus the latest advances in preventative medicine, diet and exercise , pain relief, blood pressure and cholesterol management, and more. Elevated cortisol levels can therefore interfere with our sleep.
The restoration of sleep patterns and circadian rhythms may therefore provide a treatment approach for these conditions. Depression can have huge consequences. Our own work has demonstrated that depression impairs cognition in both non-emotional domains, such as planning and problem-solving, and emotional and social areas, such as creating attentional bias to negative information. In addition to depression and anxiety, chronic stress and its impact at work can lead to burnout symptoms , which are also linked to increased frequency of cognitive failures in daily life.
As individuals are required to take on increased workload at work or school, it may lead to reduced feelings of achievement and increased susceptibility to anxiety, creating a vicious cycle. Stress can also interfere with our balance between rational thinking and emotions.
For example, the stressful news about the global spread of the novel Coronavirus has caused people to hoard hand sanitisers, tissues and toilet paper.
Shops are becoming empty of these supplies, despite reassurance by the government that there is plenty of stock available. Under stress, brain areas such as the putamen , a round structure at the base of the forebrain, show greater activation. Such activation has been associated with hoarding behaviour. In addition, in stressful situations, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex , which plays a role in emotional cognition — such as evaluation of social affiliations and learning about fear — may enhance irrational fears.
So what should you do if you are suffering from chronic stress? Luckily there are ways to tackle it. We know, for example, that exercise has established benefits against chronic stress. Exercise tackles inflammation by leading to an anti-inflammatory response.
In addition, exercise increases neurogenesis — the production of new brain cells — in important areas, such as the hippocampus. It also improves your mood, your cognition and your physical health.
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