What would your life look like without stress? Stress or anxieties are not strangers to most of us. For some, stress is like a distant relative surfacing on occasion. For others, it is a perceived force controlling our lives, and denying us of choice. One person uses stress to motivate and gauge productiveness, while the next is stunned into numbing overload. Everyone’s response to stress is unique.
The daily pressures of life, such as family and child rearing, school tuition and exams, jobs, debt, health issues, aging parents, road rage, and deadlines affect us, either as fear, anxiety or emotional strain. When stress levels shift from moderate to excessive the body’s stress apparatus is activated. The brain, heart, lungs, blood vessels, and muscles become chronically over- or under-activated. This may produce physical or psychological damage over time. The response can be immediate or delayed. Heart diseases, weight fluctuations, skin disorders, irritable bowel, insomnia, back pain, cancer, headache, high cholesterol and diseases like Alzheimer’s are, in some cases, an indirect consequence of unmanaged stress. Of course, individual genetic and medical differences, and environmental and behavioral factors play an important role in how stress affects each of us.
When you become stressed, what physical or psychological response affects you first? Do you become forgetful in stressful situations? The emotional and physical responses you have to stress are a function of the basic biology of your body. When you experience stress, the body’s reaction is to trigger a cascade of chemical events that releases stress hormones into the bloodstream. Cortisol is the hormone produced by the adrenals as a response to stress.
Normally, in response to stress, the brain’s hypothalamus signals the pituitary gland to begin a cascade of chemical messengers to stimulate the adrenal gland. The adrenals are then signaled to secrete cortisol. When levels of cortisol rise to certain levels in the body, the hippocampus tells the hypothalamus to turn off the cortisol production. A rise in cortisol blood levels is a normal response to stress to help us cope. When the stress is relieved the cortisol levels should return to normal. With chronic stress this does not happen and the feedback cycle is disrupted, resulting in a long lasting increase in the production of cortisol.
Excessive cortisol can make it difficult to think clearly and impairs memory retrieval. Too much cortisol can prevent the brain from laying down a new memory or accessing existing memories. Cortisol, when produced in excess as a result of chronic stress, has a toxic effect on the brain and kills brain cells. Compounded over the years, as we add more responsibilities and goals/demands to our life, cortisol has been found to destroy the biochemistry of the brain.
The hippocampus is the area most damaged by cortisol. A damaged hippocampus compromises memory and cognitive function. Dr. Dharma Singh Khalsa writes in Brain Longevity, that older people often loose 20- 25% of the hippocampus cells attributed to excessive cortisol production. Groups who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, such as war veterans and those that have suffered from sexual abuse, displayed up to 8% shrinkage in the hippocampus. It is not yet known if this shrinkage is reversible.
Mayo Clinic researcher Dr. Ronald Petersen found that specific changes in the hippocampus were linked to changes in behavior associated with aging and Alzheimer’s disease. “When the hippocampus shrinks or deteriorates, memory ability tends to progress more rapidly toward Alzheimer’s.”
Not all stressors are unavoidable. Many sources of stress can be controlled. If you don’t know how to manage the stressors that you cannot control, consider making new choices about your health and well-being. Self-care is the first form of prevention. Managing stress, or at least the way you cope with it, may have some real benefits in the long run.
References: Dharma Singh Khalsa, M.D. Brain Longevity, Warrner Books, Inc. New York, 1997, www.alzheimersprevent.com