Why Stress Management Is Important? The Effect Of Stress On The Brain
It’s just a bit of stress right? How bad could it possibly be?
Besides you’re not even all that stressed anyway, by the measure of all the external factors you’re actually doing just fine.
But is that really the case?
Most clients come into see me for some sort of physical imbalance or illness, anything from chronic pain to digestive imbalances or hormonal issues like hypothyroidism.
At some stage there is often a discussion about stress and anxiety. For the most part everyone accepts that stress and anxiety are huge players in their disease state. However most people scratch their heads at what to really do about it, where should you start when it comes to managing your stress and anxiety, or do you simply wait for the external thing (insert boss, project, event that’s perceived to be the issue) to improve so the stress can .
Stress and anxiety affects just about every single system in the body.
In this article we’ll look at how it impacts the brain and what you can start doing today.
Your brain is a dynamic, social organ it is constantly changing and developing and interacting with your external and internal environment.
Stress and anxiety has devastating effects on your brain.
Research has shown that stressed pregnant mothers have, in utero babies who’s dopamine receptors are affected and these babies are at an increased risk of ADHD, learning challenges, delayed development of language skills and other cognitive issues.
In 2017-18, 13% (that’s approximately 2.4 million Australians) aged 18 and over experienced high or very high levels of psychological distress. You can check out these statistics here
NOTE THIS IS PRE COVID!!!!
This is going to to be much higher at the time of this article.
I’m going to show you why this is such a concern for brain health in the long term and most importantly what you can do about it. Before I jump into explaining impacts on your brain I want to cover a key component of stress.
Where Stress & Anxiety Comes From?
We can look at 3 types of stress:
1. Actual Stress
2. Anticipated Stress
3. Imagined Stress
To better understand these let’s see an example of each one:
Actual Stress
You’re walking in the park and off in the distance you can see a large black dog, as you get closer you can see it’s a Rottweiler in a snap the dog comes racing towards you, you try to ran but it’s futile before you know it the dog is upon you jumping up and attacking you.
Anticipated Stress
You’re walking in the park and off in the distance you can see a large black dog, as you get closer you can see it’s a Rottweiler and you begin looking around to see where the dogs owner is. Dogs like these shouldn’t be off the lead. They’re dangerous and could attack innocent walkers like you in the snap of a moment.
Imagined Stress
You’re walking in the park and off in the distance you can see lot’s of other people enjoying the beautiful day and the peace and quiet of the park. You walk past a sign that says off leash area for dogs and you immediately look around for any dog owners, you imagine the danger of large dangerous dogs being off the lead after all you could be attacked.
These 3 could be applied to just about any scenario from corporate office environments to issues in intimate and family relationships.
What I want you to note here is
Whether actual, anticipated or imagined your stress response will be activated.
That’s right even if you just imagine something stressful happening, it will increase the release of stress hormones and your body physiology will change.
This is also why when I ask clients how much stress they’re under, they will often reply with I’m not really stressed, many times they look to the external markers to validate their stress levels, “I have a job- tick, I have my home- tick, everyone I love is ok- tick.”
So for the most part you think yeah it’s all good however on the inside your anticipated and imagined stress has you swimming in cortisol most days, your sleep quality is poor and this is why…
Stress Management Is About Learning & shifting patterns
You need to learn how to identify your markers for stress, as well as the thought patterns that are being triggered for you and in turn triggering the stress response. It’s also essential to learn new thought patterns that are more useful and helpful to mitigating the usual cascade of hormonal release from your adrenal glands.
This is usually something referred to in psychotherapy as psycho-education, getting in touch with your existing resources and calling on those to help you feel more calm and in control. Sounds easy but it can be a real challenge, this is where working with a practitioner can really help you.
Let’s take a look at some of the bodies give aways that you’re either is a fight or flight (Stressed State/ Sympathetic Nervous System) or in a Rest and digest (Relaxed State / Parasympathetic Nervous System)
start reducing stress today…
Notice your bodies response in any one give moment throughout the day and try and pull yourself back from that pattern of behaviour. This is often easier said than done.
You can start creating small pattern interrupts like: shifting your breathing to diaphragmatic breathing, when you’re overwhelmed get up to get a glass of water or herbal tea, take a quick walk you only need 3-5 mins, if you’re at work take the stairs (moving nervous energy by moving the body is very effective for many people) put the headphones on and do a 3 min breathing meditation.
The purpose of this is to start interrupting the patterns that aren’t serving you.
Find things you can do that remove you from the stressor for a really short time even 2 mins, but more on this further on.
How Stress & Anxiety Affects Your Brain?
When your stressed you release multiple chemicals that have various effects.
STRESS AND YOUR HIPPOCAMPUS
Your hippocampus is the part of your brain that is crucial for memory and regulation of stress hormones themselves. It’s involved in helping to stop the stress response.
When this part of your brain is flooded with stress hormones over a long period of time (more than 30 minutes) learning and memory can be affected.
You know that feeling of utter frustration when you go to say something and you pull a total blank? Like it’s something you were looking at just a moment ago how could you possibly just completely forget?
This is the part of the brain that is responsible for the recalling of facts, so remembering the what, when, where and who.
Key dendrites (cells) in this part of the brain shrink when exposed to long term stress. The cells also morph. Scientists have also observed that there is an increase in the death of cells in this part of the brain in people who are chronically stressed.
Now learning generally increases the production of important cells in this part of your brain however scientists have also found that the production of the granule cells is inhibited by stress.
So you are more likely to learn well and retain what you learn if you are in a calm, relaxed state. As opposed to the forgetful Felicia who’s running around like a headless chook trying to get 10 things done at once.
STRESS AND YOUR AMYGDALA
This is the part of your brain essential for emotional learning
In this part of your brain chronic stress will:
- Prevent analgesia- so you’re more likely to experience higher amounts of pain, why so many of your symptoms worsen when you’re stressed.
- Inability to regulate anxiety like behaviour, so you’re more likely to binge eat, or nail bite etc.
- Impacts on working memory function, so here it gets a little interesting.
This is thought to be the area in your brain where you take short term memory and store it for the long term. Many long term memories are connected to strong emotions.
When this part of the brain is impacted by stress we see that even if an event occurs that has a strong emotional stimuli you’re unlikely to remember it. Could this start to influence a negativity bias? Where we store and recall primarily negative events and emotions as opposed to a more balanced view of all of our emotional experiences?
So both the hippocampus and amygdala are affected adversely by stress and both of these parts are also in communication with each other.
Long term anxiety can lead to depression and isolation
We know that if you're anxious and you’re not actively managing that anxiety your avoidance strategy will stop working and then you’re at a higher risk for depression.
There has also been some research that shows if you experience anxiety in childhood or adolescence you’re more likely to develop depression in adulthood.
These changes in the brain can be long term and devastating
There has been research that shows that stress and anxiety can increase the risk of things like dementia and alzheimer’s by up to three fold!!
What you see isn’t always what exists…
We also know that stress and anxiety directly impacts perception of risk and danger. This is thought to be one of the driving factors that leads people to become more isolated and risk averse. So in normal situations where you may benefit from community interaction. Like meeting a new group of people or trying out a new sport or hobby.
Those who have a certain level or stress or anxiety are more likely to feel a real sense of fear or an increased perception of threat due to the impacts of these stress hormones on the brain.
So the very thing that will help you, being around others, connection, support, and having an external focus on something other than yourself and your own problems will be something that you tend to shy away from because of the shift in perception.
Coping with stress
Left to their own devices most people will do several things to self medicate when stressed or anxious:
- Online shopping - Hello new pair of Lululemon tights 💁🏼♀️
- Scrolling social media
- Drink alcohol
- Smoke
- Over eat
- Lash out at those they love
These are all coping mechanisms whether you’re aware of them or not. So it’s best if we can choose wisely to take on healthier more constructive coping mechanisms. So I’d like you to pick one or two of these and implement them over the coming week.
Then you want to try a different one and then look back and re-evaluate. You want to see which approaches work best for you and stick to those.
There’s no one size fits all you need to find the approach that works for you.
Mindfulness practices, keep in mind you can do these while walking or drinking tea.
Time in nature
Prayer if you have faith you ascribe to
Journalling or writing
Drawing or painting
Reading non-charged books and just for the fun of it.
Playing cards or bridge or some other board game preferably not on a screen
Puzzles
Knitting, cross stitch, crochet or something to do with your hands
Breathing practices
Visualisations (positive ones preferably recorded or guided)
Watching a stand up comedy show.
Picking up the phone and chatting to an old friend.
Take a long bath with Epsom salts
Foot spas
Infra red saunas
LED light therapy
Massage chairs etc.
Listen to a Hypnotherapy recordings for stress and anxiety
These are just a few of the things you can do to start decompressing at the end of a long day. You need to try and have something you do daily to release the stress built up.
Can Stress Make You Sick?
Over the coming weeks I’ll be compiling articles on how stress impacts different body systems and can contribute to physical disease, this is important so we can learn what to do to bring the body and mind back into balance.
I deliberately wanted to start here with the brain because if this does encourage you to prioritise your mental health and reduce the load of stress then I don’t know what will really.
The other key thing if stress and anxiety is an ongoing issue for you and has already started to impact your physical health please seek out the help of mental health practitioners.
Medicare has recently increased their number of visits to a psychologist for therapy.
Strategic Psychotherapy is fantastic as a short term therapy to help you start creating new thought patterns and understandings around your stress, anxiety and resources you already have to overcome the unhelpful thought patterns.
Hypnotherapy is fantastic for shifting some of the anxiety.
Much of stress and anxiety is an interplay of the environment around you and your interpretation of that environment which is why two people will go through the same life event and both will respond completely differently.
Bolster yourself from the effects of stress by building your self awareness and developing your confidence to be able to deal with whatever life has to throw at you.
Stay tuned for more information on how stress and anxiety has the potential to impact your health and well being.
Look out for you loved ones, stress and anxiety is often addictive with many people running off the adrenalin they get from their stress. Share this content with them so that they can start to understand some of the long term health implications of living in that way.
If you want help or advice you can schedule a complimentary call here.