Brain Facts:
Stress

Stress

Stress hurts the brain, and that inevitably hurts productivity in the workplace…Enduring chronic stress is a little bit like taking a giant airplane and sticking it into water. The airplane wasn’t built to be in water; the brain wasn’t built to endure chronic stress.

Stress
—Adrenaline Too Much

Over the long term too much adrenaline stops regulating surges in your blood pressure. These unregulated surges create sandpaper-like rough spots on the insides of your blood vessels. The spots turn into scars, which allow sticky substances in the blood to build up there, clogging your arteries. If it happens in the blood vessels of your heart, you get a heart attack; in your brain, you get a stroke. Not surprisingly, people who experience chronic stress have an elevated risk of heart attacks and strokes.

Stress
—Age Related Disease

Stress is among the leading causes of age-related disease. It contributes to physical pain, as well as to the appearance of wrinkles and premature aging.

Stress
—Allostatic Load

Stress, left alone, is neither harmful nor toxic. Whether stress becomes damaging is the result of a complex interaction between the outside world and our physiological capacity to manage the stress. Your body’s reaction to stress depends on the stress, on its length and severity, and on your body. There’s a point where stress becomes toxic, and McEven calls it the allostatic load. (Bruce McEwen)

Stress
—Brain

The brain is just as influenced by stress as the immune system is. The hippocampus, that fortress of human memory, is studded with cortisol receptors like cloves in a ham. This makes it very responsive to stress signals. If the stress is not too severe, the brain performs better. Its owner can solve problems more effectively and is more likely to retain information…Life-threatening events are some of the most important experiences we can remember. Research shows that memories of stressful experiences are formed almost instantaneously in the human brain, and they can be recalled very quickly during times of crises.

Stress
—Champion - Brain Derived Neurotrophic Factor (BDNF)

The champion is the Brain Derived Neurotrophic Factor (BDNF). BDNF is the premier member of the powerful group of proteins called neurotrophins. BDNF in the hippocampus acts like a standing military armed with bags of Miracle Gro, keeping neurons alive and growing in the presence of hostile action. As long as there is enough BDNF around, stress hormones cannot do their damage.

Stress
—Classroom

The type of stress that most activates the stress hormones, and so shoots up cortisol levels, lurks in the classroom, in the forms of social threats like fears of a teacher’s judgment or of seeming ‘stupid’ in the eyes of other students. Such social fears powerfully impair the brain’s mechanisms for learning.

Stress
—Cortisol

There is a less famous hormone at work…also released by the adrenals, and just as powerful as adrenalin. It’s called cortisol. You can think of it as the “elite strike force” of the human stress response. It’s the second wave of our defense reaction to stressors, and, in small dopes, it wipes our most unpleasant aspect of stress, and returning us to normalcy.

Stress
—Defined

Researcher Jeansok Kim and David Diamond came up with a three-part definition that covers many of the bases.  In their view, if all three are happening simultaneously, a person is stressed.

Part one: There must be an aroused physiological response to the stress, and it must be measurable by an outside party.

Part two: The stressor must be perceived as averse. This can be assessed by a simple question: “If you had the ability to turn down the severity of this experience, or avoid it all together would you?”

Part three: The person must not feel in control of the stressor.

Stress
—Forgive
Positive Attitude

The ability to let go of angry feeling and turn the other cheek lowers stress levels and fosters a positive attitude. Dr. Neal Krause of the University of Michigan found that people who are readily able to forgive others experience enhanced psychological well-being and less depression than grudge-holders.

Stress
—Hippocampal Cell

Stress hormones will eventually overwhelm the brains natural defenses and wreak their havoc. In sufficient quantities stress hormones are fully capable of turning off the gene that makes Brain Derived Neurotrophic Factor (BDNF) in the hippocampal cells.

Stress
—Hypothalamus

When you sensory systems detect stress, the hypothalamus reacts by sending a signal to your adrenal glands, lying far away on the roof of your kidney. The glands immediately dump bucket loads of adrenaline into your blood stream. The overall effect called the fight or flight response.

Stress
—Immune   System

The stress response helps equip your white blood cells, sending them off to fight on the body’s most vulnerable fronts, such as the skin. Acute stress can even make you respond better to a flu shot. But chronic stress reverses these effects, decreasing you number of heroic white-blood-cell solders, stripping them of their weapons even killing them outright. Over the long term, stress ravages parts of the immune system involved in producing antibodies. Together, these can cripple your ability to fight infection. Chronic stress also can coax your immune system to fire indiscriminately, even at targets that aren’t shooting back—like you own body.

Stress
—Immune   System - Sickness

People who experience chronic stress are sick more often. A lot more often. One study showed that stressed individuals were three times as likely to suffer from the common cold. People were especially vulnerable to the cold-producing virus if the stressors were social in nature and lasted more than a month. They also are more likely to suffer from autoimmune disorders, such as asthma and diabetes.

Stress
—Learned  Helplessness

Phrase coined by Martin Seligman to describe both the perception of inescapability and its associated cognitive collapse.

Stress
—Learning

If the stress is too severe or too prolonged, stress begins to harm learning. The influence can be devastating. Stressed people don’t do math well. They don’t process language very efficiently. They have poorer memories, both short and long forms. Stressed individuals do not generalize or adapt old pieces of information to new scenarios as well as non-stressed individuals. They can’t concentrate. In almost every way it can be tested, chronic stress levels performed 50 percent worse on certain cognitive tests than adults with low stress. Specifically, stress hurts declarative memory (thing that you can declare) and executive function (the type of thinking that involves problem-solving). Those, of course, are the skills needed to excel in school and business.

Stress
—Learning

Certain types of stress really hurt learning, but some types of stress boost learning.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging of men and women under stress showed neuroscientists how their brains differed in response to stressful situations. In men, increased blood flow to the left orbitofrontal cortex suggested activation of the "fight or flight" response. In women, stress activated the limbic system, which is associated with emotional responses.

There are many books and movies that highlight the psychological differences between men and women -- Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus, for example; but now, neurologists say they have brain images that prove male and female brains do work differently -- at least under stress.

Same species, different genders … And now, a new high-tech scientific study reveals the differences between men and women may really start at the top. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania used a high-tech imaging method to scan the brains of 16 men and 16 women. The subjects were placed inside a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine, or fMRI.

"Using this state-of-the art-functional magnetic resonance imaging technique, we try to directly visualize what the human brain does during stress," Jiongjiong Wang, Ph.D., a research assistant professor of radiology and neurology at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, told Ivanhoe.

Researchers then purposely induced moderate performance stress by asking the men and women to count backward by 13, starting at 1,600. Researchers monitored the subject's heart rate. They also measured the blood flow to the brain and checked for cortisol, a stress hormone.

When the scans were completed, neuroscientists consistently found differences between the men's stressed-out brains and the women's. Men responded with increased blood flow to the right prefrontal cortex, responsible for "fight or flight." Women had increased blood flow to the limbic system, which is also associated with a more nurturing and friendly response.

Doctors say this information may someday lead to a screening process for mood disorders. "In the future, when physicians treat patients -- especially depression, PTSD -- they need to take this into account that really, gender matters," Dr. Wang explains.

Other experts caution that hormones, genetics and environmental factors may influence these results, bringing to light yet another difference between men and women. Neuroscientists say the changes in the brain during stress response also lasted longer in women.
WHAT IS fMRI? Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) uses radio waves and a strong magnetic field rather than X-rays to take clear and detailed pictures of internal organs and tissues. fMRI uses this technology to identify regions of the brain where blood vessels are expanding, chemical changes are taking place, or extra oxygen is being delivered.

These are indications that a particular part of the brain is processing information and giving commands to the body. As a patient performs a particular task, the metabolism will increase in the brain area responsible for that task, changing the signal in the MRI image. So by performing specific tasks that correspond to different functions, scientists can locate the part of the brain that governs that function.
FIGHT OR FLIGHT: Certain events act as "stressors," triggering the nervous system to produce hormones to respond to the perceived danger. Specifically, the adrenal glands produce more adrenaline and cortisol, releasing them into the bloodstream. This speeds up heart and breathing rates, and increases blood pressure and metabolism. These and other physical changes help us to react quickly and effectively under pressure.

This is known as the "stress response," or more commonly, as the "fight or flight response." But if even low levels of stress go on too long, it can be detrimental to one's health. The nervous system remains slightly activated and continues to pump out extra stress hormones over an extended period, leaving the person feeling depleted or overwhelmed, and weakening the body's immune system.
STRESS-REDUCING TIPS: There are several easy, practical things people can do to reduce the amount of stress in their lives. (1) Be realistic and don't try to be perfect, or expect others to be so. (2) Don't over-schedule; cut out an activity or two when you start to feel overwhelmed. (3) Get a good night's sleep. (4) Get regular exercise to manage stress -- just not excessive or compulsive exercise -- and follow a healthy diet. (5) Learn to relax by building time into your schedule for reading or a nice long bath.

Stress
—Villain

Cortisol is the villain, part of the hormones called glucocorticoids. These hormones are secreted by the adrenal glands, which lie on top of the kidneys. Stress hormones can do some truly nasty things to your brain if boatloads of the stuff are given free access to your central nervous system. That’s what’s going on when your experience chronic stress. Stress hormones seem to have a particular liking for cells in hippocampus, and that a problem, because the hippocampus is deeply involved in many aspects of human learning. Stress hormones can make cells in the hippocampus more vulnerable to other stresses. Stress hormones can disconnect neural networks, the webbing of brain cells that act like a safety deposit vault, storing your most precious memories. They can stop the hippocampus from giving birth to brand-new baby neurons. Under extreme conditions, stress hormones can even kill hippocampal cells. Quite literally, severe stress can cause brain damage in the very tissues most likely to help your children pass their SATs.

Stress
—Workplace

Three things matter in determining whether a workplace is stressful: the type of stress, a balance between occupational stimulation and boredom, the condition of the employees’ home life.

Control is critical. The perfect storm of occupational stress appears to be a combination of two malignant facts: 1) a great deal is expected of you and b) you have no control over whether you will perform well.