Stress is rewiring your brain!

The term "stress" was first used in the 1930s by a Hungarian physician named Hans Selye. He defined it as the body's response to a demand or challenge, be it physical, mental, or emotional.

Stress has been around since the dawn of humanity. Our ancestors faced daily physical and environmental stressful events which were life threatening such as hunting for food, natural disasters, or protecting themselves from predators. The body's response to that stress, known as the "fight or flight" response, was necessary for their survival.

Over time, as the world got taken over by technology, the stressors have become multi-factorial, intertwined within the multi-layered lives that we live, making it more complex and intense than ever before.

Another sea change in the nature of stress today is that it is longer lasting than ever before…. what is called long-term or chronic stress.

While it is common wisdom that stress is not good for the body, but recent brain research reveals that long-time stress also causes long-term changes in our brain function. To understand how stress affects our brain, important to understand a little about how the brain works.

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Did you know that stress is not always a bad thing? In fact, there's such a thing as "good stress", which is also known as eustress. Eustress is the positive stress that we experience when we are excited or engaged in a challenging activity, such as starting a new job or participating in a sport we love. It can help us feel motivated, energized, and focused, and can even improve our performance. So next time you feel a little stressed out, remember that not all stress is bad, and that a little bit of eustress can actually be a good thing!

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Brain plasticity!

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The human mind is a fascinating thing, and far more flexible than we assume. The mind can transform over time, learning to cope with everything from daily challenges such as stress to even catastrophic injury. This flexibility has a name: neuroplasticity.

This process of neuroplasticity, also known as brain plasticity, continues throughout our lives, involves many processes and is influenced by new experiences.

Put simply; your brain has the amazing ability to reorganize itself, create new neural pathways, and expand neural networks based on the environmental stimuli and thinking patterns. Depending on what is present in the environment, the neural synaptic relationship in our brain undergoes a change in order to respond to the stimuli.

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Stress pattern

Say, you are in a stressful situation, like a car accident on a highway. The part of your brain that governs your survival instincts may take over, leaving the parts of your brain that help to store memories and perform higher-order tasks with less energy and ability to get their own jobs done. (this is why you might be more forgetful when you are under stress or may even experience memory lapses during traumatic events.)

Our stress follows a fairly predictable pattern. You encounter some external stimulus like the accident above. That stimulus, in turn, triggers a series of negative thoughts and feelings that cause a physical reaction: a quickened heartbeat, headaches, irritability, etc. In turn, these physical reactions lead to more stressful thoughts, and the whole cycle repeats.

Now when we experience stress, our bodies release a hormone called cortisol, which triggers the "fight” (confront) or "flight" (escape) response. This response is designed to help us deal a short-term stress event like this. However, when stress becomes constant, chronic or long-term, the constant release of cortisol potentially leads to long-term changes in the brain.

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1. Effect on thinking: One of the ways that stress rewires the brain is by shrinking the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for decision-making, impulse control, and other higher-level functions. This can make it harder to regulate our emotions and make good choices, leading to a greater risk of anxiety, depression, and other mental health problems in the future.
2. Impact on memory: Stress can also cause changes in the hippocampus, which is responsible for memory and learning in humans. Chronic stress shrinks the hippocampus, making it harder to remember things and learn new information which means that a person is unable to make new short-term memories and process older memory.
3. Effect on emotions: When the amygdala, which is responsible for processing emotions, is constantly activated by stress, it can become overactive and hypersensitive. This can lead to increased anxiety and difficulty processing emotions, making it harder to cope with stressors in the future. This dysfunction affects emotional processing, memory formation and storage, and conditional learning, and as such, is associated with neurodevelopmental and neurologic disorders as well as psychiatric conditions.

Constant, chronic or long-term stress alters the synaptic communication (neuron communication) in the brain leading to impairments in learning, memory, storage and perception which in the future increases the chances of degenerative brain diseases like Alzheimer’s etc.

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Taking care of your mind

It is unrealistic to expect a life in today’s times completely devoid of stressful situations. Does it mean we can’t do anything to stop the adverse effects of stress on our lives. What can we do to take care of our mental make-up and reduce the impact of stress on our brains?

The good news is that just the way constant stress adversely effects our brain function, with constant and repeated practice, our brain can be trained to form positive synaptic associations with the ongoing events in our lives.

One of the most important things one should do in this direction is self-care. This essentially means taking care of one’s physical activities and includes getting enough sleep, eating a healthy diet, exercising regularly, and forming positive, contributive compassionate relationships in society. this gives the brain an opportunity to settle down, recharge itself and find purpose or meaning in life.

Secondly, it is important to reprogram your brain which has been under tremendous stress and strain over a period of time. This includes working on overcoming our ‘ingrained thinking patterns’, develop positive and taking external help to learn the ways of overcoming stress.

Just the way we consult a doctor for our physical ailments to avoid the risk of having any major problems later on, one must not shy in taking counseling or therapy from a qualified professional, who will help us learn how to effectively manage long-term or chronic stress.

In therapy, individuals learn new ways of thinking and coping with stress, which can lead to changes in neural connections that ultimately reshape the brain. They enable us to build coping mechanisms and resilience to environmental stress which are a fantastic way to reprogram your brain to handle stress more effectively by disciplining our thoughts, avoiding the triggers that provoke negative reactions, and resolve to take action.