Mental
Stress and Brain Health
If you’re out and around people a lot, you will eventually hear someone say that they
love stress sometimes because it helps them to perform better, but is that really the
case most of the time? It’s obvious that stress is a part of life, but the ways that it can
affect you should move most people to want to figure out better ways to get things done.
The next few paragraphs will be a discussion of stress and health.
It Damages Your Memory and Brain
A calm mind is always the best way to solve any problem. When you get super stressed
out, the signals and host of chemicals that comprise your thoughts and memories are
traveling back and forth at extremely fast rates. Rapid fire chemicals create more
chance for a miscommunication, and because stress can slow your cognitive ability,
something is likely to be disrupted in some way or another. Stress is so detrimental that
it can actually shrink the physical size of your brain, so it would be a good idea to learn
control as soon as you can.
It Directly Kills Brain Cells
Stress can have such an effect on you that it makes some parts of your body sick, but
what is even scarier is that it literally kills new brain cells in your hippocampus. After
extensive testing, researchers could predict a loss of new cells in animals that were
exposed to a stressful situation while in the study. The heaviest revelation became
apparent when they found that those cells weren’t replaced a week later. Hopefully that
research will put human closer to finding out how to avoid that stress completely.
The Structure of Your Brain Can Change
The makeup of the brain is a precise balance of tissues that are supposed to be able to
do work for you until the day you die. If you have experienced a high amount of stress
for prolonged period, then the structure of your brain is different than it was before that.
Some people who experience these changes, like soldiers who suffer from PTSD, will
show some pretty serious changes to the makeup and amounts of specific tissue types.
These imbalances could
set you up for a possible future of mental illness.
Stress Can Actually Make You Mentally Ill
When stress is being pushed onto you, it can do a lot of damage. When the damage or
changes have taken place, it doesn’t take much to push someone out of reality.
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