Stress Hormones and How can Chronic Stress can affect brain and body in the long term?
Cramming for a test? Trying to get more done than you have time to do? Are you sleeping restlessly, feeling irritable or moody, forgetting little things, and feeling overwhelmed and isolated?
Don’t worry. We’ve all been there. You probably just stressed out. Stress isn’t always a bad thing. It can be handy for a burst of extra energy and focus, like when you’re playing a competitive sport, or have to speak in public. But when it’s continuous, the kind most of us face day in day and day out, it actually begins to change your brain.
Stress is a feeling we all experience when we are challenged or overwhelmed. But more than just an emotion, stress is a hardwired physical response that travels throughout your entire body.
In the short-term, stress can be advantageous, but when activated too often or too long, your primitive fight or flight stress response not only changes your brain but also damages many of the other organs and cells throughout your body.
Stress Hormones
Your adrenal gland releases the stress hormones cortisol, epinephrine, also known as adrenaline, norepinephrine. As these travel through your blood stream, they easily reach your blood vessels and heart. Adrenaline causes your heart to beat faster and raises your blood pressure, over time causing hypertension. Cortisol can also cause the endothelium, or inner lining of blood vessels, to not function normally.
Scientists now know that this is an early step in triggering the process of atherosclerosis or cholesterol plaque build up in your arteries. Together, these changes increase your chances of a heart attack or stroke.
Chronic Stress
Chronic stress can affect brain size, its structure and function, right down to the level of your genes. Stress begins with something called the hypothalamus pituitary adrenal axis (HPA axis), a series of interactions between endocrine glands in the brain and on the kidney, which controls your body’s reaction to stress.
When your brain detects a stressful situation, your HPA axis is instantly activated and release cortisol, which primes your body for instant action. But high levels of cortisol over long periods of time wreak havoc on your brain. For example, chronic stress increases the activity level and number of neural connections in the amygdala, your brain’s fear center. And as the levels of cortisol rise, electric signals in your hippocampus, the part of your brain associated with learning, memories, and stress control, deteriorate. The hippocampus also inhibits the activity of the HPA axis, so when it weakens, so does your ability to control your stress. That’s not all, though.
Cortisol can literally cause your brain to shrink in size. Too much of it results in the loss of synaptic connections between neurons and the shrinking of your prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain that regulates behaviors like concentration, decision-making, judgment, and social interactions. It also leads to fewer new brain cells being made in the hippocampus. This means chronic stress might make it harder for you to learn and remember things, and also set the stage for more serious mental problems, like depression and eventually Alzheimer’s disease.
The effects of stress may filter right down to your brain’s DNA. An experiment showed that the amount of nurturing a mother rat provides its newborn baby play a part in determining how that baby responds to stress later in life. The pups of nurturing moms turned out less sensitive to stress because their brain developed more cortisol receptors, which stick to cortisol and dampen the stress response. The pups of negligent moms had the opposite outcome, and so became more sensitive to stress throughout life. These are considered epigenetic changes, meaning that they effect which genes are expressed without directly changing the genetic code. And these changes can be reversed if the moms are swapped. But there’s a surprising result. The epigenetic changes caused by one single mother rat were passed down to many generations of rats after her. In other words, the results of these actions, were inheritable.
When your brain senses stress, it activates your autonomic nervous system. Through this network of nerve connections, your big brain communicates stress to your enteric, intestinal nervous system.
How stress affect digestion?
Besides causing butterflies in your stomach, this brain-gut connection can disturb the natural rhythmic contractions that move food through your gut, leading to irritable bowel syndrome, and can increase your gut sensitivity to acid, making you more likely to feel heartburn. Via the gut’s nervous system, stress can also change the composition and function of your gut bacteria, which may affect your digestive and overall health.
Waistline and Stress
Speaking of digestion, does chronic stress affect your waistline?
Well, yes. Cortisol can increase your appetite. It tells your body to replenish your energy stores with energy dense foods and carbs, causing you to crave comfort foods. High levels of cortisol can also cause you to put on those extra calories as visceral or deep belly fat. This type of fat doesn’t just make it harder to button your pants. It is an organ that actively releases hormones and immune system chemicals called cytokines that can increase your risk of developing chronic diseases, such as heart disease and insulin resistance.
Meanwhile, stress hormones affect immune cells in a variety of ways. Initially, they help prepare to fight invaders can heal after injury, but chronic stress can dampen function of some immune cells, make you more susceptible to infections, and slow the rate of healing.
Powerful Weapons
It’s not all bad news, though. There are many ways to reverse what cortisol does to your stressed brain. The most powerful weapons are exercise, and meditation, which evolves breathing deeply and being aware and focused on your surroundings. Both of these activities decrease your stress and increase the size of the hippocampus, thereby improving your memory.
Want to live a long life?
You may have to curb your chronic stress. That’s because it has even been associated with shortened telomeres, the shoelace tip ends of chromosomes that measures a cell’s age. Telomeres cap chromosomes to allow DNA to get copied every time a cell divides without damaging the cell’s genetic code, and they shorten with each cell division. When telomeres become too short, a cell can no longer divide and it dies.
As if all weren’t enough, chronic stress has even more ways it can sabotage your health, including acne, hair loss, sexual dysfunction, headaches, muscle tension, difficulty concentrating, fatigue and irritability.
So what does all this mean for you?
Your life will always be filled with stressful situations. But what matters to your brain and entire body is how you respond to that stress. If you can view those situations as challenges you can control and master rather than as threats that are insurmountable, you will perform better in the short run and stay healthy in the long run.
So don’t feel defeated by the pressure of daily life. Get in control of your stress before it takes control of you.
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