80 lines
3.9 KiB
Markdown
80 lines
3.9 KiB
Markdown
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Effects of Chronic Stress
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Well...I guess I can try talking about chronic stress now. It's quite something.
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Basically,
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When your body encounters stress, be it from any sort of anxidety, physcial or mental,
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(also, excuse typing errors; my terminal is very laggy this morning)
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Your body releases this chemincal into your blood. A stress harmone. And when it
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interacts with certain parts of your body, it does some things.
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It basically puts you in a "fight or flight" mode.
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Digestion is hindered, your cognitive abilites are hightened, your immune system is hindered, basically most of the energy is going to "Deal with whatever you're dealing with right now"
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Then, after some time, this one neurotransmitter is released, and it tells your
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brain to stop producing that harmone. And it goes away, and your body goes back
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to normal.
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Here's the thing.If you have too much of a neurotransmitter being pumped into
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your brain, the receptors start to get weaker over time.
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Consider addiction.
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When someone gets addicted to something, it's because this one neurotransmitter called Dopamine is being activated.
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Dopamine basically goes off when something good happens, to tell yourself that something good is, well, happening.
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When you get a peice of candy, for instance, you might get Dopamine firing off
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in your brain.Sex gives you about 150% normal amount of Dopamine firing.
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There's a few drugs, such as crack, that give off about 800% Dopamine firing.
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Such high levels of Dopamine mean you're going to feel really good when taking this drug.
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It's also going to train your brain to want to take it more.
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Because neurons that fire together, wire together.
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The more something happens in your brain, the stronger the connection.
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Here's the thing though.
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Your Dopamine receptors are going to be /saturated/ in Dopamine.
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So they're going to catually respond by becoming more tolerate for Dopamine.
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They're going to /decrease/ the amonunt of receptors so they won't be as
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sensitive, to balance out for the large amount of Dopamine coming in.
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This is why with some drugs, people need more and more to get that fix.
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Because they need to keep upping the levels of Dopamine that's produced by the
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drug, and the neuron responds by making the neurotransmitters that recieve
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Dopamine less and less sensitive.
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So, here's the question.
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If you're stressed very often, what's going to happen to the neurotransmitter
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receptors that are triggered to turn off being stressed?
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They'll be saturated by the "stop being stressed" neurotransmitter. They start
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to decay, become less sensitive. And what happens, is that the normal amount of
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"don't be stressed anymore" neruotransmitter that would tell your body to stop
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producing that stress harmone stops working. And you end up having those stress
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harmones in your blood constantly, because they never go down.
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And then,
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Immune system is always lessened, causing things like sickness.
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Digestion is always weakened, causing things like ulsers.
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Cognitive function is always hightened, causing things like neurodegenerative
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deseases.
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It's not fun.
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What ends up happening is,
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One very small thing that could trigger stress,
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And your body will take /forever/ to try and turning it back off again.
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So you have a hard time getting out of stress once that happens.
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Something I've been working on recently -- since I get stressed a lot -- is meditating.
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For one, there's neurological evidence that meditation is corralated with stronger neurons, even neural growth.
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A publication on the study can be found here:
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http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2006/02/meditation-found-to-increase-brain-size/
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> Meditating can even replace small amounts of sleep.
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\- Nobillis
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It can, and I've seen it work like that.
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I think someone mentioned Sam Harris earlier; if nothing else, he does have a nice article on meditation.
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http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/how-to-meditate
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For those who don't know how to get started.
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