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