Get a Grip (Intro) - A primer on handling stress

First in a series about getting a grip on stress for the sake of your brain and a better life

We have all experienced the way our bodies respond when we are faced with a stressful event - the racing heart, the slight sick feeling in the stomach, the release of sweat. What you don’t feel is the glucose, which is an energy source, released into the blood, or the stress hormones released by different parts of your brain that make you more alert and filter out information that isn’t needed at that moment. If you want the details of the main stress system in our body, the HPA axis, see this great 2-minute video:

The main stress hormone in humans, cortisol, acts on specialized receptors throughout our body and brain, and especially in brain areas like the amygdala (emotion-regulation) and hippocampus (memory). Most importantly, this hormone plays a major role in coordinating the behaviours that you will need to deal with the stressor at hand.

All of these changes in your body are absolutely necessary when you are faced with a real threat. If a lion ran into your space right now, you would experience what I just described. However, the exact response would vary somewhat from person to person. Some of us would hide, some of would run, some of us might even try to fight the lion. In other words, how we respond to even major stressors is not fixed. There is a lot of individual variability and there are a myriad of reasons for that (more posts on that later).

The lion example is extreme and in fact, having a strong stress response to things like predators is how humans have survived this long. Some humans still face stressors that threaten their very existence every day. We only have to go to current news to know that. But, for many of us living in the developed world, the situations that we perceive as stressful are not that severe. But, they can still lead to the same changes in the body and brain.

What we know about stress hormones in the brain is that they do a great job when they are released once in awhile for a short time, but, when they are released frequently or for long periods of time, they are damaging because they break things down (for example, releasing stored glucose). Eventually, they can damage the cells in those parts of the brain that we rely on for emotion, memory, and making important decisions. So, managing stress as much as possible means protecting those structures.

For example, the effect of stress on memory has been studied for many years and a great review of that work is now available as an open-access article (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2022.02.020) for those interested in the technical aspects. For an overview, see the figure below that comes from that article. When a stressor occurs (yellow lightning strike) some mental processes are enhanced (green) and some are suppressed (red) and these things happen over time (see bottom for timeline) and are a result of the hormones and other chemical messengers that are released. Memory for the event, for example, may be enhanced as might be habits and routines that surrounded that event. But, memory for other events that occurred at the same time or the details and updating of other memories could be suppressed. Over time, if the stressor was significant, new memory formation may be hindered but the specific details of the original stressful event can be enhanced (memory specificity). You can see how this could lead to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Figure from Schwabe et al., 2022

For most of us, avoiding situations that are potentially stressful is not possible. You have a deadline looming, you get stuck in traffic when you’re already late, you’re standing in front of 500 first-year Psychology students about to give a lecture. But, fortunately, your response to those situations is not fixed. We know this because of work showing large individual variability to such situations allowing you to take some control over that response. Your perception of the situation matters a great deal. For example, having the ability to stop and appraise the situation prior to responding has a large effect on the physiological stress response. Recent research by Crum and colleagues (https://doi.org/10.1080/10615806.2016.1275585) (regretably, not open access) showed in a lab setting that providing people with a ‘stress is enhancing’ mindset prior to a challenging and threatening social stressor improved various aspects of their stress response compared to people that had been provided with a ‘stress is debilitating’ mindset.

There has been a lot of research done showing that managing your response to potentially stressful events keeps your brain healthy. And that feeds forward as a healthy brain makes it easier to have control during times that can be stressful. What can you do? So, it turns out there is a secret about your brain that even health care professionals (especially in the west) kind of forget….your body isn’t just a scaffold for your head and brain! Your brain and various parts of the body below the head are in constant two-way communication. In other words, physical health and brain health are inseparable so maintaining a healthy body means maintaining a healthy brain.

So, in conclusion, stressful events may not be avoidable but suffering the consequences of an uncontrolled reaction to them is. Please join me for future segments of Get a Grip to learn about how you can gain control over the way in which your brain deals with stress.