The month of April is Stress Awareness Month. Stress means different things to different people; well at least the degrees and duration of stress do, so there is no template for tagging and categorising it. In general, if you are subject to stress, you will not be expecting to feel particularly good either mentally or physically. You might however decide that this is the price that you must pay for the life you lead. Would you however be as happy with this trade if you knew that you were also damaging your brain and creating an environment whereby your ability to learn is impaired whilst at the same time your emotional responses are vastly increased. Well, the latest neurological research reveals that stress physically damages the brain and that reducing sources of stress is the single most useful thing that you can do to mitigate this.
Studies illustrate that stressors signal to the pituitary gland to deliver you some basic fight of flight chemicals and the villain of this particular piece is Cortisol. Cortisol is produced in response to our fight or flight reaction to stress and this chemical influx has structural effects on the brain at a cellular level. This will eventually take its toll on your brain and some of its functions.
The hippocampus is the part of the brain that deals with learning and with short term memory. Have you ever played a video game and as you tried and tried to take the shot or make the jump you got better and better until eventually you cracked it? Yes? Well, that’s the Hippocampus fine tuning your hand-eye coordination until you can eventually hit the spot. The hippocampus is vulnerable when we suffer ongoing emotional distress; because of the effects that cortisol has in this area. When there is a long duration of stress, cortisol has an effect on the rate at which neurons are added or more worryingly subtracted from the hippocampus thereby damaging your ability to learn. It is supposed to keep a healthy balance of neurons and so when it loses too many then the hippocampus itself reduces in size, lessening our ability to take in new information.
When neurological researchers put a mouse in a stressful situation within a laboratory setting, its hippocampus got smaller and smaller as the stress endured, and its nerve cells shrunk to a point where the cells could no longer communicate with each other. This resulted in the mouse finding it harder and harder to get around its environment. More alarmingly perhaps, they also discovered that the amygdala—the part of the brain that governs anxiety and fear—increased in size, all of which means the focus of the brain will be more on the emotions that we feel and less on taking in new information and making meaning of it.
It is true that you cannot always control the stressors that will assault you in your life but you do have control on how you view them. You also have choices around your work and relationships, especially those that neither feed your soul nor enhance your physical well-being. Stress Awareness Month is a chance for you to take an honest look at the stresses in your life and when making decisions about the dynamics at ply make sure that you take on board the full and true cost of letting yourself be exposed to a constant onslaught of stress.
Naked Training’s life coach and mindfulness guru, Jacque Smith, says of stress; – Managing stress and mental health comes in many forms; healthy diet, exercise, rest and relaxation are all high on the agenda. Did you know that just 10-15 minutes of mediation and mindfulness can be of huge benefit to individuals, employees and their business; resulting in a calmer mind; more focus; increased productivity and an overall sense of well-being?
It’s all about creating some space for you to be in the present moment. In that moment there is no past and there is no future, nothing other than the present is real. It allows your brain, body and minds to focus on that
moment and relieves them from other stressors and distractions.
Try this little tip to get a glimpse of just how relaxing it can be:
Sit comfortably. Briskly rub the palms of your hands together until you feel some warmth. Place your hands over the sockets of your eyes and breathe deeply into the warmth and the darkness, pay attention to the
feeling of relaxation and calm. It’s amazing what a few moments like that can achieve; imagine the positive impact you could have on your stress levels with a little more time spent on you?
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