Stress (Psychosocial Health pt 3)

Question 1

Stress

Answer 1

Ranges from mild state of alertness (pregame) to a sense of complete overwhelmed by the push and pull of life.
Stay there too long = chronic stress
Translate from emotional to physical:
-your body’s response can lead to mental disorders such as anxiety, depression, IBS, heart disease, and high blood pressure.

Question 2

The Evolutionary Perspective on Stress

Answer 2

Your body and brain respond depending on many factors.
Ie. genetic background, personal experience.
Stuck today with ever-widening gap between the evolution of our biology and our society.

Question 3

The Alarm System and Memory

Answer 3

The body’s built in stress response is a gift of evolution.
Response ranges from mild to severe with severe activating fight or flight.
It engraves a memory of what happened, so we avoid it next time.
It puts all your focus on the danger.
-humans are different from animals because the danger doesn’t have to be present to elicit a response.
-the mind is so powerful that imagining ourselves in a stressful situation can elicit a physiological response.
The stress response leads to a chain reaction that results in memories being created.
It bullies the hippocampus-pruning dendrites, killing neurons, prevents neurogenesis, so those bad memories just keep rolling and new ones aren’t well formed.
The stress overload creates more connections in the amygdala which keep firing and calling for more cortisol and epinephrine, even though there is lots already available.
-the more it fires the stronger the response gets.
Eventually the stress response takes over the hippocampus, repressing the connection to reality.
-the stress becomes generalized and the feeling becomes a free-floating sense of fear that turns into anxiety.
-everything becomes a stressor, and this is the cusp of anxiety

Question 4

What happens in the fight or flight response? How is memory related?

Answer 4

Fight or flight hits the panic button in the brain known as the amygdala.
The amygdala fires off messages to the adrenal gland to release different hormones.
First norepinephrine activates the adrenal gland to dump epinephrine (adrenaline) into the bloodstream.
Heart rate, blood pressure, and breathing increase.
Pituitary gland then tells adrenal gland to release cortisol (to repair depleted energy stores).
The amygdala also tells the hippocampus to start recording memories.
-the hippocampus stores and retrieves memories
So we have a memory of a bad thing and that’s tied to a physiological respones

Question 5

Stress: An Active Response

Answer 5

The trick is how you respond to stress.
-if you react passively, it’s hard to change the stress response process.
Chronic stress makes the brain get locked into the same patterns, typically ones associated with fear, pessimism, hostility, anger, retreat.
Exercise controls the emotional and physical feelings of stress at the cellular level.
-physical activity is non-passive response to stress.
-allows you to actively release stress.

Question 6

The Science of Burning It Off (Related to Stress)

Answer 6

Exercise increases blood flow
-brings glucose and oxygen to all cells.
Exercise increases BDNF (neuron miracle grow) allowing for the making of new neurons and helping others survive.
Keep cortisol in check.
Increases our regulatory neurotransmitters serotonin, norepinephrine, and dopamine (in a balanced way).
Increases GABA.
On a mechanical level it relaxes the resting tension of muscle spindles.
-this breaks the stress feedback loop
-if the body doesn’t think its stressed, the brain figures it can relax too

Question 7

Reversing the effect of chronic stress…

Answer 7

Research has shown that rats that have been chronically stressed and then put on exercise do well.
Furthermore, the hippocampus grows back from its shrivelled stated.