Stress Damages your Brain!

Work, toxic relationships, kids, schedules, traffic, lack of sleep, and financial pressure can all cause you stress. They can also lead to poor brain function!
Do you have unhealthy symptoms of stress? Let’s see. No time for yourself? Not getting enough sleep? Always have a to-do list a mile long? No time to work out regularly? Not doing what you want with your life? Most of us will relate to some of these.
Stress promotes inflammation. Stress deteriorates the blood brain barrier. Stress is dangerous to your health, and especially to your brain.
Stress doesn’t just come from external forces, either. There are also physiological forms of stress. Conditions within your body that cause stress include things like elevated blood sugar, allergies, food intolerances, being overweight, parasites, gut infections and overgrowths, autoimmunity, anaemia, smoking and sugary, high carb diets.
Being under stress causes an elevation in the hormone cortisol. Cortisol is damaging to the hippocampus, an important part of your brain that helps you learn and convert short term memory into long term memory. It also helps regulate your circadian rhythms - the sleep-wake cycle - and if you’ve read any of our articles you’ll know how important sleep is! Chronically elevated levels of cortisol actually shrink your hippocampus. Basically, stress shrinks your brain!

Stress shrinks your brain!

Stress also damages your prefrontal cortex by shrinking brain neurons. This area of your brain helps you process emotions, regulate blood sugar levels, and helps you solve problems. It also affects your autonomic nervous system - all the things your body does that you don’t consciously tell it to do. These include your digestion, heart rate, and blood pressure.

The more you’re under stress, the more sensitive you get to it. Something that you could tolerate easily last year may now really stress you out. This is due to plasticity in the brain, and when put under enough stress it learns to favour the stress response.
If your goal is to slow brain degeneration, it is essential to tackle the stress in your life. While studies on Truehope EMP show it’s highly effective against stress, a supplement alone is not the solution. It might mean taking up meditation or yoga, but typically it means taking bigger action. ​

Click on the bottle to see the double-blind study on EMP and how it helped with an immense amount of stress for New Zealanders post-earthquake!

In our experience, tackling the biggest stressors in our lives means taking an honest look at what’s most important to us, and not what should be most important to us. It also means finding ways to become more resilient and changing our perspective where we can’t change our circumstances. Are the expensive car payments worth it when a cheaper car can get you from A to B just as effectively? Is the one hour commute in traffic the only way, when you could move and walk or get public transit to work? Is keeping up appearances in a bad marriage a good trade off for your health?

​Stress is the hardest aspect of health to address because it takes personal courage, and making hard decisions. It’s up to you to decide which stressors to tackle first, but your brain will thank you.

What do you do to reduce stress in your life? Share with us on Facebook!