How can your physical health be impacted by stress?
Stress eats you alive. Or at least, that's how it feels, right?
I've been having a tough couple of weeks. My medications changed, life got busy, and suddenly it felt like I was fighting for my life to keep my head above water when everyone else was calmly floating along.
This led me to wonder: to what extent does stress impact the body? There's obviously the idea of hair going grey early, but how much further does it go?
Studies have shown that both short and long term stress can worsen connections in the brain related to memory. If you have ever been so stressed over something that you start to do worse in school, you can probably attest to this on a personal level. One study from UC Irvine showed that with short term stress, hormones called corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH) activate and disrupted the dendritic spines where synapeses are. Synapses transmit information from one neuron to another, so they are extremely important.
In mouse/rat experiments with the same team, they found that by blocking CRH from interating with their receptor molecules, they can prevent stress damage to the dendritic spines. Future medicines or therapies could possibly use that information to help patients with ADHD, PTSD, or other situations where stress negatively impacts memories.
A study from the INRS found that long term work related stress, like a job that puts one in danger, had links to lung, colon, rectal,and stomach cancer, as well as Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma.
If constant pressure can degrade our body to such a degree, we should make more efforts to support those who are struggling. I look around everyday and I see people casually talking about killing themselves and giving up entirely out of stress and exhaustion. I constantly hear:
- 'If I skip a day for mental health, I'll have to spend so much time making up work I'll be even more stressed.'
-'It's like one awful, stressful thing is over and 15 more pop up with no room to breathe.'
-'I'm holding on by a thread, but if I take a break I'll want to die even more...'
This mental health crisis, especially among teens, speaks to the lack of support most feel they have in regards to their mental health. More safety nets need to exist so that a few bad days in a row don't build into something that is so stressful to get out of, ending it all or giving up entirely is preferable.
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Quick, off-topic tangent before we go:
The dendrites we've been talking about come from the greek word "déndron", which literally means tree, since the dendrites look like treee roots in the way they sprawl out.
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Dionysus, the greek god of wine, theatre, fertility, and madness has many epithets. One that caught my attention was "Dendrites", meaning he of the trees, alluding to his fertility associations.
Though obviously they come from the same root word and that's really the extent of the connection, I think its interesting that unintentionally, a god who has all these connections to the mind and madness in this way, has a direct connection to the science of the brain. Maybe a bit silly of a connection, but I think it's fun!
Links I Reference:
Stress Influences Brain and Psyche Via Immune System
Short-term Stress Can Affect Learning And Memory
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