By JULIE LAFRANZO
Everyone has some stress in their lives and that is normal. It is when you have chronic stress and it overflows your body that it becomes a problem. An “Experience Life” article by Jon Spayde about stays quotes that “The stress response is a normal adaptive coping response that evolved over hundreds of millions of years to help our ancestors avoid sticks and get carrots,” says Rick Hanson, PhD, a neuropsychologist and author of Buddha’s Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom (New Harbinger, 2009). “It’s natural. What’s also natural, though — and you see it in the wild — is that most stressful episodes are resolved quickly, one way or another. The natural biological, evolutionary blueprint is to have long periods of mellow recovery after bursts of stress.”
Now a days, the problem is that people have constant stress for 10 hours or more a day, said Spayde in his article. This constant amount of stress can come from anything. “School, obviously. Interpersonal relations aren’t always easy. Other than that life is just one giant ball of stress. Kind of Indiana Jones style just kind of following you.” Said Keegan Finger, a first-year Physics major at Drake.
There are also difference levels of stress. Not everything causes you the same amount of stress or the same kind of stress. “School is a different kind of stress than anything else because it both is and isn’t defining my future to an extent. School is on its own level, not necessarily higher or lower just different and then everything else is just this looming doom as time continues to march forward,” said Keegan.
“The stress involved with school is less sever but it’s spread out over a lot of time whereas with social situations it’s a lot of stress in really short doses,” Zach Wellens, a first-year Computer Science major here at Drake, said. Everyone feels stress differently so for one school might be more stressful while socializing might be more stressful for others.
Stress can cause problems in your brain when there is too much of it. Touro University Worldwide said that excess amounts of stress can “disrupt synapse regulation” which would mean that you have a harder time socializing and you tend to avoid interaction. Stress can also kill brain cells and reduce the size of the brain’s prefrontal cortex while also increasing the size of your amygdala, which makes your brain more “receptive” to stress. All of this is due to a high level of cortisol which is being constantly released in the brain due to stress.
Spayde’s article suggests different strategies of what to do to help reduce stress and reminds us that the brain can go back to its original state. Remember to rest and eat healthy food. It’s important to take care of yourself because if you don’t that can only bring you more stress. Take breaks from your work to sleep and eat. Exercising is something that is believed to be a good stress reliever as it “brings down your adrenaline and cortisol levels” to relax you.
Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
