Posts tagged: psychology
A study in press at the journal Biological Psychiatry asked 103 people about how often they had experienced stressful events, both recently and over the course of their lifetimes, as well as about their chronic ongoing stress, and then took functional magnetic resonance images of their brain.
The results of this very small study continue to confirm what we already know: The more stress, the smaller the brain in several critical high-functioning areas.
More about what we know:
- Cumulative adversity (a combination of recent stressful events and the lifetime total of stressful events) is associated with smaller volume in medial prefrontal cortex (PFC), insular cortex , and subgenual anterior cingulate regions.
- Recent stressful life events were associated with smaller volume in two clusters: the medial PFC and the right insula.
- Life trauma (total stressful events over a lifetime) was associated with smaller volume in the medial PFC, anterior cingulate, and subgenual regions.
- The interaction of greater subjective chronic stress and greater cumulative stressful life events was associated with smaller volume in the orbitofrontal cortex , insula, and anterior and subgenual cingulate regions.
What’s so important about all those regions? They are all associated with reasoning and decision making, with emotion, and with self-control. And, while it’s true that lower brain volume does not always translate to defunct functionality (think of age-related atrophy in the human brain. Research continues to demonstrate that older adults are by no means less intelligent than the younger individual) it does mean that stress can lead to permanent brain damage.
Worry leads to stress and stress, unmanaged, can lead to a lifetime of poor brain function. Stress literally shrinks your brain.
Worrying of any sort is, essentially, feeling threatened, and that triggers the biology of the Fight or Flight response, which causes levels of stress-related steroid hormones like glucocorticoids to go up. If those levels persist for more than several days, they start to do permanent damage, including, it appears, shrinking the brain, especially the parts of the brain involved in higher order reasoning and decision making.
Is this a case for feeling less? No. Is this a case for thinking how you deal with daily stressors and to practice stress management? Yes.
Be nice to yourself. Don’t “tough it out”. Talk to people. Take breaks. Breath. Walk. Daydream. Be realistic. Sleep. Laugh.
You don’t have to, but you might enjoy your brain more.
Facets of Emotional Labour (Larger image)
Emotional labor is a form of emotional regulation wherein workers are expected to display certain emotions as part of their job, and to promote organizational goals. The intended effects of these emotional displays are on other, targeted people, who can be clients, customers, subordinates or co-workers.
Example professions that require emotional labor are that of nurses and doctors, waiting staff, actors, as well as escorts who provide what is called a girlfriend experience (or boyfriend experience). (Source: X)
