How to build resilience to chronic stress by exercising in the morning and drinking less alcohol

Any flourishing corporation must change with the times. Your brain functions just like such a corporation. It moulds itself to your circumstance, so that you thrive. It switches its gears smoothly, gliding from one mode to another, in response to a changing terrain.

Acute stress puts you into a unique paradigm. Intuition guides your behaviour and accentuates your sense of threat. Your emotions are amplified and motivation surges as your hormones give your brain a sugar surplus. In mice, acute stress boosts the growth of brain cells in the hippocampus, a site that serves memory and learning. This response mobilises all your resources and equips you for survival. Acute stress, in itself, is no bad thing. It temporarily turns you into a superhero version of yourself and can save your life.

The benefits of acute stress transmute into the harm of chronic stress when the brain struggles to change its gears. When your stressful moment is past, you must, like an elastic band, snap back to a non-stressed state. If your brain is pushed past its elastic limit, however, it loses its resilience and finds it difficult to recoil from its stress paradigm.

In chronic stress, the brain starts leaning towards a chaotic exaggeration of the state of acute stress.

Mice who have suffered from chronic stress develop insulin resistance. Their hippocampi shrink. Humans suffer too. A Japanese study published in the Journal of Occupational Health last November, has shown how the chronic stress of diminishing supervisor support at work increases the risk of having insulin resistance. People with chronic work-related stress and burnout are demonstrably less able to regulate their negative emotions. Mice who are forced to endure stress over a period of time lose the ability to enjoy pleasure. These behaviours feed into themselves and reinforce each other. Dysregulated emotions can exaggerate acute stress into chronic stress, which further worsens emotional regulation, which in turn promotes chronic stress. Chronic stress may increase the risk of insulin resistance, which may lead to inflammation which can worsen symptoms of stress-induced depression.

A powerful game changer in the stress landscape has been the discovery that chronic stress is associated with changes in brain structure. If we were to scan the brains of people with work-related stress and burnout we would be likely to find thinning in regions of the cortex that overlap with areas serving executive function, cognitive control, emotional regulation and attentional focus, the very functions that seem to suffer in chronic stress. The brain changes seen in chronic stress are startlingly similar to the changes seen in ageing and dementia, prompting some to question whether both of these conditions can be accelerated by a lifetime of chronic stress.

A team from Sweden’s Karolinska Institute has recently shown how some of these changes can be reversed if people suffering from exhaustion related to chronic work-related stress undergo effective cognitive therapy and recover. The results, published in the January 2017 edition of the journal Cerebral Cortex, have tremendous implications because they give chronic stress a causal role in the brain changes, since these are reversed upon relief from chronic stress. It means that anything that you do to effectively buffer chronic stress will have a profound effect on your brain – an effect that goes beyond subjective sensations of wellness. It may also potentially reduce the risk of accelerated ageing, and even the risk of dementia.