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- Chronic Stress Is Dumbing You Down - Learn how your brain is impacted & how to stop it.
Chronic Stress Is Dumbing You Down - Learn how your brain is impacted & how to stop it.
This week you get the 🔑 to undoing years of damage from chronic stress. You're welcome.
Life-Maxxing Magazine & Sam Bachvaroff
03 Aug
In partnership with
In partnership with
🚨 SOS: I’m not stressed out?! 🚨
We’re all obsessed with stress management these days.
Meditation apps, gyms as therapy, actual therapy…
Whether we like it or not, modern life barrages us with minor stressors 24/7. Traffic, artificial lights, rent - our modern stressors are less threatening, but more constant, than the ones we evolved to face.
But these minor stressors add up to chronic stress that makes you more emotionally reactive and less cognitively agile than you should be.
Table of Contents
How does chronic stress cause disease?
To understand why chronic stress drives disease, we have to explore a field of research called “psychoneuroimmunoendocrinology” - which is a long way of saying that your mood, your neurotransmitter levels, your immune function, and your hormonal system can all impact one another.
The main way that works is through the endocannabinoid system (ECS). The ECS “represents a microcosm of psychoneuroimmunology or mind-body medicine.” The ECS is involved in all sorts of bodily functions and states:
Sleep
Inflammation
Your immune system
The pain you feel in your body
The good feeling you get from exercise
How stressed out you get from daily life
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How does chronic stress change your brain?
What is the ECS & why is it the secret to health?
Many systems in our body rely on these things called signaling molecules, which are molecules that bind to specific sites on cells called receptors. For example, dopamine binds to dopamine receptors on neurons. Endorphins bind to opioid receptors to relieve pain. And endocannabinoids (eCBs) bind to eCB receptors.
In general, receptors and signaling molecules (called ligands) are like locks and keys. When a ligand binds with a receptor, it “produces a signal” or a change inside the cell.
So what is the ECS? In humans, the ECS is made up of:
the CB1 and the CB2 receptors,
the eCBs anandamide (AEA) and 2-AG,
the enzymes that make and break down the eCBs.
Your eCBs are made of fats, and the Omega-3 fatty acids that you eat in your diet are the precursors to these eCBs. So don’t skimp on your Omega-3s! The ECS can be thought of as “a lipid-signaling system…that modulates neurotransmitter release.”
Basically, fat-based signaling molecules (eCBs) are made and released when you need them (on demand), like if you have a stressful interaction or stub your toe. They bind to receptors on neurons and the release of that neurotransmitter is suppressed. For example, if eCBs bind to receptors on a GABAergic neuron, the release of GABA will be suppressed.
This system plays a role in many biological processes, but has a particularly important role in helping you recover from stress. However, chronic stress can mess up your ECS, such that you can’t effectively handle any stress. To fix that problem, you need to restore your ECS.
4 stress relief products to change your life
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Magnesium L-Threonate works rapidly to give me a cool, even-keeled stress-relieving effect. It was invented in 2009 by a team of neuroscientists at MIT in their search for substances that could improve cognitive function. Mag Threonate crosses the blood brain barrier and is known to relieve “subjective anxiety in subjects prone to mental stress.”
Eating brain is known to support neurological health due to its rich Omega-3 fat content. In times of glut, prehistoric peoples would harvest large numbers of animals and consume only the brain and a few choice cuts of muscle meat. I swear by the Heart & Soil brain and bone marrow supplement for some extra support during times of stress.
Reading recommendation: Buddha’s Brain
There is something about this book written by two neuroscientists who are also practicing Buddhists that just unlocks your understanding of mindfulness. They discuss the science behind mindfulness, exploring the idea that the Buddha was born a normal person, but his habits and epiphanies shifted his brain state in a way that made him the Buddha.
Why chronic stress makes you dumb & reactive
Chronic stress can give you brain fog through neuro-inflammation, and it can change your brain and ECS to make you more emotionally reactive and cloud your thinking. What we care about is the science of how chronic stress changes our brains, how these brain changes impact our daily life without us even realizing it, and what we can do to fix our brains.
Chronic stress changes a key part of your brain
Our conscious experience is primarily created by our brain state. One area of our brain has an outsized impact on our daily experience: the amygdala. The amygdala is a part of your brain that is often thought of as your “fear center.”
We need to go over a little neuroscience to unlock the secret to healing chronic stress. - Editor
The amygdala plays an outsized role in our daily life because all sensory information travels through this area of your brain - specifically a part of the amygdala called the basal lateral amygdala (BLA) - where the information is processed before being sent out to the emotional processing area of your brain.
How is sensory information “processed” in your BLA? Let’s imagine a club with a long line of guests waiting outside and a bouncer guarding the door. The club represents your conscious experience. The bouncer is your BLA, and everything that you see, hear, and feel are the guests (the “sensory information”).
The BLA bouncer either roughs up the guests when they enter or he compliments them. As a result, the guests come in grumpy or happy. In other words, the information stays the same, but how the information is processed in the BLA affects how you feel.
What does all this have to do with the ECS?
Well, let’s imagine that if the bouncer is stoned, then he compliments all the guests as they enter the club. It turns out that in a healthy individual, your BLA has an incredible density of CB1 receptors. If you recall, endocannabinoids (eCBs) bind to CB1 receptors.
Researchers have found that “eCB signaling in BLA constrains activation of the stress response and anxiety.” That means when your BLA has lots of CB1 receptors, sensory information is down-regulated in a way that makes you feel good and relaxed.
The problem is that chronic stress causes resorption (disappearing) of CB1 receptors in the BLA. Less CB1 receptors means less signaling. With less CB1 signaling, the sensory information gets roughed up by the bouncer/BLA before it enters the emotional processing part of your brain. That can make you feel anxious, or reactive, or cloud your judgement - depending on the person and situation. So how do we stop chronic stress, heal after chronic stress, and restore our healthy ECS function?
How to heal from chronic stress
Many people find that exercise or fun social interactions are the most effective ways to relieve stress. Social interaction reliably increases eCB levels, which decreases stress ratings and just feels good. Similarly, exercise bolsters eCB levels - the real cause of the “runner’s high.”
To heal after chronic stress and revitalize your ECS, you need to move your body. Exercise increases levels of the bliss molecule, makes your CB1 receptors more sensitive, and increases genetic expression of CN1R, which means you build more CB1 receptors in your BLA.
There’s one more thing. Cold exposure has been found to dramatically increase CB1 receptor density in the BLA. That’s why people who regularly do cold exposure are (ideally) clear headed and emotionally regulated.
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