Friday, November 24, 2017

Let's Talk Chronic Stress

Our most impulsive actions are not always determined by the moments when they happen according to Stanford neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky. He argues in his new book, Behave:The Biology of Humans at our Best and Worst, that rash decisions result not only from temperament and upbringing, also from what happens to a person's body in the moments, hours, weeks, months and even years before hand. It can go all the way back to childhood, Perhaps even further to our genetic makeup and the culture into which we were born. He believes biology can influence our behavior, for better or worse. He also believes all sorts of behavior, how we raise our children, how we assess our moral system and how we accommodate stressors, are within our control. Chronic stress makes us behave badly because it makes us sick. "If you're chronically stressed, you're not going to be at your sharpest cognitively." Chronic stress does awful things to your frontal cortices. During times of stress, we make ridiculous, stupid decisions. It may seem brilliant at the time, then later we regret them for decades after. Because of the effect on the frontal cortex, judgement, impulsive control and emotional regulation are not acting as they should. It becomes easier for you to learn to be afraid when you are chronically stressed. According to the latest finding, we are less empathetic, less compassionate, less capable of taking somebody else's perspective when we are stressed. There would be fewer cases of hypertension and diabetes if we could get stress under control. Ultimately, the most important reason is people would be nicer to each other. There is a huge body of literature that shows you are more likely to feel stress if you feel you have no control over what's going on and if you have no predictive information about when it's coming, how bad it's going to be and how long it's going to last. When you lack outlets for the frustration caused by the stressor and you lack social support it is even worse. Out of all these variables-control, predictability, social support and outlets for frustration-the most important one is social support. You don't need a lot of friends. you just need a few very good ones. An awful lot of time is spent on mistaking acquaintances for friends, then in times of crisis, we are deeply disappointed when the acquaintances turn out to be just that-acquaintances. Those people have become more selective about whom then associate with do the best.

1 comment:

  1. This is a great post; all your posts that I've seen thus far are... I am interested in how this chronic stress, mixed with my inability to sleep (I can go days without sleep, I'm simply not tired and if I am tired, I wake up when late evening/early night rolls around until the sun starts to rise or about 6-7am... I have a good number of issues one being anorexia nervousa...so i don't eat very much and that's great but i am so weak and so lost in this place I am in. I feel so hopeless, I don't know how to cope anymore.
    but your blogs do give me some hope. thank you for sharing <3 if you ever want to perhaps talk and see where our combined ... thoughts or whatever they are lol take us, please do message me. if not, no hard feelings. Sending all my respect and love.

    ReplyDelete