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Brain Is a Co-Conspirator in a Vicious Stress Loop (2009)
- Veronexim 10y agoI wonder how much conscious will can help pull you out of a stress loop? If, of course, you can figure out which of your behaviors are stress-induced.
- robg 10y agoI was trained as a neuroscientist, took me over a decade to realize two important, basic, biological facts I wasn't taught: 1) Stress is always on - always. It's the survival instinct that can be reduced but not turned off. 2) Sleep is quite simply the recovery from stress. Without proper sleep, we don't recover. Now as we develop technologies for stress management, I'm still amazed that #1 and #2 are not as commonly understood - and talked about - as the need for good nutrition and hydration. The body was designed to stress and sleep. We ignore those primal drives to our short- and long-term peril.
- Florin_Andrei 10y ago> Stress is always on - always. It's the survival instinct that can be reduced but not turned off. This idea goes back decades ago to Hans Selye. He even postulated that there are optimal levels of stress that promote the most well-being - not too much, no too little. These become sort of self-evident when you think of the need to exercise and so on.
- BooneJS 10y agoI'm not a neuroscientist, but I have noticed in my life that there's certainly times where stress and internal drive form a loop which interferes with sleep. Crunch time, changes in employment, or trying to get something new off the ground with issues you don't yet know how to solve all adds up. Fight-or-Flight is a valuable response to actual life-and-death danger, but for some the brain turns too many innocuous things into saber tooth tigers.
- Practicality 10y agoThe worst is when you are so tired you can't sleep. I get that way if I stay awake ~36 hours or more. I try not to do that anymore though.
- shostack 10y agoif stress is chemical, is there not a good way to dampen or come close to removing it chemically? Would there be major health downsides to working to reduce stress in your life to this degree?
- robg 10y agoTrue. Alcohol and sedatives work really well. Both are addictive. Best natural approach appears to be exercise, which also helps us sleep better.
- thatcat 10y agoAdrenaline uptake can be prevented with beta blockers[0], such as propanolol[1] which is often prescribed for blood pressure, arrhythmia, and performance anxiety. The down sides are when you stop taking it, you may be hypersensitive to stress since other methods of dealing with the adrenaline have been neglected. Exercise and meditation are better ways to reduce the effects of stress in the long term. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_blocker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_blocker [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propranolol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propranolol
- DigitalJack 10y agoI take propranolol for both BP and stress. I also meditate. I can attest to propranolol's effectiveness for acute anxiety. Meditation is about equally effective for me, but not always practical.
- peterDeranger 10y ago"The body was designed to stress and sleep" robg, tell me – What kind of nonsens is this? Designed by whom? God? That's just fiction mongering my friend.
- thr0waway1239 10y agoI think sleep is talked about - but it is not understood. Specifically, unlike nutrition and hydration, we seem to be struggling to define conditions necessary for getting good sleep. And while I agree that exercise helps, there have been times when I used to tire myself out a lot via exercise and still struggled to fall asleep.
- TempleOSV409 10y agoI have a space alien. I win. You are a dead man walking. Fall-over retarded CIA nigger and die. God says... ibuprofen plums hassle's craves tough's marketability tasteful adventitious exhaustion puffiness Rosanne's Kip Xenophon imputations cleanliest ketch's merchandise motocross besiege baleen's understandingly surreys tassel's culminations cynic's cod's intravenous's Rhonda raspier cybernetics's uptown's wider 7 years in prison means 7 years as prince. 20 years in prison means 20 years as prince. You will suck my cock, in the end.
- throwanem 10y agotl;dr: "We tortured some rats, and they reacted as though they'd been tortured. When we stopped torturing them, they got better." Don't mistake me for someone who has a problem with animal research in its own right, but I'm having a hard time seeing the novelty here.
- astazangasta 10y agoThey probably got some fMRI, and they framed it in terms of cortisol, adrenaline and cytokines. Old knowledge is useless to modern science, we need to continually re-express it in the modish jargon of the day or people won't accept it as true. Thus, generations of studies restating the same old crap with new methods.
- tokensimian 10y agoThis is good! It sucks as a learner. But for science and progress of knowledge, it provides an inefficient but lacks-false-positives mechanism. It sucks for Liebniz, but was a positive for our understanding
- astazangasta 10y agoNo, it isn't good. It is brittle and dogmatic, and these dogmas are often thinly-evidenced ("now we know stress is all about cortisol levels!"). It means vast categories of human knowledge are regularly discarded without understanding or examination because of epistemological prejudice. And the process is not by any means lacking in false positives; this presumes that our current modes of knowledge are actually better, less error-prone, etc., than the forms of knowledge they are refusing to countenance, which they often are not.
- sevensor 10y agoThanks for this, I misread the headline and jumped to the comments to see if they would shed any light on who Brian is.
- dominotw 10y ago>It’s still August. Time to relax, rewind and remodel the brain. Who the hell is the entity that is doing the remodeling. What a bunch of garbage.
- peterDeranger 10y agoIt's even worse… some ppl here believe we are designed. Disappointing.