Your Brain, Stressed Out — But in a Good Way!
This is a modified excerpt from Inside Your Head 🧠, a weekly newsletter exploring why your brain makes you think, feel, and act the way you do, written by me, Elemental’s senior writer and a former brain scientist. Subscribe here so you won’t miss the next one.
One of the few universally accepted truths right now is that 2020 is a stress tsunami of a year. And when your brain is too stressed for too long, seriously scary long-term consequences can occur, like depression and dementia. This news has probably contributed additional stress to some people, but stress isn’t all bad! In fact, research suggests that it can even be protective for the brain.
A study conducted by researchers in the Netherlands found that people who had mild to moderate stressful life events in old age, like the illness — but not death — of a loved one, had less cognitive decline than people who experienced either no stress or a very stressful event. Another study by epidemiologists at Johns Hopkins University found that people who were caretakers for a loved one lived 18% longer than people who didn’t have to take on that responsibility.
The theory is that these types of challenging, stressful situations in which you’re forced to adapt and change (like this pandemic) cause neurons to grow new pathways in the brain. Those new connections…
