What Happens To Your Brain When You Stress?

How stress rewires your brain and what you can do about it

that was a title of a recent video I saw by The Seeker channel and it was a great

video, but it didn't explain a whole lot about how stress rewires the brain or

the mechanisms involved. So I thought I'd fill in a few things. They gave you some

great tips they basically said exercise and sleep and meditate, but I thought I'd

explained a little more about how that actually works so first of all you have

in your brain you have brain cells and they do what they do because they're

connected to each other you have about a hundred billion brain cells and they

make connections so each brain cell makes on average about five to ten

thousand connections so you imagine the complexity of that neural network that

handles everything about you another thing we need to understand is brain

cells and just like muscles that if you work them out then they get stronger so

you work out a muscle by putting tension on it and then it grows it hypertrophies

if you don't use it it shrinks it atrophies. Brain cells are the same

way but they you don't put tension on them you send signals to them and

between them so the more connections a brain cell has the more likely that it's

going to be part of some communication the more likely that it's going to get

stimulated and get hypertrophied and stay strong so the stability of a brain

cell depends on of course the nutrition it gets but also the number of synapses

how many connections how well anchored how many roots does it have if you will

so in order to make new synapses you need two hormones in the video they

talked about one called BDNF called means brain derived neurotrophic

factor but you need one more hormone and that's human growth hormone and the best

way the single best way to create those two hormones is exercise

and a little bit exercise gives you a little bit of those hormones

high-intensity exercise gives you a lot of those hormones so while low intensity

long duration like walking is good for circulation it will give you a tiny

little bit of this what's more important is actually the intensity so if you do

short bursts like high-intensity interval training for even just a few

seconds then you're gonna increase your levels of these hormones by three to

four hundred percent and the other good way to increase them is fasting so

high-intensity exercise of fasting is a way to increase these hormones and the

other part of this is the complexity so your neural networks will be as complex

as the challenge that you put on them if you vary your behavior if you teach

yourself a lot of different skills whether it's physical skills or thought

skills then you're going to need a very complex network to handle that when

we're born we actually have a lot more a larger number of brain cells than we

have once we get older brain cells die off we wean off the ones we don't need

but the ones we need are the ones that are connected to others so we actually

increase the number of connections the number of synapses as we gain more

experience as we get wiser as we gain more skills and especially if we stay

active and keep developing then we increase the number of synapses but we

decrease the number of brain cells and exercise and complex behavior is the

number one way to maintain the complexity of these neural networks and

the more connections we have the stronger the brain cells are this more

stable and solid they are so when we have neurodegenerative diseases like

Alzheimer's and Parkinson's then the cells are losing their strength their

degenerating and a large part because they don't get stimulated through

exercise we don't have these hormones in place and we don't maintain the

complexity and the variation in our activities nutrition of course is

another important part but it's not the topic of this video so stress exercise

is stress but it's a good form of stress it's a form of stress that we're

designed for stress breaks you down and then you rest you recover and you

rebuild so exercise is a challenge and when we challenge the body it makes

these hormones so that we can rise to the challenge so that we can become

better so we can build stronger cells with more connections so it's not the

exercise that does it exercise is the challenge that breaks down recovery is

the thing that produces the health and the result and short term stress is what

we're designed for but there is another form of stress that's called chronic

stress and that's the stuff that people hear about that's what we mean when we

talk about stress that it's bad for us because this is a little bit of stress

it's not enough to challenge us it's just enough to wear us down and it goes

on and on and on and on day after day week after week year after year and when

it does that it does not produce these hormones it does not challenge the body

but what it does is this it reroutes the blood flow from the cortex to the brain

stem so the cortex is the surface layer of your brain this is where your

humanity or your creativity your thinking your motivation all those

things that make us uniquely human is a function of the cortex of the

surface layer but when we get stressed then that part of the brain becomes less

active and the blood goes from the cortex down into the brainstem to the

primitive to the survival brain so we get more into the animalistic to the

instinct to reflex action and that's where we lose our creativity our our

humanity if you will so that's how stress rewires the brain by shifting the

blood flow and inhibiting all of these functions that keep your brain vital and

strong and alive so get some exercise to challenge your body make some hormones

then get some rest so that your body can recover and then get some meditation so

that you can reduce the chronic stress so you can calm your mind you can help

your mind settle down a little bit please share this with as many people as

you can because these are things that are affecting all of us we have an aging

population and these are things that you want to start caring about and being

concerned about before they become a problem

once you have Alzheimer's and you have some degeneration often time it's too

late to really do something about it so prevention is much much better make sure

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coming your way and thanks for watching