There is a caveat, however, the researchers said. The findings are related to low to moderate stress. When your stress levels go beyond moderate and become constant, that stress becomes toxic.
“The bad consequences of stress are pretty clear and not new,” said Assaf Oshrilead author of the study and assistant professor in the College of Family and Consumer Sciences.
Sustained high stress can actually change the structure of the brain. It leads to an increase in white matter at the expense of gray matter, as it is involved in muscle control, decision-making, self-control, emotion regulation, and more. Chronic stress can also make people more susceptible to a variety of ailments, ranging from nausea and migraine headaches to high blood pressure and heart disease.
“But there is less information about the effects of more limited stress,” Oshri said. “Our results show that low to moderate perceived stress was associated with increased neural activation in working memory, leading to better mental performance.”
In a previous study, Oshri and his colleagues showed that low to moderate levels of stress could help individuals build resilience and reduce their risk of developing mental health disorders such as depression and antisocial behavior. This study also showed that limited periods of stress can help people learn to cope with future stressful situations.
This study builds on that work and provides magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to show how mild to moderate stress can make the parts of the brain that control working memory do their job more efficiently.
Support networks, friends and family can help people cope with stress in healthy ways
Researchers analyzed the Human Connectome Project’s MRI scans of more than 1,000 people from different races and ethnicities. The Human Connectome project, funded by the National Institutes of Health, aims to provide information on how the human brain works.
The results suggest that individuals who reported low to moderate levels of stress had increased activity in the parts of the brain involved in working memory. Participants who said they experienced chronic high stress showed decreases in these areas.
To assess perceived stress levels, participants answered questions about how often they experienced certain thoughts or feelings. For example: “In the past month, how often have you been upset by something that happened unexpectedly?” and “In the past month, how often have you found yourself unable to get through all the things you had to do?” This scale has proven to be an effective measure in several other international studies.
The researchers also examined participants’ social networks using a variety of measures, including how individuals felt about their own ability to deal with unexpected events, how satisfied they were that their lives had meaning and purpose, and the availability of friend-based support in their social networks. .
To analyze working memory, participants were shown a series of four types of pictures of things, such as tools and faces of individuals, and were later asked to recall whether they were the same pictures they were shown earlier. The researchers then analyzed MRI images of the participants’ brains as they performed the tasks to assess neural activation in different parts of the brain.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, participants who said they received more support from family and friends appeared to be better able to cope with low to moderate levels of stress in a healthy way.
“You have to have the right resources to get validation from adversity and stress,” Oshri said. “For some people exposure to adversity is a good thing, but for others maybe not.
“It’s possible that you can sustain more stress if you have a supportive community or family.”
HT
Source: ANI
Source: The Nordic Page