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Stress is a familiar and unavoidable part of daily life.
You have probably heard about howbad stressis for your mind and body.
It can lead to physical symptoms such as headaches and chest pain.
Maria Korneeva/Moment/Getty Images
It can produce mood problems such as anxiety or sadness.
It can even lead to behavioral problems such as outbursts of anger or overeating.
Sometimes stress can help sharpen the mind and improve the ability to remember details about what is happening.
Stress might play a role in the development of mental disorders such as depression and various emotional disorders.
They discovered that such stress creates more myelin-producing cells but fewerneuronsthan normal.
The researchers found that stress can also have negative effects on the brain’shippocampus.
For more mental health resources, see ourNational Helpline Database.
It can also lead to lasting changes in the brain’s structure.
Chronic stress, on the other hand, can lead to an array of problems.
Stress can also limit or even halt the production of new neurons in the hippocampus.
The hippocampus is one of the regions of the brain heavily associated withmemory,emotion, and learning.
Glutamate is an excitatory neurotransmitter that plays a vital role in mood regulation, cognition, and memory functions.
Excessive glutamate, however, can contribute to the damage or death of brain cells.
Excessive glutamate is associated with neurodegenerative conditions such asAlzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and Huntington’s disease.
Participants with high cortisol levels lose greater brain volume and perform worse on cognitive and memory tests.
The effects of stress also appear to be cumulative.
Different kinds of stress affect the brainin different ways.
Recent stressful events (job loss, car accident) affect emotional awareness.
Traumatic events (death of a loved one, serious illness) have a greater impact on mood centers.
That’s because sometimes stress can make events can be difficult to remember.
Animal studies have shown some of the ways that stress may impact memory and learning.
Another study revealed that high levels of the stress hormone cortisol were connected toshort-term memorydeclines in older rats.
Feeling a little bit nervous before you give a presentation at work may help you perform better.
But too much stress or stress that happens when you are trying to learn something can be harmful.
A little stress at the right time can give your memory a boost.
The wrong stress at the wrong time, however, can make remember more difficult.
However, feeling stressed when trying to remember something can have the opposite effect.
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