16/04/2025
I wanted to share some important information with you about stress, something that's often overlooked.
We often speak of stress as if it's a fleeting moment, but what you might not know is that according to neuroscience, if left unchecked, stress can become a lifelong struggle.
Can you believe that stress can reshape your brain, body, and even your genes? Here's how that works:
1. Stress triggers the fear circuitry in your brain. When you're stressed, your amygdala sounds the alarm and your brain sends a signal to your body, making you feel unsafe. This sets off a chain of events from your hypothalamus to your pituitary gland, then to your adrenals, resulting in a surge of cortisol. This can be useful in short term but dangerous when it's persistent.
2. Stress floods your brain with chemicals. High cortisol levels disrupt your prefrontal cortex, hippocampus, and the levels of dopamine and serotonin in your brain, affecting your ability to make decisions, learn, remember, and stabilize your mood. Your brain chemistry is altered.
3. Stress changes how your genes behave. Through a process known as epigenetics, chronic stress doesn't alter your DNA, but it does modify how your genes function. This means that genes responsible for mood, inflammation, and brain plasticity become dysregulated and can potentially pass this 'epigenetic signature' to future generations.
4. Persisting stress can make your body and brain normalize this imbalance. Under constant stress, the corrective system ceases to be effective, and the chemical imbalances become your new normal.
From all these, what started as stress might progress to Major Depressive Disorder, Generalized Anxiety, PTSD, autoimmune conditions, or cardiometabolic diseases. At this stage, therapy alone may not suffice. It could require medication, structured rewiring of the brain, and long-term support.
So, when should we intervene? Recognising early signs like sleep issues, irritability, withdrawal, and reduction in joy can deter progressing from mere stress to severe mental health disorders. Equipping oneself with mental health education, resilience techniques, mindfulness, self-awareness, and stress recovery practices can nip the problem in the bud.
Our understanding of mental health needs to evolve from the notion of treating either symptom or cause to treating both. It means not only employing talk therapy or medication alone but employing them in tandem. It entails treating both the emotional and biological aspects and working on prevention along with healing.
Remember, stress isn't just mental – it's encoded in your genes, present in your bloodstream and manifest in your brain. And without early intervention, it becomes your biology. I believe it's important to disrupt this process before it's too late.
If you would like help managing stress and learning more about yourself.
get in touch today.
Jason - Clinic Director of Kent hypnotherapy lounge and wellbeing clinic and Founder and CEO of Mentalk health Sittingbourne.
