This Video Explores How Stress Destroys Your Brain.
Chronic stress from overwork, lack of sleep, or drama in a relationship can negatively impact your ability to learn, concentrate, and remember things. This TED-Ed video explains how constant stress damages our brains and what we can do to deal with it.
Sadly, for most of us, stress is inevitable in our modern digital age, a bit like internet memes except for the less funny ones. Sometimes your body can just get stressed from a hard workout, in which case that’s a good thing. But, as the TED-Ed video explains, the stress of being constantly worried about finances or feeling pressured by family or friends, to name a few, is when your brain begins to weaken and affect your ability to control stress, which in in turn, can harm your social life and decision making.
The video also talks about an interesting experiment that showed an inverse relationship between how much care a mother rat gave her newborn puppy and how the puppy dealt with stress later in life. It turned out that a puppy with a less caring mother became more sensitive to stress; the opposite was true for a puppy with a more nurturing mother. Even more surprising, the video suggests that the actions of these mothers are hereditary – this is called epigenetics .
This all sounds pretty bad to us (and perhaps our future generations), but – don’t worry – the best weapons against stress are exercise and meditation. This is not surprising, but we’ve also written about other ways to deal with stress . For example, we may not always “just stop working,” but we can become more organized, prioritize better, and outsource tasks to get the same amount of work done, if not more, but with less stress.
How Stress Affects Your Brain | TED-Ed