I had written about good and bad stress about a year ago (https://medium.com/@health-nut/stress-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly-9d2e6f6e4573) . Nothing defines our times like stress!
When reading Mark Manson’s recent article https://medium.com/@markmanson/10-cool-things-about-the-brain-and-what-it-means-for-you-792b28e486c, the point 4) about “how stress kills brain cells” caught my attention. I have been learning about stress for a while. This article is my way to consolidate what I have learnt and understood about stress.
It is chronic stress that kills brain cells. Stress is like friction in the sense that just like you can not have any motion without friction, you can not get anything worthwhile done without stress. So there is good stress and bad stress.
I also want to emphasize that mother nature did not evolve the stress mechanism just to annoy us modern humans! Stress has played important part in evolution and helped us survive all kinds of dangers over millions of years.
However, we also know that blood pressure, diabetes, depression, anxiety, … are related to stress in big way.
But it is chronic stress, specifically chronic psychosocial stress that causes elevated levels of glucocorticoids in brain that kills the brain cells or neurons. Most of us modern humans have this chronic…
