Is Stress All Bad?

In my last two posts I have delved into how stress can be detrimental to the brain and the body, and it is, but today I’m going to take a different look at stress. Is it all bad? If we are so stressed out in the modern world, then are we destined to die early and have poor physical and mental health? Some research would challenge that notion, and hopefully it changes the way that you think about your own stress.

The “Inverted U”

During stress, the brain uses many different neuronal circuits to respond to the stressor’s demand, activating the HPA axis, and producing cortisol. In acute stress, this response is key, but in chronic stress, this response can cause wear and tear on the body. Understanding the impact of stress hormones on cognition and emotion lay the foundation for how we can understand the complex positive and negative effects of stress. There seems to be an “inverted U” relationship of stress to cognitive function — a moderate level of cortisol helps cognitive function, while too little or too much cortisol can be detrimental to cognitive function.

The prefrontal cortex is a key brain region for controlling cognition and emotion and is strongly influenced by stress. While chronic stress has been found to be detrimental, acute stress has been shown to enhance learning and memory, through the action of the corticosteroid stress hormones. Behavioral tests indicate that working memory, a key function relying on recurrent excitation within networks of PFC neurons, is enhanced by acute stress.

A study from the State University of New York found that acute stress causes significant glutamatergic transmission in the prefrontal cortex directly impacted working memory performance and found that performance in a prefrontal cortex memory task was enhanced by acute stress.

Rethinking Stress

Two years ago I came across a Ted Talk by Kelly McGonigal that completely transformed the way that I thought about stress and the way I approach my own stress — ever since I have been interested in why our perception of stress matters.

In McGonigal’s talk, she references a study (Keller et al., 2012) from the University of Wisconsin-Madison which found a few key things:

1. That 33.7% of the U.S adults that they studied perceived that stress affected their health.
2. Higher levels of reported stress is associated with an increased likelihood of worse health and mental health outcomes.
3. The perception that stress affects health is associated with an increased likelihood of worse health and mental health outcomes.
4. How much stress people reported and their perception of stress on health interacted so that those who reported a lot of stress and also that stress impacted their health a lot had a 43% increased risk of premature death.

It is surprising to me that only one third of the U.S adults believed that stress affects their health when there is so much evidence that it does. It was not surprising that higher levels of reported stress were associated with worse health and mental health outcomes. The perception of stress is what is so interesting here and there are very significant implications of this.

Reappraisal of Stress

A study out of Harvard University and the University of California San Francisco wanted to look more closely at why and how reappraisal improves the way that we interact with stressors (Jamieson et al., 2012). They looked specifically at cardiovascular outcomes and attentional bias (paying more attention to) for negative emotional information. They put into action the ideas from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, they had participants rethink their physiological stress response as functional and adaptive — something preparing your body to respond to the stressor at hand. The participants that were instructed to change they way they thought about their stress response had increased cardiac efficiency and lower vascular resistance. These people also had decreased attentional bias — they were less likely to pay more attention to negative emotions. This reappraisal technique demonstrated physiological and cognitive benefits.

Stress and Social Behavior

Stress also affects how we interact with others. A study found that participants who experienced acute social stress engaged in substantially more prosocial behavior — trust, trustworthiness, and sharing (von Dawans et al., 2012). Stress triggers social approach behavior, which operates as a stress buffering strategy for humans, providing evidence for the tend-and-befriend hypothesis. The tend-and befriend hypothesis argues that in response to threat, people protect (tend) and seek out social group for defense and support (befriend). Having strong social support before stressors is a buffer to stress, but this study went a step further and found that while experiencing acute stressors, both men and women have an improved our ability to connect with others.

Stress in excess can be damaging to the body and mind, but changing the way that we view stress can be transformative. If we perceive stress as our body’s complex and rather impressive way of dealing with threats, we may be able to buffer some of the known detrimental effects of stress. Building a strong support system can also buffer stress and keep stress in the optimal range within the “inverted U” of cortisol.

References

Keller, A., Litzelman, K., Wisk, L. E., Maddox, T., Cheng, E. R., Creswell, P. D.,… Witt, W. P. (2012). Does the perception that stress affects health matter? The association with health and mortality. Health Psychology, 31(5), 677–684. doi: 10.1037/a0026743

Jamieson, J. P., Nock, M. K., and Mendes, W. B. (2012). Mind over matter: reappraising arousal improves cardiovascular and cognitive responses to stress. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 141(3), 417–422. doi: 10.1037/a0025719

Yuen, E. Y., Liu, W., Karatsoreos, I. N., Feng, J., McEwen, B. S., and Yan, Z. (2009). Acute stress enhances glutamatergic transmission in prefrontal cortex and facilitates working memory. National Academy of Sciences, 106(33), 14075–14079. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0906791106

Ell, S. W., Cosley, B., and McCoy, S. K. (2010). When bad stress goes good: increased threat reactivity predicts improved category learning performance. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 18(1), 96–102. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-010-0018-0

von Dawans, B., Fischbacher, U., Kirschbaum, C., Fehr, E., and Heinrichs, M. (2012). The Social Dimension of Stress Reactivity: Acute Stress Increases Prosocial Behavior in Humans. Association of Psychological Science, 23(6), 651–660. DOI: 10.1177/0956797611431576