Your Brain On... Stress

Ayesha Sherzai (0:00)

Welcome to Your Brain On podcast powered by our Neuroworld Community, an online community built to support people like you in creating brain healthy habits that last. At Neuroworld, we combine expert guidance, practical tools, and a welcoming space for growth, all grounded in cutting-edge neuroscience and behavioral science. It's designed to fit into real life and costs less than a dollar a day. And if after three months of engaging with the program, you don't feel a difference in your clarity, focus, and cognition, we'll give you your money back. No questions asked. If we go back more than two centuries, it's clear that we've known about the effects of stress on our minds for a long, long time. Looking at Hippocratic texts from around the 4th century BCE, we see this quote, Those who are worn out with fatigue are liable to delirium. With today's scientific methods and modern brain imaging techniques, we can see the cognitive impact of physical and mental overexertion with incredible clarity. But also, we now know that good stress, sometimes called Hermetic Stress or Eustress, in the right context and the right dose, can actually build your brain, improving memory, strengthening neuroplasticity as you age, and helping you stay cognitively resilient. Our two guests for this episode have written incredible books offering refreshing and nuanced perspectives on how we think about stress. Dr. Mithu Storoni, a brilliant neuroscientist and author of Stress Proof, The Scientific Solution to Protect Your Brain and Body, and Dr. Sharon Bergquist, a physician and health care leader with nearly three decades of experience working at the forefront of preventive care. Dr. Bergquist wrote The Stress Paradox, Why You Need Stress to Live Longer, Healthier and Happier, and her interview comes from one of the many live sessions we host in our Neuro World community. We're Drs. Ayesha and Dean Sherzai, and this is Your Brain On Stress. So Dean, stress, it's so important that we decided to actually put it in the neuroacronym. You know, we have NEU, you is unwind or stress management, because after reading so much about the impact of stress, especially during early life and midlife, and how it changes our biology, and how it impacts the way we see the world, the way we interact with information, and how basically all the doors just shut off when you're under a lot of stress, and so you can't really learn anything, you can't grow in any way.

Dean Sherzai (2:40)

It's critical. It's central. It is the pivot point of health, and we've avoided it for much of health history because it's difficult. It's amorphous. You can't put your hands around it. We couldn't even define it, and only recently we've begun to understand the science of stress. It is at the center of everything that flows down from the brain to the rest of the body. Let's take one aspect of that, which is the limbic hypothalamic pituitary axis. The limbic system is your emotional memories. It's the basic structure that tells you how you feel or how you should feel, given your context, given your history. It's a driver of much of what we do. That system is directly connected to the hypothalamic pituitary system, which downstream affects everything in our body. We understand that the cortisol pathway is so powerful that it affects our neurons, the connections between our neurons, our sexuality, our hormones, our growth hormones, our thyroid hormones, our kidneys. Every system, including our immune system, is affected by this. And that's just one of the pathways. That doesn't take into account sympathetic parasympathetic system, which also is directly affected by our emotions and our stress. Now, it wouldn't be much of a problem if it happened once in a while, because cortisol is actually the thing that pushes us to become aware. It tells us that we have to be aware of something urgent.

Ayesha Sherzai (4:08)

It's a very important chemical in our body. It actually helps in so many different other systems as well. It helps us heal. Usually, cortisol is deemed as a very harmful thing. But no, we actually survive because of cortisol.

Dean Sherzai (4:20)

It's not a villain. It's needed. It's powerful. But it becomes chronic. It affects our immune system. It affects every other system you can think of. Nothing in your body is unaffected by this chronic stress. But the good news is we now have neurobehavioral systems. We have techniques that can really address it systematically and in a way that doesn't just address stress, but quality of life. You talked about eustress or good stress. Good stress is the foundation of our brain growth, our quality of life. We can strategize to build a life that builds up good stress and then addresses bad stress in a very systematic and meaningful way. We always talk to our patients, to our communities, that it's great that you're now attentive to nutrition. And it's also wonderful that you're talking about exercise, which is important. But if we don't address stress, you're going to be overwhelmed by the cumulative effect of this devastating phenomena. And that's why much of our focus in our communities, Neuro World and other places, is around positive stress and good stress. We know that chronic stress actually literally shrinks your brain. We also know that the most powerful thing that grows your brain, the most powerful variable factor that grows your brain by creating connections between neurons is good stress. So there lies the mechanism, tools, and a pathway to build around good stress.