Dealing with Stress

Medical professionals, and Neurobiologists in particular, urge us to take dealing with stress seriously.

This means respecting our bodies and protecting our brains by learning even the most rudimentary stress management skills to offset the damage of unchecked stress does to our cells, especially our braincells.


WHEN GOOD STRESS GOES BAD

A little stress is good. Deadline pressure, relationship demands, and financial challenges can be motivating up to a certain degree. However without good stress intervention skills, worries, fears, negative thoughts, and even pushing ourselves too hard, can easily become perceived by our body/mind systems as a threat to our overall well-being.

Your brain and body then initiate the "stress response". Stage one of this response is mobiling energy and activating neurological and physiological systems as though you were in danger, this is the flight-or-fight stage. Stage two stress occurs if there is no escape from the stressors in stage one and the body and brain begin to use up it resources. Stage three occurs when the bodily stores are depleted to the extent that the continued demand on them exceeds your ability to fill them.

Each of these Stages of Stress Health is identifiable by various indicators and signs, which accompany each stage.

Above all the brain's resources are at risk. The entire brain is highly vulnerable to stress, but prolonged emotional stress is brutal on the mid brain especially. When the brain has not been trained with appropriate techniques for dealing with stress, or has not developed good stress response mechanisms in childhood, it radically alters the chemical balance and cell death in certain brain structures.

THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON STRESS

Our brains were not designed to withstand long term stress, not even low levels of unchecked stress. Even low levels of stress blocks the growth of new neurons, and decimates our hypothalamus (mid brain) – that emotional intelligence processing center. When you are stressed high levels of toxic stress hormones wash over your brain causing a withdrawal of opioids (chemicals that promote a sense of well being).

This is the brain’s way of dealing with stress by keeping your attention focused on the perceived threat. Pain circuits in the brain are activated just as they would be if you were hurt physically. Too much prolonged stress can rewire your body’s stress response system to become neurobiologically oversensitive. The more unchecked stress your brain is exposed to the less it can deal with stress at all.

UNCHECKED STRESS HAS SERIOIUS CONSEQUENCES

PHYSICAL AILMENTS AND FATAL DISEASES
It is commonly known that chronic stress is the underlying cause of 95% of all disease, and that people who have not established effective stress response systems in their brains can suffer from all manner of problems.

MENTAL AND EMOTIONAL DISORDERS
In fact an overactive stress response system in the brain, underlies a great many mental disorders, foremost is depression. But it also includes things like persistent anxiety, phobias, obsessions as well as lack of desire, energy, excitement, spontaneity, optimism, and hope.

INSTABILITY
Rising divorce rates are closely linked to stress. Job stress is now considered endemic worldwide.

DEPRESSION
According to the high esteemed World Health Organization, the year 2020 will see depression become second only to heart disease in terms of the global burden of illness. And, as a heads up for our times, numerous studies in the last ten years corroborate this forecast is on track to arrive sooner if we neglect dealing with stress.

SUICIDE
2003 studies published in the American Journal of Psychiatry showed that 75 percent of those who committed suicide and/or homicide were depressed from stress, and (in a separate study) that every 1% rise in unemployment typically results in a twofold to threefold increase in suicide. If we ever were going to take stress management seriously now is the time.

DAMAGED STRESS RESPONSES IN CHILDHOOD
Ineffective stress response systems are often developed in childhood, for in order to develop the frontal lobes of the new brain, which are under developed at birth, the old brain and mid brain needs lots of opioids, neurochemicals that are generated from things like childhood comforting and help to cope with instinctual systems of fear of loss and risk, anger, separation anxiety etc.

THE GOOD NEWS - HEALTHY STRESS RESPONSES CAN BE LEARNED!

The good news is that healthy, effective stress responses for dealing with stress can be learned at any point in life.

The bad news is that we are so tragically unaware of how important dealing with stress is in our daily lives, how easy it is to learn and how vital it is for us to train our brain/minds to do it without delay.

Neuroscientists warn that disregard for the fragility of our brains when it comes to unmanaged stress, not only causes underutilization but full blown dysfunctions and major neuropsychiatric disorders that are today, in a world were chronic stress is so common place, becoming accepted as normal.

Only when you begin dealing with stress, by developing effective stress regulating systems in your brain is it possible to grow in wisdom from trading and life’s painful experiences instead of being damaged by them.

Clearly I am not just talking only about financial damage. Vital life forces are used up battling stress instead of accomplishing rewarding trading or life achievements. In other words, you will never become as good a trader as you can be without first and foremost training your brain to manage its stress responses.