Although most people think of stress as a bad thing, it’s a natural part of the events that drive our brain to achieve, and motivate us to do things quickly. In the normal chain of events in evolution, stress kept us safe and alive. The experience of it created the chemical responses we needed to be alert, focused and driven to do what was necessary to survive.

But stress batters the brain, causing damage all the time, and for the most part, we evolved mechanisms to keep up a running repair. However, the modern world environment often creates prolonged or intense stresses which can exceed our own capacity to repair damaged cells or replace them, or strengthen brain connection. Not only does the brain not keep up with the workflow, but it can cease repairing and building entirely. Particularly sensitive are the deep emotional and information processing areas, the hippocampus and its constituent fields. When this happens, we begin to feel fuzzy, slow, our concentration capacity is poor, we feel tired and demotivated, drained, and often we then respond to ordinary stimuli as if they were stressful: we bark at people and get irritated by everything.

Hans Selye, the great Canadian scientist, called this the loss of the selective and adaptive response, the loss of selectivity in only responding with the right amount of emotion at the right time. What we know now, and as exemplified by the writings of luminaries such as John Ratey in his book “Spark” is that intense physical exercise produces several growth hormones which work during the recovery and rest period to help rebuild and strengthen these vital connections. How many of us have, as a default strategy, the amount of intense recovery with hydration, mobilization, Omega 3 intake, massage etc that athletes practice? They recover for longer periods than they train, letting their bodies ‘supercompensate’ and thus grow stronger, using the stress that training creates to provide the source of growth, known as building resistance: not having a default recovery strategy, when we work 8-10 hours or more a day, batters the brain non-productively, and we feel stressed.

Remember the 7Body Brain Boosters and use them as a guide to create your own body-brain recovery strategy.

Dr Roy Sugarman