We Need Love for Stress

Think about your most traumatic experience. Do you remember how stressful it was? Dry mouth, excessive sweating, heart pumping, and cortisol levels rising are all symptoms that one might feel during a stressful situation. Now compare every other situation after that moment. Sure, it might seem difficult at the moment, but compared to that one experience, your stress levels were not that high. What if that traumatic experience occurred during early childhood? Imagine a child born to non-responsive parents, individuals that should not have become parents in the first place. Or imagine a child being born to a family in severe poverty and watching their parents work day-in and day-out just to make ends meet and unfortunately had no time to properly raise the child. What do you think will happen to those individuals as they grow older?

Dr. Hackman has conducted extensive research on the effects of parental responsivity in early childhood to reactivity to stress later in life. He found that lower levels of parental responsivity during early childhood were associated with blunted cortisol reactivity. Cortisol is the hormone released when you are in an excited state, whether stress, fear, or excitement.  Lower cortisol levels means you don’t perceive the situation as stressful as an average person would, and therefore will react to the situation differently. Imagine cortisol levels as your “spider senses” which alert you to threats and helps you deal with the situation. A person with lower cortisol levels is more likely to procrastinate for an assignment, or cross precariously through traffic, or decide not to go to the hospital because they do not perceive a wound they sustained as serious. Hackman found support to relate blunted cortisol reactivity to poor psychosocial outcomes. Not everyone is blessed with parents who can give them the attention and support they need, so what is to be done?

Thankfully, University of Washington researchers have found that early intervention in a child’s life can mitigate the negative effects of low-to-no parental reactivity. The environment has a very strong impact on how the stress response in the body develops, but even children who are exposed to an extremely negative environment can overcome those effects in the long term if placed into a supportive family. They studied orphans in Romanian institutions and found they had blunted cortisol levels compared to children who were removed from the institutions and placed with foster families. The latter children had similar stress responses to children raised by families in the community. It is thought that their stress response systems might have initially been hyperactive but adapted to the stress by reducing the number of receptors in the brain that stress hormones bind to, which can lead to heightened risk for multiple physical and mental health problems.

            Stress, although disliked, is essential for productivity and survival. I sometimes say that I work best under pressure, and if it weren’t for stress, I would have never been able to complete an assignment and still be stuck in middle school.

Refernces:

Hackman DA, Betancourt LM, Brodsky NL, Kobrin L, Hurt H, et al. (2013) Selective Impact of Early Parental Responsivity on Adolescent Stress Reactivity. PLoS ONE 8(3): e58250. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0058250

University of Washington. "Early environment has a lasting impact on stress response systems, study shows." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 20 April 2015 <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/04/150420154631.htm>.