How can stress disrupt your life, and what impacts does it have on your body? And most importantly, what can be done to fix it? We’ve all experienced stress at some point in our lives, rather it was during an important sporting event or an important presentation, we’ve all been there before. Awareness for mental health has been on the rise in recent years, you might have noticed it as well, schools, companies, and even the government, all have been trying to sensitize the general population on mental health disorders, and how to prevent or manage them better. In fact, according to a 2019 article on mental awareness by Forbes, “funding in mental health startups has more than tripled over the past five years.” With this rise in publications, advertisement, and funding, you might be asking yourselves, is are behavioral healthcare system meeting the need? Well, according to data collected by AbleTo, the company specialized in virtual consultations with therapists and coaches showed that our behavioral healthcare system lacks in value, quality of care, and access but is pretty good in awareness and innovation, as we said before. So is there a better alternative to our behavioral healthcare that might be cheap, accessible, and actually be efficient?
I will attempt to answer this question using research conducted by Dr. Weinberg: “Risk and Resilience in an Acute Stress Paradigm: Evidence From Salivary Cortisol and Time-Frequency Analysis of the Reward Positivity” and research by Dr. Cernasov: “Attenuated Default Mode Network Functional Connectivity is Associated With Improvement in Depressive Symptoms Following Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy in a Transdiagnostic Anhedonic Sample”
Dr. Weiberg’s research builds on the growing scientific belief that stress is associated with the brain’s response to rewards, thus this association is believed to be responsible for the development of some mental illness such as depression or PTSD for example. This research focuses on attempting to determine what associations can be made between stress and reward sensitivity in the brain? To answer this question, the researchers examined the association between hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal-axis stress response and event-related potentials sensitive to the receipt of reward-related feedback. The study included 100 male participants, the participants were randomly divided between stress and control groups. The research exposed participants to an acute psychosocial stressor and examined its impact on a sensitive measure of neural processing of rewards, they also examined “potential buffering effects of increased neural response to reward on hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis response to the stressor.” This research showed that delta power, which is a brain wave that is believed to generate from the Thalamus and plays a role in suspending external awareness during deep meditation and sleep, this brainwave was particularly enhanced after reward-related feedback. They also showed that this Delta brain frequency was responsible for a reduction in reward-related neural activity after stress, the researchers also studied the impact of stress on cortisol levels and showed that “baseline reward sensitivity in the delta frequency was associated with a reduced cortisol response when exposed to stress”. Dr. Weinberg’s research showed that “stress and the brain’s reward circuitry may have a bidirectional relationship that underlies pathways of risk and resilience for pathology” Furthermore it is believed that stress-induced anhedonia would be associated with reductions in both positive and negative reactivity. It is believed that chronic stress levels could be detrimental to our health due to prolonged exposure to elevated levels of glucocorticoids, which could lead to dendritic atrophy and reductions in neurogenesis. People who suffer from impairments to neural structures involved in reward processing could be more prone to stress, while also showing higher levels of cortisol during stress.
So now that we have explored some of the neurobiological evidence of the impact of stress on our body, what can we do to fix it? As we said previously, mental health awareness has been on the rise but our behavioral healthcare is starting to show its limits, so let us go back to our original question, is there a better alternative to our behavioral healthcare that might be cheap, accessible, and actually be efficient? If I told you that I found a solution to managing stress in your life and avoiding stress-induced anhedonia, and if I told you that it can be 100% free of charge, no it's not a scam and yes it has been proven to be very efficient in most cases. This practice is called mindfulness, and Dr. Cernasov’s study highlights the scientific benefits of this increasingly popular practice. Mindfulness has been shown to impact neural networks involved in sustained attention, such as the the frontoparietal network, it can also impact networks involved in self-reflective thought, such as the default-mode network. This study used 56 adults with clinically significant anhedonia were randomly assigned to 15 weeks of Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) or Behavioral Activation Therapy for Anhedonia (BATA). The research showed that Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy reduced connectivity of the default-mode network compared to the other form of therapy. So in other words, mindfulness works.
Mindfulness can be practiced at no cost and is maybe the easiest method to use at home when trying to manage stress, you can gain back control over your life one meditation at a time. Mindfulness can be practiced through various activities such as yoga or even just meditation. We have seen what some of the harmful effects stress can have on our brain, most of the time these are dynamic changes but sometimes they can become lifelong if chronic stress is left untreated for too long. Mindfulness just might be the answer to our daily mental wellbeing.
Mindfulness is a great practice that I highly recommend, it does not work for everyone, some people might get better help seeking professional care but others might benefit more from this experience.
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