How stress eats holes in your brain

A wonderful Catch-22 for us, we are under stress because we don't know how to recover or how long it will take and we can shrink our brains while doing this, making it even harder to recover. Ask your doctor how to prevent this.
http://www.courier-journal.com/article/20120308/FEATURES03/303080006/stress-effects-on-brain?odyssey=mod|newswell|text|Home|s
After her husband died, Sandi Bond Chapman says she “could feel it immediately.”

“For a year, I couldn’t think,” says Chapman, founder and chief director of the Center for BrainHealth at the University of Texas at Dallas. “I couldn’t write a coherent word. I couldn’t do anything.”

At the time of his death, she was working on her doctorate, and she credits a professor for helping her stay on track.

“She kept me moving forward: ‘You have to finish.’ She kept me on my bicycle,” Chapman says. “I had no memory. I couldn’t remember what I’d done that evening.”

“Stress,” she says, “is one of the best brain robbers we have.”

This isn’t merely figurative. According to a recently released Yale University study, stress causes the brain to shrink. So next time you’re stressed to the gills and can neither focus, think nor remember the ingredients for the meatloaf you make every week, you can legitimately blame stress.

“It’s a short, easy story actually,” says Houston neuroscientist and author David Eagleman. “Stress is underpinned by particular hormones that circulate through the body and the brain. Those stress hormones are very bad for brain tissue. They eat away at brain tissue.

“What’s new to be stressed about is that stress is literally chewing miniature holes in your brain.”
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