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What Stress Does to the Brain

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Re: What Stress Does to the Brain

#41

Post by dspillett »

mkagenius wrote: post #12

My body also changes due to stress. I get rashes on my hand if I get stressed for more than 2 days at a stretch.

IIRC the repair/replace cycles of the body including the skin are affected by sleep patterns, because of different hormone levels and other changes between wake & sleep states, which might indirectly be why your skin suffers from stress (because we know stress can significantly affect patterns and effectiveness of sleep). The immune system can be affected also.

I get mild eczema and sometimes have periods of insomnia, I've noticed not sleeping enough for a few days to be something that often seems linked to a break-out of raw itchy patches.

Also rubbing is often a subconscious "tick" while stressed, so you may be putting extra strain on the skin that way too?

Re: What Stress Does to the Brain

#42

Post by trykondev »

mettamage wrote: post #37
trykondev wrote: post #35

I've been thinking lately about the line between feeling "stimulated" and feeling "stressed" by intellectual work. I certainly crave challenging problems but I feel sometimes like that inherently brushes up against stress -- thinking hard about a problem and hitting frustrating roadblocks along the way is more stressful than laying on the beach, but also to me feels much more meaningful. I worry if the type of person…

I thought quite a bit on the topic of craving and frustration. I wrote an article about it that I could email to you if you would like. And I learned a thing or two about stress when I studied psychology. Here are my thoughts (without sources and a bit worse editing as I am on my phone). > I certainly crave challenging problems. When crave something I always wonder how it is different vs a cocaine addict craving coca…

Thank you so much for such a detailed reply -- I would definitely be interested in reading your article! My email is in my bio.

I definitely agree with the insight that having options can reduce the feeling of stress, and that's a great way to articulate that point -- a hobby project with options to take a break and do something else versus a work scenario where you have no choice but to push forward and often times money or reputation is on the line.

The analogy with physical exercise is a great point and hopefully a helpful way to think about mental exertion as well. In the context of avoiding chronic stress, I wonder how an average 9-5 software job compares to the physical equivalent. For example, if you have a job where you are on your feet all day but mostly just walking around (maybe like a park ranger), resting that night & resuming the job the next day is usually enough. But you probably couldn't play in the NFL 5 days a week & would need more rest in between than just a good night's sleep.

So if we look at a software engineer's week, is it more like the park ranger or the NFL player? I assume most knowledge workers don't exert 100% of their mental energy all day long, so maybe it's somewhere in between a park ranger and an NFL player. Perhaps after a particular taxing day, knowledge workers should think about that exertion more like an NFL game and might need a full day or two to recuperate. I guess work schedules sometimes make this kind of rest schedule tough to do in practice.

It could be worth trying to monitor exertion levels so that it stays in the zone of temporary stress and doesn't become chronic stress, which is when it becomes really harmful as you've pointed out.

I appreciate all of your insight & I plan to do a bit more research on some of the topics you've mentioned here.

Re: What Stress Does to the Brain

#43

Post by tempguy9999 »

martin-adams wrote: post #24
mkagenius wrote: post #12

My body also changes due to stress. I get rashes on my hand if I get stressed for more than 2 days at a stretch.

This happened to me when my daughter used to wake in the middle of the night causing me to jump out of deep sleep. Doctor was useless and said I must be coming into contact with things. When my sleep was fixed, it went away. Then went though a short period of it happening again, and the rash came back.

In general contact eczema or a food intolerance would be the cause. Lack of sleep really would be unusual - I've never heard of it (though I'm not a medical person). I think slagging off your doc for making reasonable conclusions is unfair. Debugging ASM has got to be an utter picnic compared to troubleshooting humans in a short time-slot.

Re: What Stress Does to the Brain

#44

Post by JoeSamoa »

arethuza wrote: post #29
speedplane wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is also possible for emotional stress to trigger an outbreak of hives. No doubt, stress has physiological effects, but so does laughter and excitement. Having stress is a normal part of being a human. In reasonable doses it's fine.

I've always found it ironic that one of the best antidotes for day to day stress is to be in a situation where you get "stressed" in a completely different way... (the main factor in the 'positive' stress situations for me being in fairly complete control, confidence in your own abilities and requirement to focus on the matter in hand for a few hours).

Good observation.

Re: What Stress Does to the Brain

#45

Post by mettamage »

trykondev wrote: post #42
mettamage wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought quite a bit on the topic of craving and frustration. I wrote an article about it that I could email to you if you would like. And I learned a thing or two about stress when I studied psychology. Here are my thoughts (without sources and a bit worse editing as I am on my phone). > I certainly crave challenging problems. When crave something I always wonder how it is different vs a cocaine addict craving coca…

Thank you so much for such a detailed reply -- I would definitely be interested in reading your article! My email is in my bio. I definitely agree with the insight that having options can reduce the feeling of stress, and that's a great way to articulate that point -- a hobby project with options to take a break and do something else versus a work scenario where you have no choice but to push forward and often times…

> So if we look at a software engineer's week, is it more like the park ranger or the NFL player?

First time I'm thinking about this, but there were a couple of things that immediately came to mind.

1. Doing something you know (you have processes and habits and strategies) vs. doing something new.

2. Doing something that is difficult (I suppose fundamental AI research is an example) vs. doing something that is easy (prototyping a CRUD app for 100 users).

Here is how I came up with these thoughts.

For 1: doing something I know vs. something new is a huge difference. And I think you need a higher sleep quality for doing something new as it aids with learning.

For 2: My family is mostly blue collar. Some of them have huge muscles and some of them didn't. The huge muscle people had a way easier time doing their blue collar jobs. However, most of them got back issues eventually and I couldn't relate that to their muscle size.

Re: What Stress Does to the Brain

#46

Post by mettamage »

dkersten wrote: post #39
mettamage wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought quite a bit on the topic of craving and frustration. I wrote an article about it that I could email to you if you would like. And I learned a thing or two about stress when I studied psychology. Here are my thoughts (without sources and a bit worse editing as I am on my phone). > I certainly crave challenging problems. When crave something I always wonder how it is different vs a cocaine addict craving coca…

> When crave something I always wonder how it is different vs a cocaine addict craving cocaine. Lately, I've been trying to give myself plenty of boredom time. I still fail at it a lot, but I try to do most things with purpose now: I don't listen to music just because, for example, instead I decide I want to listen to music and then sit down to do just that. I feel I enjoy it a lot more this way! I also don't idly li…

I feel like I'm almost reading my own writing here. I have very similar experiences.

> Its an aspect of startups people rarely talk about or warn you about.

I agree, and it should be talked about more. The same is true for other high performance jobs (e.g. investment banking or consulting), where high performance means working a lot of hours.

I also think Ycombinator could improve on this as I remember Sam Altman saying during a Startup School lecture (paraphrased): if you get a burnout, fix it. I felt like he implied to just make it work somehow, it doesn't matter how.

In fairness, most of these people aren't mental health professionals and somehow had to deal with these things themselves as well and they are simply sharing their views on how they dealt with it. What I wonder is if they reflect on the idea that some people that this as advice and moreover take it to heart. Taking a personal strategy of someone else to heart seems quite dangerous to me.

Re: What Stress Does to the Brain

#47

Post by hef19898 »

want2know wrote: post #40

Some time ago I had a long period of intense stress. It is amazing how much it changes your mind and body. Muscles contract causing all kinds of insuline problems, your hormones become a mess, and all this is raising stress levels more because you don't know what is going on in your body. And then an anxiety disorder is right around the corner. And when everything is ok again your brain produces stress hormones when…

The worst thng about that, at least for me, was that I actually liked it. I felt alert, productive, full of energy. Things moved gast and I felt on top of them, it was just great.

When things changed, arguably forvthe better, I kind of wanted the previous status back. Took me quite a while to cool down again, yet I still prefer high pressure high speed environments.

Funn thing is, my body felt good too. I was healthy as check ups showned. I even managed to trian more than today. Strange period that was indeed...

Re: What Stress Does to the Brain

#48

Post by GuB-42 »

trykondev wrote: post #35

I've been thinking lately about the line between feeling "stimulated" and feeling "stressed" by intellectual work. I certainly crave challenging problems but I feel sometimes like that inherently brushes up against stress -- thinking hard about a problem and hitting frustrating roadblocks along the way is more stressful than laying on the beach, but also to me feels much more meaningful. I worry if the type of person…

I don't find challenging work particularly stressful. In fact, I usually find them less stressful, because I just try to do my best, and accept the possibility of failure.

The most stressful situation for me is when I have a relatively easy task but that failure is not an option.

For example:

- Climbing a vertical cliff with full protection: challenging but not stressful.

- Walking on a beam on top of a 10 story building: easy but stressful.

Re: What Stress Does to the Brain

#49

Post by IAmGraydon »

Farraige wrote: post #17
mkagenius wrote: post #12

My body also changes due to stress. I get rashes on my hand if I get stressed for more than 2 days at a stretch.

Same, dyshidrotic eczema is the closest thing I've found to what mine looks like.

Exact same thing here! Happens on the sides of my fingers during times of high stress. Looks like dyshidrodic eczema and leaves tiny red dots when it goes away.

Re: What Stress Does to the Brain

#50

Post by kekebo »

want2know wrote: post #40

Some time ago I had a long period of intense stress. It is amazing how much it changes your mind and body. Muscles contract causing all kinds of insuline problems, your hormones become a mess, and all this is raising stress levels more because you don't know what is going on in your body. And then an anxiety disorder is right around the corner. And when everything is ok again your brain produces stress hormones when…

>But I doubt the paths in the brain will ever go away. It will be like a overgrown path in the end but it is still there.

While this aligns with current knowledge of neuroscience, provided the 'healthy' paths overgrow the stress-pathways over time (maybe using methods described in CBT or MBSR for example), theoretically the latter ones should become a non-issue over time. Picture a road being built over a footpath. Notwithstanding building that road requires a lot of conscious effort. But it seems doable, both based on scientific data and anecdotal evidence in myself and people around me.

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