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What Stress Does to the Brain

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Re: What Stress Does to the Brain

#91

Post by apta »

martin-adams wrote: post #65
tempguy9999 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're right, it is extremely unusual and I shouldn't be speaking in this way about my doctor. They do in fact do great work for the majority of cases. Out of interest, what's ASM?

ASM is assembly.

Re: What Stress Does to the Brain

#92

Post by rconti »

coldcode wrote: post #55
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…

I am in such a period and have been for months. Stupid company demands we ship something no matter what, even though there is insufficient time to do all the work, and they keep adding more on top of it. I work 7 days a week, no vacations, hardly even a weekend day off much less a vacation. I even lost my temper at work and yelled a lot, something I never do. This is no way to do proper work either. At least what lit…

I support you and hope you can reclaim yourself. A lot of good advice has been given here. One thing I realized when I stepped out of Ops is that lots of the life-and-death situations we felt were, to a certain extent, self-imposed. We always thought the world was going to end if $bigcustomer became dissastisfied that the site was down (or whatever).

In the end, it turned out (as long as we did our best), it didn't really matter. The business was constantly making best guesses at allocation of resources (human, equipment, etc) and hedging that against the customer experience. 100% reliability was never the goal. Violating SLAs and potentially having to give the customer a service credit was just part of the calculus. We were taking it upon ourselves as the most important thing in the world to keep the service up, because that's how it was presented to us, but to the business it was not nearly as important.

If you can de-couple yourself from these stresors somewhat, keep them at arm's length, you'll be doing yourself a great service.

Re: What Stress Does to the Brain

#93

Post by graeme »

mistermann wrote: post #81
graeme wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I think this is the most difficult part to get back to normal: The brain brings you in stress mode for no obvious reason. Then you have to reason about it so the stress goes away and you will slowly reset your brain. 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. I had this. Try square breathing every time you have a stress trigger. It was alm…

> I would say I did this for 2-4mweeks Every time you had a trigger you did this, and symptoms lifted after 2-4 weeks? https://www.healthline.com/health/box-breathing

Yup, pretty much exactly that. YMMV of course. For me my triggers were linked to breath anyway. I would have them, and then when I exhaled get tension in my neck and shoulders. Doing the box breathing with an exhale short circuited that. I think it gave my mind a thing to focus on, and helped train my stress response.

For sake of completeness, I did do one other thing. I had periodic worries about financial certainty in my business. But as with stress, I was past the point where this was a realistic concern. Problems could arise, but it would never be instant, total destruction of my business.

So, I wrote down all the things I was worrying about, how realistic they were, how much harm it would cause, and what my responses would be. I then kept thinking about this for a few days. Did a lot to remove worry. Then the breathing combined well with that.

I also found out fodmaps caused me digestive trouble + stress feeling, but the breathing had had its day to day impact before I discovered that.

Re: What Stress Does to the Brain

#94

Post by tempguy9999 »

martin-adams wrote: post #65
tempguy9999 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're right, it is extremely unusual and I shouldn't be speaking in this way about my doctor. They do in fact do great work for the majority of cases. Out of interest, what's ASM?

ASM = assembler (assembly code; very low-level programming).

Nice reply, agreed that docs are a great bunch, upvoted.

Re: What Stress Does to the Brain

#95

Post by phil21 »

hef19898 wrote: post #47
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…

There is good stress and bad stress, as I'm coming to find out the hard way.

I also do very well in environments most would call "high stress" - I ran a medium-sized hosting company for many years, being the guy where the buck stopped if things went wrong. Sure there were days that were pretty terrible, but in the end I controlled the entire stack, the people working on that stack, and even which customers I took on. Yes, the work was incredibly hard, fast paced, and sometimes very stressful. But it was enjoyable because I had personal agency to effect change. We have a service going down daily causing escalations at 2am? I can put a couple guys on it and fix it, with a sane solution we all felt proud of. That sort of thing.

In another environment where I in theory had a "nice easy 9-5" with effectively zero external stressors such as customers yelling at me - I was the most stressed out I ever was. The job was entirely internal politics and jockeying for position with all the subterfuge and backstabbing that implies. Effectively being put in charge of outcomes I had practically no real agency over.

That latter time period of stress has likely damaged me long-term, and caused many forms of health problems I would not have expected. It is a long road to recovery from something like that, if it's even fully possible.

Re: What Stress Does to the Brain

#96

Post by eee_honda »

mlurp wrote: post #7

Professor Sapolsky has talked about this in a somewhat different context as well, about what it does during childhood development. Really tragic actually.

re: childhood development - Arguably the more interesting work on this is how particularly intense acute periods of stress that would register as "trauma" predispositions an individual to things like much higher rates of ischemic heart failure, diabetes, and other health conditions that we might not typically relate to trauma.

Then there's all the standard stuff you might expect, emotional dysregulation into adulthood, drug and alcohol abuse, suicidal behaviour, etc.

See Dr. Vincent Felitti's Adverse Childhood Experience studies for more info.

Re: What Stress Does to the Brain

#97

Post by hef19898 »

phil21 wrote: post #95
hef19898 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There is good stress and bad stress, as I'm coming to find out the hard way. I also do very well in environments most would call "high stress" - I ran a medium-sized hosting company for many years, being the guy where the buck stopped if things went wrong. Sure there were days that were pretty terrible, but in the end I controlled the entire stack, the people working on that stack, and even which customers I took on.…

Agree on the politics part, the one thing that wears me down the fastest. Hope you recover quickly, it might take I guess so...

Re: What Stress Does to the Brain

#98

Post by nemonemo »

phil21 wrote: post #95
hef19898 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There is good stress and bad stress, as I'm coming to find out the hard way. I also do very well in environments most would call "high stress" - I ran a medium-sized hosting company for many years, being the guy where the buck stopped if things went wrong. Sure there were days that were pretty terrible, but in the end I controlled the entire stack, the people working on that stack, and even which customers I took on.…

I'd say the dividing line is how much control you have. If there is short burst of stress for the amount of work you are sure to be capable of, the stress is nothing. The problem is with the duration and the uncertainty.

There is also a genetic factor: I remember there was a gene (or a base pair?) that is called "worrier or warrior", and if one has the warrior one, one performs worse without stress than with stress whereas the worrier one is the opposite.

Re: What Stress Does to the Brain

#99

Post by Jcampuzano2 »

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.

I don't get rashes, but I have noticed the signs of me being overstressed typically include itchiness for some reason, almost always down my back.

Re: What Stress Does to the Brain

#100

Post by SolaceQuantum »

grep_name wrote: post #67
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…

Could you share any resources that helped you get past this? This is basically what my life is like all the time

Talk therapy is helpful, since it forces you to address the underlying thought processes behind the stress response in an environment that is outside of said process, with someone who can point you to alternate thoughts and beliefs.

In the pure physical response, you can practice breathing exercises or distract the body with another stimulus. A friend of mine who has very high general anxiety uses their phone. Another friend will grab a handful of ice (in a bag to avoid mess) and hold it in their hands until it melts.

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