Mind Over Mammoth
How stress muddles your brain and what to do about it  

Tim Johnson

It’s 4:30 p.m., and you have to collect the kids by 5 sharp. But the phone won’t stop ringing, and your boss just plunked down an assignment he wants finished ASAP—as in now. Your heart is pounding like a jackhammer; your palms are sweating. You may be in the cool confines of a 21st-century office, but as far as your body is concerned, it’s 30,000 BC and you are staring into the eyes of a prehistoric beast.

“Your poor body doesn’t realize that it’s 2006, so it responds in the same way to an unreasonable boss as it would if you were facing down a woolly mammoth,” says Dr. Sonia Lupien, director of the Centre for Studies on Human Stress at the Douglas Hospital Research Centre/McGill University in Montreal. Kicking into fight-or-flight mode, the brain signals the adrenal glands, which sit on top of the kidneys, to release hormones known as catecholamines (such as adrenalin and noradrenalin) and glucocorticoids (including cortisol).

Illustration: francis blake / 3inabox.com

The result is what Lupien calls the “Popeye Effect.”  Just as a can of spinach gave the sailor man superhuman  strength, our body’s stress response allows us to mobilize tremendous energy to deal with a perceived threat. Adrenalin is responsible for the physical characteristics of stress (rapid breathing, perspiration), while cortisol targets the brain, interfering with the hippocampus, a region involved in learning and memory. Yet all of this is actually a good thing. “Without this chemical-driven response of fleeing or fighting, you’d be dead by now.”

Once in the hippocampus, however, cortisol creates a tunnel vision focused on dealing with the immediate threat. This greatly diminishes your ability to distinguish between what’s important and what’s not in the wider scheme of things. “Stress throws a big splash of paint on this capacity, so now you don’t know what’s relevant anymore,” Lupien explains. “That meeting you ‘forgot’ because of stress, you perhaps never encoded in memory as being important in the first place.” That’s why even well-prepared people can blow interviews or exams. Stress impairs the process of recall and retrieval.

And since your brain and body are not equipped to handle the stress response on a daily basis, the regular release of cortisol will hurt your everyday ability to commit things to memory and recognize what is and is not important. It can also lead to long-term memory problems and even burnout. “You wake up one morning and the brain’s on strike,” says Lupien. “Nothing seems important anymore.”

When you’re hit with a high-stress situation, Lupien suggests responding with some deep breathing. “When you breathe with the biggest belly you can make, you trip a sensor in the diaphragm that puts the brakes on stress.” The diaphragm activates the vagal nerve, which runs between the cranium, the chest cavity and the digestive tract. This inhibits the sympathetic nervous system—the nerve group that acts as a stress accelerator.

Another strategy is to think of something nice or do something kind, such as letting someone go ahead of you in line or buying someone a coffee. The aim is to trick your system into stopping the secretion of stress hormones. “When you do something nice, the brain says, ‘This person should not be able to do something good in front of that level of danger—so it must not be a mammoth after all.’”