What impact does stress have on the growing brain?
In: Biology
Stress gets your level of cortisol high (stress hormone), short burst of this are useful for survival, learning to identify potential threats and so on. Chronic stress keep this hormone high, and it has detrimental effects. In the brain, it reduces the growth of new neurons in hipoccampus affecting memory, affects the prefrontal cortex (which control executive function) and affects negatively other neural pathways, which can lead to depression and anxiety.
In the growing brain, it’s basically the same, it can lead to mental health problems and affects learning.
When you’re growing, the brain is full of possibilities. It’s still making connections between different parts of the brain, strengthening (making faster) the connections that are used the most, and pruning away the ones that aren’t used and thus likely not necessary.
The brain is constantly trying to learn and adapt to its environment. If you’re exposed to lots of stress when you’re young, your brain will strengthen its connections that help it respond to that stress and weaken the ones that are less useful/used.
For example, if you’re raised by physically abusive parents, your brain will wire itself to quickly recognize angry faces, or even to err on the side of assuming neutral faces are angry. This is good in the abusive environment because it can help you stay safer: if you can tell dad is angry, then you’ll know to tiptoe around him and maybe avoid getting hurt. Other changes could be to have a low threshold for feeling fear or anxiety – again, things that help keep you safe in that stressful environment if they make you more cautious.
As you get older, your brain gets more set in its ways, and there’s less and less remodeling of its connections. That means that the stress responses wired when you’re young can be stuck there when you’re older.
If you change environments, that may mean that what was once helpful under stress – like thinking everyone is mad at you or feeling anxious all the time – is no longer helpful in a non-stressful environment. Instead, you may find it hard to make friends because you think people are mad at you when they’re not, or you could be anxious all the time when you’re actually safe, which can be hard on the body and the mind.
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Hi, I’m studying Childhood Development. A lot of good answers here but I feel that its not quite answered LI5.
When a child is chronically stressed, They can revert to a fight or flight mode. Traumatised children can be in this mode for months or even years if they do not receive therapeutic parenting.
While in this mode, they will not feel safe enough to explore their relationships with others or the world around them. This stunts their psychological development until they feel safe in their environment and with the adults around them.
This can often be why we see traumatised children of 8 years old behaving like babies, reverting back to “goo-goo ga-ga” baby talk and behaviour when exposed to stress. They don’t know how to behave, that section of their development was completely missed because they were too stressed to learn basic behaviours.
If these critical building blocks of their development are not addressed then it can have permanent effects into adult life. Depression, lack of empathy, prone to violence. Not good.
The best way to combat these missing blocks is to parent them at their ‘Developmental age’. Traumatised grown boy regularly acting like a baby and having a tantrum? Give him cuddles and don’t judge them, they are trying to communicate that they are stressed and don’t know how to deal with their emotions. Like a baby.
Here are some fancy diagrams and fuller explanation of different stages of development. [https://www.verywellmind.com/erik-eriksons-stages-of-psychosocial-development-2795740](https://www.verywellmind.com/erik-eriksons-stages-of-psychosocial-development-2795740)
Stress is terrible on the brain and body at any age. I’m 59 and I’m losing my ability to spell.
You would have to answer, what type of stress first. Shearing stress or tensile stress. Tensile stress can be handled to a degree but shearing stress is catastrophic.
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