A slew of new research during the past few years shows that marital stress can play a significant role in a person’s overall health—increasing risk for everything from chronic pain to a heart attack. A low-stress marriage can even increase survival chances when a health problem strikes. People who are married tend to be healthier and live longer than unmarried people.
Stress Relief: Social Isolation
This is one of the extreme forms of stress that a human being can be subjected to. Evolution has favoured us with a large number of tools like language, emotions, and a hugely developed brain; that makes social cohesion possible and even necessary. It is obvious that depriving a person of this basic human requirement is a cruel punishment.
Stress Relief: The Neurochemistry of Depression
Considerable evidence exists that something is askew with the chemistry of the brains of depressives. In order to appreciate that, it is necessary to understand a little about how brain cells communicate with one another. The basic structural and functional unit of the nervous system is the nerve cell or neuron, which is the principal type of brain cell. The neurons are similar to other cells in the body except for two projections—antenna like structures called dendrites for receiving signals and a long projection for transmitting signals called axon.
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Stress Relief: The Symptoms of Depression
Stress Relief: Why Do We Get a Fever?
The explanation for the fever producing effect is on much stronger ground. Studies have shown that the immune system works more efficiently at higher temperatures— specifically the proliferation of the fighter cells is accelerated at higher temperatures. A wide variety of viruses and bacteria thrive at temperatures below 98.6°. As the body temperature rises, their doubling time slows and in some cases stops altogether.
Stress Relief: Neuroanatomy of Depression
The top layer of the brain is the cortex—the area involved in abstract thinking, cognition, philosophical thought and memory functions. This portion is extremely large and well developed in primates as compared to other animals.
Stress Relief: Neurochemical Theory of Depression
Neurochemical Theory 1 of Depression
‘It is not too little but actually too much norepinephrine’. First, some background orientation. If somebody constantly yells or shouts at you, you stop listening. Similarly, if you surround a cell with lots of a neurotransmitter, the cell will not ‘listen as carefully—in scientific terms the cell will down regulate (decrease) the number of receptors for that neurotransmitter, in order to decrease its sensitivity to that messenger.
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Stress Relief: Cognitive Model of Depression
The field of experimental psychology provides some excellent theoretical understanding about stress and depression. The key point from this theory is that events are considered psychologically stressful when they have some of the following characteristics—a loss of control and predictability within certain contexts, a loss of outlets for frustration, a loss of source of support, a perception that in some aspects life is getting worse. In a number of experiments, when animals are subjected to stressful events that have these characteristics, the result is a condition similar to human depression.
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Stress Relief: Stress and the Onset of Depression
The first stress-depression link is an obvious one. Statistically, stress and the onset of depression go together. People who are undergoing a lot of life stressors are more likely to succumb to depression and people in depression are more likely to have undergone a recent significant stressor.
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Stress Relief: Human Memory
Stress—Friend or Foe?
A little sharpens the mind and memory; too much shrivels the brain and makes you sick.
The quote above captures the essence of the effects of stress on memory. In the following sections, we will examine in greater detail how the memory system functions and see exactly how stress disrupts the different functions.