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Chronic stress enlarges the amygdala, the brain's threat detector, leading to overreactions. A larger amygdala increases sensitivity, making minor stressors feel overwhelming. To calm an overactive amygdala, practice deep breathing by inhaling for four seconds and exhaling for six to activate the body's natural calm-down response. Additionally, practicing mindfulness, even for five minutes daily, can lower amygdala activity. The brain can reset with the right tools.

A human organism has a finite energy budget for vital functions like growth and repair, plus everything else. Psychosocial stress or disease can consume much of this budget, forcing the brain to cut costs. Symptoms of depression, such as distress, fatigue, concentration problems, and lack of contextual sensitivity, indicate reduced metabolic outlay. The brain attempts to reduce energy expenditure when resources are limited.

A new study indicates that stress can shrink the brain. Research has found a link between high levels of the stress hormone cortisol and brain size and function. The study, which involved over 2,000 people, measured thinking skills and found that the outer layer of the brain was smaller in those who were more stressed. Doctors also state that stress can lead to memory loss and headaches.

Chronic stress enlarges the amygdala, the brain's threat detector, leading to overreactions. A larger amygdala increases sensitivity, making minor stressors feel overwhelming. To calm an overactive amygdala, practice deep breathing by inhaling for four seconds and exhaling for six to activate the body's natural calm-down response. Additionally, practicing mindfulness, even for five minutes daily, can lower amygdala activity. The brain can reset with the right tools.

It's not only that stress makes us unhealthy and forgetful and maybe even demented and dead earlier, stress makes us tunnel visioned. If you've got a choice between more of a sense of control or more of a sense of outlets or more of a sense of predictability or more social support, social support is the way to do it every single One of the most interesting important things that stress does is it decreases our capacity for empathy.

The chronic stress causes your emotional brain to become hyperactive where now you're always watching for something bad to happen. So that's the negativity bias. So the more ACE score you have, the higher your ACE score, the more likely you are to notice the negative. And I actually had a positive training program to teach people to notice what's right. And my wife who has an ACE ACE score of eight, she's like, this is the dumbest game I've ever seen because she believed noticing the scary people protected her. Where I'm like, the chronic stress is gonna take you out early.

I'm a brainwashing expert, and I am personally terrified of short form social media like that. And I'm not immune. And I'm one of the best in the world, and I am not immune to it. And I think that should be a stark warning for a lot of people. What's the cost, though? What's the cost of the life, in your view, of living this kind of life where we go home and we just burn our brains out with these social media apps and fry our dopamine receptors? Is there a cost? Yeah. I think the cost is increased loneliness. And that these apps any app that sells ads has two main goals. Number one, and all advertising shares these two main goals. Number one, make you compare yourself to other people in unhealthy ways. Number two, make you think I am not enough, and we see that everywhere. I'm not enough, and I'm comparing myself to other people, and it gets us into an us versus them. Then it traps you into a corner of confirmation bias. Whatever you think, I'm gonna show you this group of a 150 people that agree with you. No matter how stupid, how radical, how absolutely bizarre your ideas are. Let me show you all of these people. And then you start thinking the whole world's like that. So really quickly, what happens when we conglomerate people together? Like, I've only been in New York once in my life, but we're in New York right now. I'm looking at my hotel. I was like struggling to find a piece of nature. Like, I think I have more trees on my property than they're in the whole city here. So on the whole, when you squeeze people together, have you heard of the bystander effect? So there there's a very good experiment that was led by doctor Phillips and Barto that they did at Liverpool Street Station. Oh, in London? In London. Yeah. Okay. So right at Liverpool Street, there's three or four steps to get up to the main. So from the street, there's a curb, and then there's three or four steps. They had this woman laid out on the ground wearing like a normal skirt and top, and I think 395 people either walked by her or stepped over her. And then they did it with a guy. And then they did it with a guy who's holding a beer, and he's asking for help. And they they it may have changed all these variables. But it's happened in New York City before. There's a woman named Kitty Genovace in the sixties, I think just two blocks from here, who was stabbed to death in front of, like, 55 witnesses. Don't quote me on that number. And no one called the police until much, much later, mostly because everyone thought somebody else would act. But if I described to you saying, watched a person get stabbed, and three people just watched, and they watched it happen. Would you say that that's psychopathy? That's a psychopath. So these large cities and stuff and the apps that are messing with the social part of our brain that makes us think the tribe is way bigger than our brains are made to handle causes this almost psychopathic behavior, which the bystander effect has been proven hundreds of times as an experiment.

- So if we have this hormone called cortisol, cortisol does a couple of interesting things: increases the inflammation that we experience, it increases our heart rate, it increases our blood pressure, it makes us more mentally stressed, we feel more mentally stressed, and it floods our bloodstream with sugar. - Now since it does all of these different things, each of these things goes back and regulates cortisol. - So there's a really interesting set of studies that show that people who have been traumatized have high levels of cortisol. - And those high levels of cortisol increase their hypervigilance, make it hard for them to go to sleep, and the cortisol is doing that to your brain.

The amygdala, insula, and anterior cingulate cortex maintain internal and external representations of self and the world, interpreting stimuli. Significant stress can alter the salience network's interpretation, leading to a mesolimbic hierarchy of issues. This ranges from internal restlessness and ruminations to severe aberrant salience, like psychosis, where hallucinations and delusions occur. In psychosis, internal sensations are misinterpreted catastrophically. For example, mild abdominal pain might be interpreted as cancer, as seen in psychotic depression. Internal sounds can be misinterpreted as external voices, demonstrating how the salience network can malfunction.

Did you know that stress could mess up the digestive system and lead to symptoms like abdominal pain, heartburn, and bloating? This is because there's a direct connection between the brain and the gut. So when we are stressed, our digestive system gets stressed. So stress literally paralyzes the digestive system and food just sits there leading to symptoms. So if you're having digestive problems make sure you're mindful of your stress.

There's a finite upper limit to your range of capabilities as a human organism because you must perform vital functions, growth, and repair, in addition to everything else. Psychosocial stress or disease can consume much of your energy budget, leaving less for other necessary functions. The brain will attempt to cut costs in such situations. Symptoms of depression, such as distress, fatigue, concentration problems, and lack of sensitivity to context, indicate reduced metabolic outlay.

"Stress is created by not being able to predict something that's going to happen in your life. The perception that something's going get worse or you can't control something, right?" "So, when that occurs, we switch on that primitive nervous system called the fight or flight nervous system, and the brain goes into this very alarm state called That means pay attention to the outer world, there's danger out there." "But if it's not a predator and it's traffic, or your co worker, or your ex, this is where it gets to be a problem because it becomes very maladaptive, right?" "And like a lightning storm in the clouds, the brain starts firing very, very incoherently." "And when the brain's incoherent, we're incoherent."

The default mode network is highly activated in depressed people; the more depressed or anxious someone is, the more active this network becomes. Meditation, as shown in functional MRI studies, reduces the activity in the default mode network (DMN).

Neuroscientists find that the medial prefrontal cortex and the anterior cingulate cortex are involved in the self perception of one's life path, positive growth, motivation and emotional intelligence—the innate tools necessary to live a thriving and abundant life. fMRI studies show that when people express internal gratitude, bioelectric activation occurs in these same areas. Like an on off switch, gratitude connects with the brain's reward center and creates a feeling of peace, putting us in a state of mind that allows for better assessment and calm response even while under pressure. Gratitude affects the brain's default mode network (DMN), which is involved in self identity, morality, and social relationships. With gratitude, the DMN becomes a more focused picture, allowing one to see more connections and opportunities as they occur in real time. Gratitude also improves heart rate variability, giving more control over the parasympathetic nervous system, permitting better impulse control and thereby leading to better decisions. It cultivates better sleep quality and lower inflammation. Gratitude not only feels good, it brings good things. No matter if you think it's merely perception or coincidence or if you think it's luck, karma or grace, whatever you want to call it, there is a predictable cause and effect when you practice gratitude. Your life inexplicably changes for the best. This is a law of nature that has been written about in most religious and esoteric traditions. In the Torah, Psalms 50:23 says, “a sacrifice of thanksgiving, honor me and show me the way to salvation.” In the New Testament, Philippians 4:6–7 says, “with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known unto God and the peace of God shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.” Perhaps the most direct version is found in the Quran’s 14:7: “If you are grateful, I will give you more. If you are ungrateful, punishment is severe.” In Hinduism's Bhagavad Gita, if one offers with devotion, I will accept with love. In Bhakti, gratitude and devotion evoke grace. In Buddhism, gratitude is a foundational practice that cultivates mindfulness and compassion and leads to blessings in your personal life. In Sikhism, daily gratitude is said to lift the spirit and bring about auspicious outcomes. Sufism teaches that gratitude attracts increased blessing. Yoga teaches that gratitude is a clear, luminous state of mind that draws grace and auspicious coincidence towards the practitioner. The Tao Te Ching’s 33 says that contentment brings wealth, and in hermetic traditions, the principles of correspondence and vibration teach that a grateful state has a resonance that attracts more experiences to be grateful for. Gratitude greatly increases opportunity, protection, guidance, harmony with others, self sufficiency, and overall peace. This is true whether you believe it’s neuroscience or a resonant response to vibrations. According to research, the most common and effective practices are gratitude journaling (listing just a few things two to three times per week) and practicing a form of gratitude meditation, of which there are many.

"Go back a 100 million years and some dinosaur is getting stressed because another one is trying to eat it." "it's secreting the exact same stress hormone, the same molecule as we do in a traffic jam." "When that hormone is mobilized, because you're running for your life, everything they're doing is saving your life." "It's sending energy to your thigh muscles." "It's making your heart beat faster." "But what do we do? We sit and we worry for thirty days each month about how we're going to pay the rent, and we're secreting the same hormones and making the same changes in our body and run for your life and your blood pressure goes through the roof." "That's good. That's saving your life." "Do the same thing when you're thinking about psychological stressors and do it chronically and you're going to get sick."

There are receptors in the brain that monitor the levels of cortisol in a way to sense threat in our environment. When those levels are high, the brain immediately thinks, I'm about to die. What is the biggest threat to my survival? The first threat that the brain will consider is starvation. So to try to protect us, one of the things that cortisol does is lay down extra fat in the abdominal fat cells. We can digest that fat and stay alive until a food source becomes available. Wait, so are you saying that stress is causing belly fat? Yeah. Wait, what?

Under stress or tension, the brain protects you. Touching a hot stove causes you to pull your hand away; strong emotions are like that hot surface. The brain can create pain based on predicted threat, but prediction is difficult and can be wrong. Chronic pain is connected to the brain sensing danger, which is connected to relationships, environment, and emotions.