Outsmarting the Brain-Shrinking Effects of Stress | Jonny Bowden | Big Think

Outsmarting the Brain-Shrinking Effects of Stress

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The hormones behind stress act on the entire body, compounding many preexisting health problems and often creating new ones. These hormones can also actually shrink regions of the brain, affecting memory, cognition and concentration. But there is a technique you can use to combat these hormones.

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Jonny Bowden:

Jonny Bowden, PhD, is a nationally known expert on weight loss, nutrition and health, and best-selling author of seven books including “The 150 Healthiest Foods on Earth”, “Living Low Carb: Controlled Carbohydrate Eating for Long-Term Weight Loss” and “The Most Effective Natural Cures on Earth”. A member of the Editorial Advisory Board for Men’s Health magazine and the health columnist for several magazines, Dr. Bowden has written or contributed to articles for dozens of publications (print and online) including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Huffington Post, America Online, Forbes, Time, Oxygen, Marie Claire, Diabetes Focus, GQ, US Weekly, Cosmopolitan, Self, Fitness, Family Circle, Allure, Men’s Heath, Prevention, Natural Health, and many others. Dr. Bowden has appeared on Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, NBC, and CBS as an expert on nutrition, weight loss, fitness and health. He’s a member of the American College of Nutrition and the American Society for Nutrition, is adjunct faculty at Clayton College for Natural Health, and is a much in-demand speaker at conferences and events across the country. His most recent book is “The Most Effective Ways to Live Longer”.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: What effect does stress have on aging?

Jonny Bowden: I singled out four processes that I think age us. And they are systemic, and they operate on the heart and the brain and the lungs and the joints and the muscles and just about every system – the immune system and hormonal system. And one of them is stress. Now, stress doesn’t necessarily cause these diseases, although in some cases they can, but it exacerbates almost any condition you can mention.

Stress can cause an outbreak of Herpes Simplex, it can cause an outbreak of asthma, it can cause an outbreak of acne. And it can certainly make serious degenerative diseases a lot worse. So, there’s a very intimate connection between stress and aging. Stress shrinks – and when I talk about stress, I’m talking about the hormones that your body secretes in response to stressful situations, such as cortisol, or adrenaline. These hormones, particularly cortisol, actually shrink areas of the brain particularly the hippocampus, which has to do with thinking, memory, and cognition. And in studies lab animals who are under a great deal of stress actually have smaller hippocampuses. Their memory is impaired; their resources are spent dealing with the stress. So you find that when you are under a lot of stress, you don’t remember things as well. You don’t control your appetite as well because you can only concentrate on so many things and if one of them is the emergency that stress is the signal about, then controlling your appetite isn’t going to be high on the list. Digesting food isn’t going to be high on the list. You’re trying to survive. Stress is a very primitive signal to the body. It was meant to tell our Paleolithic ancestors that there’s a wooly mammoth coming and that you had better be able to run up a tree or pick up a club and fight him off. That’s why it’s called the “fight or flight” hormone.

Now these hormones keep us alive. They have tremendous survival purpose. But they weren’t meant to be on all the time. It’s kind of like the fifth gear in your car. They are not meant to be petal to the metal all the time. And unfortunately, most of us in the way that we live have that stress hormone dial turned up far more than it should be.

Question: How can we minimize stress in our lives?

Jonny Bowden: We do think that stress is not an easy thing to do in our current industrialized, westernized society. But there are some things that you can do to lower stress hormones, and they are very effective. One of them, and I would consider this to be one of the top anti-aging strategies I know of and I talk about it in the book, is deep breathing. And it doesn’t take that much.

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