Science Says Stress Can Seriously Change Your Brain, Here’s How

Are having trouble concentrating and learning new ideas? Do you toss and turn at night? Science says that it isn’t your fault. These are side effects of feeling too much stress. Who doesn’t feel over stressed these days? It may be the standard, but it isn’t normal. Too much stress can literally shrink the size the of the brain, and reduce your ability to perform simple tasks.

How Stress Affects Your Brain

Stress isn’t all bad. In fact, it’s quite helpful when you’re feeling the right amount of it. Stress is what pushes you through during a marathon and gives you the energy to finish it. Stress is what gives you the ability to pull a magical speech off in front of a big crowd when you were positive you didn’t remember all your lines.

However, so many of us are overworked at work and home, and never have a chance to destress. This is when it becomes a problem. Whether you’re in a car crash or at work, the body responds the same when the brain thinks there is a threat. So our brains have cortisol pumping through them almost daily, which is not how nature intended it.

When we’re too stressed, too much cortisol would be present that creates quite a few issues:

• Dampens your immune system.
• Raises cholesterol and blood pressure, increasing your chance for a heart attack.
• Hinders the hippocampus from making new brain cells. This part of your brain helps memory, and too much cortisol has been shown to lead to Alzheimers.
• An excess of cortisol in the blood is related to chronic depression.

Brain scans of a cognitively healthy person and a person with Alzheimers from Dementia Lab.

These brain scans show the hippocampus of two people. The smaller the hippocampus, the worse your memory is. The hippocampus deteriorates naturally with age – leading to Alzheimers, but too much cortisol hinders its ability to rejuvenate brain cells. This speeds up the process of deterioration. You can see the far higher amount of “blank space”, which is a where the brain has deteriorated.

Stress has become tricky; it is absolutely necessary for human survival, yet too much of it can kill you.

3 Ways to Overcome Stress

If stress is really killing us, there must be a way to live without much stress, right? There are a handful of recommended daily habits that will reduce your cortisol in situations where it isn’t necessary.

1. Evaluate and Change

The first recommendation is that you evaluate where your stress is coming from, and you change it. Is it coming from work? Perhaps you should consider something simple like talking to your boss or something drastic like finding a new job. If your stress is coming from your spouse, it’s time that you sit down and talk about how your relationship can be healthier moving forward. If you’re just plain overwhelmed by all aspects of your life, you can learn to say “no” more often. We al feel the need to do everything thrown at us, but that may literally kill us.

2. Exercise

Doing daily exercises such as power-walking, running, biking, or even weight training will get your blood sugars pumping naturally, without the need for stress. You’ll be better equipped to handle daily situations in a calm manner, and your brain will sound the cortisol alarm less often.

3. Meditation

Meditation is simply one of the best ways to reduce stress. Deep breathing and focused thinking are like exercise for your brain. Meditating is like unplugging your brain from the constant stimulation of the real-world, giving it a chance to rest and rework and itself. Personally, I use an app called HeadSpace, which helps me with 10 easy minutes of meditation a day.

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Mood Disorders Are Linked To Higher Intelligence, Science Says

“No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness.”- Aristotle

Today, doctors are ready to prescribe pharmaceuticals at the first signs of a mood disorder in order to control any unpredictable behavior. But, are they potentially stifling genius thought processes? As it turns out, many mood disorders have been positively linked to higher levels of intelligence and creativity.

Since ancient times, people have associated “madness” with creative genius, believing the gods had blessed these individuals. These beliefs have carried on to the modern times, leading to the understanding of the infamous phenomenon of artistic temperament or the tortured artist characterization. Recently, researchers have discovered why this happens.

Writers and Mood Disorders

In the late 1980’s, researchers compared a sample group of writers to a control group of non-writers in order to identify the presence of mental disorders. Their findings concluded that the majority of writers did, indeed, have higher rates of mood disorders. In fact, 80% of the sample group had a mood disorder with a tendency toward bipolar disorder. The study was replicated with some different criterion and included a wider range of writers who had won awards. The researchers did not diagnose them, but rather asked if the subjects had received treatment for mental disorders. In this study, 38% of the participants had received treatment, and 63% of those were playwrights.

Types of Mood Disorders

As previously mentioned, the link between creative intelligence and mood disorders has long been established. But, what exactly are the common mood disorders found in intelligent people? Some of the most influential artists of all time were inflicted with bipolar disorder, mania, depression, anxiety, and schizophrenia.

Bipolar Disorder

Bipolar disorder seems to be the most common of the mood disorders in highly intelligent and creative people. For example, in one study, it has been shown to be four times more likely in young adults who earned straight A’s in school. This finding was particularly true for high achievers in language, music, and math classes. Another study found that people with a genetic likelihood of developing bipolar disorder were also likely to express higher creative intelligence. This was shown to be true in literature and leadership roles. This mood disorder leads to periods of depression followed by periods of mania, characterized by extreme happiness, ambition, and creativity.

The Burden of High Intelligence

Not only does a high IQ come with the propensity for mood disorders, but also risky behaviors like drug and alcohol use. This is because drug and alcohol consumption is a relatively new occurrence on the human evolutionary timeline making it an evolutionarily novel concept. Children who were considered the brightest in their classroom are more likely to grow up and experiment with drugs and alcohol as several studies have suggested.

Brain Power, Social Interaction, and Autism

Medical researchers suggest that the human brain controls several different areas of survival. One of these, social interaction, takes up a large part of the brain’s functionality. This area of the brain helps with the development of cooperation, empathy, and altruism. When this brain function is non-existent or underdeveloped, a large quantity of cerebral activity is liberated for other uses.

In the right person, this extra brain power can be channeled into creative energy. These individuals may go on to create moving pieces of art, explanations of previously misunderstood world processes, or even refining mathematical research. Lacking the social interactive part of brain functionality and replacing it with creative intelligence may be related to diagnoses of autism.

Brain Activity and Creative Intelligence

Other researchers have explained that when a person comes out of depression or other mood disorder episodes, the activity in the brain changes. In the lower part of the frontal lobe, brain activity decreases and shifts to the upper part of the lobe. This same brain activity is noted when people are experiencing creativity. Additionally, people with mood disorders do not have the same processing filters for outside stimuli as people without these disorders. These people are able to process contradictory ideas at the same time thereby identifying associations among previously unassociated ideas. This thought process can be overwhelming for individuals, but this also results in creative productivity.

Whether it is the mood disorder that leads to higher intelligence or the higher intelligence that leads to mood disorders, continues to be a point of contention for many researchers. One thing is certain, the two are most certainly connected.

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Daydreaming Indicates A Well-Equipped Brain, Study Says

A lot of people think that those who let their minds wander off to some fantasy land cannot possibly have what it takes to pay close attention to any type of task. Remarks such as “get your head out of the clouds” or “you need to live in reality” are commonly expressed to daydreamers both young and old. However, researchers have found that daydreaming may actually be a good thing. According to an article in the Smithsonian, the Psychology of Science has released data from a new study revealing that those who daydream, or let their minds wander, may have a higher degree of working memory.

How The Experiment Was Done

This surprising revelation came from a study that was performed by researchers from the University of North Carolina. They discovered some very interesting information on how those who allow their brain to wander, or to daydream, may actually have working memories that outperform those who do not daydream. The researchers were interested to see if there is a link between the capacity of the working memory and how a person’s mind wandering may or may not have an effect on it.

Researchers performed an experience sampling study, which included 124 undergraduate participants. The participants used electronic devices over the course of 7 days to record when their thoughts wandered during an activity. The personal digital assistant would send out an alert to the participant at random times each day. This alert made them stop and report at that moment if their mind was wandering while working on the task that they were currently doing. The participants also had to record what the daydream was about, which included information on both the physical aspects of the daydream as well as the psychological aspects of it.

The Results

The study concluded that individuals who allow their minds to wander do have a better working memory ability. Working memory is defined as the brain’s ability to retain and recall information in the face of distractions. The results show that a person who daydreams, or lets their mind wander during some mundane activities will have a larger working memory capacity than those who do not. The participants who recorded on the personal digital assistant devices that they were daydreaming during the smaller tasks focused more on the tasks that required concentration than the individuals who did not let their minds wander.

Paying full attention to something means that the participants who did daydream during certain tasks could block out sensory information in the surrounding environment enough to give full, undivided attention to the harder tasks. The participants who did not record any information in the personal digital assistant devices about daydreaming were not able to block out the interfering sensory information from the world around them enough to give the harder tasks the full concentration that it needed, and so they performed worse than the other group did.

The Conclusion

The results of the study performed by the researchers from the University of North Carolina show that when a task is mundane or easy for daydreamers, their working memory is still searching for something to do and this is where the mind wandering comes in.

Some researchers believe that this is due to the fact that daydreaming causes the working memory to perform in the same way as it would for a difficult task that requires full concentration. The good news is that the results of this study reveal that the working memory is something that can be enhanced the more that it is used. So, let your mind wander and dream up whatever it takes to create a happy place.

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Eating Chocolate At Least Once A Week Can Change Your Brain

Good news for your sweet tooth! According to a recent study, eating chocolate at least once a week can increase your cognitive ability. It’s true, you have the permission to get up and go eat some chocolate!

In ancient times chocolate was used as medicine to “reduce fever, treat childhood diarrhea, promote strength before sexual conquests, decrease ‘female complaints’, increase breast-milk production, encourage sleep and helps to clean the teeth.” However, this new research is different. Read on to find out what makes chocolate a super-food for the BRAIN.

How Chocolate Changes Our Cognitive Ability

The study done at the Main-Syracuse Longitudinal center by Merrill Elias studied over 1,000 people: the researchers used a number of different cognitive tests on people who never or rarely ate chocolate and gave the same tests to those who ate chocolate at least once a week. The people who regularly ate chocolate scored better on cognitive exams and carried out simple tasks such as remembering phone numbers with greater success.

“We found that people who eat chocolate at least once a week tend to perform better cognitively,” said Elias. “It’s significant – it touches a number of cognitive domains. The key benefits of eating chocolate once a week increased “visual-spatial memory, working memory, scanning and tracking, abstract reasoning, and the mini-mental state examination.”

While the research suggests that they don’t know exactly what the relationship between chocolate and cognitive ability is, they do know that there’s something special going on here.

Flavonols Increase The Brain’s Power

What science does know about chocolate is that it’s full of flavonols. Flavonols are found naturally in cocoa, which chocolate is made from, and they seem to have a positive effect on people’s brains. Many studies have found that intaking flavonols can reduce the effects of age on cognitive ability and memory. This study tested 90 elderly people over an 8 week period and on an average the people who ingested high levels of flavonols completed tests they were given faster.

Another study from 2010 found that flavonols increase the brain’s power. It’s thought that flavonols, like coffee and tea, increase blood flow to the brain, and therefore improve it’s cognitive ability.

Some Chocolates Are Better

This is not to suggest that everyone should stop what they’re doing and shove chocolate bars down their throats. Chocolate is still full of sugars, which is currently the bane of the nutrient world. However, now there seems to be a good reason to eat some chocolate occasionally.

However, now there seems to be a good reason to eat some chocolate occasionally. Dark chocolate is higher in flavonols and lower in sugar than milk chocolate, so it surely is the better option. At most grocery stores, you can find dark chocolate that has up to 90% cocoa. That’s almost pure chocolate! Since flavonols are naturally occurring in cocoa, it stands to reason that the higher the percentage of chocolate you’re eating, the better it is for your brain.

Go buy some dark chocolate and enjoy. Don’t take it from me, take it from a scientist, Merill Elias says “I think what we can say for now is that you can eat small amounts of chocolate without guilt if you don’t substitute the chocolate for a normal balanced healthy diet.”

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5 Dreamy Destinations For Weddings Abroad

»ha ha ha« by claudia comte[via]

»ha ha ha« by claudia comte

[via]

Palacio de MarquesaTucked in the mountains of northern New...

Palacio de Marquesa

Tucked in the mountains of northern New Mexico, in the beautiful, artsy town of Taos, Palacio de Marquesa features eight individually styled rooms, lush gardens, and a small, lovely spa.

Appointed with marble bathroom and private fireplace, each accommodation pays tribute to a notable woman artist who made Taos her home. The decor is an elegant mix of contemporary and classical elements, with beautiful tile or hardwood floors, traditional beam ceilings, and plush canopy beds.

A complimentary gourmet breakfast is served each morning in the inn’s warm and cozy community room.

TripAdvisor

J.K. Rowling Loses Her Billionaire Status Because Of Being Too Generous

J.K. Rowling was one of the richest people in the world in 2011, but since then her fortunes have decreased to such an extent that she is no longer a billionaire. Forbes announced their yearly list of the World’s Billionaires, but the Harry Potter author’s name was noticeably absent.

She was one of 129 people to be removed from the list that year, but her reason for leaving is a little different to the normal reason. The 51-year-old author’s departure was due to her sizeable donations to charity, as well as the high British taxes she is asked to pay.

J.K. Rowling’s Charity Work

Forbes, who have produced a yearly list of billionaires for over 20 years, said that Rowling’s declining fortune was mostly linked to her charitable giving, which has drastically lowered her bank balance. The magazine said: “New information about Rowlings’ estimated $160 million in charitable giving combined with Britain’s high tax rates bumped the Harry Potter scribe from our list this year.”

Lots of people would be sad to lose their billionaire status, but J.K. didn’t regret her decisions – in fact, she is very proud of her choices. She said:

“You have a moral responsibility when you’ve been given far more than you need, to do wise things with it and give intelligently.”

Her words are inspirational, and many people have a newfound respect for the extremely talented writer. She is one of the very few celebrities who can actually relate to people who are struggling financially, as she was once in a similar position.

Before Harry Potter was published the author was on benefits and struggling to make ends meet. During this time she also went through heartbreak and divorce, but she persevered and continued to put effort into achieving her dreams. At one point, she was even writing Harry Potter on free napkins in cafes. In the end, her determination paid off, and she quickly went from being an unemployed single mom to being the first billionaire author of all time.

This might have influenced her decision to give an astounding amount of money to various charities; Forbes estimate that the Harry Potter mastermind has given away $160 million to charity so far. Her main beneficiaries are charities that help single parent families; they offer free childcare facilities and they help single parents to find employment or enter education.

She also gives to other charities that are linked to children’s welfare, illiteracy, poverty and multiple sclerosis. She has also written three books for charity; “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them,” “The Tales of Beedle the Bard” and  “Quidditch Through the Ages” and “The Tales of Beedle the Bard.” These books alone have raised almost $30 million for various charities, which is pretty impressive.

Because of her charity work, J.K. Rowling is now a millionaire instead of a billionaire. She may no longer be on the Forbes list, but her generosity has changed the lives of thousands of people, which many people would agree is far more important. She truly is an inspiration; if everyone was as generous as she is, the world would be a much better place. Thank you, J.K. Rowling!

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