
Brain Is a Co-Conspirator in a Vicious Stress Loop (2009) - jimsojim
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/18/science/18angier.html?em
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robg
I was trained as a neuroscientist, took me over a decade to realize two
important, basic, biological facts I wasn't taught:

1) Stress is always on - always. It's the survival instinct that can be
reduced but not turned off.

2) Sleep is quite simply the recovery from stress. Without proper sleep, we
don't recover.

Now as we develop technologies for stress management, I'm still amazed that #1
and #2 are not as commonly understood - and talked about - as the need for
good nutrition and hydration. The body was designed to stress and sleep. We
ignore those primal drives to our short- and long-term peril.

~~~
shostack
if stress is chemical, is there not a good way to dampen or come close to
removing it chemically? Would there be major health downsides to working to
reduce stress in your life to this degree?

~~~
thatcat
Adrenaline uptake can be prevented with beta blockers[0], such as
propanolol[1] which is often prescribed for blood pressure, arrhythmia, and
performance anxiety. The down sides are when you stop taking it, you may be
hypersensitive to stress since other methods of dealing with the adrenaline
have been neglected. Exercise and meditation are better ways to reduce the
effects of stress in the long term.

[0][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_blocker](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_blocker)
[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propranolol](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propranolol)

~~~
DigitalJack
I take propranolol for both BP and stress. I also meditate.

I can attest to propranolol's effectiveness for acute anxiety. Meditation is
about equally effective for me, but not always practical.

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throwanem
tl;dr: "We tortured some rats, and they reacted as though they'd been
tortured. When we stopped torturing them, they got better."

Don't mistake me for someone who has a problem with animal research in its own
right, but I'm having a hard time seeing the novelty here.

~~~
astazangasta
They probably got some fMRI, and they framed it in terms of cortisol,
adrenaline and cytokines.

Old knowledge is useless to modern science, we need to continually re-express
it in the modish jargon of the day or people won't accept it as true. Thus,
generations of studies restating the same old crap with new methods.

~~~
tokensimian
This is good!

It sucks as a learner. But for science and progress of knowledge, it provides
an inefficient but lacks-false-positives mechanism.

It sucks for Liebniz, but was a positive for our understanding

~~~
astazangasta
No, it isn't good. It is brittle and dogmatic, and these dogmas are often
thinly-evidenced ("now we know stress is all about cortisol levels!"). It
means vast categories of human knowledge are regularly discarded without
understanding or examination because of epistemological prejudice. And the
process is not by any means lacking in false positives; this presumes that our
current modes of knowledge are actually better, less error-prone, etc., than
the forms of knowledge they are refusing to countenance, which they often are
not.

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dominotw
>It’s still August. Time to relax, rewind and remodel the brain.

Who the hell is the entity that is doing the remodeling. What a bunch of
garbage.

~~~
peterDeranger
It's even worse… some ppl here believe we are designed. Disappointing.

