stress on Brain

What happens in the brain when we are afraid? Remember the little red metal square on the school-room wall with a piece of glass that reads, “Break in case of fire”? Just as the school has a fire alar...

Did you know that more has been discovered about our minds in the last twenty years than in all the time before that? Did you know that an estimated 60 to 80 percent of visits to primary care physicia...

Social media addiction also changes our neurochemistry: our slumped posture produces cortisol; the backlit phone and blue light can suppress melatonin (needed for sleep); and a recent study with “hard...

Regardless of how real the stress may or may not be, when our brain perceives a situation as being threatening, the process it engages is the same. Just like airport security, our brain has to take ev...

A study in Berlin even found that the part of the brain that processes fear and stress (the amygdala) was healthier in people who lived within a kilometre of a forest. To help soothe your spirits and ...

A man can wear out a particular part of his mind by continually using it and tiring it: but the tired parts of the mind can be rested and strengthened not merely by rest, but by using other parts… Man...

What you allow to occupy your mind will sooner or later determine your feelings, your speech and your actions. Thoughts . . . have a real impact on how you feel and behave.”

Mess creates stress.

“The mind can go either direction under stress—toward positive or toward negative: on or off. Think of it as a spectrum whose extremes are unconsciousness at the negative end and hyperconsciousness at...

The truth is that it’s what we say to ourselves [the self-talk of our thought life] in response to any particular situation that mainly determines our mood and feelings.

Learn to master time, and you will be able—whatever you do, whatever the stress, in the storm, in tragedy, or simply in the confusion in which we continuously live—to be still, immobile in the present...

Excessive stress occurs when the demands made on an organism exceed that organism’s reasonable capacities to fill them.

Have you ever felt like a part of you was dying while sitting in traffic? Apparently, you’re not too far off. A team of German researchers found that being stuck in a traffic jam increased your chance...

We need the interruption of the night To ease attention off when overtight, To break out logic in too long a flight, And ask us if our premises are right.

Fear and restlessness kill more than do illnesses.

“Thirty years ago,” Anne Lamott writes in her book Bird by Bird, “my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he’d had three months to write. ...

In times of stress, the best thing we can do for each other is to listen with our ears and our hearts and to be assured that our questions are just as important as our answers.

We are hyperliving, skimming along on the surface of life.

My whole life is a movie. It’s just that there are no dissolves. I have to live every agonizing moment of it. My life needs editing.

“Relax, none of us are getting out of here alive.”

Caesar Augustus, the first Roman emperor, had quite the sharp wit. After hearing about a Roman nobleman who had passed away with enormous debts (which were kept private throughout his lifetime), he se...

If you walk into a woods and select a ten-foot sapling, you can bend that sapling over, let it go, and it will return to its normal height and straightness. However, if you bend it again, this time a ...

The little troubles and worries of life may be as stumbling blocks in our way, or we may make them stepping-stones to a nobler character and to Heaven. Troubles are often the tools by which God fashio...

The objects of the present life fill the human eye with a false magnification because of their immediacy.

Although we use the word stress in a negative connotation, it actually is a value-neutral concept. In the medical sense, stress is the body’s response to any change required of it or any demand impose...

A clock would make a poor bank. No customer would ever be able to deposit a moment to save for later because, at the end of the day, every second would be spent and the clock would be bankrupt. While ...

Unless we can discover ways of staying afloat amidst the surging torrents of information, we may end up drowning in them.

A common question I’m hearing from folks these days is whether it is beneficial (or a moral imperative) to pay attention to the news. The Catholic nun and social activist Dorothy Day asked the same qu...

[Here is] a malady of modern times: unremitting and increasing levels of stress. The statistics on mounting stress and its detrimental effects on body, mind, emotions, and health shout at us. The Amer...

In the fall of 2009, I was invited to go on a month-long speaking tour throughout Africa. During the trip, a CEO from South Africa named Salim took me to Soweto, a township just outside of Johannesbur...