Researchers find out why some stress is good for you

Overworked and stressed out? Look on the bright side. Some stress is good for you.

“You always think about stress as a really bad thing, but it’s not,” said Daniela Kaufer, associate professor of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley. “Some amounts of stress are good to push you just to the level of optimal alertness, behavioral and cognitive performance.”

New research by Kaufer and UC Berkeley post-doctoral fellow Elizabeth Kirby has uncovered exactly how acute stress – short-lived, not chronic - primes the brain for improved performance.

In studies on rats, they found that significant, but brief stressful events caused stem cells in their brains to proliferate into new nerve cells that, when mature two weeks later, improved the rats’ mental performance.

“I think intermittent stressful events are probably what keeps the brain more alert, and you perform better when you are alert,” she said.

Kaufer, Kirby and their colleagues in UC Berkeley’s Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute describe their results in a paper published April 16 in the new open access online journal eLife.

The UC Berkeley researchers’ findings, “in general, reinforce the notion that stress hormones help an animal adapt – after all, remembering the place where something stressful happened is beneficial to deal with future situations in the same place,” said Bruce McEwen, head of the Harold and Margaret Milliken Hatch Laboratory of Neuroendocrinology at The Rockefeller University, who was not involved in the study.

Stress. The word alone can make someone feel paranoid, edgy and nervous. But is stress really what is wrong, or is it the way you handle your stress that needs to change? People look at the word stress as an enemy that needs to be terminated for good, even though we all know that stress is an inevitable fact of life. So the question is not so much how do you avoid or get rid of stress, but more how do you deal and handle the stress when it does come to surface (because it will)?

Stress is a factor that induces bodily and/or mental pressure and tension. When you read that definition, you automatically assume that it is a bad thing, right? Why? The reason majority of people look at stress as bad is because of the place they take it to when it comes along. When the mind or body has to work a little stress relationshipharder than usual, people fear it because it is not something that is a part of their normal pattern or comfort zone and so that take that stress to a level of where they feel much discomfort and feel painful, angry and depressing emotions and thoughts. So the first step would be to stop being afraid of unfamiliarity or situations where you have to step out of your comfort zone- and start focusing on the positive points of the stress and use it to your advantage.

Kaufer is especially interested in how both acute and chronic stress affect memory, and since the brain’s hippocampus is critical to memory, she and her colleagues focused on the effects of stress on neural stem cells in the hippocampus of the adult rat brain. Neural stem cells are a sort of generic or progenitor brain cell that, depending on chemical triggers, can mature into neurons, astrocytes or other cells in the brain. The dentate gyrus of the hippocampus is one of only two areas in the brain that generate new brain cells in adults, and is highly sensitive to glucocorticoid stress hormones, Kaufer said.