Stress Can Make Your Brain Stronger If You Know This
iStock Can what doesn’t kill you make you smarter? They are more likely to say, “I can control many things that are happening in my life,” instead of “many events in my life happen by chance.” The feeling of control appears to reduce the amount of the toxic stress hormone cortisol in the brain. The sheer will to go on switches on the brain’s left hemisphere – the reward-seeking set of brain circuits underlying goal-seeking – to override the brain’s anxiety-prone right hemisphere. Taking time to self-reflect and gain perspective activates the brain’s right frontal lobe, releasing noradrenaline – a powerful chemical that can build the brain’s gray matter and give us the mental strength to solve new problems better. Reinterpreting distress as something other than a personal attack is a powerful tool that redirects brain activity from the emotional centers in the amygdala to the brain’s thinking and problem centers in the frontal lobes.
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