Stress and Anxiety can Change your Brain
The Brain changes and alters throughout life.
Changes in the structure of your brain are continuous as learning and life experiences affect three parts of your brain.
The main learning area and memory - hippocampus (the pink strip)
The worry centre - amygdala (blue area)
The pre-frontal cortex - immediately behind our forehead that is not shown on this picture.
The right side of the picture is normal, however the left side where the hippocampus has shrunk and the amygdala has almost doubled in size.
I have people coming to me who have been under excessive stress (chronic stress) and now find they have high levels of anxiety that can make life difficult and at times not too much fun.
The problem has been neuroplasticity; the brain has changed shape with some neurons shrinking by loosing connections by making learning and memory more difficult and at the same time their amygdala or fear centre growing more connections, with a tendency to worry more or be more anxious.
Stress Overload becomes Life Threatening
Management
Research on Exercise
Over the past 20 years, researchers have begun to get at the root of the benefit of exercise, with studies pointing to increases in the volume of the hippocampus, development of new neurons, and infiltration of blood vessels into the brain.