Brain Is a Co-Conspirator in a Vicious Stress Loop (2009) | Hacker News Reader

Brain Is a Co-Conspirator in a Vicious Stress Loop (2009)

nytimes.com

61 pointsjimsojim17 comments

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.

I'm not a neuroscientist, but I have noticed in my life that there's certainly times where stress and internal drive form a loop which interferes with sleep. Crunch time, changes in employment, or trying to get something new off the ground with issues you don't yet know how to solve all adds up.

Fight-or-Flight is a valuable response to actual life-and-death danger, but for some the brain turns too many innocuous things into saber tooth tigers.

The worst is when you are so tired you can't sleep. I get that way if I stay awake ~36 hours or more. I try not to do that anymore though.

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?

True. Alcohol and sedatives work really well. Both are addictive. Best natural approach appears to be exercise, which also helps us sleep better.

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 [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propranolol

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.

"The body was designed to stress and sleep"

robg, tell me – What kind of nonsens is this? Designed by whom? God? That's just fiction mongering my friend.

I think sleep is talked about - but it is not understood. Specifically, unlike nutrition and hydration, we seem to be struggling to define conditions necessary for getting good sleep. And while I agree that exercise helps, there have been times when I used to tire myself out a lot via exercise and still struggled to fall asleep.

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

This idea goes back decades ago to Hans Selye. He even postulated that there are optimal levels of stress that promote the most well-being - not too much, no too little. These become sort of self-evident when you think of the need to exercise and so on.

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.

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.

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

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.

Thanks for this, I misread the headline and jumped to the comments to see if they would shed any light on who Brian is.

>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.

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

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