NURS 3335 Stress Management, Healthy Sleep, and Brain Health

NURS 3335 Stress Management, Healthy Sleep, and Brain Health

NURS 3335 Stress Management, Healthy Sleep, and Brain Health

 

After reviewing this week’s readings and media on Stress and Stress Management, take some time to reflect upon the importance of stress management for yourself and your patients. Then, please respond to the following TWO discussion board questions.

Remember to include an APA formatted in-text citation AND corresponding reference from a recent (within last 5 years), professional journal or website (NIH, CDC, etc.). (Failure to include BOTH an in-text citation AND a corresponding reference will result in a significant point deduction. Please contact your coach if you have any questions about this BEFORE submitting your post to the discussion board this week.) You do not need an in-text citation/reference for both questions, but the FIRST question DOES require an in-text citation and reference.

What are some of the benefits of Stress Management? What are some of the obstacles to performing Stress Management strategies? (in-text citation and reference required)

What are some techniques that you have successfully utilized to manage your own stress? How often do you use these techniques? Describe some of the benefits you have experienced. (no reference required)

 

It’s not uncommon to feel disorganized and forgetful when you’re under a lot of stress. But over the long term, stress may actually change your brain in ways that affect your memory.

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Studies in both animals and people show pretty clearly that stress can affect how the brain functions, says Dr. Kerry Ressler, chief scientific officer at McLean Hospital and professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Scientists have seen changes in how the brain processes information when people experience either real-life stress or stress manufactured in a research setting. (For the latter, researchers might challenge subjects to perform a difficult task, such as counting backward from the number 1,073 by 13s while being graded.) Either type of stress seems to interfere with cognition, attention, and memory, he says.

Stress affects not only memory and many other brain functions, like mood and anxiety, but also promotes inflammation, which adversely affects heart health, says Jill Goldstein, a professor of psychiatry and medicine at Harvard Medical School. Thus, stress has been associated with multiple chronic diseases of the brain and heart. In addition, it can affect men and women differently, she says.

Stress and the brain

To understand why stress affects thinking and memory, it’s important to understand a little about how the brain works. Your brain isn’t just a single unit, but a group of different parts that perform different tasks, says Dr. Ressler. Researchers believe that when one part of your brain is engaged, the other parts of your brain may not have as much energy to handle their own vital tasks, he says. For example, if you are in a dangerous or emotionally taxing situation, the amygdala (the part of your brain that governs your survival instincts) may take over, leaving the parts of your brain that help to store memories and perform higher-order tasks with less energy and ability to get their own jobs done. “The basic idea is that the brain is shunting its resources because it’s in survival mode, not memory mode,” says Dr. Ressler. This is why you might be more forgetful when you are under stress or may even experience memory lapses during traumatic events.

The effect that stress has on the brain and body may also differ depending on when it occurs in the course of someone’s life, says Goldstein. Certain hormones, known as gonadal hormones — which are secreted in large amounts during fetal development, puberty, and pregnancy and depleted during menopause — may play a role in how stress affects an individual, says Goldstein. “For example, reductions in the gonadal hormone estradiol during the menopausal transition may change how our brain responds to stress,” she says.