You Lose 80% Of This From Your Brain When Stressed

One of the things I often hear my clients say is:

“Nicola, I can’t think clearly when I am stressed, I feel full up and lose focus”.

Stress can be linked to a very real threat in your environment or a highly personal, perceived response to your circumstances.

Let’s understand what happens in your brain and body when you experience stress.

Then how to use some simple and powerful energy medicine techniques to re-pattern this response. To help you create focus and calm whenever you need it.

 

Flight, Fight, Or Freeze Response​

You did not evolve to think your way out of danger but rather for your autonomic nervous system to take over and ensure instant effective responses.

Your entire energy system is ready to use your body to respond instinctively to that saber tooth tiger. This is known as your fight, flight, or freeze response.

The “threats” of a typical modern life, however, are more rooted in a barrage of emails and messages and demands of daily life.

What is it that you lose from your forebrain when stressed?
Blood.
In response to an emergency you can lose up to 80% of the blood from your forebrain when you are experiencing stress.

Why does that matter to you?

Amy F. T. Arnsten from the Department of Neurobiology, at Yale University School of Medicine gives an insight into why the healthy functioning of this area of your brain is vital to your daily life. 

“Your pre frontal cortex, your forebrain intelligently regulates your thoughts, actions , and emotions through extensive connections with other brain regions. It creates a “mental sketch pad” (to use a phrase coined by Alan Baddeley) through networks of neurons that can maintain information in the absence of environmental stimulation.

Neuroscientists such as Patricia Goldman-Rakic referred to this process as working memory: the ability to keep in mind an event that has just occurred, or bring to mind information from long-term storage, and use this representational knowledge to regulate behaviour, thought and emotion.”

No wonder thinking clearly is a challenge when experiencing stress as your blood flow is redistributed from this area of your brain.

The stresses that hit you and I today, however, require us to think clearly.  

In addition to the redistribution  of blood from your forebrain, stress chemicals flood your entire body, distorting that accuracy of your perceptions and thoughts

 

The Statistics Of Stress​

A recent study by the UK Mental Health Foundation reported that 51% of adults who felt stressed reported feeling depressed, and 61% reported feeling anxious.

The American Institute of Stress has compiled some of the leading research on stress and how this impacts individuals and employers.

• 83% of US workers suffer from work-related stress.
• US businesses lose up to $300 billion yearly as a result of workplace stress. Stress causes around one million workers to miss work every day.
• Only 43% of US employees think their employers care about their work-life balance.
• Depression leads to $51 billion in costs due to absenteeism and $26 billion in treatment costs.
• Work-related stress causes 120,000 deaths and results in $190 billion in healthcare costs yearly.

 

The Impact On Your Wellbeing​

An overactive stress response has a negative impact on your wellbeing by depleting your immune system energy over time. Stress energy has a direct relationship with your immune system energy. Your stress response recruits energy from your immune system as the first place it looks.

Many of the prominent disorders of the modern world such as chronic physical conditions, allergies, autoimmune diseases and cancer have this underlying energy imbalance.

Learning how to redress this balance is crucial to your long term wellbeing and energy.

 

What can you do to create a different stress response?​

Energy Medicine self care protocols give you a way to boost blood circulation and draw blood that had been diverted to the chest and limbs for the stress response back up to the brain.

This can be done using some powerful points called Neurovascular points located on your forehead. 

Holding these points lightly with your fingers or palms draws blood, energy and oxygen and cerebrospinal fluid back into your brain. These points connect into every aspect of your energy system.

 

 

This allows you to think more clearly and release emotional energy and stress. You are able to re-centre yourself and re-pattern and reprogram a habitual response into a more stress resilient one.

Working with these points regularly can also repattern your stress response. Hold these points for 2-20 minutes, or longer.