Stress is a killer
You’ve likely got more going on than you realize
(Excerpt from my book The Minds of Mass Killers: Understanding and Interrupting the Pathway to Violence. The holidays bring incredible stress for many people due to unhappy/unhealthy family dynamics, financial limitations, and unrealistic expectations.)
We can be too quick to diagnose someone experiencing any psychological distress as mentally ill when, in fact, symptoms of anxiety and depression can be very logical and coherent responses to environmental stress.
When we are stressed, our sympathetic nervous system is activated, resulting in a flood of neurochemicals that generate our fight/flight response by activating the amygdala. While this is appropriate if we’re running from a tiger, it’s harmful if we persist in this high-adrenaline state over days, weeks, or months. This nervous system hyperarousal can cause multiple mental health symptoms in the short term, including insomnia, depression, and anxiety disorders. Chronic flooding of stress hormones in the brain can also cause thinning in the frontal cortex, the cognitive part of the brain, which reduces an individual’s ability to control impulses over the long term. Living in an environment of prolonged stress changes our biology in multiple ways; all facets of our health can suffer.
