Why some people handle stress better
When you watch the news it’s hard not to feel bombarded by the stories of horror, violence and sadness that plague our world. But some people can manage stress and negativity much better than others.
“There is a drive to cope and to survive,” Rajita Sinha says. Sinha is the director of the Yale Stress Center and she is also the lead author of a new study about the brain’s response to stress.
Using fMRI scans to watch how people’s brains reacted during stressful situations allowed Sinha and her team to determine why some people cope with stress more efficiently than others.
The six-minute scans, conducted on 30 people, monitored the brain’s activity as they were shown images that were either stressful (scary images such as people being shot or stabbed) or neutral (such as a table or a lamp).
“When you get stressed, it’s not brief – it goes on for a little bit,” Sinha explains. “And that’s the state in which the brain has to figure out what to do.”
As well as the brain scans, the study asked the participants about their own mechanisms for coping with stress, such as their alcohol and food consumption.
There was one particular area of the brain that the researchers became interested in during the study: the ventral medial prefrontal cortex. This is the part of the brain that regulates emotions and detects hunger and cravings.
Those with more neuroflexibility and neuroplasticity in this area tended to be at a lower risk for being binge drinkers and emotional eaters. They were also less likely to have emotionally destructive ways of coping with stress, according to Sinha. “The greater the magnitude of the change in the neural signal, the more active copers they were,” she says.
The study’s results appear to suggest that resilience is determined by this part of the prefrontal cortex. Sinha feels that this is a great start to understanding resilience, although more research is required to work out how to improve it. “We have a natural circuitry to try to regain control and to be resilient,” Sinha says. “I think it’s tied to the survival processes that are hardwired, and this is what we’re tapping into.”
Related links:
How to build self-discipline in 10 days
7 “bad” habits that are actually good for you