Study: Stress Shrinks the Brain and Lowers Our Ability to Cope with Adversity | Healthland | TIME.com

Stress is an integral part of all of our lives, so much so, in fact, that we tend to shrug off our racing pulses and insomnia and constant angst as nothing unusual. But researchers say that even everyday stress can be leading to changes in the brain that make us more vulnerable to mental as well as social disorders ranging from depression to addiction and behavioral conditions.

Dr. Rajita Sinha, a professor of psychiatry and neurobiology at Yale University School of Medicine and director of the Yale Stress Center, reports in the journal Biological Psychiatry that even among healthy individuals, adverse life events that cause stress can lead to shrinkage in parts of the brain responsible for regulating emotions and metabolism. In addition, she and her team found that it’s not individual traumatic events that have the most impact, but the cumulative effect of a lifetime’s worth of stress that might cause the most dramatic changes in brain volume.

via healthland.time.com