Too stressed to think straight?

Human beings are thinking animals. Your capacity for complex thought makes you what you are. In classical psychology, thought, or cognition, is seen as a process consisting of several steps: sensation, perception, apperception (conscious perception with full awareness), association, and memory. Your brain conducts these complex processes, with different sections more or less responsible for particular elements. Stress disrupts the functioning of those parts of your brain necessary for cognitive activity, just as it alters the functioning of the sections involved in emotion. When it does, it interferes with your cognitive processes on a number of levels.

Here's what happens: Adrenaline from your adrenal gland stimulates a section of your nervous system buried deep in the brain, your ascending reticular activation system (ARAS). The ARAS, in turn, activates and energizes your brain, causing its neurons to fire two to three times faster than normal. This increase in brain activity not only creates emotional intensity, it makes you think faster. The greater your perceived burden of pressure, the greater the physiological arousal, the greater the stimulation of the ARAS, the greater the increase in brain activity. At high levels of arousal, your brain becomes hyperactive and so do you.

Brain hyperactivity has profound effects on how you think. Your thoughts race, with scattered fragments of incomplete ideas whirling about in your mind, your memory is impaired, your judgment deteriorates. You make hasty decisions that lead to impulsive, ill-advised actions; in turn, you create more problems and stress for yourself.

And the problem compounds itself. You get so used to your hyperactive brain and the thought and behavior patterns it generates, you think it's normal. You may seek stimulating drugs, situations, or activities to whip it up when it starts to flag. Under conditions of recurrent stimulation, your ARAS becomes increasingly sensitive, requiring less and less adrenaline to exert its electrifying effect.

Your overstimulated brain creates problems for you when it's time to slow down, however. You may seek "chemical help" to dampen its activity. A drink before dinner is ritualized chemical relaxation; similarly the "nightcap." Muffling brain activity, we think, contributes significantly to the popularity of prescription and over-the-counter sleeping medications.

Click on other stress symptoms you may have experienced to learn more about what you can do about them as well.