Can Your Lifestyle Shrink Your Brain?

We all love to think we have a big brain, I'm no different… and we’re all kind of right! 

The size of our brains are extremely important, especially from an evolutionary perspective. More surface area means more information is stored and more lobes of the brain means it can perform more functions. The good news is human brains are the biggest of the big. 

But what if i told you your lifestyle can directly change how big your brain is.

The more we push ourselves, the more we decide we need to consume (both food wise and knowledge wise), the more we use technology instead of interacting with humans, the more sedentary we become… the more we add a certain thing in to our lives.

Stress.

Now we all know what stress looks like and we’ve all felt the effects of short term stress on our bodies. However, when we keep pushing ourselves and our bodies over and over again this short term stress becomes long term (chronic) stress. 

Chronic stress comes with a whole host of psychological and physiological changes. One highly impactful change being an increase of cortisol in our body. This increased cortisol effectively puts our body in a state of constant fight or flight mode, usually only meant for when we feel we’re being immediately threatened. 

Once the body is in fight or flight mode it acts differently. Processes deemed immediately necessary are ramped up such as heart rate, breathing rate, increased sweating and tunnel vision, while processes deemed unnecessary in the short term are dampened such as learning ability and memory, emotional response and rationale, and sex drive. 

What happens when stress becomes a long term state is that the parts of the brain responsible for the short term ‘unnecessary’ roles starts to SHRINK due to it consistently being inhibited.

But why should you care?

Well, other than having a literally smaller brain than your healthy self which can’t be good to any degree, this has huge implications on our long term mental health. 

Some all too common mental health issues such as anxiety and depression are directly influenced by this process. The even more worrying issue is that these conditions lead to further stress, causing a loop that just keeps on snowballing until we do something about it.

Looking at the lives we live today and the prevalence of mental health concerns you can clearly see the correlation. So we can either stop living the lives we want/need, or we can start taking better care of ourselves. Ultimately that’s your choice, but I know which one I prefer.