Tag: stress

Your ‘Surge Capacity’ Is Depleted — It’s Why You Feel Awful

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By Tara Haelle

It was the end of the world as we knew it, and I felt fine. That’s almost exactly what I told my psychiatrist at my March 16 appointment, a few days after our children’s school district extended spring break because of the coronavirus. I said the same at my April 27 appointment, several weeks after our state’s stay-at-home order.

Yes, it was exhausting having a kindergartener and fourth grader doing impromptu distance learning while I was barely keeping up with work. And it was frustrating to be stuck home nonstop, scrambling to get in grocery delivery orders before slots filled up, and tracking down toilet paper. But I was still doing well because I thrive in high-stress emergency situations. It’s exhilarating for my ADHD brain. As just one example, when my husband and I were stranded in Peru during an 8.0-magnitude earthquake that killed thousands, we walked around with a first aid kit helping who we could and tracking down water and food. Then I went out with my camera to document the devastation as a photojournalist and interview Peruvians in my broken Spanish for my hometown paper.

Now we were in a pandemic, and I’m a science journalist who has written about infectious disease and medical research for nearly a decade. I was on fire, cranking out stories, explaining epidemiological concepts in my social networks, trying to help everyone around me make sense of the frightening circumstances of a pandemic and the anxiety surrounding the virus.

I knew it wouldn’t last. It never does. But even knowing I would eventually crash, I didn’t appreciate how hard the crash would be, or how long it would last, or how hard it would be to try to get back up over and over again, or what getting up even looked like.

In those early months, I, along with most of the rest of the country, was using “surge capacity” to operate, as Ann Masten, PhD, a psychologist and professor of child development at the University of Minnesota, calls it. Surge capacity is a collection of adaptive systems — mental and physical — that humans draw on for short-term survival in acutely stressful situations, such as natural disasters. But natural disasters occur over a short period, even if recovery is long. Pandemics are different — the disaster itself stretches out indefinitely.

“The pandemic has demonstrated both what we can do with surge capacity and the limits of surge capacity,” says Masten. When it’s depleted, it has to be renewed. But what happens when you struggle to renew it because the emergency phase has now become chronic?

By my May 26 psychiatrist appointment, I wasn’t doing so hot. I couldn’t get any work done. I’d grown sick of Zoom meetups. It was exhausting and impossible to think with the kids around all day. I felt trapped in a home that felt as much a prison as a haven. I tried to conjure the motivation to check email, outline a story, or review interview notes, but I couldn’t focus. I couldn’t make myself do anything — work, housework, exercise, play with the kids — for that whole week.

Or the next.

Or the next.

Or the next.

I know depression, but this wasn’t quite that. It was, as I’d soon describe in an emotional post in a social media group of professional colleagues, an “anxiety-tainted depression mixed with ennui that I can’t kick,” along with a complete inability to concentrate. I spoke with my therapist, tweaked medication dosages, went outside daily for fresh air and sunlight, tried to force myself to do some physical activity, and even gave myself permission to mope for a few weeks. We were in a pandemic, after all, and I had already accepted in March that life would not be “normal” for at least a year or two. But I still couldn’t work, couldn’t focus, hadn’t adjusted. Shouldn’t I be used to this by now?

“Why do you think you should be used to this by now? We’re all beginners at this,” Masten told me. “This is a once in a lifetime experience. It’s expecting a lot to think we’d be managing this really well.”

It wasn’t until my social media post elicited similar responses from dozens of high-achieving, competent, impressive women I professionally admire that I realized I wasn’t in the minority. My experience was a universal and deeply human one.

An unprecedented disaster

While the phrase “adjusting to the new normal” has been repeated endlessly since March, it’s easier said than done. How do you adjust to an ever-changing situation where the “new normal” is indefinite uncertainty?

“This is an unprecedented disaster for most of us that is profound in its impact on our daily lives,” says Masten. But it’s different from a hurricane or tornado where you can look outside and see the damage. The destruction is, for most people, invisible and ongoing. So many systems aren’t working as they normally do right now, which means radical shifts in work, school, and home life that almost none of us have experience with. Even those who have worked in disaster recovery or served in the military are facing a different kind of uncertainty right now.

“I think we maybe underestimate how severe the adversity is and that people may be experiencing a normal reaction to a pretty severe and ongoing, unfolding, cascading disaster,” Masten says. “It’s important to recognize that it’s normal in a situation of great uncertainty and chronic stress to get exhausted and to feel ups and downs, to feel like you’re depleted or experience periods of burnout.”

Research on disaster and trauma focuses primarily on what’s helpful for people during the recovery period, but we’re not close to recovery yet. People can use their surge capacity for acute periods, but when dire circumstances drag on, Masten says, “you have to adopt a different style of coping.”

Understanding ambiguous loss

It’s not surprising that, as a lifelong overachiever, I’ve felt particularly despondent and adrift as the months have dragged on, says Pauline Boss, PhD, a family therapist and professor emeritus of social sciences at the University of Minnesota who specializes in “ambiguous loss.”

“It’s harder for high achievers,” she says. “The more accustomed you are to solving problems, to getting things done, to having a routine, the harder it will be on you because none of that is possible right now. You get feelings of hopelessness and helplessness, and those aren’t good.”
That’s similar to how Michael Maddaus, MD, a professor of thoracic surgery at the University of Minnesota, felt when he became addicted to prescription narcotics after undergoing several surgeries. Now recovered and a motivational speaker who promotes the idea of a “resilience bank account,” Maddaus had always been a fast-moving high achiever — until he couldn’t be.

“I realized that my personal operating system, though it had led to tremendous success, had failed me on a more personal level,” he says. “I had to figure out a different way of contending with life.”

That mindset is an especially American one, Boss says.

“Our culture is very solution-oriented, which is a good way of thinking for many things,” she says. “It’s partly responsible for getting a man on the moon and a rover on Mars and all the things we’ve done in this country that are wonderful. But it’s a very destructive way of thinking when you’re faced with a problem that has no solution, at least for a while.”
That means reckoning with what’s called ambiguous loss: any loss that’s unclear and lacks a resolution. It can be physical, such as a missing person or the loss of a limb or organ, or psychological, such as a family member with dementia or a serious addiction.

“In this case, it is a loss of a way of life, of the ability to meet up with your friends and extended family,” Boss says. “It is perhaps a loss of trust in our government. It’s the loss of our freedom to move about in our daily life as we used to.” It’s also the loss of high-quality education, or the overall educational experience we’re used to, given school closures, modified openings and virtual schooling. It’s the loss of rituals, such weddings, graduations, and funerals, and even lesser “rituals,” such as going to gym. One of the toughest losses for me to adapt to is no longer doing my research and writing in coffee shops as I’ve done for most of my life, dating back to junior high.

“These were all things we were attached to and fond of, and they’re gone right now, so the loss is ambiguous. It’s not a death, but it’s a major, major loss,” says Boss. “What we used to have has been taken away from us.”

Just as painful are losses that may result from the intersection of the pandemic and the already tense political division in the country. For many people, issues related to Covid-19 have become the last straw in ending relationships, whether it’s a family member refusing to wear a mask, a friend promoting the latest conspiracy theory, or a co-worker insisting Covid-19 deaths are exaggerated.

Ambiguous loss elicits the same experiences of grief as a more tangible loss — denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance — but managing it often requires a bit of creativity.


A winding, uncharted path to coping in a pandemic

While there isn’t a handbook for functioning during a pandemic, Masten, Boss, and Maddaus offered some wisdom for meandering our way through this.

Accept that life is different right now
Maddaus’ approach involves radical acceptance. “It’s a shitty time, it’s hard,” he says. “You have to accept that in your bones and be okay with this as a tough day, with ‘that’s the way it is,’ and accept that as a baseline.”

But that acceptance doesn’t mean giving up, he says. It means not resisting or fighting reality so that you can apply your energy elsewhere. “It allows you to step into a more spacious mental space that allows you to do things that are constructive instead of being mired in a state of psychological self torment.”

Expect less from yourself

Most of us have heard for most of our lives to expect more from ourselves in some way or another. Now we must give ourselves permission to do the opposite. “We have to expect less of ourselves, and we have to replenish more,” Masten says. “I think we’re in a period of a lot of self discovery: Where do I get my energy? What kind of down time do I need? That’s all shifted right now, and it may take some reflection and self discovery to find out what rhythms of life do I need right now?”

She says people are having to live their lives without the support of so many systems that have partly or fully broken down, whether it’s schools, hospitals, churches, family support, or other systems that we relied on. We need to recognize that we’re grieving multiple losses while managing the ongoing impact of trauma and uncertainty. The malaise so many of us feel, a sort of disinterested boredom, is common in research on burnout, Masten says. But other emotions accompany it: disappointment, anger, grief, sadness, exhaustion, stress, fear, anxiety — and no one can function at full capacity with all that going on.

Recognize the different aspects of grief

The familiar “stages” of grief don’t actually occur in linear stages, Boss says, but denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance are all major concepts in facing loss. Plenty of people are in denial: denying the virus is real, or that the numbers of cases or deaths are as high as reported, or that masks really help reduce disease transmission.
Anger is evident everywhere: anger at those in denial, anger in the race demonstrations, anger at those not physically distancing or wearing masks, and even anger at those who wear masks or require them. The bargaining, Boss says, is mostly with scientists we hope will develop a vaccine quickly. The depression is obvious, but acceptance… “I haven’t accepted any of this,” Boss says. “I don’t know about you.”

Sometimes acceptance means “saying we’re going to have a good time in spite of this,” Boss says, such as when my family drove an hour outside the city to get far enough from light pollution to look for the comet NEOWISE. But it can also mean accepting that we cannot change the situation right now.

“We can kick and scream and be angry, or we can feel the other side of it, with no motivation, difficulty focusing, lethargy,” Boss says, “or we can take the middle way and just have a couple days where you feel like doing nothing and you embrace the losses and sadness you’re feeling right now, and then the next day, do something that has an element of achievement to it.”

Experiment with “both-and” thinking

This approach may not work for everyone, but Boss says there’s an alternative to binary thinking that many people find helpful in dealing with ambiguous loss. She calls it “both-and” thinking, and sometimes it means embracing a bit of the irrational.

For the families of soldiers missing in action in Vietnam that Boss studied early in her career, or the family members of victims of plane crashes where the bodies aren’t recovered, this type of thinking means thinking: “He is both living and maybe not. She is probably dead but maybe not.”

“If you stay in the rational when nothing else is rational, like right now, then you’ll just stress yourself more,” she says. “What I say with ambiguous loss is the situation is crazy, not the person. The situation is pathological, not the person.”

An analogous approach during the pandemic might be, “This is terrible and many people are dying, and this is also a time for our families to come closer together,” Boss says. On a more personal level, “I’m highly competent, and right now I’m flowing with the tide day-to-day.”

It’s a bit of a Schrödinger’s existence, but when you can’t change the situation, “the only thing you can change is your perception of it,” she says.

Of course, that doesn’t mean denying the existence of the pandemic or the coronavirus. As Maddaus says, “You have to face reality.” But how we frame that reality mentally can help us cope with it.

Look for activities, new and old, that continue to fulfill you

Lots of coping advice has focused on “self-care,” but one of the frustrating ironies of the pandemic is that so many of our self-care activities have also been taken away: pedicures, massages, coffee with friends, a visit to the amusement park, a kickboxing class, swimming in the local pool — these activities remain unsafe in much of the country. So we have to get creative with self-care when we’re least motivated to get creative.

“When we’re forced to rethink our options and broaden out what we think of as self-care, sometimes that constraint opens new ways of living and thinking,” Masten says. “We don’t have a lot of control over the global pandemic but we do over our daily lives. You can focus on plans for the future and what’s meaningful in life.”

For me, since I missed eating in restaurants and was tired of our same old dinners, I began subscribing to a meal-kit service. I hate cooking, but the meal kits were easy, and I was motivated by the chance to eat something that tasted more like what I’d order in a restaurant without having to invest energy in looking through recipes or ordering the right ingredients.

Okay, I’ve also been playing a lot of Animal Crossing, but Maddaus explains why it makes sense that creative activities like cooking, gardening, painting, house projects — or even building your own imaginary island out of pixels — can be fulfilling right now. He references the book The Molecule of More, which explores how dopamine influences our experiences and happiness, in describing the types of activities most likely to bring us joy.

“There are two ways the brain deals with the world: the future and things we need to go after, and the here and now, seeing things and touching things,” Maddaus says. “Rather than being at the mercy of what’s going on, we can use the elements of our natural reward system and construct things to do that are good no matter what.”
Those kinds of activities have a planning element and a here-and-now experience element. For Maddaus, for example, it was simply replacing all the showerheads and lightbulbs in the house.

“It’s a silly thing, but it made me feel good,” he says.

Focus on maintaining and strengthening important relationships

The biggest protective factors for facing adversity and building resilience are social support and remaining connected to people, Masten says. That includes helping others, even when we’re feeling depleted ourselves.

“Helping others is one of those win-win strategies of taking action because we’re all feeling a sense of helplessness and loss of control about what’s going on with this pandemic, but when you take action with other people, you can control what you’re doing,” she says. Helping others could include checking in on family friends or buying groceries for an elderly neighbor.

Begin slowly building your resilience bank account

Maddaus’ idea of a resilience bank account is gradually building into your life regular practices that promote resilience and provide a fallback when life gets tough. Though it would obviously be nice to have a fat account already, he says it’s never too late to start. The areas he specifically advocates focusing on are sleep, nutrition, exercise, meditation, self-compassion, gratitude, connection, and saying no.

“Start really small and work your way up,” he says. “If you do a little bit every day, it starts to add up and you get momentum, and even if you miss a day, then start again. We have to be gentle with ourselves and keep on, begin again.”

After spending an hour on the phone with each of these experts, I felt refreshed and inspired. I can do this! I was excited about writing this article and sharing what I’d learned.
And then it took me two weeks to start the article and another week to finish it — even though I wanted to write it. But now, I could cut myself a little more slack for taking so much longer than I might have a few months ago. I might have intellectually accepted back in March that the next two years (or more?) are going to be nothing like normal, and not even predictable in how they won’t be normal. But cognitively recognizing and accepting that fact and emotionally incorporating that reality into everyday life aren’t the same. Our new normal is always feeling a little off balance, like trying to stand in a dinghy on rough seas, and not knowing when the storm will pass. But humans can get better at anything with practice, so at least I now have some ideas for working on my sea legs.

https://elemental.medium.com/your-surge-capacity-is-depleted-it-s-why-you-feel-awful-de285d542f4c

If you could erase the worst memory of your life, would you? Scientists are working on a pill for that.

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The 60 souls that signed on for Dr. Alain Brunet’s memory manipulation study were united by something they would rather not remember. The trauma of betrayal.

For some, it was infidelity and for others, a brutal, unanticipated abandonment. “It was like, ‘I’m leaving you. Goodbye,” the McGill University associate professor of psychiatry says.

In cold, clinical terms, his patients were suffering from an “adjustment disorder” due to the termination (not of their choosing) of a romantic relationship. The goal of Brunet and other researchers is to help people like this — the scorned, the betrayed, the traumatized — lose their total recall. To deliberately forget.

Over four to six sessions, volunteers read aloud from a typed script they had composed themselves — a first-person account of their breakup, with as many emotional details as possible — while under the influence of propranolol, a common and inexpensive blood pressure pill. The idea was to purposely reactivate the memory and bring the experience and the stinging emotions it aroused to life again. “How did you feel about that?” they were asked. How do you feel right now? And, most importantly: Has your memory changed since last week?

The investigators had hypothesized that four to six sessions of memory reactivation under propranolol would be sufficient to dramatically blunt the memories associated with their “attachment injury.” Decrease the strength of the memory, Brunet says, and you decrease the strength of the pain.

The study is now complete, and Brunet is hesitant to discuss the results, which have been submitted to a journal for peer review and publication. However, the participants “just couldn’t believe that we could do so much in such a small amount of time,” he confides.

“They were able to turn the page. That’s what they would tell us — ‘I feel like I’ve turned the page. I’m no longer obsessed by this person, or this relationship.’”

Brunet insists he isn’t interested in deleting or scrubbing painful memories out entirely. The idea of memory erasure, of finding the cellular imprint of a specific, discreet memory in the brain, of isolating and inactivating the brain cells behind that memory, unnerves him. ‘It’s not going to come from my lab,” he says, although others are certainly working on it. Memories are part of who we are, what forms our identity, what makes us authentic, “and as long as only one choice exists right now, and it’s toning down a memory, we feel on very solid and comfortable ground,” ethically speaking, Brunet says.

“However, if one day you had two options — I can tone down your memory, or I can remove it altogether, from your head, from your mind — what would you choose?”

The choice might soon be yours.

“If you could erase the memory of the worst day of your life, would you,” Elizabeth Phelps and Stefan Hofmann write in the journal, Nature. “How about your memory of a person who has caused you pain?”

What was once purely science fiction is moving ever closer to clinical reality. Researchers are working on techniques and drugs that might enable us to edit our memories or at least seriously dull their impact — to make the intolerable bearable — by, say, swallowing a pill to block the synaptic changes needed for a memory to solidify. A pill that could be taken hours, even months or years after the event.

Much of the work is based on the theory of memory reconsolidation – the belief that the mere conscious act of recalling or conjuring a memory makes it vulnerable to tinkering or meddling. When a memory is evoked, a reconsolidation window opens for a brief period of time (two to five hours, according to Brunet), during which time the memory returns to a state of “lability.” It becomes pliable, like Play-Doh. It also becomes susceptible to modification, before “reconsolidating” or re-storage. The thought is that propranolol interferes with proteins in the brain needed to lock down the memory again.

A similar line of thinking holds that a memory isn’t an exact impression of the original event, an Iphone video of the past, says Boston University neuroscientist Steve Ramirez. Rather it’s more like Plato’s wax tablet. Press a signet ring into the wax and it leaves an imprint, but the wax can melt when we recall the memory, form again and then melt all over again. “Memory is dynamic,” Ramirez says. It isn’t static. Memories can also be updated with new information when they’re recalled, like hitting “save as” every time you go into a Word file.

But the idea that memories can be edited, softened or dialled down, is more than a little discomfiting to some, and not just for what it means for eyewitness testimony. “We’re not reliable narrators when it comes to some details, and sometimes even entire scenarios,” Ramirez says. More profoundly, without good and bad memories it’s hard to imagine how we would know how to behave, says Dr. Judy Illes, professor of neurology and Canada Research Chair in neuroethics at the University of British Columbia.

Learning doesn’t occur without memory. How do we learn from a bad relationship, if we can’t remember it? “And so now, if we pre-select what memories stick and don’t stick, it almost starts to be like the eugenics of memory,” Illes says. “We ought to think carefully about that.”

She has absolutely no qualms about using memory manipulation for people suffering desperately from post-traumatic stress disorder, people whose burden of suffering from horrifying experiences exceeds any moral argument against using it.

“To me, a PTSD that is profound and debilitating is like a disease of any other and, to the extent that we can have an intervention that treats it, we should vigorously pursue it.”

Even the heartbroken recruited for Brunet’s study were experiencing symptoms congruent with PTSD. We’re geared to form attachments, he says, and not so much to detach.

But memory manipulation has a slippery slope. Would it bleed into not-so-disabling disorders? If someone misbehaves at a cocktail party and would really sooner forget what happened, is that an appropriate use? Isn’t it good to be embarrassed by your past behaviour, to keep you from doing it again? What about war fighters, asks Illes. “If we had a drug that can mitigate a bad memory, could we possibly use it in advance of an act to actually prevent a memory from forming, and therefore enable people to fight less fearfully, and more fiercely, because there’s no consolidation of the acts of crime, or acts of war?”

The pull of moral responsibility — “one’s future ‘oughtness’” — is grounded in our life story, writes bioethicist Dr. Peter DePergola in the Journal of Cognition and Neuroethics. Using blood pressure pills or some other intervention like, say, transcranial direct current stimulation, to deaden or blast away memories of trauma “ultimately undermines one’s ability to seek, identify and act on the good,” DePergola argues.

And how do you manipulate a bad memory, without risking happy, shiny, positive ones? What does a memory even look like in the brain? Can we visualize it? Can we see what happens when positive and negative memories form? And where would all the bad memories go? Saved in glass bottles in the Ministry of Magic?

We can’t go into the brain and erase memories in an Eternal-Sunshine-of-the-Spotless-Mind kind of way, Ramirez says, at least not yet. We can’t touch or poke a memory. However, scientists are starting to get unprecedented glimpses into the physical structure of memory in the brain. The goal is to identify the brain cells a particular memory gloms onto, and artificially manipulate those cells.

The challenge is that human memories aren’t localized to one specific location in the brain. There’s no spot X you can point to, and say, Aha! There it is. Rather, they’re scattered throughout the organ. The sights and sounds and smells and emotions of a memory are going to recruit different corners of the brain that are involved in processing the sights and sounds and smells and emotions, Ramirez says.

“Right now, there are a lot of memories that are asleep in your brain. If I asked you, ‘what did you do last night?’, that memory just woke up. How did that happen? You just did that effortlessly in, like, 500 milliseconds. And yet we don’t know how that process works.”

However, we know that it does happen, and scientists have some pretty good indications of what happens physiologically when we recall a memory, and what it means for that memory to become awake again.

American-Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield was one of the first to hint at where to look. When Penfield stimulated cells in the hippocampus of people who were undergoing surgery for epilepsy in the 1940s with mild jolts of electricity, specific episodic memories — memories of actual experiences — suddenly popped into their minds. “It was like, ‘I have no idea why, but I’m randomly remembering my 16th birthday and I was walking my cat,’’” Ramirez said on a National Geographic podcast earlier this year.

In experiments that helped open the floodgates, Ramirez and other scientists at MIT reported that they could identify — in mice — the cells that make up part of an engram, the coding for a specific memory, and reactive those same cells using a technology called optogenetics.

Briefly, here’s what they did: Viruses were inserted into the brain cells of genetically modified mice that made the cells glow green in response to light. Next, the researchers isolated cells in the hippocampus of a mouse as the rodents were forming a specific memory — in this case, the memory of receiving a mild electric foot shock while exploring a box.

A day later, the mouse was placed in a different box — different smells, different floor, meaning there should be no reason for them to be fearful. But when those memory cells were activated with a laser, the mouse froze in fear.

More recently, in a paper published earlier this year, Ramirez and co-author Briana Chen mapped out which cells in the hippocampus were being activated when male mice made new memories of positive (meeting a female mouse) and negative (those mild electric foot zaps again) experiences. They were able to trigger the memories again later, using laser light to activate the memory cells. When memory cells in the bottom part of the hippocampus were stimulated, it seemed to dial up the negative memories. But stimulating memory cells in the top part of the hippocampus seemed to dial them down.

The goal, says Ramirez, is to artificially activate positive memories to overwrite the bad ones — in a sense, using the brain as a drug. “In depression, there is a bias toward negative thinking,” Ramirez says. We’ve been using drugs like Xanax and Prozac for decades, but we haven’t really advanced all that much since the 1970s, Ramirez says. “Maybe we need to tackle these kinds of disorders from all angles.”

Ten years ago, Sheena Josselyn’s lab was the first to offer fairly convincing evidence that we can erase a specific fear memory in mice, without erasing every one of the rodent’s fears. The University of Toronto neuroscientist used a toxin to destroy a handful of neurons housing the memory “It wasn’t like a huge legion. If you take out the entire brain, the mouse doesn’t remember a darn thing.”

That’s obviously not technically, or ethically ideal in humans. No one is talking about ablating neurons in people, or injecting viruses into human brain cells to make them glow green. “But it does tell us that in order to manipulate a memory in people we don’t have to give an entire, systemic thing,” Josselyn says. Rather, we could go in and just hit the target neurons using some kind of smart bomb.

Mice aren’t humans, and efforts to translate the results from animal experiments to healthy humans have been mixed, Phelps and Hoffman note in their Nature article. Still, whether it’s beta-blockers like propranolol, or ecstasy or ketamine or other drugs being tested that might block the synthesis of proteins required to lock down a memory after it’s been retrieved, Ramirez and others believe we could tackle the emotional “oomph,” the psychological sting, of a traumatic memory, while leaving the autobiographic experience — the actual, conscious recollection of the event — intact. No, you may not be able to erase the memory of the “venomous, evil snake that is my ex,” as one Redditor asked Ramirez. There isn’t a memory anti-venom. With memory manipulation, people would still remember the breakup, and the person, but the toxic, gut-twisting emotions associated with it would melt, like ice cream in the sun. And, just as doctors shouldn’t hand out anti-depressants to the entire population of Boston, Ramirez says memory manipulation should be reserved for those suffering crippling anxiety, depression or other symptoms.

Betrayal and abandonment themselves are “no small stuff,” adds Brunet. “This is the material Greek tragedies are made of.” People can become hyper vigilant, he says. They have intrusive thoughts. Everything around them reminds them of the former relationship. “It affects negatively your world views, your self esteem and the trust you can place in other people,” Brunet says.

However, a memory buster is challenging, Illes, of UBC says, because it interferes with our experience as humans.

Our brains are hardwired to remember emotionally charged events. “Do you remember where you were on 9/11? Do you remember five supermarkets ago?” Illes asks.

Our memories are so closely interrelated and interconnected, she adds, that you can’t just pull one brick out without the integrity of the entire wall being affected.

“Go back to your dating question,” Illes says as a thought experiment. “We have a bad relationship. Unless two people are on an isolated island and don’t interact with other humans, your bad relationship has other people in there. And, so, how do you remove all the memories associated with all the complexities that we have on a daily basis?”

Memories give us a sense of consciousness, she says, of who we are and what we know to be right and wrong and moral and immoral.

A prescient 2003 report from the U.S. President’s Council on Bioethics asked whether the then-emerging field of memory-alteration would mean abandoning our own truthful identities.

“Armed with new powers to ease the suffering of bad memories, we might come to see all psychic pain as unnecessary and in the process come to pursue a happiness that is less than human,” the authors wrote, “an unmindful happiness, unchanged by time and events, unmoved by life’s vicissitudes.”

Steve Ramirez was running in the Boston marathon in 2013 when two crude pressure cooker bombs detonated 12 seconds apart near the finish line, killing three and injuring several hundred more. The sights, the sounds, the smells — “they helped carve a very deep corner into my personality,” he says.

“It exposed a darker aspect of humanity, but I wouldn’t really find any personal gain in not knowing that corner, either.”

https://nationalpost.com/health/eternal-sunshine-of-the-spotless-mind

Thanks to Kebmodee for bringing this to the It’s Interesting community.

Positive childhood experiences tied to better adult mental health

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by Lisa Rapaport

Kids who have more supportive experiences with family, friends, and people in their school and community may be less likely to have psychological or relationship troubles in adulthood, a new study suggests.

Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) like abuse, neglect, violence, and parental absence have long been linked to lasting negative effects on physical and mental health, researchers note in JAMA Pediatrics. But less is known about whether positive experiences make it easier for kids to cope, or what happens with children whose lives have mix of negative and positive experiences

For the current study, researchers surveyed 6,118 adults about how often in childhood they felt able to talk to family and friends about feelings; felt their family stood by them during difficult times; enjoyed participating in community traditions; felt a sense of belonging in high school; felt supported by friends; had at least two nonparent adults who took an interest in them; and felt safe and protected by an adult in their home.

Overall, adults who reported six to seven of these positive childhood experiences were 72% less likely to have depression or at least 14 poor mental health days each month than adults who reported no more than two positive childhood experiences. Even three to five positive experiences were tied to a 50% lower likelihood of depression or poor mental health than two or fewer.

These associations held true even when respondents reported multiple adverse childhood experiences.

“The absence of the types of positive childhood experiences we assessed in our study is very stressful for a child,” said lead study author Christina Bethell of the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

“Without positive nurturance, children’s stress hormones can get stuck on high and this impacts how their brain develops in ways that can make it hard for them to experience safety, relaxation and to become open, curious and learn to have positive relationships with others,” Bethell said by email.

The association between positive life experiences and better adult mental health and relationships persisted even among people who experienced ACEs during childhood.

Compared to participants who reported no more than two positive childhood experiences, people who experienced six to seven positive childhood experiences were also more than three times more likely to report that as adults, they “always” got the social and emotional support they needed.

When people had no more than two positive childhood experiences, only about one-third reported always getting the social and emotional support they needed – even when they didn’t have a history of ACEs.

The study doesn’t prove that positive childhood experiences impact adult mental health or relationships.

“In fact, people with poor mental health might be less likely to view their childhood experiences as positive,” said Dr. Rebecca Dudovitz, a researcher at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California Los Angeles.

“It might actually be that adults with depression remember their childhood differently than adults without depression,” Dudovitz, who wasn’t involved in the study, said by email.

Parents may not be able to prevent adverse childhood experiences, but they can help kids become resilient, said Dr. Angelica Robles, a developmental-behavioral pediatrician at Novant Health in Charlotte, North Carolina, who wasn’t involved in the study.

“Parents can accomplish this by simply talking about feelings with their children, standing by their children during difficult times, and showing interest in their daily lives,” Robles said by email. “The child will then feel safe, and it is in this sense of security in the face of stress that the child learns to flourish.”

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-childhood/positive-childhood-experiences-tied-to-better-adult-mental-health-idUSKCN1VU2CP

Chronic Bullying Could Actually Reshape The Brains of Teens

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by Carly Cassella

Sticks and stones may break your bones, but name-calling could actually change the structure of your brain.

A new study has found that persistent bullying in high school is not just psychologically traumatising, it could also cause real and lasting damage to the developing brain.

The findings are drawn from a long-term study on teenage brain development and mental health, which collected brain scans and mental health questionnaires from European teenagers between the ages of 14 and 19.

Following 682 young people in England, Ireland, France and Germany, the researchers tallied 36 in total who reported experiencing chronic bullying during these years.

When the researchers compared the bullied participants to those who had experienced less intense bullying, they noticed that their brains looked different.

Across the length of the study, in certain regions, the brains of the bullied participants appeared to have actually shrunk in size.

In particular, the pattern of shrinking was observed in two parts of the brain called the putamen and the caudate, a change oddly reminiscent of adults who have experienced early life stress, such as childhood maltreatment.

Sure enough, the researchers found that they could partly explain these changes using the relationship between extreme bullying and higher levels of general anxiety at age 19. And this was true even when controlling for other types of stress and co-morbid depressive symptoms.

The connection is further supported by previous functional MRI studies that found differences in the connectivity and activation of the caudate and putamen activation in those with anxiety.

“Although not classically considered relevant to anxiety, the importance of structural changes in the putamen and caudate to the development of anxiety most likely lies in their contribution to related behaviours such as reward sensitivity, motivation, conditioning, attention, and emotional processing,” explains lead author Erin Burke Quinlan from King’s College London.

In other words, the authors think all of this shrinking could be a mark of mental illness, or at least help explain why these 19-year-olds are experiencing such unusually high anxiety.

But while numerous past studies have already linked childhood and adolescent bullying to mental illness, this is the very first study to show that unrelenting victimisation could impact a teenager’s mental health by actually reshaping their brain.

The results are cause for worry. During adolescence, a young person’s brain is absolutely exploding with growth, expanding at an incredible place.

And even though it’s normal for the brain to prune back some of this overabundance, in the brains of those who experienced chronic bullying, the whole pruning process appears to have spiralled out of control.

The teenage years are an extremely important and formative period in a person’s life, and these sorts of significant changes do not bode well. The authors suspect that as these children age, they might even begin to experience greater shrinkage in the brain.

But an even longer long-term study will need to be done if we want to verify that hunch. In the meantime, the authors are recommending that every effort be made to limit bullying before it can cause damage to a teenager’s brain and their mental health.

This study has been published in Molecular Psychiatry.

https://www.sciencealert.com/chronic-bullying-could-actually-reshape-the-brains-of-teens

New research shows that heavy marijuana users may hold on more strongly to negative feelings

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By Rachael Rettner

Many people tend to look back on the past with rose-colored glasses, remembering the good times and the good feelings…while forgetting the bad.

But a new study suggests that heavy marijuana users may have some trouble letting go of negative emotions tied to memories — a phenomenon that’s also seen in people with depression. Earlier research has also linked marijuana use with depression.

Although the new results are very preliminary, the findings, presented here on Friday (May 25) at the annual meeting of the Association for Psychological Science, may offer clues about the link between marijuana use and depression.

Rose-colored memories

The study explored a psychological phenomenon called “fading affect bias,” in which people tend to hold on to positive feelings tied to their memories more than they hold on to negative feelings. In other words, negative feelings related to our memories fade faster than positive ones.

Psychologists have hypothesized that this phenomenon, which is generally seen in people without mental health conditions, may serve as a sort of “psychological immune system,” said study lead author Daniel Pillersdorf, a graduate student in psychology at the University of Windsor in Ontario. This may be “so that we think more pleasantly in general, and don’t have that cognitive burden of holding on to negative emotions associated with memories,” Pillersdorf said.

Some previous studies have suggested that this fading affect bias may be different for people who use drugs, but no studies have looked at whether marijuana use could affect this phenomenon.

In the new study, the researchers analyzed information from 46 heavy marijuana users — most of whom used the drug at least four times a week — and 51 people who didn’t use marijuana. Participants were asked to recall, and provide written descriptions of, three pleasant memories and three unpleasant memories from the past year. The participants were then asked to rate the intensity of emotion tied to those memories, on a scale of negative 10, meaning extremely unpleasant, to positive 10, or extremely pleasant. They rated their emotions both at the time the memory was made, and at the current time. (Marijuana users were not under the influence at the time the researchers asked them the questions.)

The researchers found that both marijuana users and non-users showed fading affect bias, but for marijuana users, the fading was a lot less.

“They were hanging on to that unpleasant affect over time, much more” than non-users, Pillersdorf told Live Science. “They were less able … to shed that unpleasantness associated with their memories.”

The study also found that marijuana users tended to recall life events in more general terms than specific ones. For example, when asked about a happy event in the past year, marijuana users were more likely to respond with general or broad answers such as “I went on vacation,” rather than recalling a specific event or day, such as “I attended my college graduation.” This phenomenon is known as over-general autobiographical memory, and it’s also linked with depression, Pillersdorf said.

It’s important to note that the new study found only an association and cannot determine why marijuana users show less fading affect bias, and more overgeneral memory, than non-users.

Link with depression?

Even so, the new findings agree with previous research that has found a link between heavy marijuana use and depression. However, researchers don’t know why marijuana and depression are linked — it could be that marijuana use plays a role in developing depression, or that people who are already depressed are more likely to use the drug. [7 Ways Marijuana May Affect the Brain]

Based on the new findings, one hypothesis is that the decreased “fading” of negative memories in marijuana users could be contributing to the development or continuing of depression, Pillersdorf said. “It may be that, chronic or frequent cannabis use is putting [a person] more at risk for the development or continuing of depression,” he said. However, Pillersdorf stressed that this is just a hypothesis that would need to be investigated with future research.

To further investigate the link, researchers will need to study marijuana users and non-users over long periods of time. For example, researchers could start with people in their late teens or early 20s, who don’t have depression, and see if those who use marijuana frequently are more likely to eventually develop depression than non-users.

Additional studies could also investigate whether other substances have an effect on fading affect bias, Pillersdorf said.

The study has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal.

https://www.livescience.com/62679-marijuana-negative-memories.html?utm_source=notification

Early life trauma in men associated with changes in sperm that are later transmitted to their children.

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Exposure to early life trauma can lead to poor physical and mental health in some individuals, which can be passed on to their children. Studies in mice show that at least some of the effects of stress can be transmitted to offspring via environmentally-induced changes in sperm miRNA levels.

A new epigenetics study raises the possibility that the same is true in humans. It shows for the first time that the levels of the same two sperm miRNAs change in both men and mice exposed to early life stress. In mice, the negative effects of stress are transmitted to offspring. The study is published On May 23rd in Translational Psychiatry.

“The study raises the possibility that some of the vulnerability of children is due to Lamarckian type inheritance derived from their parents’ experiences,” said Larry Feig, Ph.D., professor of Developmental, Molecular and Chemical Biology at Tufts University School of Medicine and member of the Cell, Molecular and Developmental Biology and Neuroscience programs at the Sackler School of Graduate Biomedical Sciences at Tufts.

The human part of the study utilized the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) questionnaire as an indicator of men’s early life trauma. The ACE Study questionnaire includes 10 yes or no questions about one’s experiences until the age of 18, including physical, verbal, or sexual abuse, and physical or emotional neglect. Other questions relate to one’s family members. Four or more yes answers put one at significantly increased risk for future mental and physical health problems. According to a ChildTrends research brief published in 2014, a remarkably high percentage (~10 percent) of the population report scores at or above this cutoff.

miRNAs constitute a newly appreciated type of gene regulator, where each miRNA controls a distinct set of genes. Until recently, sperm from fathers were thought to contribute only DNA to the mother’s egg upon fertilization, but new data in mice indicate that sperm also contribute miRNAs that influence the next generation. Sperm miRNA expression in humans is known to be affected by environmental factors, such as smoking and obesity, but no human study to date has documented the effects of stress.

The new study found that among 28 Caucasian male volunteers, the expression of two highly related sperm miRNAs, miR-449 and miR-34, were inversely proportional to the men’s ACE scores. Men with the most extensive early abuse (highest ACE scores) had as much as a 300-fold reduction in the two sperm miRNAs compared to men with the least abuse.

The idea that these changes can affect the next generation is supported by additional findings in the study, e.g.:

the same sperm miRNA changes that take place in men with high ACE scores also occur in mice exposed to early life social instability stress, which Feig’s lab has shown previously leads to anxiety and sociability defects in female offspring of stressed males for at least three generations;
these two sets of miRNAs are known to work together in mice to allow proper development of the brain and sperm;
in humans, miR-34c has been implicated in promoting early embryo development;
the mouse studies showed that the decline in these sperm miRNA levels is transmitted to the next generation; and
when these embryos mature, these miRNAs are also reduced in the sperm of their male offspring who pass on stress behaviors to their female offspring.
“This is the first study to show that stress is associated with altered levels of sperm miRNAs in humans. We are currently setting up a new, larger study in men, and additional experiments in mice that could yield further support for the idea that changes in these sperm miRNAs do, in fact, contribute to an elevation of stress-related disorders across generations,” said David Dickson, an M.D./Ph.D. student at Tufts and first author of the study.

“Looking to the future, we may be able to figure out a way to restore the low miRNA levels found in men exposed to extreme trauma, because epigenetic changes, such as stress-induced decreases in sperm miRNA expression, are reversible, unlike genetic changes that alter the DNA sequence,” Dickson added.

For example, obesity has been shown to alter specific sperm miRNA levels in men, while bariatric surgery and subsequent weight loss can reverse the changes. In addition, Isabelle Mansuy’s lab has reversed some of the negative effects of stress in mice across generations by exposing mice to an “enriched environment” that involves extensive social interactions, exercise and opportunities to explore their surroundings.

Feig pointed out that in addition to focusing on the potential transgenerational effects of stress, there is a growing appreciation that physicians should collect information on childhood trauma for the sake of the patients who are experiencing this early trauma.

This is because “childhood abuse, trauma and dysfunction adds to the risk of future physical and psychiatric maladies, and significant exposure to abusive and/or dysfunctional families is remarkably common. Moreover, sensitivity to PTSD has been shown to correlate with ACE score, implying the ACE questionnaire could be used as a screening tool to identify people who should take extra precaution to avoid potentially traumatic experiences,” he said.

“However, some people may not answer the ACE survey accurately due to inaccurate recall or because of the sensitive nature of many of the questions, particularly in settings that do not allow anonymity and/or where their answers could affect their future. Thus, discovery of unbiased markers for early trauma, like specific sperm miRNA content, could complement ACE surveys in some clinical settings to bolster preventative medicine,” he concluded.

The authors note that the relatively small sample size limits their ability to more deeply explore the association between ACE scores and miRNA expression. In addition, a longitudinal study with information on behavioral and psychological factors throughout adulthood, with repeated measurements of sperm miRNA content, could allow for further exploration on the effect of cumulative exposure to childhood trauma on miRNA.

Additional authors are Jessica Paulus, Sc.D., Tufts Medical Center as well as Tufts University School of Medicine and the Sackler School; Virginia Mensah, M.D., formerly in Feig’s lab with Women & Infants Hospital and the Warren Alpert Medical School at Brown University and now with the Reproductive Science Center of New Jersey; Janis Lem, Ph.D., Tufts Medical Center; Lorena Saavedra-Rodriguez, Ph.D., formerly a postdoctoral fellow in Feig’s laboratory at Tufts and now with a biopharmaceutical company; and Adrienne Gentry, D.O. and Kelly Pagidas, M.D., University of Louisville School of Medicine.

This study was supported by awards from the National Institute of Mental Health of the National Institutes of Health (R01MH107536), as well as the Tufts Center for Neuroscience Research (National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke of the NIH, P30NS047243). The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health or other funders.

Dickson, D.A., Paulus, J.K., Mensah, V., Lem, J., Saavedra-Rodriguez, L., Gentry, A., Pagidas, K., and Feig, L. A. (2018). Reduced levels of miRNAs 449 and 34 in sperm of mice and men exposed to early life stress. Translational Psychiatry. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41398-018-0146-2

https://now.tufts.edu/news-releases/early-life-trauma-men-associated-reduced-levels-sperm-micrornas

Stanford scientists find fear, courage switches in brain

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Pinpoint stimulation of a cluster of nerve cells in the brains of mice encouraged timid responses to a perceived threat, whereas stimulation of an adjacent cluster induced boldness and courage.

Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have identified two adjacent clusters of nerve cells in the brains of mice whose activity level upon sighting a visual threat spells the difference between a timid response and a bold or even fierce one.

Located smack-dab in the middle of the brain, these clusters, or nuclei, each send signals to a different area of the brain, igniting opposite behaviors in the face of a visual threat. By selectively altering the activation levels of the two nuclei, the investigators could dispose the mice to freeze or duck into a hiding space, or to aggressively stand their ground, when approached by a simulated predator.

People’s brains probably possess equivalent circuitry, said Andrew Huberman, PhD, associate professor of neurobiology and of ophthalmology. So, finding ways to noninvasively shift the balance between the signaling strengths of the two nuclei in advance of, or in the midst of, situations that people perceive as threatening may help people with excessive anxiety, phobias or post-traumatic stress disorder lead more normal lives.

“This opens the door to future work on how to shift us from paralysis and fear to being able to confront challenges in ways that make our lives better,” said Huberman, the senior author of a paper describing the experimental results. It was published online May 2 in Nature. Graduate student Lindsey Salay is the lead author.

Perilous life of a mouse
There are plenty of real threats in a mouse’s world, and the rodents have evolved to deal with those threats as best they can. For example, they’re innately afraid of aerial predators, such as a hawk or owl swooping down on them. When a mouse in an open field perceives a raptor overhead, it must make a split-second decision to either freeze, making it harder for the predator to detect; duck into a shelter, if one is available; or to run for its life.

To learn how brain activity changes in the face of such a visual threat, Salay simulated a looming predator’s approach using a scenario devised some years ago by neurobiologist Melis Yilmaz Balban, PhD, now a postdoctoral scholar in Huberman’s lab. It involves a chamber about the size of a 20-gallon fish tank, with a video screen covering most of its ceiling. This overhead screen can display an expanding black disc simulating a bird-of-prey’s aerial approach.

Looking for brain regions that were more active in mice exposed to this “looming predator” than in unexposed mice, Salay pinpointed a structure called the ventral midline thalamus, or vMT.

Salay mapped the inputs and outputs of the vMT and found that it receives sensory signals and inputs from regions of the brain that register internal brain states, such as arousal levels. But in contrast to the broad inputs the vMT receives, its output destination points were remarkably selective. The scientists traced these outputs to two main destinations: the basolateral amygdala and the medial prefrontal cortex. Previous work has tied the amygdala to the processing of threat detection and fear, and the medial prefrontal cortex is associated with high-level executive functions and anxiety.

Further inquiry revealed that the nerve tract leading to the basolateral amygdala emanates from a nerve-cell cluster in the vMT called the xiphoid nucleus. The tract that leads to the medial prefrontal cortex, the investigators learned, comes from a cluster called the nucleus reuniens, which snugly envelopes the xiphoid nucleus.

Next, the investigators selectively modified specific sets of nerve cells in mice’s brains so they could stimulate or inhibit signaling in these two nerve tracts. Exclusively stimulating xiphoid activity markedly increased mice’s propensity to freeze in place in the presence of a perceived aerial predator. Exclusively boosting activity in the tract running from the nucleus reuniens to the medial prefrontal cortex in mice exposed to the looming-predator stimulus radically increased a response seldom seen under similar conditions in the wild or in previous open-field experiments: The mice stood their ground, right out in the open, and rattled their tails, an action ordinarily associated with aggression in the species.

Thumping tails

This “courageous” behavior was unmistakable, and loud, Huberman said. “You could hear their tails thumping against the side of the chamber. It’s the mouse equivalent of slapping and beating your chest and saying, ‘OK, let’s fight!’” The mice in which the nucleus reuniens was stimulated also ran around more in the chamber’s open area, as opposed to simply running toward hiding places. But it wasn’t because nucleus reuniens stimulation put ants in their pants; in the absence of a simulated looming predator, the same mice just chilled out.

In another experiment, the researchers showed that stimulating mice’s nucleus reuniens for 30 seconds before displaying the “looming predator” induced the same increase in tail rattling and running around in the unprotected part of the chamber as did vMT stimulation executed concurrently with the display. This suggests, Huberman said, that stimulating nerve cells leading from the nucleus reunions to the prefrontal cortex induces a shift in the brain’s internal state, predisposing mice to act more boldly.

Another experiment pinpointed the likely nature of that internal-state shift: arousal of the autonomic nervous system, which kick-starts the fight, flight or freeze response. Stimulating either the vMT as a whole or just the nucleus reuniens increased the mice’s pupil diameter — a good proxy of autonomic arousal.

On repeated exposures to the looming-predator mockup, the mice became habituated. Their spontaneous vMT firing diminished, as did their behavioral responses. This correlates with lowered autonomic arousal levels.

Human brains harbor a structure equivalent to the vMT, Huberman said. He speculated that in people with phobias, constant anxiety or PTSD, malfunctioning circuitry or traumatic episodes may prevent vMT signaling from dropping off with repeated exposure to a stress-inducing situation. In other experiments, his group is now exploring the efficacy of techniques, such as deep breathing and relaxation of visual fixation, in adjusting the arousal states of people suffering from these problems. The thinking is that reducing vMT signaling in such individuals, or altering the balance of signaling strength from their human equivalents of the xiphoid nucleus and nucleus reuniens may increase their flexibility in coping with stress.

Reference:
Salay, L. D., Ishiko, N., & Huberman, A. D. (2018). A midline thalamic circuit determines reactions to visual threat. Nature. doi:10.1038/s41586-018-0078-2

http://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2018/05/scientists-find-fear-courage-switches-in-brain.html

Dogs may go gray when stressed, just like US presidents, study says

On By A.P.In ageing, agingLeave a comment

By Jacqueline Howard

Whether you call them gray hairs or stress highlights, world-renowned animal scientist and autism advocate Temple Grandin wants you to know that dogs may get them prematurely, too — possibly when stressed, such as being left at home alone.

Premature graying in dogs may be an indicator of anxiety and impulsivity, according to a study published in this month’s edition of the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science, in which Grandin served as a co-author.

Camille King, an animal behaviorist and owner of the Canine Education Center in Denver, noticed a few years ago that many impulsive and anxious dogs seemed to be prematurely turning gray. When King told Grandin about her observations, Grandin said she encouraged King to lead the research.

“The first thing I thought of when she told me that were the presidents, and how they age and get prematurely gray,” said Grandin, professor of animal science at Colorado State University, referring to American commanders in chief.

“The fact that presidents turn prematurely gray was one of the things that made me encourage her to do the study,” Grandin said. “Basically, (the study findings) validated what she had seen in years of doing dog behavior work.”

The study, conducted at Northern Illinois University, involved 400 dogs, 4 years old or younger, with non-white-colored hair so the researchers could adequately determine degrees of graying.

“Normally, dogs wouldn’t be gray at age 4,” Grandin said.

The study, conducted at Northern Illinois University, involved 400 dogs, 4 years old or younger, with non-white-colored hair so the researchers could adequately determine degrees of graying.

“Normally, dogs wouldn’t be gray at age 4,” Grandin said.

Next, the researchers compared the survey responses with how much gray hair appeared on the dogs’ muzzles in their photos.
Grandin helped the researchers build a scoring system to measure the degrees of grayness: A score of 0 is “no gray;” 1 is for gray on the front of the nose only; 2 is for gray hair halfway up the muzzle; and 3 is “full gray.”

It turned out that a high grayness score was significantly and positively predicted by survey responses that indicated both high anxiety and impulsivity.

“Essentially, the results indicate that for each standard deviation increase in the measured trait, either anxiety or impulsiveness, the odds of being in a higher rating category of muzzle grayness increase 40% to 65%,” said Thomas Smith, a professor at Northern Illinois University’s Department of Educational Technology, Research and Assessment, who was a co-author of the study.

Smith added that he was initially skeptical that a dog’s premature muzzle grayness might be linked to anxiety and impulsiveness.

“However, when we analyzed the data, the results actually were striking,” he said. “I was surprised.”
A similar association between stress and premature graying possibly could be found in other mammals, outside of humans and dogs, but more research is needed, Grandin said.

The new study appears to extend what has been previously seen in people — the relationship between stress and gray hair — to dogs, said Matt Kaeberlein, a professor and co-director of the University of Washington’s Dog Aging Project, who was not involved in the new study.

“There are a few things about this study that I really like. One is that it nicely illustrates another way in which dogs and humans are similar, specifically in this case, the way we interact with our environment to experience stress. I like the innovative approach of applying facial image recognition to dogs,” Kaeberlein said.

“I do think it’s important to keep in mind that while hair graying is a useful ‘biomarker’ of aging and experienced stress, it is not particularly precise. We should avoid interpreting causation from correlation,” he said about the study. “Many dogs and people get gray hair for reasons unrelated to their perception of stress or anxiety, so while anxiety (or) stress appears to cause hair graying, gray hair is not necessarily caused by anxiety or stress. In other words, just because your dog gets gray hair doesn’t mean she or he is stressed out.”

For instance, more research is needed to determine how much genetics might play a role not only in premature graying in young dogs but also how a dog might respond to stress, Grandin said. She added that additional research could also determine how much of the study results were influenced by anxiety and impulsivity, respectively.

“There’s probably some genetic influence where some dogs that are impulsive and anxious don’t turn gray. You see, that would be your genetic interaction, but when you take a big population of dogs, it statistically comes out that anxious and impulsive dogs are more likely to start turning gray before age 4,” Grandin said.

“Genetic factors are important, but genetic factors also can be modified by experience, so you can’t just say an animal’s hard-wired genetics, it’s not. It’s both. Both genetics and the environment are important,” she said.

http://www.cnn.com/2016/12/23/health/stress-dogs-gray-hair/index.html

Having a socially interactive job helps protect from Alzheimer’s disease.

On By A.P.In Alzheimer's disease, brainLeave a comment

By Patrick Foster

Lawyers, teachers and doctors have a better chance of fighting off the effects of Alzheimer’s disease, because of the complex nature of their jobs, scientists reported this week.

Researchers found that people whose jobs combined complex thinking with social engagement with others – such as social workers and engineers – were better protected against the onset of Alzheimer’s, compared to those in manual work.

The study came as another report suggested that people with a poor diet could protect themselves against cognitive decline by adopting a mentally stimulating lifestyle.

Both pieces of research, published at the international conference of the Alzheimer’s Association, in Toronto, examined the impact of complex thinking on the onset of the disease.

In the first study, carried out by scientists at the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Centre, in Wisconsin, researchers examined white matter hyperintensities (WMHs) – white spots that appear on brain scans and are associated with Alzheimer’s – in 284 late-middle-aged patients considered at risk of contracting the disease.

They found that people who worked primarily with other people, as opposed to with “things or data”, were less likely to be affected by brain damage indicated by WMHs.

While lawyers, social workers, teachers and doctors were best protected, those who enjoyed the least protection included shelf-stackers, machine operators and labourers.

Elizabeth Boots, a researcher on the project, said: “These findings indicate that participants with higher occupational complexity are able to withstand pathology associated with Alzheimer’s and cerebrovascular disease and perform at a similar cognitive level as their peers.

“This association is primarily driven by work with people, rather than data or things. These analyses underscore the importance of social engagement in the work setting for building resilience to Alzheimer’s disease.”

The second study, carried out by Baycrest Health Sciences, in Toronto, examined the diet of 351 older adults.

Researchers found that those who had a traditional Western diet of red and processed meat, white bread, potatoes and sweets were more likely to experience cognitive decline.

However, those who adhered to such a diet but who had a mentally stimulating lifestyle enjoyed some protection from such decline.

Dr Matthew Parrott, one member of the team, said: “Our results show the role higher educational attainment, mentally stimulating work and social engagement can play in protecting your brain from cognitive decline, counteracting some negative effects of an unhealthy diet.

“This adds to the growing body of evidence showing how various lifestyle factors may combine to increase or protect against vulnerability to Alzheimer’s disease.”

Other research put forward at the convention included a study showing that digital brain training exercises can help stave of Alzheimer’s, and another paper that suggested that some newly-identified genes may also increase resilience to the disease.

Maria C. Carrillo, the chief science officer at the Alzheimer’s Association, said: “These new data add to a growing body of research that suggests more stimulating lifestyles, including more complex work environments with other people, are associated with better cognitive outcomes in later life.

“As each new study emerges, we further understand just how powerful cognitive reserve can be in protecting the brain from disease. Formal education and complex occupation could potentially do more than just slow cognitive decline – they may actually help compensate for the cognitive damage done by bad diet and small vessel disease in the brain.

“It is becoming increasingly clear that in addition to searching for pharmacological treatments, we need to address lifestyle factors to better treat and ultimately prevent Alzheimer’s and other dementias.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/07/24/stressful-job-it-might-help-you-fight-off-alzheimers/

The employees shut inside coffins

On By A.P.In KoreaLeave a comment

South Korea has one of the highest suicide rates in the world, and workers often report feeling stressed. So in order to make people appreciate life, some companies are making employees take part in their own pretend funerals.

In a large room in a nondescript modern office block in Seoul, staff from a recruitment company are staging their own funerals. Dressed in white robes, they sit at desks and write final letters to their loved ones. Tearful sniffling becomes open weeping, barely stifled by the copious use of tissues.

And then, the climax: they rise and stand over the wooden coffins laid out beside them. They pause, get in and lie down. They each hug a picture of themselves, draped in black ribbon.

As they look up, the boxes are banged shut by a man dressed in black with a tall hat. He represents the Angel of Death. Enclosed in darkness, the employees reflect on the meaning of life.

The macabre ritual is a bonding exercise designed to teach them to value life. Before they get into the casket, they are shown videos of people in adversity – a cancer sufferer making the most of her final days, someone born without all her limbs who learned to swim.

All this is designed to help people come to terms with their own problems, which must be accepted as part of life, says Jeong Yong-mun who runs the Hyowon Healing Centre – his previous job was with a funeral company.

The participants at this session were sent by their employer, human resources firm Staffs. “Our company has always encouraged employees to change their old ways of thinking, but it was hard to bring about any real difference,” says its president, Park Chun-woong. “I thought going inside a coffin would be such a shocking experience it would completely reset their minds for a completely fresh start in their attitudes.”

“After the coffin experience, I realised I should try to live a new style of life,” says Cho Yong-tae as he emerges from the casket. “I’ve realised I’ve made lots of mistakes. I hope to be more passionate in all the work I do and spend more time with my family.”

As the company’s president, Park Chun-woong believes an employer’s responsibility extends beyond the office. For example, he sends flowers to the parents of his employees simply to thank them for bringing his workers up.

He also insists that his staff engage in another ritual every morning when they get to work – they must do stretching exercises together culminating in loud, joint outbursts of forced laughter. They bray uproariously, like laughing asses together. It is odd to see.

“At first, laughing together felt really awkward and I wondered what good it could do,” says one woman. “But once you start laughing, you can’t help but look at the faces of your colleagues around you and you end up laughing together.

“I think it really does have a positive influence. There’s so little to laugh about in a normal office atmosphere, I think this kind of laughter helps.”

Certainly, some laughter is needed in the South Korean workplace. The country has the highest rate of suicide in the industrialised world. There is a constant complaint of “presenteeism” – having to get to the office before the boss and stay until he – invariably he – has gone.

The Korean Neuropsychiatric Association found that a quarter of those it questioned suffered from high stress levels, with problems at work cited as a prime cause.

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-34797017