How stress can shrink your brain

ALL this week, a pair of eminent neurologists specialising in Alzheimer’s are sharing cutting-edge research with Mail readers and revealing how lifestyle tweaks can help fend off the disease. Today, they show how avoiding stress and learning to meditate could boost your brain...

THERE’S no doubt that many of us are more stressed than ever before. Thanks to the rise of smartphones, we’re never far from our emails — meaning too many of us take work home with us.

Then there are all the other stresses of modern life: never getting to the end of your to-do list, worrying about family, money, friends, work and so on.

It can be easy to shrug off that missed appointment or lost wallet as the inevitable consequence of having too much to do and never enough time.

But those mental blanks and foggyheaded moments could be an early warning sign that stress is damaging your brain.

In fact, stress management is a critical and often misunderstood aspect of a brain-healthy lifestyle. Regardless of your degree of risk of developing dementia, stress reduction is crucial to overall health and happiness.

Together, as a neurologist husband-and-wife team, we run the prestigious Memory and Aging Center at Loma Linda University in California.

We have dedicated our careers to finding a cure for Alzheimer’s and after decades of research and clinical experience we believe we have found a scientifically-backed way to reduce your risk — and keep your brain sharper for longer.

All this week in the Mail we have been serialising this personalised lifestyle plan, based on our book, The Alzheimer’s Solution, which focuses on five key areas that can really make a difference: diet, exercise, sleep, stress and brain training.

Today, the focus is on stress, and specifically on finding ways to unwind.

Some forms of stress are, in fact, good for your brain — if the stress helps you pursue some kind of long-term goal (such as studying for a degree).

This kind of purposeful action actually bolsters brain reserves, making you stronger and more resilient. But many of us now live our lives in a state of unrelenting, uncontrolled stress.

This is the worst possible kind — if you don’t own it and you didn’t choose it and you feel there’s no end to it in sight. Stress like this puts the body in overdrive and subsequently increases the level of stress hormones (such as cortisol). These affect blood sugar levels and cause damaging long-term problems such as anxiety, depression, disrupted sleep and depressed immune function, which then makes us more vulnerable to infections — and all of which increase our risk of developing Alzheimer’s.

Stress affects each of us differently, but our brains are particularly vulnerable. Studies show chronic stress decreases levels of the crucial protein responsible for the production of new brain cells.

It puts the brain in a state of high inflammation, causing structural damage and impairing its ability to clear harmful waste products. Uncontrolled stress initiates a hormonal cascade that taxes the brain on many levels. It even changes the structure of the brain, destroying cells and effectively shrinking it.

If you were to look at the brains of people with Alzheimer’s, even early on in the disease process, you’d see evidence of chronic inflammation in the form of special proteins (called cytokines and chemokines) that rush to the site to support the immune system by attacking foreign

substances. You’ll also see small cells (called microglia) that rush there to help with the clearing of waste and damaged brain cells.

The problem is, under stressful conditions, these microglia can become so responsive in clearing waste that they start to harm neurons (the cells of the nervous system) and their supporting structures, resulting in both cell death and structural damage.

This is why stress, and the chronic inflammation that it induces, is widely considered to be a main factor in the development of Alzheimer’s.

Studies have also shown that chronic stress can quite literally shrink your brain.

A single stressful event is enough to destroy brain cells — very often in an area called the hippocampus, which controls memory. When the hippocampus is damaged by cortisol, the region struggles to regulate the body’s stress system.

This results in the secretion of even more cortisol, a vicious cycle that in turn damages more cells.

Everyone, whatever the state of their brain health, will benefit from unwinding and de-stressing. This factor alone could be enough to significantly reduce your risk of getting Alzheimer’s, and if you already have a dementia diagnosis, should ease your symptoms and improve your focus and memory.

To work best and have the greatest impact, the process of unwinding or destressing, just like the other four lifestyle factors in this series, should be personalised to you. Turn to your free magazine which was given away in last Saturday’s paper (if you don’t have one, call 0808-272 0808 to get one posted out to you), and focus on the main sources of stress in your life, and possible ways you could mitigate them.

We encourage our patients to work towards eliminating, as much as they can, any situations in life that make them feel stressed, and taking steps to avoid the difficult and awkward relationships that make them uncomfortable.

We urge them to make sure they give themselves time in each day to relax (this is very important!) and to find a way to reduce the constant distractions of mobile phones, computers and TV (you might think this is just background noise, but it can put your brain in a permanent state of unrelenting alert).

For our part, we managed stress levels by keeping a close eye on our schedules. We now cancel meetings and events at night to allow time to decompress after a busy day.

When we travel, we allow a day at home to eat well, exercise and sleep soundly before returning to our work routine.

Four times a day we practise mindful breathing (left) for five to ten minutes a time, and spend lunch hours walking the same path around the hospital where we work (exercise and relaxation combined).

When we are at home you’ll hear classical music playing at a low volume, and, when they are around, one of our children will put on a dance song every hour or so and we have a rule that we all have to get up and dance, (which is great fun and another effective form of stress relief).

THE BENEFITS OF MEDITATION

LIKE many people, we used to get uncomfortable when someone mentioned meditation — it hadn’t entered textbooks when we were studying medicine.

But it is such a buzzword in California, where we work, and many of our healthiest patients were such great advocates, that we set out to research its scientific benefits.

To our surprise, we found many studies that, over the years, really have convinced us of the powerful relaxation benefits of meditation.

Beyond stress reduction, meditation has been shown to either increase the brain’s volume or slow the rate at which the brain loses volume through age — particularly in the crucial parts of the brain that govern attention. This means regular meditation really could help enhance memory.

As we investigated further, we started to think of meditation as an antidote to modern distraction. If it could help us focus, we thought, it could also help us reduce stress, especially in the brain.

Meditation isn’t ‘doing nothing’. It’s not a passive

activity. Done properly, it is all about cultivating concentration and focus, a fantastically powerful antidote to dementia as it happens in the very brain regions which are often the first to be affected by Alzheimer’s.

We are now convinced that including meditation or mindfulness of some sort in your daily routine can dramatically reduce the effects of uncontrolled stress and even expand important —and very useful — areas in the brain.

And you can rest assured that enjoying the benefits of meditation will not mean joining an Ashram or compulsory crosslegged sitting.

Yes, it can mean chanting if you wish, but it can also simply be sitting quietly, walking around your neighbourhood or having a comfortable de-cluttered space you can go to that helps you unwind at the end of the day.

If you want to give it a go, find a quiet place where you won’t be disturbed for ten minutes.

Sit down, close your eyes and try to clear your mind, focusing only on the breath going in and out of your nose.

Every time your mind starts to wander, bring your focus back to your breath. Don’t be discouraged if you find it hard — with practice you’ll see amazing benefits.

Even doing something you love — that puts you in a ‘zone’ (it could be knitting or washing up, cleaning your shoes or daydreaming) where you simply experience the activity rather than think too much about it — can have enough of a meditative effect to provide huge mental benefits for both focus and stress management.

Ultimately, the best relaxation techniques for you are ones that interest you and bring you a sense of calm. Everyone responds differently.

But don’t think you’re too busy, or that unwinding isn’t important. Pick something from the suggestions in the boxes.

Whatever method you choose should be simple, convenient for you and, most importantly, relaxing.

ADAPTED from The Alzheimer’s Solution: A Revolutionary Guide To How You Can Prevent And Reverse Memory Loss by Dr Dean Sherzai and Dr Ayesha Sherzai, published by Simon & Schuster