Are you stressed out?
If so, a new Canadian study hints that you may want to take care when you’re among others who are stressed too.
The new study published in the journal, Nature Neuroscience, shows that stress conveyed to you by others may change your brain in the same way as your own stress does.
Jaideep Bains, professor in the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, and Toni-Lee Sterley, a postdoctoral fellow in Bains’ lab and the study’s lead author. (Adrian Shellard, Hotchkiss Brain Institute)
Jaideep Bains and his team at the University of Calgary’s Hotchkiss Brain Institute made their findings after studying the effects of stress on pairs of male and female mice.
He suggests that stress-related changes in the brain may bolster a number of mental illnesses including anxiety and depressive disorders along with Post-traumatic stress disorder or PTSD.
“Recent studies indicate that stress and emotions can be ‘contagious’. Whether this has lasting consequences for the brain is not known,” said Bains in a University of Calgary press release.
He proposes that the findings of the mice study may have relevance for humans – we may also unwittingly transmit our own stress to others, along with its deleterious brain effects.
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