It's the most wonderful time of the year - well, almost. Before those fantastic and heartwarming few weeks of winter vacation comes a string of very difficult weeks full of lengthy term papers, class presentations and final exams.
For most students, it is "make or break time," when performance essentially determines the outcome of an academic semester. During these few weeks, the amount of work coupled with lofty goals of stellar grades leads many, if not all, students to experience stress. Some of us will live white-knuckled and clenching our teeth, while others will coast along. Most of us will be somewhere in between - with several fast-paced, Red-Bull-pounding all-nighters mixed in with an afternoon nap following that arduous night of studying.
Some stress can be good for us and probably helps us make the grades we ultimately want, but a prolonged exposure can be hazardous to the body and bring many undesired consequences. Everyone has a stress response that occurs essentially in two main phases - an immediate phase and a delayed phase. When encountered with a stressor - "I have to write this 20-page paper in eight hours" - a cascading reaction of events occurs in the body. The recognition of the stressor may send a signal through the autonomic nervous system that signals the release of norepinephrine from peripheral nerves and epinephrine, also known as adrenaline, into the bloodstream. The immediate effect of these hormones is easily recognizable: We feel warmer, our hunger desire goes down and our heart rate speeds up drastically.
Epinephrine also promotes gluconeogenesis, a process in which glucose, the primary energy of our body tissues, is built in the muscle and the liver. The result is a net rise in your blood sugar to deal with a situation that may require a larger amount of available energy to consume. That's a good thing, especially because your brain becomes more focused with the burst of epinephrine - and because it is the primary consumer of glucose in your body, it is good to have higher levels of glucose in the bloodstream, at least in the short term. This is appropriately called the "fight-or-flight" response. Although a tough exam might not be a true threat, our neurochemical responses certainly don't make any true differentiation.
After the bursts of epinephrine and norepinephrine, a slower response occurs. The hypothalamus in your brain signals the pituitary gland, also in your brain, to release hormones into your bloodstream. These hormones travel to the adrenal glands, which sit right above your kidneys. These glands also secrete epinephrine and react to this hormone by releasing so-called "stress hormones" - namely, cortisol. The effects of cortisol on the body do not begin to appear until days or even weeks after the initial threat. Lucky for us, the threats have resolved by then and our body has moved out of crisis mode and back into normal homeostasis. That's a good thing, too, because long-term exposure to cortisol does not have positive effects on the body. In the brain, chronic exposure to cortisol has been shown to alter memory formation and can be mildly sedating, perhaps leading to increased risk of depression. Imagine feeling threatened or doomed constantly
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