Stress Is Good. Getting Stressed Is Not
A new study conducted at the University of Buffalo shows that acute stress, the kind where the body produces the stress hormone, corticosterone in rats which were used as the test subjects and cortisol in humans, increases the transmission of the neurotransmitter glutamate thereby enhancing learning and memory. More specifically, according to the senior author of the study, professor of physiology and biophysics, Zhen Yan, “Stress hormones have both protective and damaging effects on the body. This paper and others we have in the pipeline explain why we need stress to perform better. but don’t want to be stressed out.”
The rats in the study were taught to run a maze and then half of them were made to swim for 20 minutes and then run the maze again. Those who had been dunked made less mistakes than those that had remained dry.
In addition, Yan noted that chronic stress suppresses the the transmission of glutamate in the prefrontal cortex of male rodents and has the opposite effect of acute stress resulting in more mistakes in the maze. Apparently, estrogen receptors in female rodents makes them more resilient to chronic stress than male rats. But you already knew this didn’t you.