All Sressed Out

The last week of classes is upon me. I have less than seven days until my final exams, and the stress is beginning to rise much like this early-summer Rochester heat. On a given day, I have no less than twenty dozen separate things on my mind. Okay, so maybe twenty dozen is a bit much, but I do have a lot on my mind. This week, for example, I had an Electromagnetic Fields project due on Monday, and both a lab, and a test in the same class on Wednesday.  I had a Linear Systems quiz on Thursday, an Electronics lab on Wednesday, two previous lab reports due, and on top of all that my drivers licence expires in less than a week. Phew.

Having this much on my mind makes it hard to concentrate and pay attention in class, which is a big problem considering this is the most important time of the quarter. With finals fast approaching, I need to be like a sponge and soak up any detail that might help me on a final exam. 

A study published in The Journal of Neuroscience sheds some light on the reasons why stressed individuals find it so hard to pay attention. The key lies in the effect stress has on neurons in two different areas of the brain. Prolonged exposure to stress leads to decreased performance in tasks that require attention and the ability to shift focus, as well as the ability to learn and unlearn new material. 

The actual experimentation in the study was performed on rats. The rat-stress was produced by keeping the rodents in painless restraints for six hours a day. After three weeks, the researchers used a series of tests which measured how quickly the rats learned to make associations between different "cues" and the location of food. A Rockefeller University report on the study outlines the different tests as follows:

"First, the researchers provided two different materials for the rats to dig in, such as sand and sawdust, and buried food consistently under only one. Next, food was left in the same material, but it was scented with strong spices (like cumin or nutmeg) that were unrelated to the foods location. Then food was buried according to scent, teaching the rats to use odor as the location cue - in other words, it could be buried in either sawdust or sand, as long as it smelled like cumin. Finally, the scent cues were flip-flopped, so that the rats had to unlearn the prior scent association and remember a new one."

The study ultimately concluded that stressed and non-stressed rats performed the same on all of the tests but the last one, in which they had to unlearn an old behavior, and learn a new one. The medical reason for this is that neurons in the medial prefrontal cortex were shortened by the extended exposure to stress.

This is a scary finding, because it points to the fact that prolonged exposure to high stress can actually physically alter the make-up of your brain. 

The value of a study such as this is that it brings to light that being exposed to stress for prolonged periods does more than make you frazzled. It actually affects your attention, and your ability to learn and unlearn information. This is specifically alarming for a college student such as myself, in the middle of my last week of classes before exams when learning takes on a new importance. 

Taking steps to reduce your stress can lead to the disappearance of these symptoms, so the best course of action is to take a page from the playbook of 80's pop band Frankie Goes to Hollywood and "relax."