Stress Hormones Can Lead to Cognitive Changes
By: Susan Anderson
Tags: Cognition, Stress And Anxiety, Stress, Brain, Stress Management

© Susan Anderson December 22 2020

Outer Child — your internal nemesis — reacts to stress by falling back on overused, automatic patterns of behavior — kneejerk reactions you have been developing since childhood. They may have helped you cope with various stressors when you were younger, but they bypass the need to think and therefore are not subject to the wiser judgment of your cognitive brain, so these patterns tend to become maladaptive to your adult purposes.

Stress hormones can mobilize your physiological resources in a real emergency, but when sustained and triggered chronically, they can lead to cognitive deficits, learning difficulties, low self-esteem, memory gaps, and heightened emotional sensitivity (resulting in depression or anxiety in adulthood). This is especially likely to occur in childhood when the brain is developing.

Stressful events in childhood also tend to give rise to repetitive patterns of (Outer Child) behavior which create a vicious cycle of recursive stress. Prolonged stress can also spur the development of unique personal strengths (post-traumatic growth (PTG)). The bottom line is that for good or evil, sustained stress can have a lasting impact.

Stress hormones can change brain structure

In Taming Your Outer Child, I share the insights of neuroscientists about how stress hormones (i.e. cortisol) can damage branches at the end of the nerves in the hippocampus, pruning the neural connections in the brain, changing brain structure. This can lead to deficits in short term memory and cognitive functioning.

Research also shows that adults who had elevated cortisol levels during childhood (per studies on children raised in orphanages and lab animals subjected to various forms of separation/abandonment trauma) are found on autopsy to have smaller Hippocampi and other structural brain differences.

Stress hormones can lead to learning problems

Stress hormones decrease the supply of glucose to the brain and prevent the brain from firing, so the brain is impeded in sending nerve impulses necessary for learning. They can also interfere in the production of the neurochemical glutamate. The way glutamate works is this: Learning can’t happen until a threshold of glutamate is reached in the brain. It is only when a massive wave of excitation occurs and nerves fire that learning occurs. Children raised under conditions of chronic stress develop deficits related to the fact that their brain cells don’t fire sufficiently to induce learning. This impedes both academic and social learning.

Stress hormones can affect the emotional quality of life

Stress hormones are known to cause the decline of growth hormone, and some believe that this impacts the vagus nerve in the brain, setting the emotional brain at a higher level of reactivity, creating patterns of mood instability into adulthood.

Stress hormones are involved in our separation/abandonment response

Researchers report that that rat pups that were handled in the first few weeks of life produced lower stress hormones as adults (as compared with pups left unhandled during this period). Conversely, when animals under study (i.e. rhesus monkeys, cats, human children) are separated from their mothers (even briefly), those animals in adulthood tend to:

have higher glucocorticoid stress hormones

have higher flight/flight reactivity

avoid novel situations

have trouble learning

have trouble forming secure attachments

be more prone to depression as adults

have higher emotional reactivity

develop compulsive (addictive) and repetitive behaviors.

We can observe most of these traits in adults who’ve had stressful childhood histories of abandonment, family dysfunction, loss, disconnection, etc.

The good news is that regardless of childhood stress’s impact on the brain, we can do things to help the brain regenerate — that is, grow new neurons (in some cases) and new connections between neurons, and well as repair damaged ones. In fact, some antidepressant medications are known to promote neuronal repair.

This information is presented to inspire you to become engaged in the tools of growth and change. The Abandonment Recovery program (explained in Taming Your Outer Child) is a series of mental and behavioral exercises that act like physical therapy for the brain to heal your primal wounds of abandonment, overcome Outer Child Self-Sabotage, and promote social, emotional, and behavioral change.

(*Among other researchers whose work I compiled for this, I’d like to credit the important work of Myron Hofer)