Sublime

factors that reduce sensitivity to exclusion, such as being given social support or a more avoidant attachment style (a cool social style), reduce activity in these brain regions.

When the alarm bell of the emotional brain keeps signaling that you are in danger, no amount of insight will silence it.

When we are highly stressed, the emotional brain gets aroused, which in turn stimulates the thinking brain to work harder to resolve our concerns. We create a vicious cycle where the baseline brain activity is geared to a higher than normal level, with increasing vigilance, fear, stress, and anxiety. Over time this extra effort depletes our energy,

For the most part, our brains are equal to our environment, a record of our personal past, a reflection of the life we’ve lived.

To test this idea, researchers recently looked at whether pill-taking women exhibit four well-established biological markers of chronic stress exposure. These include (1) increased expression of genes associated with cortisol signaling (trauma predicts having a greater number of cortisol-triggered genes turned on); (2) higher levels of blood lipids

But Beckes and Coan reviewed a vast array of studies and deduced that the energy-costly prefrontal cortex not only offloads, as it were, less demanding functions to other parts of our nervous system, it also does a fabulous job of conserving energy by offloading one person’s brain functions onto other people’s brains.

The result is that we are increasingly left with only work or other stressors that often deplete our resources, and nothing to replenish or nourish us – and exhaustion is the result.

Our most surprising finding was a white spot in the left frontal lobe of the cortex, in a region called Broca’s area. In this case the change in color meant that there was a significant decrease in that part of the brain.