Stress Can Change Our Brains |
What Are Adverse Childhood Experiences?
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The type of stress experienced, as well as its timing and duration, determines its effects.
Chronic toxic stress alters danger perception, leading to maladaptive behaviors.
Toxic stress without support can harm childhood brain development.
Stress is unavoidable. It is a part of all of our lives. Its causes, timing, and nature determine its impact on our bodies and our minds.
Not all stress is the same. It varies from common challenges of everyday life to life-threatening events. “Positive” stress, the mild or brief stress of doing things for the first time—a job interview, the first day of school, a first date—is a frequent and necessary occurrence. It arouses some anxiety, but demands of new experiences also help us grow and develop new strengths and skills. We need them.
“Tolerable” stress is exposure to a greater threat or adversity, such as the death of a loved one or a natural disaster. These more serious situations evoke a strong activation of our stress response system, the built-in neurobiological warning system that is set off when we perceive a threat. The hormones released by our stress response system—adrenaline, cortisol—prepare our bodies for immediate action, the fight (confront the danger) or flight (flee) response. Talking with others after such events helps us to calm our stress response and return to equilibrium.
“Toxic” stress is the most severe type of stress. These are situations that are so threatening, chronic, or harmful that they trigger frequent or prolonged activation of our stress response system when there is no one available to help us calm down and return to equilibrium. Think of a child alone with an abuser or one who is suddenly separated from their parents. Or imagine yourself being assaulted and having no one to talk to about it.
Stress that happens in infancy or early childhood, when our brains are being built, has the greatest likelihood of interrupting, disrupting, or actually changing the expectable course of our development. Adolescence is another period of rapid advances in the brain, bringing heightened vulnerability to stress. Positive stress experiences can cause positive genetic potentials to unfold more fully, just as toxic stress can shut down nascent gifts or derail the development of a healthy stress response.
Chronic toxic stress that is unmediated by support activates your stress response system repeatedly or keeps it activated. Stress hormones flood your body and you can’t stop being on alert, or your system shuts down and you develop a defensive numbness. Your ability to accurately identify danger becomes impaired, and you might see threat where it doesn’t exist and react inappropriately, or you might fail to see a real threat and be victimized.
A Stressful Childhood
Constant activation of his stress response is what happened to Rafael, one of the men I interviewed for my book, Before Their Crimes: What We’re Misunderstanding about Childhood Trauma, Juvenile Crime, and the Path to Healing. Rafael's father was incarcerated, and he lived with his mother, who worked long nights to keep the family fed and housed.
“When I was five or six years old, I woke up to someone banging at the door, the cops coming through the door and hitting me with the door knocker and then they do a raid. I went through that in the morning, and then I had to walk myself to school and go through the street—the drug abuse, the gangs lingering in the streets where I lived.
What Are Adverse Childhood Experiences?
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The fear was constantly there because I would see people get hurt or they get put in an ambulance. One time my uncle picked me up from school when I was six years old, and someone started chasing him with a gun. They chased us really bad, shooting at the car, blowing out the window. He stopped and told me to run. After that experience, I became numb.
The first time I witnessed cold-blooded murder I was eight or nine years old. One of my uncles was having a party and in the middle of it, I hear shouting. As I'm walking up the stairs, I see an argument and one of the guys pulls out a gun and shoots the other guy in the face. The guy continued towards where the music was playing and shot another guy and ran out of the backyard while I was watching these two guys bleeding out.
I was watching it and not feeling much about it, like it messed up my feeling fear anymore or anything much. When I was 10 or 11, I started becoming really violent. I started trying to be in a gang. I became more radical the less that I feared.”
Rafael’s gang-involved uncles, whom he idolized, lived with the very same stresses, which they saw as unavoidable aspects of life, requiring neither discussion nor comfort.
A constant release of stress hormones can cause changes that disrupt the course of development of the brain, increasing the risk of chronic diseases and cognitive impairment in childhood and in adult life. At the same time, positive experience in the form of supportive relationships with adults also profoundly affects brain architecture and development, and can prevent or reverse harmful effects of the body’s response to stress (de Magalhaes-Barbosa et al., 2022).
When there is someone to respond with care and understanding, children and adults can survive very difficult events, resume their developmental journey, and even thrive.
Magalhães-Barbosa, M., Prata-Barbosa, A. & Ledo Alves da Cunha, A. (2022). Toxic stress, epigenetics and child development. Jornal de Pediatria 98(S1). 513-518
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