Now that most of us are vaccinated and some sense of normalcy may soon return, lets look back at how our brains may have changed while going through the stress of the pandemic.
I would like to utilize the analogy of a smoke detector. When there is a fire hazard or smoke, the detector starts buzzing and it is loud. There is no way it goes unheard. It alerts us , we run around the home looking for the cause and we resolve it right away . Our brain stays in that high alert mode until the smoke detector stops buzzing and it takes some time to exit the alert mode.
So has your brain made the exit from the high alert mode which it has been in since the pandemic started ? With the extent of the COVID pandemic, it has been hard for all of us to take the exit off the stressed /high alert mode. We have been stressed, anxious and worried throughout and still are. Did you know that our brain has been going through structural changes as we encounter above emotions. Our emotional regulation head quarters have been swamped. The high alert mode has driven the Amygdala a key role player assisting with emotional reactions to grow bigger which negatively affects our brain health. Yes, we all know and there have been TED talks about stress being helpful for survival. However, we do not have an exact proportion of stress which would be just right. Quantifying stress like the dose of your pill , 50 mg of stress twice a day is just right , would be very hard. But we all know too much of anything is not good. The duration of Covid pandemic has definitely provided us with an overdose of stress.
Lately, I have been reading the amazing work by Dr. Bastian Bloem & colleagues about Stress in people with Parkinson's disease(PD). They have published several articles through the pandemic about how the pandemic has affected PD symptoms, mobility levels and stress induced symptom elevation as well as the role of mindfulness. This information in addition to my personal interest in mindfulness, motivated me to create my new webinar on Stress & Anxiety in PD. This is a free webinar that I will be hosting on May 28th
We will be discussing changes that occur in the body due to ongoing chronic stress and its impact on PD related symptoms. The perspective will be about what lessons have we learnt from the pandemic and moving forwards. The talk will look at sleep, exercise as well as mindfulness as tools to help handle stress and anxiety with the goal of inducing positive brain plasticity.
Please email me at rupali@congruencept.com to enroll for this free webinar.
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