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Ayurveda and COVID-19
Published in Srijan Goswami, Chiranjeeb Dey, COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2, 2022
The function of the sympathetic nervous system is especially significant during a crisis. It is mainly responsible for the fight or flight response. This is known as the stress response and is especially significant when escaping from predators or hunting for prey. As a response to stress, the sympathetic nervous system raises the blood pressure, increases the heart rate, and dilates the airways, preparing the body for action. The hair stands on end, the palms start sweating, and the pupils dilate. Energy from the liver is released for the anticipated burst of action. Blood supply from the digestive system is diverted to the muscles. The whole system is put on red alert. The sympathetic nervous system uses norepinephrine as its neurotransmitter to relay its messages.
Breathing Lessons: Skills for Activating Parasympathetic Recovery
Published in Brian C. Miller, Reducing Secondary Traumatic Stress, 2021
Conscious Oversight: During your workday, develop deliberate awareness of the effect that stress is having on you emotionally and physiologically. Establish a goal of engaging in strategies deliberately to allow resolution of the fight-or-flight response after a stress event.
Emotional Trauma: Brain Zapping and Concussion
Published in Eldo E. Frezza, The Moral Distress Syndrome Affecting Physicians, 2020
Apprehensive behavior creates a state of anxiety. This activates the body’s emergency response, the stress response. The stress response secretes stress hormones into the bloodstream where they bring about specific changes. These changes are emotional, psychological, and physiological and help the body to deal with danger. They trigger the fight, flight, or freeze response. The stress response is often called the fight or flight response. These biochemical changes can create brain zapping.
Measuring stress: a review of the current cortisol and dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA) measurement techniques and considerations for the future of mental health monitoring
Published in Stress, 2023
Tashfia Ahmed, Meha Qassem, Panicos A. Kyriacou
The general adaptation syndrome comprises of three stages: the alarm reaction; the resistance and the exhaustion stage. Immediately upon the body’s perception of a stressor, the alarm reaction is triggered, i.e. the stress response or “fight or flight” response. The stress response is responsible for several physiological and biochemical changes in the body, to restore homeostasis (Mcewen, 2005). Once triggered, catecholamines (adrenaline and noradrenaline) are released into the bloodstream via the sympathetic-adrenal-medullary (SAM) axis for mobilization of energy required for the “fight or flight” responses (Juster et al., 2010; Romero & Butler, 2007). In parallel, corticotrophin-releasing hormone (CRH) is released from the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, which subsequently leads to the synthesis and release of glucocorticoids, such as cortisol, into the bloodstream (Sapolsky et al., 2000; Schmidt et al., 2011). As a result of the biochemical responses, there are several physiological changes that occurs, such as an increase in heart rate and blood glucose levels, muscular tension and perspiration (Charmandari et al., 2005; Evans, 1950). Furthermore, there are adaptive redirections of behavior such as increased arousal and alertness and, focused attention (Charmandari et al., 2005). These characteristics and responses contribute to the restoration of homeostasis interrupted by a short-term stressor.
Querulant delusion and post-traumatic embitterment disorder
Published in International Review of Psychiatry, 2020
To understand and treat PTED it is necessary to understand the psychology of embitterment. Alexander (1960) characterised embitterment in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis as ‘a burning sense of unfairness or injustice, a protesting feeling of having been wronged without cause, or at least without sufficient cause. This sense of injustice is felt with deep sincerity by the embittered person’. ‘Qualitatively there is a querulous note. With the question of the universe in general: Why? The reason for this is that the bitter querulant feels reproachful, resentful, over pain whose reason he cannot understand, which appears to him unnecessary, not inevitable, but deliberately inflicted by fate, in short, as a persecution. This relates bitterness to the paranoid affects.’ Alexander sees embitterment as a masochistic-aggressive adaptation reaction. Znoj (2011) explains that the function of embitterment is probably best seen as a mixture of anger and hopelessness. In situations where things get so bad that the likelihood for survival is minimised, a special emotion of desperation might be appropriate, a mixture of suicidal ideation and absolute courage. Embitterment enables the organism to survive in a threatening situation. This is comparable with the fight-or-flight response in panic to acute frightening situations. Embitterment is an emotion that arises in situations in which the control of the stressor is in the hand of some other person and no hope of improvement is to be seen. This results in hatred and (self-)destruction.
Neuroinflammation caused by mental stress: the effect of chronic restraint stress and acute repeated social defeat stress in mice
Published in Neurological Research, 2019
Yuequan Zhu, Eric Allen Klomparens, Sichao Guo, Xiaokun Geng
The sucrose preference test (SPT) is the most widely used and accepted parameter to assess anhedonia in depressed animals, with a lower SPT ratio indicating a higher severity of depression [26]. In our study, both RSDS and CRS significantly reduced the SPT ratio (Figure 1(a,b)), indicating that both stress protocols were able to induce a depressed state in the animals, which is consistent with related research [27–29]. Besides the change in sucrose preference, the stress protocols also activated the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal (HPA) axis and the sympatho-adreno-medullar (SAM) system [21,30]. HPA axis activation increases the release of glucocorticoids (cortisol in humans and corticosterone in rodents), so the serum corticosterone (CORT) reflects the stress state of the body [21,31]. As shown in Figure 2(a), RSDS significantly increased serum CORT, which is consistent with other studies [21,32,33]. CRS, however, failed to significantly up-regulate serum CORT expression (Figure 2(b)). A possible reason for this is that the long duration of the stress stimulation might have decreased the activity of the HPA axis [34,35]. Changes in serum EPI reflected those of CORT, with a significant increase seen in the RSDS group but not in the CRS group (Figure 2(c,d)). The SAM axis, which promotes the release of EPI, mediates a rapid physiological adaptation after stress. This helps the body regulate responses to environmental stimuli and activates the ‘fight or flight’ response [36]. The acute nature of the SAM axis is likely why the effect of chronic stress on EPI was not obvious.