Stress and Anxiety. Two words you hear often now a days. Especially if you are like me a college student. These two factors can negatively impact our lives and make life much more difficult. These two things are caused by our non-stop desire to be productive. People vary between how they deal with stress and anxiety differently and people differ in how easy they get stressed out or anxious. It’s weird how that is a widely accepted truth. But how does this occur? There are a couple of different reasons why.
A review article in the frontiers of psychiatry reveals that it is the formation of memories attributed to stress and anxiety. Although our bodies are designed in a way that you can make strong memories of stressful events so that in the future you can avoid them. When I say stressful event, the most likely stressor that a human would activate this mechanism would be a wild animal attacking them in the woods or something along the lines of that. But with the modern civilization and the way society is today we do not experience these sort of stressors often at all. This biological mechanism in the brain gets hijacked by the “stressors” we experience as humans almost everyday in the modern world. The paper describes that the adrenal gland releases corticotrophins, which are responsible for releasing adrenaline in the body and increase heart rate and alertness, which is characterized with stress and anxiety. In people with stress and anxiety disorders this becomes dysregulated and this very mechanisms attributes to the formation of the memories associated with the stressors.
In combination with increased corticotrophin release glutamate signaling pays into factor within stress related memories as well. Cellular mechanisms such as a dual histone activation of a protein complex called H3S10P-K14ac increases the production of proteins called c-Fos and Egr-1. These proteins are directly involved with forming strong memories and consolidation processes as well. This underlying mechanism can thus cause an increase of “noisy” thoughts that are characterized with the intense memories of the stressors, which can cause attention deficits. The Prefrontal cortex gets dysregulated as a result of this cascade because the connections between the hippocampus and the amygdala become desensitized.
There is a wide array of medications for anxiety, they include, Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs), Serotonin-Norephenipherine Reuptake Inhibitors (SNRIs), and Benzodiazepines. The mechanisms for SSRIs and SNRIs block the reuptake channels on neurons of these specific neurotransmitters that play important roles in mood stabilization. Recently it has been described that Histone modification of the phosphorylation and acetylation of the histone H3 complex (H3S10p-K14ac), leads the activation of gene transcription of IEG genes, which facilitate strong memory formation. This mechanism is strongly linked to anxiety disorders and it appears Lorezapam and well-known benzodiazepine blocks the phosphorylation and acetylation of the histone complex. Other anxiety medications and their mechanisms relating to these histone modifications are not well known. However, It has been found that the mechanism for benzodiazepines like lorezapram acts on GABAergic neurons. This relationship could possibly lead to the inhibition of the phosphorylation and acetylation of the histone complex. They are allosteric modulators of the GABA-A receptors. These receptors ligand-gated chloride channel and when activated hyperpolarize the target cell allowing Calcium ions to flow in. Benzodiazepines bind to these receptors in a specific pocket that induces a conformational change and allows GABA to bind.
It’s a terrible cycle. Stress and anxiety when in high doses can be maladaptive for everyone as indicated by this article. However, in this day and age these things are unavoidable. This is why developing a deeper understanding of these aspects and what they can do to a person is important. It is also important to manage these things so that the stress and anxiety levels to become too high where you can develop problems that can be very hard to deal with.
Are Stress and Anxiety Hijacking Your Body?
