Stress and Resilience
– why are some better at it
than others?
Stress
and anxiety are unfortunately
integrated into the lives of students and the
working population in Hong Kong. It does not take
a scientist to notice that certain students handle
stress a lot better than others. There are, in fact,
biological reasons for this and methods by which
one can improve their resilience to stress.
Resilience refers to a positive stress-coping
ability. A person is resilient to stress if they are
immune to the negative symptoms that stress
brings about, or are able to cope by recovering
quickly from traumatic experiences [1]. Resilience
is largely a product of one’s brain architecture and
its associated signalling pathways. Depending
on the effects exerted on the brain, stress can
be split into two categories: tolerable stress and
toxic stress. Tolerable stress is defined by stress that
one has resources to cope with and is easier to
adapt to and overcome. Toxic stress, on the other
hand, is overwhelming and can result in residual
psychological disorders such as depression or post-
traumatic stress disorder.
Brain cells have receptors for insulin and
insulin-like growth factor (IGF-1). Type II diabetes
patients whose cells have impaired response to
insulin, experience similar structural changes as do
people who are stressed. While structural changes
in the brain can be reversed following a stress-free
recovery period, chronic activation of the stress
response can overload the system, deteriorating
the brain’s resilience to future stressful events.
The stress pathway is also interconnected with
the inflammatory and metabolic systems, which
means that chronically stressed individuals are
at risk of developing secondary disorders such as
chronic inflammation, cardiovascular disease and
dementia.
Early childhood experience determines one’s
ability to cope with stress. In rats, lack of maternal
care impairs proper brain development, leading
to aversive behaviour in later life. Rhesus monkeys
that were raised by anxious mothers have been
documented to mimic chronic anxiety as well.
In humans, those from a lower socioeconomic
class, which generally increases the chances
of experiencing stressors, correlate with greater
emotional reactions when presented with stressful
images. They are also more likely to be diagnosed
with depression – consistent with the hypothesis
that they are less resilient.
In line with environmental factors, epigenetics
have been shown to influence one’s stress-coping
skills. Epigenetics refer to the changes in the
responsiveness of genes to external factors that
References and further reading
[1] McEwen, B. S., Gray, J. D., Nasca, C. Recognizing resilience: Learning from the effects of stress on the brain (2015). Neurobiology of Stress.
DOI: 10.1016/j.ynstr. Retrieved from
By Raphaella So
蘇韋霖
