Stress kills us. Luckily, it’s not a quick death, but rather a slow, agonizing death over the course of years. But what does it do to your brain in the meantime?
It is clear that stress will fire off an epileptic seizure faster than just about anything else. But is stress so damaging to the brain that it could actually cause epilepsy? I’ve written in a previous blog post that those who were more physically active were less likely to develop epilepsy, so the idea that we can control our risk of developing epilepsy with the lifestyle choice we make is not unheard of.
Early life stress exposures to stress contributing to epilepsy is exactly the question that researchers asked in this particular study. If we can protect our brain on the front end, the likelihood of even haven’t that first seizure if much reduced. Once a first seizure is experienced, there is a possibility that a pathway through the brain cells gets created, making future seizures more likely. This process is called epileptogenesis.
Back to the article. In it, the author reviews the research that suggests that stress, when prolonged and severe, can cause epilepsy. In addition, there are suggestions that early life stress can have the same effect on the development of epilepsy.
While this isn’t a clinical study with data to share, it should open up your mind to just how damaging stress is to your brain. It destroys it. Enough so that serious neurological disorders like chronic migraine headaches, epilepsy, Alzheimer’s dementia and Parkinson’s disease have stress as a major contributor.
This means that if you have one of these conditions or have a parent with one of these conditions stress avoidance or at least management is even more important. If your are a parent of a young child, this message is absolutely critical. You MUST manage stress in your life and teach your child the joys of life and shelter them from a stressful household.
Exercise, meditation, biofeedback, yoga, deep prayer, hypnosis or any other tool that feels right to you. Today.