Something we all are faced with is stress, especially during the end of the year when we have deadlines to meet, along with the numerous responsibilities during the holiday season. A report put out by the American Institute of Stress, found that about 80% of workers feel stress on the job, with 40% feeling that their “job is very or extremely stressful.” This is due to the fact that the workforce landscape has changed and, as a result, many workplaces are attempting to mitigate stress. However, as I’ve written before, stress causes a biological response in the body which is associated with headaches, depression and other illnesses. Thus, it not only affects us mentally but also physically. So a question came to me: is there a connection between our physical and mental health, or the brain and the immune system?
For a long time it has been thought that the brain and the immune system are two separate entities that exist in different realms. This dates back to the 1940s, when a Nobel Prize winning biologist known for studying how the immune system interacts with transplants, showed that foreign tissue grafted in the brain was slower to be rejected than foreign tissues placed in other parts of the body. From there came a notion that the immune system and brain are separate entities, which is attributed to the fact that there is something called the brain-blood barrier. This barrier is thought to separate and protect the brain from various pathogens that could enter through the blood, thus implying that there is no need for the immune system to be present in the brain. However, there were skeptics to this theory and a group of scientists believed otherwise. Recently highlighted in the Scientific American, a body of research indicated that the brain and immune system actually do interact! Scientists have found that there is a link between the brain in the immune system both in the response to psychological stress as well as finding lymphatic vessels in the membranes of the brain. These astonishing revelations puts a spin on our understanding of what the way the brain and the immune system interacts and the implications it has.
Scientists have found that immune system supports the brain during times of psychological distress. Researchers found that mice who lack adaptive immunity, or immunity that was acquired, respond to stressful situations by “exhibiting not only impaired spatial learning behavior but also compromised social behavior, preferring to spend time with inanimate objects rather than with another mouse.” Thus, this seem to indicate that not having the acquired immunity to deal with stressful situations may cause us to perform worse in tasks that require learning. It also seems to indicate that we are able to acquire immunity to stressful situations, by developing responses in dealing with them better and thus, managing stress in way that does not mitigate our performance. More importantly, it shows that our immune system supports us in the times of stress.
Findings of this research suggest that stress is not merely a psychological state experienced by the brain, rather the immune system plays a role in communicating with the brain and supporting us in times of stress. In other words, dedicating more time to our health, developing healthy life style will help our performance and ensure our immune system is function in an optimal way.
