Forget the rubbish your football coach/boss/teacher may tell you about the benefits of the ‘positive stress’ they are putting you through. Real stress (as opposed to just being kept busy and stimulated) is the negative experience of failure to cope with excessive demands, such as those in the workplace — and it’s bad for us. It is well established that chronic stress is associated with a range of serious physical and mental health problems. It is also associated with cognitive deficits such as memory loss.
A recent study suggests that one of the neural correlates of memory loss — reduction in the volume of the hippocampus — results not just from chronic stress but from much more short-term stress. Rahman et al. (2016) deliberately stressed out rats for 2 hours a day over a 10-day period. MRI scans on the rat brains were carried out after 3 days and the rats’ ability to form new memories was tested after 5 days.
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