Overworked and stressed out? Look on the bright side. Some
stress is good for you.
“You always think about stress as a really bad thing, but
it’s not,” said Daniela Kaufer, associate professor of integrative biology at
the University of California, Berkeley. “Some amounts of stress are good to
push you just to the level of optimal alertness, behavioral and cognitive
performance.”
New research by Kaufer and UC Berkeley post-doctoral fellow
Elizabeth Kirby has uncovered exactly how acute stress – short-lived, not
chronic – primes the brain for improved performance.
In studies on rats, they found that significant, but brief
stressful events caused stem cells in their brains to proliferate into new
nerve cells that, when mature two weeks later, improved the rats’ mental
performance.