
Ever heard of a synapse? I’m sure you have, but have you ever thought about how to manage its health? Or why you would even need to?
Understanding the difference between a healthy and unhealthy synapse is key to understanding the difference between a stressful and stress-free life. And it all comes down to brain cell life or death
The truth is, your synapses are one of the most important things in your entire human ecosystem. Healthy synapses, in the brain, keep everything ticking over and working to their optimum.
Healthy synapses means that you’re learning better, thinking better, making better and faster decisions, remembering and recalling better. In fact, everything that’s going on in your brain is better with healthy synapses.
On the flip side, unhealthy synapses mean the exact opposite. All those essential functions that make you who you are and what you do, they all slow down if your synapses are not healthy.
The synapse is a gap, a connector, between neurons. and it’s fundamental to the working of your brain. As the messaging required for all that thinking and learning and deciding passes through your brain, it has to go through those synapses.
It’s like a pony express rider, one neuron handing the message off to the next through that synaptic gap.
With a healthy synapse, it’s like swimming through clear fresh water. An unhealthy synapse, more like wading through mud.
Want to know the best way to maximize the health of those synapses? Learning and thinking. They’re the lifelong health plan for the synapse.
And what hurts them? What turns clear water to mud? Stress.
If you’ve ever noticed that when you’re stressed, you’re not thinking as clearly. You’re not as rational, not as decisive, not processing emotions as well as you should, not recalling and remembering as clearly as you should.
Too much stress triggers the creation of too much glutamate in the synaptic cleft and that is toxic when it gets too high. And that’s what turns everything to mud. Including your life.
And that’s why managing your stress is so key to managing your long-term brain health