Well Said: This is your brain on stress

Everyone gets stressed. It’s a natural part of life. We all face many stressors every day. Stressors can take many forms — jobs, relationships, children. For college students, final exams are one of the stressors they face throughout the semester. Final exams begin Dec. 6 at Carolina. To appropriately deal with stress, Anthony Zannas said, you don’t want to avoid it. “There are certain things in life that we have to come to terms with,” said Zannas, an assistant professor in the UNC School of Medicine who studies how stress interacts with our bodies. “There are many studies showing that the more you avoid a stressful situation, the more stressful it will become when you actually face it.” Zannas researches epigenetics and examines how stressors influence the chemicals on top of DNA that determine whether genes will be active or not. His research can help identify people with stress-related disorders earlier. “If we can detect these epigenetic changes that happen in response to stress early on,” he said, “then we might have a chance of targeting those individuals earlier.” On this week’s episode, Zannas explains the differences between good and bad stress and shares some tips on how we can better deal with the stressors we face every day.