Stress associated with the coronavirus pandemic is self-evident, whether due to health concerns for friends and family, or the impact of the economic fallout of the virus.  New research from Stanford University highlights how stress such as this can significantly hamper our ability to successfully plan for the long-term, which might be crucial to being able to ride out the storm as successfully as possible.

The difficulties stem from the impact stress has on our ability to draw upon our memory when making decisions.  The researchers believe their findings have important implications for understanding how decisions are made.

“It’s a form of neurocognitive privilege that people who are not stressed can draw on their memory systems to behave more optimally,” the researchers explain.  “And we may fail to actually appreciate that some individuals might not be behaving as effectively or efficiently because they are dealing with something, like a health or economic stressor, that reduces that privilege.”

Planning ahead

The researchers monitored both the brain activity and the behavior of volunteers as they navigated through virtual towns.  Each was given a period of time to familiarize themselves with the layout of the towns, before being asked to navigate to particular locations.

An element of stress was added to the tasks when the volunteers were told that failure to complete the task would result in a mild electric shock being administered.  A control group were allowed to complete the task free from such concerns.

The results showed that those who were not threatened with punishment were able to find more novel shortcuts on their journey, with those in the stress-induced group tending to fall back on tried and tested routes.

Thinking process

As the volunteers waited to begin their task, their brains were scanned to monitor activity.  Those in the stressed group showed less activity in the hippocampus, which is the part of the brain associated with memories.  There was also less activity in the frontal-parietal lobe, which is an area associated with the alignment of our goals with our neural activity.  It’s a process that previous research suggests is hindered by stress.  The researchers believe their work is the first to show how important disruption to the hippocampal-frontal lobe network is in our ability to tap into memories when planning.

“It’s kind of like our brain is pushed into a more low-level thought-process state, and that corresponds with this reduced planning behavior,” they say.

The team are particularly curious how stress inhibits the planning process in older people, who can often suffer from both financial and health-related issues.  There is also likely to be concern about memory loss to consider too, which may further exacerbate stress levels.  The researchers are working on a couple of experiments with people between 65 and 80 years of age to explore just that.

“It’s a powerful thing to think about how stressful events might affect planning in your grandparents,” the researchers conclude. “It affects us in our youth and as we interact with and care for older members of our family, and then it becomes relevant to us in a different way when we are, ourselves, older adults.”