Dr. Jameca Cooper explains how chronic overwork damages your brain. Stress shrinks your prefrontal cortex, weakens emotional regulation and decision-making, and causes loss of synaptic connections. Self-care isn't a reward for hustle culture—it's what prevents your brain from breaking down.
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Make sure you check out my other video about how shame hijacks your brain. Today we're going to talk about myths and actual brain functioning and how it all ties into self-care and us doing our part. So let's talk about what I see a lot in practice, which is women coming in for therapy tired, needing self-care, burnout, and they endorse this superwoman syndrome belief, which is this overarching belief that society has placed on women You will find this more ingrained or more prominent when you're looking at African American women or other women of color, but all women, all races, ethnicities can endorse this as well because society really will place this expectation on women that women suppress their emotions and instead prioritize caretaking other people. Other people could be your spouse, your partners, your friends, your children, your coworkers, your parents, everybody in your extended family. But notice I did not say you, right? Herein lies the problem. Also, what is related to self-care is how sometimes we work and work and work, overextend ourselves to the extent that we are actually damaging our brains. So as we talk about dopamine— dopamine is the neurotransmitter in the brain that is responsible for reward motivation, and pleasure, right? When you're working, overworking, and getting things done, multitasking, when you complete a task, uh, you cross it off your list, right? Your brain releases dopamine and it gives you this feeling of satisfaction and reward, right? So what happens? You want that feeling again, so you do more things, you get more things checked off the list, you accomplish, you are successful, You feel good about the accomplishments, but the downside is now you've created this need for dopamine, this dopamine loop, you could call it, right? But this whole process of overworking and getting things done can negatively affect parts of your brain, mainly the prefrontal cortex, right? This is the part of the brain that is responsible for emotional regulation, planning, and decision-making. We need that part of the brain, but overworking and accomplishing things chronically over time damages that part of the brain. What happens is chronic stress and chronic working over time can lead to a loss of synaptic connections with the brain cells. So connections between different parts of the brain that act and do different things, sending neurotransmitters that way, this way, all that, right? And it could also potentially result in a decreased brain mass, so smaller brain mass, right? So when we look at just the effects of chronic stress over time, we're gonna see loss of connections, smaller brain size, and actually over time you can even begin to see atrophy of the brain, certain parts of the brain. That impact your cognitive ability. So, so many detrimental and damaging effects of just overworking, getting things done, this whole Superwoman syndrome accomplishment, this hustle culture. It's BS, really. It may not be BS as far as your accomplishments and efficiency and maybe the benefit or value you bring to other people, but when you look at what it does to yourself It's killing you. It's not what we want. Self-care is not about killing yourself over the long haul. It's about being smart about what you're doing so that it doesn't damage you.
