A brain that is stretching itself and utterly engaged looks very different from a brain that is high performing but under the influence of toxic stress. Chronic stress can transform into anxiety when you don’t give your brain and body a chance to recover. Instead of seeing lions only when you’re on the savannah, you see them everywhere, even when they’re nowhere near and really you’d do much better to chill out and graze. The amygdala becomes bigger and more reactive than it should be, and with the prefrontal cortex cut off, you have a hard time distinguishing between things that are
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