City living affects you in six shocking ways. It gets under your skin and goes to your head. It is not all bad though!
1. It may make biological clocks tick a little faster. Light pollution may be to blame for this. Even a tiny amount of light can suppress sleep-time levels of melatonin in our bodies. Reduced melatonin levels and increased free-radicals age us faster and affects the “baby clock” because melatonin keeps sex hormones in check, regulates the ovaries, and prevents eggs from maturing too quickly.
2. It makes a touchier amygdala, the brain’s anxiety trigger. Urban dwellers’ amygdala was found to be more frenzied than rural residents. This could be because the city wires us for performance anxiety which may help us deal better and quicker to complex social situations. This social stress can be a good stress because it leads to being street savvy.
3. It makes you burn brighter. The noisy, busy-ness energy that comes from the city can make you more creative.
4. It shuts down your senses. Information overload leads to shutting down of our senses when they are overstimulated. Noise may be at the heart of the problem here. The louder the racket, the more people acted unhelpful to others and “emotionally deaf”.
5. It’s calming you softly with its smog. Noise is the biggest urban stressor while carbon monoxide from car exhaust offsets it.
6. It programs you to bloom in any green oasis. A 25-minute walk in a city park is all it takes to recover from urban attention fatigue. When urbanites strolled into leafy green plazas and parks, their thoughts became expansive, attentive, and meditative.
Read the full article here on Oprah.com.
