Living in a city may provide night life and more job opportunities, but it’s also damaging your mental wellbeing. This is according to a study, published in Nature, which found that people who live in a city don’t handle stress as well as those who dwell in the country side.
Wellness expert Leo Benedictus details, ‘You are lying down with your head in a noisy and tightfitting fMRI brain scanner, which is unnerving in itself. You agreed to take part in this experiment, and at first the psychologists in charge seemed nice. They set you some rather confusing maths problems to solve against the clock, and you are doing your best, but they aren’t happy. “Can you please concentrate a little better?” they keep saying into your headphones. Or, “You are among the worst performing individuals to have been studied in this laboratory.” Helpful things like that. It is a relief when time runs out.’
Benedictus comments, ‘Few people would enjoy this experience, and indeed the volunteers who underwent it were monitored to make sure they had a stressful time. Their minor suffering, however, provided data for what became a major study, and a global news story. The researchers, led by Dr Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg of the Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim, Germany, were trying to find out more about how the brains of different people handle stress. They discovered that city dwellers’ brains, compared with people who live in the countryside, seem not to handle it so well.’
But what does that mean specifically? ‘While Meyer-Lindenberg and his accomplices were stressing out their subjects, they were looking at two brain regions: the amygdalas and the perigenual anterior cingulate cortex (pACC),’ Benedictus explains. ‘The amygdalas are known to be involved in assessing threats and generating fear, while the pACC in turn helps to regulate the amygdalas. In stressed citydwellers, the amygdalas appeared more active on the scanner; in people who lived in small towns, less so; in people who lived in the countryside, least of all. And something even more intriguing was happening in the pACC. Here the important relationship was not with where the subjects lived at the time, but where they grew up. Again, those with rural childhoods showed the least active pACCs, those with urban ones the most.’
So why does living in a city make you less able to handle stress? Surely, being exposed to more busy and potentially stressful environments makes you better able to handle it, right? German researcher and clinician, Dr Mazda Adli has one theory that implicates that most paradoxical urban mixture: loneliness in crowds. According to Adli, ‘Obviously our brains are not perfectly shaped for living in urban environments. In my view, if social density and social isolation come at the same time and hit high-risk individuals … then city-stress related mental illness can be the consequence.’
However, a group of researchers at Hammersmith hospital in London believe that dopamine could hold the answer. Researcher Michael Bloomfield notes, ‘How we explain that at the moment,” says one of the researchers, , “is If there’s just a car going past your house, normally your dopamine cells wouldn’t fire, because it’s just a car. But if your dopamine cells are firing, your brain will try and make sense of it. It will seem to say there’s something very important about that car, then your brain will try to process that and, depending on your experience and your culture, it might jump to the conclusion that it was MI5 following you around.’ Dopamine levels are often very high in parts of schizophrenic peoples’ brains.
