‘The brain says it’s had enough’

As aviation jobs become more demanding, the risk of chronic stress only increases – and this not only impacts on individual health, but safety as a whole. Australian Aviation talks to neuroscientist Annett Koening about the hidden dangers of stress, and how they can be alleviated.

AA: Can you give us a sense of the issues you found regarding stress in the aviation sector?

Annett Koenig: So, what I’ve found after my 25 years now practising clinical neuroscience is that we are more and more seeing patients with severe symptoms, insomnia, memory loss, paralysis, aphasia, or even the whole body, and normally I treat them for epilepsy. This is sort of my specialty, and I send them for medical intervention or even brain surgery. What I found then over the years is that one in three patients who come through having similar symptoms, but when I do the testing, what’s surprising is they’re all normal; they’re all coming back negative, and after more testing, it turns out they’re really suffering from chronic stress. You can imagine how debilitating this is for their personal life and their ability to work moving forward.

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