“Everything around me is in flames. It’s just stress and more stress, and nothing I do seems to make a difference,” a patient told me. “I feel I’m on a hamster wheel. I run and run, but I can never get anywhere. So, I run faster. There’s no point to it, but I don’t know what else there is to do.”
Stress is hard to avoid. Here are 3 ways to reduce its negative effects
Stress is hard to avoid. We find ourselves facing constant deadlines and never-ending demands at work and home — which push us to be hyperalert — and feeling that we are stuck in a situation that will never improve. Worse yet, we worry that if we stop swimming, we’ll sink. To complicate things more, we are bombarded by troubling information about the world, feeding into our insecurities and anxieties and making it harder to relax our minds.
Stress can affect us on multiple levels — physically and mentally — particularly if it becomes the norm for long periods of time. But we can take some steps to ease stress in our lives and feel better.
How stress affects our body, brain and thinking
Biologically, strain and adversity can lead to excessive stress hormone release, potentially resulting in increased inflammatory markers in the blood. This suggests that the body is in reaction mode, attuned to something in the environment that is potentially problematic and requiring heightened attention. Stress can affect health measures, increasing chronic illness risk and cellular markers of accelerated aging.
Stress affects the brain as well. One of our main stress hormones, cortisol, binds to the emotional response areas of the brain (such as the amygdala) and keeps them on overdrive. The need to be constantly worried and on alert can lead to an increase in excitatory receptors in the emotional brain neurons — a genetic and molecular adaptation that maintains the level of stress felt necessary to match the environment’s demands.
Heightened brain preparedness can begin early on — for instance, when there is significant adversity in childhood, overactivation of the amygdala puts pressure on other brain areas to develop faster to increase awareness of one’s surroundings and try to dampen emotional arousal. The typical “infantile amnesia” period (roughly the first three years of life, when lasting conscious memory registration is minimal, given brain immaturity) can get shortened, as the environment is pushing us to pay attention and encode memories sooner, since our survival may be threatened.
When we are stressed, it naturally affects how we think and behave. Challenging life events can shape our beliefs and cognitions so that we expect more of the same, leading us to feel discouraged and further on edge.