Manage Stress

What is Stress?

Stress is a normal and automatic biological and emotional response to environmental pressures that overwhelm a person’s ability to cope. When a person encounters a situation that they perceive to be stressful, an automatic “alarm system” is sounded within the body which enables a person to mobilize the physical and emotional resources required to deal with the situation and return to a normal state of functioning.

The Physiology of Stress:

The body’s “alarm system” involves the activation of the sympathetic nervous system, which involuntarily arouses the body to deal with danger and emergencies through increasing heart rate, respiration, muscle tension, perspiration, and hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline, which provide additional energy to the body. The sympathetic nervous system also provides information and feedback from the brain to the “body’s organs, glands, and blood vessels” (Ragin, 2015).

When sensory information travels from the body to the brain stem any trigger, such as the sensation of pain or seeing a car speeding your way, can activate the internal “alarm system”. If there is a perceived threat, the brain then moves through a series of activations in the brainstem (instinctual and reflexive responses), the limbic system (emotional and social center), and the prefrontal cortex (organizing and decision-making processes) which helps to activate the sympathetic nervous system in the body.

The two areas of the brain which play a large role in the activation and moderation of stress include the amygdala and hypothalamus. The amygdala acts as the emotional center of the brain, interpreting the emotional significance of sensory information and triggering fear and survival responses, if a threat is perceived. The body’s survival responses include fight, flight, freeze, tend and befriend, and fawn. Meanwhile, the hypothalamus acts as the center for the automatic nervous system (sympathetic nervous system and parasympathetic nervous system) and releases hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline from the adrenal glands (CTRI, 2014) when a threat is perceived.

The following diagram is helpful for understanding the process the body goes through from the initial stages of stress to the hopeful return to homeostasis.

Ragin, 2015

The activation of the sympathetic nervous system involves a variety of other physical and neurochemical responses, which result in physical and emotional hyper-arousal, designed to help a person survive short-term environmental pressures. To learn more about physiological reactions of stress, check out the following videos:

• Sympathetic Nervous System Crash Course: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0IDgBlCHVsA
• Your Brain on Stress and Anxiety: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmwiJ6ghLIM

Types of Stress:

There are a variety of different types of stress, which impact a person’s health and well-being. In general, stressors can occur through daily struggles, significant life changes, and catastrophes. There are 6 different types of stressors that a person will likely experience over the course of their life. These stressors include:

Acute Stressors: Are brief, time-limited stressors that involve staged or manipulated events that last approximately 5 minutes to an hour and a half in length. These types of stressors can include public speaking or conducting a difficult counseling session.

Brief Naturalistic Stressors: Are short-term stressors that are related to real-life events. These could include visiting your family during the holidays or driving during a snowstorm.

Daily Hassles: These include the many little stressors that one must deal with throughout the day. This could include issues with commuting, technological difficulties, communication issues, etc.

Stressful Event Sequences: Stressors that result in a number of unforeseen challenges that occur over an unknown length of time but will eventually subside. These types of stressful events could include divorce, death, and natural disasters.

Chronic Stressors: These are stressors that have no specific onset, develop over time, seem to be never-ending, and result in a variety of health-related issues, such as chronic exhaustion, burn out, illness, disease, and eventually, death. Chronic stressors can include caregiver strain, dealing with poverty, unhealthy work environments, abuse and harassment, etc. 

Distal Stressors: Traumatic experiences that happened in the past but continue to have an on-going impact on a person’s health and well-being. These can include experiences of serious illness, abuse, assault, natural disasters, and other experiences that result in trauma.

It is important to note that these are not distinct categories. For example, a person might experience a trauma (distal stressor) due to a natural disaster (brief, naturalistic stressor) which results in chronic stress and a series of stressful life events. Often, these stressors will overlap, creating a sensation of chronic stress over-time, if not dealt with. Chronic stress, distal stress, and stressful event sequences are the most related to stress-related health concerns.

Is Stress Helpful or Hurtful to Your Well-being?

As a person’s sense of stress is linked to this automatic inner “alarm system”, designed to originally protect someone from brief, time-limited survival issues, such as running away from a bear; it can be difficult to separate one’s self from the biological response in order to differentiate when stress is a helpful reaction versus a hinderance to one’s health and well-being.

As mentioned, stress is a normal response to danger and emergency situations that require additional emotional and physical energy in order to maintain safety. In this way, the stress response in the body is helpful and necessary as it allows a person to quickly react to situations where they may be in peril. In certain situations, stress can actually help you to:

• Accomplish certain tasks.
• Perform competently.
• Ensure you meet important deadlines.
• Increase your energy levels.
• Promote creativity and “out of the box” problem-solving.
• Take risks.

Every person has a different optimal stress level, which helps them to perform. So long as the stress level remains tolerable for the person and they feel they have the internal and external resources required to deal with the situation, stress can be beneficial. The problem with stress is that the body can’t distinguish from life and death threats versus everyday hassles that cause stress. In modern day life, there are a variety of persistent stressors that do not actually present an imminent threat to one’s safety. In this case, the stress put on one’s body and mind from constant non-life-threatening stressors, slowly exhausts a person’s internal and external resources and cause harmful health consequences.

Signs of Stress:

Chronic stress has a variety of health consequences, contributing to issues such as: 

• Sleep issues.
• Auto-immune issues.
• Unhealthy coping strategies, like the use of drugs and alcohol to manage stress.
• Mood disorders, such as depression and anxiety.
• Chronic illnesses, such as heart disease.

It is important to be able to recognize the signs of stress, in order to recognize red flags and create self-care strategies to promote long-term optimal well-being and deal with emergency situations. Helpguide.org provides the following warning signs and symptoms of stress:

Source: Segal, Smith,  Segal, & Robinson, 2018)

How to Combat Stress:

1. Activating Your Parasympathetic Nervous System:

The parasympathetic nervous system is activated once the perceived threat subsides, helping to calm the body and allowing it to return to a sense of homeostasis, or it’s normal state. The parasympathetic nervous system helps a person slow down their heartbeat and respiration, reduce the level of stress hormones in the body, and return other functions, such as the digestive system, back to normal. Essentially, our parasympathetic nervous system allows a person to move hyper-aroused energy out of their body, rest, relax, and digest.

For more information on the biology of stress and the parasympathetic nervous system, check out these videos:

• Parasympathetic Nervous System Crash Course: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqU-VjqjczE
• Emotion, Stress, and Health Crash Course: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KbSRXP0wik

Many people experiencing chronic stress remain in the hyper-arousal state for pro-longed periods of time, leading to exhaustion and mental/emotional/physical breakdowns. When you experience hyper-arousal from stress it is paramount that you learn how to activate your parasympathetic nervous system to combat the body’s automatic survival responses and re-activate higher cognitive functions in the brain, which will allow you to effectively problem-solve and deal with the stressful situation in a calmer manner.

There are a variety of ways to activate the parasympathetic nervous system, the most important of which include:

• Breathing techniques, such as diaphragmic, or deep belly, breathing.
• Grounding practices to reconnect you to your physical sensations and the present moment.
• Physical stretches, such as chair yoga.
• Mindfulness practices, such as body scans.
• Relaxation techniques, such as massaging pressure points.
• Visualization techniques, such as picturing yourself on the beach.
• Connective experiences, such as being in nature or hugging your pet.

For a full list of different stress-reducing activities to try, please visit the activity section *link here*

The first and likely easiest way to activate the parasympathetic nervous system is to focus on your breath. When you are stressed, you may notice that you struggle to breath and your chest feels constricted or that your breathing becomes rapid and shallow. Both types of breathing indicate that your body is in survival response mode. To help your body and brain realize that there is no present danger or threat to your safety, it is important to start to regulate your breathing. This will automatically send signals to your brain to start the calming down process. Diaphragmic breathing, or belly breathing, is the easiest breathing technique to begin with. Below is a 2-minute video on how to do belly breathing. When practicing the belly breath, try breathing in for 5 seconds, holding your breath for 5 seconds, and breathing out for 5 seconds. Repeat this 10 times.

• How to Practice Belly Breathing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xQJ2O4b5TM

Once you have activated the parasympathetic nervous system, you can then begin to focus on self-soothing, re-apprising the stressful situation and the resources required to effectively deal with it, and developing an action plan.

2. Self-Soothing:

Self-soothing involves a variety of techniques used to calm yourself down and promote feelings of relaxation and well-being. Self-soothing activities could include things like:

• Taking a shower
• Watching tv
• Cleaning
• Going outside
• Dancing and singing
• Reading a book
• Allowing yourself to have quiet time

As everyone’s self-soothing techniques will look differently, it is important to remember the basics of forming healthy coping strategies, which is to engage in activities which may not always feel easy or fun to do in the moment, but will benefit you in the long run; such as exercising or eating a salad. An easy way to determine if a self-soothing strategy is helpful for your long-term well-being is to ask yourself the following question: If I were to use this coping strategy every day for the next year, would it improve my health or deteriorate it?

3. Building Resources:

A key component to dealing with stress is understanding how your unconscious and conscious evaluations of the situation and the physical and mental resources you have influence your ability to effectively manage stressful situations.

When you experience a situation that may be stressful you initially undergo a primary appraisal whereby you assess whether the situation is important enough or dangerous enough to be considered harmful to your well-being. A situation then becomes stressful if you realize, often unconsciously, that a situation may be harmful to you if not dealt with. For example, if you have an exam coming up that is worth 40% of your grade, you will weigh whether or not that exam is important enough to have a harmful impact on you if you don’t study for it.

If you consider something to be stressful, you then go through a secondary appraisal, which allows you to determine whether you have the resources required to effectively deal with the situation. If you determine that you have the resources you need to deal with the situation, stress can be a helpful motivator. For example, if you feel stressed out over the exam you have coming up that’s worth 40% of your grade but you determine that you have all the study materials you need to do well, stress can help you ensure that you actually do study for that exam.

Stress becomes overwhelming when you determine that a situation is stressful, but you do not feel you have the resources you need to overcome the situation and you engage in cognitive reappraisals that reinforce your belief that you don’t have what it takes to cope. Cognitive reappraisals allow you the opportunity to shift your understanding of the situation and your ability to cope. For example, you can see studying for your exam as a challenge to overcome or as an opportunity to build your knowledge base.

Below is a diagram that illustrates the steps one goes through in determining whether or not a situation becomes stressful. As you can see, stress becomes manageable when you feel you have the resources you need and you’re able to provide a new context to the situation that helps you move forward, with confidence in your ability to cope. This process can only be done once you have calmed your body down, self-soothed, and are ready to reflect and develop an action plan. To practice stress appraisals and building your resources/ action plan please visit the activities section *link here*

(N.A., 2020)

Basic Self-Care:

When you feel overwhelmed from stress, remember that your body is in a state of survival and thus is primarily functioning from an instinctual place and not utilizing higher cognitive functions, like effective problem solving, organizing information, meaning-making, decision-making, etc. As such, it is important for you to engage in basic self-care strategies that will allow you to return your mind and body to a sense of calm. When in doubt, always return to the self-care basics:

• Eat
• Sleep
• Connect
• Exercise