When Stress Doesn't Let Up

When the Body Doesn't Get Enough Recovery

Photo Credit: whitewolfpack.com

A bear walks onto the trail in front of you. It looks at you. You look at it. A standoff? Immediately, a surge of chemical signals begins changing what is happening throughout your body. Your brain registers a threat. A big, annoyed threat. Adrenaline surges. Your heart starts racing, your blood pressure rises, and sugar floods into your bloodstream, putting readily available fuel there in case you suddenly need to act.

Your breathing quickens and your muscles tense, ready to move. Your eyes focus directly on the threat, while your attention narrows around what the bear is doing and what it might do next. Whatever you were thinking about thirty seconds ago has become spectacularly unimportant. Stress hormones, including adrenaline and cortisol, are helping coordinate changes throughout your brain and body to prepare you to fight, flee, freeze or fawn. Fawning, admittedly, has some limitations here. There isn't much opportunity to agree with the bear, apologize for whatever you apparently did wrong, and smooth things over. The bear has your full attention, and your brain is giving very little priority to anything else.

Fortunately, the bear eventually decides you aren't worth the trouble and wanders back into the forest. The threat is disappearing, and your body can begin standing down too. Your heart rate and blood pressure start coming back toward normal, your breathing settles, your muscles relax, and the flood of stress hormones begins to ease. Your attention starts widening again, although you are probably doing a few more shoulder checks than you were before. You might also quietly check that everything else survived the encounter, including your underwear. What you have just experienced is acute, or short-term, stress: an immediate threat triggered a powerful stress response, and when the threat disappeared, your brain and body had the opportunity to recover.

Sometimes the stressor doesn't leave. Ongoing conflict at home, repeated bullying, persistent uncertainty or another difficult situation may still be there tomorrow, and the next day. Other times there isn't one continuing problem, but different stressors keep arriving one after another, without enough time in between for your brain and body to fully recover. This is ongoing, or chronic, stress: instead of the bear disappearing and giving your body the chance to stand down, the brain and body keep being called on to respond.

There is another way stress can stay with us. The event ends, but sometimes the brain continues responding to what happened. A particularly frightening or significant stressful experience can leave memories and reminders that bring some of that stress back later. Something you see, hear, remember or experience may remind your brain of what happened, and the stress response can be triggered again even though the original danger is no longer there. The event may be in the past, but the brain can still recognize reminders of it as important or threatening.

Whether stress comes from something that keeps happening, from one stressor after another, or from the continuing effects of a significant distressing stressful experience, the concern is similar when high levels of stress keep returning without enough recovery.

Your brain and body spend more time responding to stress and less time back in their usual resting state. And that matters because the same changes that were remarkably useful when the bear was standing in front of you were designed to help for a short time, not to become the way your body regularly operates.

When the Stress Response Doesn't Let Up

The racing heart, higher blood pressure, readily available fuel and narrowed attention that helped prepare you for the bear all had a purpose. For a few minutes, that is brilliant biology. But if high levels of stress keep calling on those systems day after day, the story begins to change. Repeated increases in heart rate and blood pressure can put strain on the cardiovascular system, while ongoing changes in cortisol, blood sugar and metabolism can affect how the body manages and uses energy. Immune and inflammatory systems can be affected too. Over months and years, that repeated strain can create wear and tear across the body and increase the risk of chronic health problems later in life.

The developing brain can be affected too. During adolescence, brain connections involved in learning, attention, emotions, behaviour and responding to stress are still developing and being refined. Prolonged excessive stress without enough recovery and support can interfere with that development. Harvard's Center on the Developing Child describes this as the potential to “disrupt the healthy development of brain architecture.” This does not mean that having a stressful week damages your brain, but it does help explain why ongoing or repeated high stress matters.

Prolonged or repeated stress can begin showing up in everyday life as disrupted sleep, difficulty concentrating or learning, exhaustion, irritability, worry or feeling overwhelmed. It can affect behaviour and relationships, and for some people, prolonged or repeated stress or experiencing a significant stressful event can contribute to mental health challenges. That does not mean everyone experiencing significant or ongoing stress will develop a mental health challenge. Recovery, previous experiences, coping skills and supportive people around us can all make a difference.

What Do You Notice When You're Getting “Tapped Out”?

Think about what being close to your capacity might look like on an ordinary day. Maybe little things start bothering you much more than usual. You have trouble concentrating, you're exhausted, you withdraw from people, or you react strongly to something you would normally handle differently.

Those changes can be clues that your brain and body have been dealing with a lot and your available capacity is getting stretched. Recognizing them earlier gives you more opportunity to do something about what is happening. Your stress response is automatic, but that does not mean you have no influence over what happens next. Being rested, prepared, supported and learning ways to manage stress can change what you bring into a difficult situation.