There’s no shortage of things to stress about these days: political tension, economic uncertainty, a late-night doom-scroll, or a mushrooming to-do list. But not all stress is the same. The burden you feel before a deadline or during a hectic day is acute stress. It’s intense, but temporary. Chronic stress is different. It lingers for weeks or months, triggered by persistent pressures that feel uncontrollable, like a high-stress job.
And here’s the part that’s really worth stressing over: chronic stress isn’t just exhausting, it’s harmful to your health.
Dr. Megie Shean, a clinical psychologist & neuropsychologist, explains that chronic stress triggers a person’s sympathetic nervous system, which is responsible for cueing a person’s “fight or flight” response. Essentially, it’s telling your body to prepare for an emergency, even if one isn’t actually present.
Unlike with acute stress, which has a beginning, middle, and end, chronic stress has no arc. People don’t get that sigh of relief at the end and instead remain in an ongoing state of tension.
“You just have all this energy and activation in your body, but your brain never receives the signal that it’s over. You never get relief,” Shean says.
Read on to learn more about how chronic stress affects your health, how to identify chronic stress in your own life, and tips for managing it.
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How Chronic Stress Affects Health
What makes chronic stress so harmful is its prolonged nature. The longer the sympathetic nervous system is activated, the longer the body stays in fight or flight. The body produces adrenaline and cortisol, which are stress hormones that disrupt how the body functions.
These elevated hormones can impact cardiovascular health, the immune system and more. People who suffer from chronic stress have a higher risk of cardiovascular disease, a shorter life expectancy, and an increased risk for diabetes, among other things, Dr. Shean says.
“It puts you in a vulnerable position. Whatever genetic loading you have, that’s going to be heightened when you’re under stress all the time,” she explains.
How to Identify Chronic Stress
Realizing you’re experiencing chronic stress can be tricky, especially when we’re so focused on whatever is triggering it. But tuning into physical cues from your body is a great starting point.
“Our bodies are really helpful communicators of stress, but most of us live as floating heads where [we] just kind of don’t really have a whole bunch of time to be like ‘What am I feeling right now?’” Dr. Shean says.
Muscle tension, teeth grinding, a fast heartbeat, weariness, and slow digestion are all physical signs that a person may be dealing with a prolonged stress response. Dr. Shean says some of her chronic-stress patients also report feeling unlike themselves or like their emotions don’t align with what’s actually happening in their lives—for instance, feeling unmoored even after returning from a restorative backpacking trip.
Dr. Shean says some of her chronic-stress patients come to her after struggling with physical symptoms without resolution. Others come to her because they feel numb or because a physician recommended counseling to help address a physical symptom like high blood pressure.
“I think what’s tricky is everybody’s stressors are going to be contextually different,” she says. “However the process [for healing] is going to be the same.”
Paying attention to those physical and emotional cues—and talking to a trusted therapist or friend—can help you understand whether chronic stress is playing a role in your life.
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How to Manage Chronic Stress
Talking through your stressors in therapy is one way people can help manage them. Another tactic—which you can do with the guidance of a therapist or by yourself—is to get out of your head and into your physical body through exercise.
Dr. Shean leads high-intensity, short-duration workouts with her patients who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. The purpose is to mimic the natural arc of an acute stress response. This creates a bell curve of sympathy activation, she explains, to create the feeling of relief that is missing when someone is battling chronic stress.
She compares this bell curve to the feeling someone gets mountain biking.
“When I go for a mountain bike ride, I am stressing my system. I am getting breathless. My heart is racing,” she explains. “And then I have the fun part of going downhill. Then at the end of it I get to have that crescendo of getting to that end.”
An easy way to replicate this at home is to do wall squats. Dr. Shean says she does these with her patients to create an arc with their heart rate—it rises during the wall sit and lowers when they release.
“Usually after these small bursts of sympathetic activation and coming down, people will drop into either understanding a trigger—why they got so activated—or understand there was actually a ton of fear and sadness,” she explains.
People with physical limitations can swap the wall squats for pranayama, or a yoga breath that involves inhaling for four seconds, holding for four seconds, exhaling for four seconds and holding again for four seconds.
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