Four Signs of Stress You Shouldn’t Ignore
Staying in a state of chronic stress is literally killing you…now that I have your attention, let me explain!
Most people are stressed, like REALLY stressed. According to a recent annual Gallup poll, Americans are among the most stressed people in the world. Americans today are experiencing moderate to high levels of stress the majority of their waking hours. This isn’t good.
When you realize that chronic stress is a pro-inflammatory state and then you couple that with the knowledge that inflammation is at the root of every disease process in the human body you begin to REALLY know something that can change your life.
Rather than calling out heart disease or diabetes, I think it’s more truthful to say we have an epidemic of chronic stress. Though, despite this unsavory news, it’s possible to change your stress state! AND it doesn’t require a pill or a drug!
I went deep into the research on stress and burnout because I was VERY curious about understanding my own life experience. When I learned that chronic stress affects the brain, that it literally diverts metabolic activity from the prefrontal cortex and siphons it back into the most primal regions of the brain, known as the reptilian brain…well, that explained a lot to me.
Chronic stress strips us of our ability to make choices that align with our greatest good and derails our successful pursuit of our goals. I mean let’s face it, stress is an inevitable part of life. I get that. And not all stress is bad for you. In fact, we (as a species) are designed to experience and benefit from a little stress here and there. It stimulates the nervous, skeletal, cardiovascular, and endocrine systems.
A little stress (meaning 5-10% of your waking hours), stimulates optimal function, growth, and repair of our physical body. Ultimately, the regenerative and reparative phases that happen after stress are helpful, but we don’t enter that phase when we are in a perpetual and continuous state of stress. The problem with stress doesn’t emerge until periodic or episodic stress becomes chronic stress, meaning we enter the regenerative or reparative phases.
Chronic stress wrecks havoc on you mentally, emotionally, and physically. In chronic stress the nervous, skeletal, cardiovascular, and endocrine systems are stimulated too often. This results in the chronic release of stress-related hormones and cellular mediators. It can lead to chronic headaches, anxiety, high blood pressure, dementia, joint and muscle stiffness and pain, adrenal fatigue, and a nearly endless list of other maladies await us when we are chronically stressed. Perhaps you already suffer from one or several of these right now?
Do you need to wait until one of the signs or symptoms of chronic stress emerge before you recognize and interrupt the cycle of chronic stress? The answer is no. There are other upstream signs you can look for before you allow chronic stress to exert deleterious effects on your mind and body. So let’s look at the mental, emotional and relational signs of chronic stress so you can hopefully avoid or mitigate the physical manifestations of chronic stress before they settle in.
How Do You Know If You Are Chronically Stressed?
Being overly focused and critical of your surroundings and environment. This includes being highly critical of things and people around you. This means we are REALLY good at finding fault in those around us (often those who live in our homes or those whom we work closely with). This means tensions are building not just for us but in our interpersonal dynamics.
A natural outcome of the stress response is we are primed to survey our environment for danger. This is a design for survival that was beneficial hundreds and thousands of years ago. But today this predilection for surveying and analyzing our surroundings back fires on us, because we have ideas and negative thoughts about the things we see it fuels anxieties, stress, and worries.
Ages ago we used to survey the environment and once imminent danger wasn’t evident the stress response settled and we entered the restorative and recovery phase. Today, every where we look (cellphones, inbox, messages, scrolling social media, etc.) there is a potential threat to our sense of security, sense of happiness, joy and success, and even our sense of self. Thus the stress response continues as if in perpetual motion for many of us until it is interrupted. And it’s perhaps obvious that we have no way of interrupting this cycle if we aren’t even aware it’s happening to us.
Being overly focused on your body and sense of self (meaning self-conscious). In times of stress, we are naturally propelled, on a largely subconscious level, to search for feedback regarding the simple question “am I ok?” Your mind begins surveying and analyzing your physical body and you become very conscious of your self. This means we can become nearly body-obsessed and unbelievably self-conscious. In times of stress, our perceptions are more likely to be harsh, critical and riddles with short-sighted judgments. This is harmful when we have this harshly critical and judgmental view of ourselves. It inevitably means we will look at others with the same harsh criticism and judgmental framework we use on ourselves. This perpetuates stress, as you can imagine and creates stress not just for ourselves but also in the lives of those around us.
Sensing a contraction of time (meaning there’s never enough time). You sense that time contracts because in stressful situations you are primed to think fast and act quickly. You may be saying to yourself, “there’s never enough time”, “I’m always late”, or you’re always feeling “behind”. This leads to a. feeling of urgency and rushing around. As you may already know this think and act fast thing can cause a whole host of misunderstandings and problems (which creates an additional layer of stress on top of the stress that’s already there—argh!) so it too continues to perpetuate the stress response. Soon enough what had been an episode of stress has now begun a perpetual cycle of chronic stress.
A propensity toward negative or catastrophic thinking. This happens because in a state of stress you are designed to plan out all threatening possibilities. If we were simply focused on our physical safety this wouldn’t be such an awful process. Thankfully we aren’t often faced with the immediate danger of physical harm. But we are continually faced with mental and emotional dangers, and this is where your minds can really wreck havoc on you. We start thinking negatively about ourselves and specifically about ourselves in relation to others. This is where a vicious cycle can ensue where you have a stressful morning and then your mind takes up the negative and catastrophic thinking and before you know it your awful morning has snowballed into a downright terrible day. Maybe it even carries over into the evening. Now what started as a stressful morning created an ongoing, self-perpetuating state of stress. Trust me, we’ve ALL had those days!
Can You Break This Dangerous Cycle of Chronic Stress?
Our work now is to evolve past these primal and rudimentary functions of our thinking mind. And we can. In fact, it’s easier than you think it is. It first starts with an awareness that you are caught in the throws of chronic stress. So the next time you start criticizing or judging yourself or someone else, stop for a moment and ask yourself if this is really what you want to be doing? Ask yourself if this could simply be a sign that you are stressed and decide in that moment that you aren’t going to let your thinking mind taking you down the stress spiral. Go easy on yourself. No need to beat yourself up. Trust me, you do enough of that already. In fact, I’m going to suggest something radical here. I’m going to suggest that you say something kind to yourself. Maybe something like, “oh my, you must be stressed…it’s okay, it happens to everyone. Just know you don’t have to keep at it, darling. Ease up a bit, on yourself and everyone else. Breathe easy and just begin again.”
So How Do You Break The Cycle of Chronic Stress?
Awareness of when you are caught in one of the 4 signs of chronic stress (playing comparisons, being body and self obsessed, feeling a constant contraction of time, and negative or catastrophic thinking). The awareness you are in a state of chronic stress instantly liberates you from it!
Acceptance and Acknowledgment that this happens to everyone from time to time. Accept your feelings, don’t minimize or ignore them. Rather notice them and acknowledge that you are having a stressful reaction. Acknowledge that life is stressful sometimes. Sometimes life itself is stressful, and sometimes we are the ones perpetuating the stress and making it worse. It isn't about casting blame, it is about liberating yourself from the effects of stress regardless of who or what has created it.
Kindness for yourself and others. Recognize that stress happens to the best of us. We can’t eliminate stress, and it’s not that stress itself is bad. It’s how we respond to stress that creates the vast majority of our ills and disease. It is important for you to find ways to nourish and nurture yourself while you are experiencing the stress of living. Choosing and committing to being aware, accepting, and kind will free you from the harmful effects that the cyclical nature of chronic stress is having on you.
Is There a Way To Enhance My Skills of Awareness, Acceptance, and Kindness?
Yes, there is a practice that enhances our ability to utilize awareness, acceptance, and kindness so we may flourish and thrive in times of stress—and that one practice is mindfulness meditation.
We’ve already established that stress is an inevitable part of life.
Yet we too often get caught in the ongoing cyclic nature of chronic stress and we suffer greatly for it. Our relationships suffer, our self-esteem suffers, our mental, emotional, and physical health suffers. Every aspect of your life is negatively impacted when you are chronically stressed.
Today it is our mental framework that most directly influences the brain and induces a fight-or-flight response and perpetuates the cycle of chronic stress. It is imperative for your health and wellbeing that you have a way of knowing when you are chronically stressed. This means you must have an awareness of your own stressful experience. Once we acknowledge our stress it is wise to skillfully meet it, and this is where acceptance and kindness really matter. When you engage in self-awareness, self-acceptance, and self-kindness you shift your experience of stress and completely disrupt the cycle of chronic stress.
This position of caring for yourself, of tending and befriending yourself when you are stressed, actually shifts your neural, biochemical, and physiologic framework so you enter a state that is conducive to restoration, regeneration, and renewal. A process that has been linked to a healthier immune system, improved cardiovascular function, improved digestion, anti-aging properties, improved information recall and higher cognitive function.
Self-compassion is an incredibly helpful skill at helping you gain greater awareness. As we all know, awareness is the first step to creating change.
Yet, in the face of chronic stress the MOST IMPORTANT & IMPACTFUL STEP you can take is to start to rebalance your nervous system. This skillset is required if you want to go from burnout to all out in your life. I personally rely on breathwork and Heart Brain Coherence Biofeedback Training. You can check out a helpful resource on this from my podcast Dr. Tami Talks: BONUS TRAINING on Heart Brain Coherence
That said, any intentional breathing that involves the diaphragm works because this activates the largest parasympathetic nerve in the human body (the Vagus Nerve). This simple, yet critical, shift of your nervous system can instantly liberates you from the ill effects of chronic stress.
It shifts your physiology, your neurobiology and allows you to reclaim access to your prefrontal cortex where your capacity to make conscious choice resides. As you shift into a more balanced nervous system state you actually modify your perception of stress and when you practice regularly you dampen your overall reactivity to stressors when they arise.
Studies suggest that practices that rebalance the nervous system have statistically significant and lasting effects on how we perceive, process and proceed in the face of stressors. This is because nervous system rebalancing work results in powerful alterations in metabolic activity and blood flow within the brain itself.
When you take the time to learn how to rebalance your nervous system you give yourself the most effective and efficient strategies for relieving and reducing stress. When you engage in these practices on a regular basis it yields unimaginable benefits and in the face of an increasingly stressful and ever-changing world we are now living in this skillset is required for successful living (in my humble opinion).
The benefits derived from a rebalanced nervous system are vast and far reaching. If you were aiming to improve your physical health, mental health, or emotional health, financial health, relationship health, or spiritual health then nervous system work will help you and is 100% worth exploring.
If you’re ready to truly commit to yourself and live the life you DESERVE (truly, it’s your birthright to live with joy and creative expression!) then consider enrolling in Stress Mastery Academy or working 1-on-1 with me. In this work, there are no downsides, truly.
ALL the Love,
Dr. Tami
