How Chronic Stress Quietly Changes the Way You Think and Feel

Stress is a part of our daily lives. While we can tolerate some level of stress for a limited period of time, our bodies and minds cannot tolerate large amounts of stress over a long period of time. When stress becomes chronic, it leaves the background and enters the foreground, where it invades our very being. We then find ourselves always on the mark, ready for action, and the original stress no longer remains in the background of our lives. Chronic stress is more than just a background factor influencing our psychological, emotional, and behavioral experience. It is a foreground factor that profoundly affects our existence. We cannot afford to be unaware of its presence. We cannot afford to ignore its impact. Chronic stress changes the way you think and feel; it is an alerting signal that cannot be ignored.

What Chronic Stress Really Means

Stress is more than just a feeling. Biologically, it is your body’s response to a threat, whether it’s real or just perceived as one. One-time stressors, such as a deadline for work or an argument, are not generally considered harmful. Still, our bodies react as if they were ongoing and cause a stress response. When our bodies encounter one-time stressors, it goes into a fight or flight response. The heart rate increases, cortisol is released, and we become very focused in an effort to assist our bodies in dealing with stressful events.

Stress vs Chronic Stress

The key feature of chronic stress is the duration of time the stress response is active. Short-term stress is a physiological response to an acute stressor that arises and resolves in a cyclical fashion with periods of active state and periods of recovery. In contrast, chronic stress is a persistent sense of pressure that has no clear end in sight. Thus, whereas short-term stress typically involves minutes, hours, or days, or possibly weeks of on and off activity, chronic stress involves activation of physiological stress responses that occur on a scale of days, weeks, months, or even years or more, with no periods of downtime for recovery.

The chronic activation syndrome is a state in which one remains in a state of permanent alertness. There are many consequences related to hormone regulation and nervous function. Chronic activation leads to significant fatigue and a drop in stress tolerance and can make one particularly sensitive, and therefore, even the smallest stress is perceived as enormous.

How Stress Alters the Brain

Stress can negatively affect various aspects of our health, and its effect on the brain can be quite damaging. Multiple things happen when the body is under stress.

Hormones That Won’t Shut Off

Cortisol is known as the “stress hormone” because your body produces it in response to stress. Your body is designed to produce cortisol in small doses to aid in your ability to cope with immediate stress. However, if cortisol is produced in large doses for long periods of time, it can have an adverse effect on the body. This includes affecting mood, memory, and emotional function.

Memory and Learning Centers Shrink

The hippocampus is part of our brain that is involved in memory and learning. The excess of stress hormones can lead to damage to the hippocampus, causing atrophy and an inability to learn and form new memories and recollections. We all joke when we are feeling brain fog, but in reality, stress is capable of affecting our brains.

Emotional Regulation Gets Harder

The prefrontal cortex (PFC) is crucial for goal-directed behavior, cognition, and emotional regulation. Chronic stress can cause cognitive atrophy in the PFC. When our prefrontal cortex is tired, it is extremely draining to make the simplest decisions. Even the most straightforward tasks can become almost impossible to accomplish and may cause feelings of extreme exhaustion and irritability. Regulating emotions also becomes very difficult.

When you’re under chronic stress, you might feel outbursts of anger or other strong emotions

Neurotransmitters Go Out of Balance

Stress is a non-physical factor that can affect the body. High levels of stress over a long period of time affect serotonin and dopamine levels. These are types of chemicals, or neurotransmitters, which regulate the mood of the individual. When the balance of these neurotransmitters is altered, the individual is at risk of increased emotional anxiety and depression, as well as a decreased interest in previously enjoyable activities.

The Emotional Toll

We know stress can play a role in bouts of sadness or anxiety, but most of us don't think too much about how it affects the brain long-term. What ends up happening is that structural changes in the brain can lead to a full-blown pattern of behavior.

Worry That Won’t Let Up

Stress can actually make you more reactive to threats in the brain. What happens is that chronic stress leads to hyper reactivity and the amygdala remains in a state of hyper vigilance. It then can’t discern whether threats are real or imagined and will continue to respond to even the most minute threat in the same way, causing a state of constant anxiety, hyperarousal, and even insomnia and agitation.

Emotional Exhaustion

Chronic stress is not just mentally draining; it’s emotionally draining, too. Suddenly, things that used to be very easy to deal with now become frustrating and exhausting. Easy relationships become more complicated to navigate. And things that used to be fun now become dull and annoying or frustrating. Emotions can also become more volatile or more difficult to manage.

How Stress Changes Daily Thinking and Behavior

Stress on the brain is not a medical or theoretical subject. It is happening to us in our everyday lives.

Trouble Concentrating

Are you reading the same paragraph multiple times because you are having trouble focusing? Are you getting distracted in the middle of conversations? Or are you finding tasks that used to be quick and easy to complete are now taking much longer? There is no laziness in play here. Your body is telling you that your stress levels are affecting your ability to focus and are impacting your executive functioning.

Similarly, memory lapses become more common. Do you frequently “lose” things or struggle to remember appointments, names, and dates? Stress-induced memory problems can be quite a problem.

Forgetting things can be a sign of high chronic stress.

Decision-Making Becomes Hard

Stress can play a role in poor decision-making due to the way it affects the brain. Not only can it cloud judgment, but it can also cause decisions to become more daunting and therefore more impactful. The prefrontal cortex of the brain is also compromised by stress, which is the part of the brain responsible for complex decision-making.

Emotional Reactivity

Why do we make such a fuss over such a small issue? Our lives are becoming increasingly stressful and the time period between us experiencing stress and reacting to it is getting shorter. With our lives getting shorter in the truest sense of the word, our tempers are getting shorter, too.

Physical Effects That Reinforce Mental Strain

So far, we have been focusing on thought and feelings, but it is also important to remember that chronic stress also affects the body and that the body has an effect on mental health. The body can react in many different ways to long-term stress. These reactions can include poor sleep, digestive problems, headaches, muscle tension, and an impaired immune system. Unfortunately, the physical symptoms we experience from stress can also make us feel more stressed. For example, if we feel tired or sore, we are likely to be more short-tempered and vice versa.

Ways to Reclaim Your Brain

As we know, our brains have the ability to learn and repair themselves. After a period of high stress, it will take some time to return to normal.

Lifestyle Shifts That Help

We’ve all had to change the way we live our lives in some way, and now might be a good time to start thinking about building new habits that support our wellbeing. Our sleep, exercise, and eating habits can all have an impact on the balance of our stress hormones, and taking steps to get these back into balance can really pay dividends for our well-being. In addition to this, we may also be looking at new ways of supporting our well-being through practices that calm the nervous system and help us to manage our emotions, such as

Professional Support

If this is an issue that you are experiencing, speak with a mental health professional who will be able to help you stop this vicious cycle of stress and negative thinking and be more resilient. Therapy can have a dramatic effect on mental health, and when combined with medication, it can have a life-changing effect.

A Quiet But Reversible Change

Chronic stress is not an event: it is a process. Transforming your life takes time. In the end, you don’t have to live in a stressful state. With the right level of awareness, understanding, support, and commitment, you can regain control of your life and help lead yourself towards a more balanced state through a more focused and emotionally stable existence and ultimately achieve greater well-being. And start your journey to a better brain today.