Your stress response is working for your safety but for many of us – the pressures of everyday life can feel like “stress” is the constant state.


Your body copes well with short bursts of stress as long as that stress is generally resolved and the system can return to balance. In this place – you can be relaxed, productive, happy and primed to connect and take nutrients from loved ones and the world.

If stress is relentless (chronic) it can start to have a really negative impact on your whole body. The chemicals, intended to be useful in short bursts can damage the circuits they’re designed to work within.

How and why does this actually happen?


Your body has one simple response to threat. It doesn’t differentiate between physical or psychological/ emotional danger.

Your “threat” response might be triggered by an obvious threat, like a dangerous animal, a dark ally or a crash on the door, or it might be activated by an email notification, a to-do list, a bill, a bank statement, a “look” from a loved one, an insta scroll, a memory, an emotion, a smell or a bodily feeling. Any of these situations, often before you’ve even registered it consciously as a threat, sets in motion a cascade of physiological processes.

First up: mobilisation

Your body prepares you to run from the threat. Your brain goes into super scan mode, your body gets pumped and strengthens, hormones and chemicals surge through your system. If this “fight or flight” response doesn’t seem to work, and your body experiences the threat as persistent and unrelenting, it has another, more dramatic option:

Shut-down

Here, your body perceives the danger so great that the only viable option is to give up and protect what’s left, a little like “playing dead” in the animal world. In modern life, this can look like exhaustion, depression, isolation, low motivation, dissociation. If your body gets used to retiring to this response, it can get stuck there.

This whole system is an ancient safety mechanism – you’re literally built to survive, and sometimes this process will save your life. When it works, it really works.

Emotional and physical consequences

But if you lose track of how and when your body is responding to stress and threat, it can begin to feel like it’s working against you. This can manifest in anxiety, low mood, panic and many other forms of psychological distress.

It can also look like physical ill health with no “physical reason” like migraines, gastro symptoms, pain and many other common ills.

So what can you do?

Obviously it’s a good idea to seek support/ medical opinion if you think there could be a connection between a physical health problem, and on-going stress in your life.

From a psychological perspective, here are some simple ideas about how to balance your stress response by toning up your other inbuilt capacity for “rest and relaxation”

👉🏼 First get yourself safe. You can’t “hack” your way out of danger so if you’re living in an environment where the threats are real, focus on getting physically safe first.

👉🏼 Look after yourself in those critical basic ways (sleep, movement, nutrition, connection) and you are much less likely to find yourself hyper-vigilant to stress or to interpret benign situations as dangerous.

👉🏼 Prioritise real and genuine time to rest. Those times when you are completely calm and consumed by something enjoyable (reading, yoga, arts, music, films) allows healing to occur in your body. Think of these practices as they are: vital times for repair, rather than woo woo privilege.

👉🏼 Become aware. Use noticing/ mindfulness skills to regularly stop and tune into what’s happening in your body at any given time. When and where are you tense?

👉🏼 Feel into your body. Learn, especially if difficult experiences have taught you to disconnect from your body that you can connect safely with yourself. Eat something completely mindfully. Take a warm shower and feel it. Use warm and gentle touch.

👉🏼 Learn to communicate safety to your system – one of the quickest languages for this is via your breath. Imagine while slowing down the rhythm of your breath that you’re really saying “it’s ok body (buddy?!): I’m safe here, thanks for getting ready to protect me, but I got this”