Chronic stress
The first thing we want to reckon with when trying to manage our stress is this: Stress is not the problem.
While it definitely doesn’t feel good to experience stress, focusing on “trying not to feel stressed” can often result in us feeling more stressed because we’re telling our body that a natural, normal process isn’t okay. It trains our brain to see an “enemy inside”.
As uncomfortable as it is, stress is natural and normal. Stress is a set of physical sensations and emotions that your body activates to help you respond to a challenge or threat.
The problem is when stress becomes chronic and the activation of stress gets stuck in “on.”
How stress becomes chronic
Chronic stress usually develops from two things happening together:
1. Not enough recovery
Your body is designed to move through stress and then reset.
But if recovery doesn’t happen consistently, the system breaks down.
Your body continually activates stress hormones for a longer period of time, resulting in your feeling “activated” more often than not.
Your “off switch” weakens and then your body just stops returning fully to baseline recovery, rest, and reset mode.
2. Lifestyle patterns that reinforce stress
You can get stuck engaging in patterns that make it harder for your body to turn the stress “off” and the recovery “on”:
Poor or inconsistent sleep
Irregular or low-quality nutrition
Too little movement or overtraining
Ongoing, unaddressed stressors
Mental patterns like worry, self-criticism, or avoidance
What happens when stress stays “on”
When stress becomes chronic, it affects your whole system:
Body: Fatigue, poor sleep, tension, illness
Mind: Difficulty concentrating, memory issues, constant worry
Emotions: Irritability, anxiety, low mood
Behavior: Withdrawal, overworking, avoidance, relying on substances
Over time, this can lead to burnout, anxiety, depression, and physical health issues.
What actually helps with chronic stress
The goal is not to eliminate stress or feeling stressed. I know that might be uncomfortable to start to realize. However, once we start to accept this, we can start to put our energy into things that can actually help us get out of feeling chronically stressed.
Here are important categories to put energy into when we want to decrease our chronic stress:
1. Make sure you’re getting enough recovery time and engaging in recovery activities
Your nervous system needs to regularly have an experience of “I’m safe-enough” and “I’m at home”. Allowing our body to experience these states can help it turn “off” the stress and turn “on” our body’s natural recovery system. Doing one of these each day and savoring it while you do it can be a great place to start:
Regularly move your body - especially doing it outdoors
Breathing or grounding/soothing practices (breathing exercises, meditation, relaxation, mindfulness, or any of these)
Doing something you genuinely enjoy or want to do (music, games, connecting with others, hobbies)
2. Reduce ongoing stressors
You don’t need to eliminate all stress, and you do need to reduce what’s possible.
Start with:
Analyze your stress
Separate your stress and your stressors:
Stressor: The thing that your body is activating stress about.
Stress: The thoughts, emotions, body sensations, and urges your body is activating to address the stressor.
Identify what you can control or influence and what you cannot control or influence
What we CAN control or influence:
Our actions and behaviors
How we relate to our thoughts, emotions, body sensations, and urges
Our attitude and perspective
Personal boundaries: identifying, communicating, and maintaining them
How we understand and relate to past events
Our effort and work ethic
Self-care
Our goals and intentions
Who we decide to trust
Our responses to external events
What we can’t fully control but can sometimes influence to a degree:
Relationship dynamics
Work culture
Some aspects of people’s responses to you
Some external circumstances (including systems of power and oppression)
Some outcomes
Some aspects of health
What we usually can NOT control or influence:
The majority of people’s responses (thoughts, emotions, actions) to you or other things
Past events
Natural events
Global events
Time
Death and aging
Random or unforeseen events
Consider using problem-solving strategies for the things you have some control or influence.
For the things you have limited or no control over, consider these strategies:
Get more effective with your actions.
Learn how to work with your thoughts.
Learn how to work with your emotions.
Learn how to shift your internal experiences.
Get support from others (therapy, relationships).
You don’t have to do it alone, and in fact working with a therapist, coach, or people you trust as you do this can be really helpful.
3. Take care of the basics
There are some basic needs your body has. When these needs are met, your body will be better able to regulate stress:
Sleep
Get 7–9 hours consistently
Try to go to sleep at the same time each night
Try to minimize disruptions
Sleep in a cool, dark room without technology
Unplug from technology at least a half hour before going to sleep
Create and maintain a wind-down routine
Limit naps during the day to 30 min
Avoid stimulants before bed (stop caffeine by noon)
Avoid heavy meals before bed (stop eating three hours before bedtime)
Get natural light exposure into your retinas in the morning through sunshine or a “happy light”
Nutrition
What we eat, how we eat, and when we eat can influence our stress hormones. Consider the following recommendations from Cindy Lockhart, RDN, LD, IFNCP to move towards eating habits that can help your body manage stress and recover. Please consult with your healthcare team before making big decisions or changes about your nutrition.
Eat regular meals and with your healthcare team consider incorporating time restriction so you are fasting overnight (12 hours minimum). Consume meals within an eight hour window in your day
50% of each meal: Plenty of colorful fruits and vegetables
Apples, asparagus, brussels, cauliflower, dandelion greens, eggplant, garlic, sunchokes, kale, jicama, leeks, onions, broccoli, sprouts, seaweed
Coconut, apricot, cherry, peach, plum, pear, raspberry, strawberry, mango, oranges
Kimchi, sauerkraut, pickles
Legumes (at least 3x a week)
Limited: berries, pomegranate, starchy colorful veggies (sweet potato)
25-45% of each meal: Helpful fats
Olives, avocado
EVOO as primary oil
Nuts/seeds: Flaxseed, Brazil nuts, chia
15-25% of each meal: Protein
Fish 2-3 meals/week (salmon, mackerel, anchovy, sardine, herring = SMASH)
Avoid: mahi mahi, swordfish, tuna, king mackerel, orange roughy, shark
Consider oysters, crab, lobster
Poultry a few times a week
Bone broth
Fermented dairy in moderation IF one tolerates it: Kefir, Yogurt, Sour cream
Other things to consider incorporating:
Green tea
Whole grains, muesli
Herbs/spices
Red wine - low to moderate and with meals
Resistant starch: cooked and cooled white rice or potatoes, raw potato starch, beans/legumes, oats-overnight/cooled, green bananas
Consider gluten-free
Keep an eye on soy (150mg/day = safe): miso, tempeh, soy nuts, tofu, soybeans, miso
Decrease or get rid of:
Red meat
Processed meat
Refined/processed grains (cereal, pasta, bread, crackers, chips)
Highly processed foods
Refined oils and trans fats
Sweets, sugary drinks, added sugars (pastries, desserts, candies)
Limit alcohol, caffeine & sugar
Work with your healthcare team to make sure you’re getting enough chromium, magnesium, zinc, Vitamin D, essential fatty acids, fiber, tyrosine, iodine, selenium, iron
Drink ½ body weight in oz of water
Practice Mindful Eating:
3 deep breaths before meals
Calm, pleasant environment, no distractions, sitting down
Eat more slowly to help with digestion; chew until liquid before swallowing
Movement
Consult with your healthcare team before making significant changes to your movement regimen.
What is most important is to find what works for you and what you are able to sustain.
Get 30-45 minutes of movement in daily movement; you can spread this out throughout the day
Be less efficient in your day so you can move more
Try to get in at least 2,000-7,000 steps daily
If you can, try to mix cardio + strength
Avoid extremes (too little or too much)
Incorporate recovery-based activities: gentle yoga, Tai Chi, Qi Gong
Move in nature
4. Work with your mind
Chronic stress is reinforced by ways we think about and interact with the world. You can learn a lot more about thoughts and how to work with them here.
Generally speaking, there are certain thought patterns tend to increase and entrench chronic stress. This is because they tend to prioritize short-term relief over long-term wellness. These include all-or-nothing thinking and other thinking traps, as well as self-blame and judgment.
Shifting our thinking patterns influences our emotions and our actions. These shifts tend to be helpful ones to make when we want our thinking to help us work with stress rather than increase it:
Becoming curious instead of judgmental
Addressing underlying beliefs and patterns
Working towards psychological flexibility
We can work on this in many different ways: mindfulness (including mindful walking/running), low/slow breathing, grounding, meditation, visualization, guided imagery, progressive relaxation, and/or gratitude journaling can all be very helpful
What is most important is to pick a way that works for you and do it consistently. It takes about 45 days to train our brain and create new neural pathways that help us manage stress well, so consider finding a strategy that works for you and committing to doing it for 45 days.
Brain training can also be supported by regularly engaging in positive relationships, laughing, listening to music, and a daily moment of where you savor something you enjoy. All of there can also be helpful in increasing your psychological flexibility
5. Notice and reduce avoidance
Most of us want to feel better when something feels bad. Our very human brains are wired to automatically look for and act on ways to escape discomfort and increase relief. If our brain is a forest, it’s a cleared out path that it immediately wants us to take.
For the most part, these strategies help. And sometimes these same strategies can keep us stuck, especially when what we’re trying to escape is happening inside of us, like thoughts, feelings, memories, or body sensations.
This is what therapists call experiential avoidance or the “feel-better” reflex. We could also call it the “fix-it-now” impulse, “the stop feeling bad” urge, or “the immediate need to feel better or less bad”.
What we call it might be less important than figuring out how to detect it in ourselves and begin to work with it rather than let it continue to “drive the bus” or “call the shots” on the decisions we make in our lives.
When we allow that “feel-better” reflex to run our lives, it can make our lives smaller and it can influence our brain to become unhelpfully sensitized to stress. This means that smaller things will create stress in our brain more easily.
One important way to start is to shift towards seeing the physical sensations of stress as information rather than as “bad” or something to get rid of. Physically feeling stressed isn’t the problem. Stress becomes a problem when we don’t give our bodies enough recovery between experiences of stress.
If we want to decrease our chronic stress, we need to learn more about our avoidance, explore it, and begin to gently challenge it so that our brain can process stress in more helpful ways. You can learn more about how to do that here and here.
What do I do now?
You don’t need to do everything at once. And remember that it takes 45 days of intentional (not perfect!) practice to start a new habit. Here are some places to start:
Step 1: Regulate
Improve sleep consistency. Start with whatever is easiest. Options to consider:
Getting 7-8 hours a night
Go to bed at the same time each night
Wake up at the same time each morning
Turn off technology 30 minutes before bed each night
Do the same bedtime routine each night (or have a few routines that work and rotate them).
Change at least 30 minutes of sedentary time into moderate to vigorous movement
Add one daily grounding or mindfulness practice
Step 2: Refocus
Separate stress and stressors. Stressors are the things that activate the stress response. Stress is the response our body activates to help us address the stressors.
Identify what part of those stressors you can control or influence and then take steps to reduce them.
If you’ve been eating too much, try to limit your eating between 6pm-6am (consult with your healthcare team).
If you’ve not been eating enough, try to increase your calories in easy, enjoyable ways.
If you haven’t been getting enough water, try starting with drinking one glass 3x a day and then build up from there.
Step 3: Rebuild
Identify parts of the stressors that you can’t control and then work on the patterns (thoughts, avoidance, habits) of stress that your brain has created around them so that you aren’t doing things that compound the stress.
Build routines that give you time to rest and recover
Closing thoughts
Chronic stress isn’t a personal failure. It’s a system in your body that has been doing its best to support you and now needs help from you to recalibrate and reset.
Your job is not to “push through.” Your job is also not “avoid feeling stressed.”
Your job is to notice stress and see it as information. And your job is to help your system recover, consistently enough, that it remembers how to regulate again.
