6 min read
What is Stress Management?
Author
Karen Vincent
LICSW
“I’m stressed.”
This is one of the most commonly uttered phrases in the twenty-first century. Everyone can relate to it: whether you are managing the demands of work, the stress of finances, dealing with parenting challenges, the pressure of exams, or trying to stay physically and mentally healthy.
It’s natural that we’ve begun to think of stress as a problem. After all, we’re bombarded with information about all of the negative consequences of stress. Unfortunately, this approach doesn’t help. You cannot stop yourself from being stressed by stressing about it!
The good news is that stress itself is not always a bad thing. Stress can help boost motivation and focus, can help us get organized, and can help us take action. It can also trigger adrenaline and other hormones which can improve reaction time and problem-solving. Stressful experiences can also lead to positive growth and personal development. Therefore, the best way to approach stress is not to try and get rid of it, because you don’t want to lose those positive benefits, but rather to learn to manage it.
In recent years, mental health and mindfulness experts have developed practical tools for effective stress management. Before we get into these techniques, it’s important to understand what stress is and how it actually helps us.
What is Stress?
Stress is a physical and emotional response that occurs when the demands placed on you exceed, or feel like they exceed, your ability to manage them. These demands can come from external sources like work, relationships or a list of tasks to be completed, or from internal sources like your thoughts about what you “should” be doing, your worries, and the expectations that you place upon yourself.
When you experience stress, your body releases hormones like adrenaline and cortisol and your body can feel like it is going into fight or flight mode. You may experience your heart racing, your muscles tense, your focus narrowing, your breathing becoming fast and shallow, and/or an overall spike in your energy.
Types of Stress
Acute Stress
This is short-term stress that happens to an immediate challenge. An example of acute stress is the stress response that causes you to slam on your brakes to avoid a car crash. It’s quick, in response to a specific situation, and ultimately helpful.
Episodic acute stress
Although acute stress is normal and healthy when facing a threat, it can become problematic when it reoccurs on a frequent basis. Episodic acute stress refers to frequent bursts of acute stress due to repeated exposure to stressful situations.
Episodic acute stress is common for people such as first responders who work in high-pressure, life-or-death professions. However, it is not only limited to these professions, as stressful situations for high-achievers in demanding work environments, facing exams and assessments in educational institutions, or juggling familial responsibilities can also experience episodic acute stress.
Sometimes we also unintentionally create our own episodic acute stress as well. For example, individuals who consistently run behind schedule may experience increased stress ongoing related to the pressure of running late.
In addition, if you are facing unstable, uncertain, or chaotic life circumstances, episodic acute stress can also become a challenge. This is because you may be continually reacting and responding to challenges that continue to arise in your life.
Chronic Stress
Many individuals face modern day threats. These include the loss of livelihood, prejudice, ongoing pressure to “keep up” with others or to excel at work, and isolation. Situations like these create ongoing feelings of stress.
For example, without a job, one faces the risk of losing their home and not being able to feed themselves and their family. Of course, this is on the extreme end of the potential consequences. It is also a scenario that would only come about in the future which may result in the stress response occurring at a lower intensity, but for a prolonged period of time.
Your stress response keeps you in a higher-than-normal state of alertness, with your body tensed as if in readiness to fight, flee, or freeze. Your thoughts remain fixated on what could go wrong and go in circles trying to find solutions to those potential problems.
It’s not conducive for our bodies to remain in a stress state, which is why chronic stress can lead to physical and mental health issues.
Signs and Symptoms of Chronic Stress
So, how do you know if the stress you are experiencing is chronic?
There are common signs and symptoms that can help you identify chronic stress. They include:
- Trouble sleeping: Your body and mind remain in a state of alertness. While high cortisol levels maintain a sense of alertness, with your heart rate elevated and your muscles tense. Your mind races with looping thoughts about all that needs to get done and repeated attempts at problem-solving.
- Irritability or mood swings: Feeling like you can’t keep up with all that is on your plate can cause impatience and snappiness, as well as heightening your emotions.
- Difficulty concentrating: Since your mind is scrambling to identify and keep track of all that is happening around you, it is tough to focus, think clearly, and make decisions.
- Feeling overwhelmed or unable to cope: It can become hard to focus on the next thing that needs to get done, or the next best action that you can take and instead, even the smallest tasks feel huge and overwhelming.
- Headaches and muscle tension: Your body stays tense so as to keep you ready to face “threats”. Over time, this leads to headaches and muscle pain.
- Digestive issues and changes in appetite: When stress becomes chronic, this leads to more long-term digestive problems as your appetite is consistently suppressed. Over time, the body tries to compensate for lower energy levels, causing increased appetite and overeating.
- Fatigue or low energy: Since the body and mind’s response to stress is, initially, to become overactive, chronic stress leads to fatigue or low energy levels.
- Avoidance: Overwhelm and burnout from chronic stress can, whether in the early stages or over time, cause you to procrastinate. This happens when it feels too difficult to keep up with responsibilities, and as many of us have experienced, procrastination can lead to even more stress.
Causes of Stress
In the modern world, there are countless potential causes of stress. Your particular circumstances may determine which affect you.
Common causes of stress include:
- Work Pressure: One of the greatest causes of stress today as many connect the pressure to perform at work to anxieties around paying for basic necessities, progress in their field, and self-worth.
- School Pressure: Regardless of the stage of education, pressure to perform at school is connected to a particular kind of stress. Performance is measured in grades that are perceived as objective. Competition with peers is often expected. And, whereas work is often confined to office hours, studying spills into nighttimes and weekends.
- Financial Problems: The need to pay bills is not the only stress associated with finances. Money is regarded by many as a determinant of status. We are also pressured not just to meet our daily obligations but to plan for the future as well.
- Relationship Problems: As a social species, it is natural that we fear isolation. As such, relationship problems can feel threatening and overwhelming.
- Genetics: The predisposition for high cortisol levels may be inherited, as is the case with anxiety.
- Always being “plugged in”: In today’s world, it can be hard to find the “off button”. We've got emails, texts, social media notifications, and a 24-hour news cycle that’s basically a highlight reel of global disasters, all of the things going wrong around us, and all of the things we should be worried about and bracing for.
- Comparison: We live in a world where it is hard to not compare our day to day lives with the highlight reels of others that we see on social media, causing us to feel like we “should” be more, do more, and have more.
There are many other potential causes for stress but one or more of the above examples affect most people to some extent.
How Normal Stress vs Chronic Stress Impacts You
Short-term stress is considered normal as it is a basic survival function. It motivates you to address problems and threats and helps you adapt to changing circumstances.
Chronic stress may be motivating at first, but over time it begins to wear on the body and mind. Physical tension, elevated heart rate, high cortisol levels, and sleep disturbances start to affect the health of your heart and other organs, as well as potentially causing stiffness and tension.
Constant alertness and looping worries can lead from stress to anxiety, depression, and other mental illnesses, making it difficult to function in your day-to-day life.
Diagnosing Stress-Related Issues
Stress-related issues may be diagnosed by your general practitioner, therapist, or psychiatrist. You can seek out a diagnosis from them, but they may also pick up on signs of stress during regular checkups or sessions.
Stress-related issues are rarely diagnosed based on one area of difficulty. Your healthcare provider will consider physical symptoms, mental health, lifestyle factors, and how stress is impacting you on a daily basis.
Common evaluations include:
- A clinical interview, with questions about symptoms, stressors, and the difficulties you are facing.
- A medical evaluation, checking for signs that stress is affecting the body, such as high blood pressure and heart palpitations.
- Clinical assessments such as questionnaires about anxiety, depression, and perceived stress.
If you are struggling with chronic stress, what can you do about it?
Find a therapist who can help with stress
Stress Management Strategies
Getting professional support is the most reliable way to receive the tools you need to manage stress. However, there are a number of stress management strategies that you can try yourself. When used consistently, they can become habitual and provide a long-term approach to stress relief.
Here are some of the most common stress management techniques (It is important to note that while these techniques may not require specialized training, they are best implemented when part of a holistic approach taught by practitioners.):
- Deep breathing: Deep breathing works to calm both the body and mind. When you focus on your breath and take slow, deep breaths, you are slowing down your nervous system which will help you feel more in control of your thoughts and emotions. There are many different breathing strategies that can have a positive impact on stress and the good news about these strategies is that they can be done anywhere and at any time.
- Mindfulness: Mindfulness is about learning to bring your attention to the present moment without judgement. This can help calm the mind from worrying about all of the future “what ifs” and slow down and become aware of what you are experiencing right now.
- Exercise: Physical activity has been shown to release endorphins, improving your mental health and helping you release stress from your body. Consistent exercise provides not only temporary relief but long-term improvements as well.
- Spending time in nature: Going out into nature and pulling in all of your senses to experience what is outside can help provide more perspective, reminding you that there is more to life than what is causing you stress.
- Time management: Chronic stress leads to a sense of a lack of control. By improving your time management, you get a better handle on your responsibilities.
- Journaling: Stress causes you to spend a lot of time in your head. Journaling helps externalize your thoughts so you can reflect on them more objectively.
- Lifestyle adjustments: If you spend hours “doom scrolling” on social media, avoid going out with friends, drink a lot of caffeine or alcohol, have an unhealthy diet, or engage in similar habits, your sense of chaos and isolation grows. Lifestyle adjustments can shift your perspective, reduce overstimulation, and help you feel calmer and more balanced overall.
- Building your support system: Having people to talk to when times are tough is crucial. By opening up to loved ones and strengthening your sense of community, you find an outlet for the chronic stress.
Therapy and Professional Support for Stress
The above stress management strategies can provide significant relief. However, the most effective approach to managing chronic stress is through professional support.
Therapy in particular is a great way to get help. In therapy, you are guided through a multi-prong approach to stress management. With your therapist, you will work through the causes of the stress and any ineffective coping mechanisms you may be using. You will also learn to identify how you want your life to look when you are not driven by chronic stress. Your approach is then tailored to achieve the balance you desire based on your individual needs.
Your therapist will help you practice stress management techniques you can use at home, while also working with you to create a framework in which to implement them. These strategies work best when you know how to use them in a sustainable way.
There are two types of therapy that are most commonly used for stress management.
Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
One of the most popular therapy modalities, cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) has been shown to be particularly effective in treating chronic stress. CBT is a structured, time-limited, goal-oriented therapy. Its practicality helps you take back your sense of control in your day-to-day life by recognizing, understanding, and changing unhelpful thoughts which can result in unhelpful emotions and behaviors, while also teaching skills for emotion regulation. This contributes considerably towards lowering your stress levels, as you no longer feel helpless in the face of pressure.
In CBT, you will do some analysis of your background and underlying issues causing you high stress. However, this is contained within a structure that prioritizes achieving a healthy balance within a relatively short period of time.
Mindfulness-Based Therapies
Mindfulness has become a crucial part of the therapy toolbox when it comes to stress. Other modalities, such as CBT, incorporate mindfulness techniques. However, when it comes to mindfulness-based therapies, the philosophy and practice of mindfulness serves as the foundation.
There is a common misconception that mindfulness is all about breathwork and meditation. They certainly play an important role in mindfulness practice but do not accurately represent the framework itself. When you look deeper into mindfulness-based therapies, you find that they are founded upon a radical approach to psychotherapy.
The philosophy of mindfulness shows us that we don’t have to address the symptoms of stress directly. Instead, if we change our underlying approach to life itself, the triggers of stress become less threatening.
Mindfulness is therefore about detaching from thoughts and feelings. Counterintuitively, we do this by accepting them. When we stop trying to find fixes for them, we begin to see that, while the thoughts and feelings are real, they do not relay objective truth. We can experience them and let them go.
This concept sounds simple to some and impossible to others. In truth, the theory is uncomplicated and therefore accessible to all. It’s the implementation that is difficult and requires training.
Therapies like mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) guide you to better understand the framework and provide a practical program for integrating mindfulness techniques into your life. Your therapist will help you work through challenges, providing you with the understanding that meditation and other practices don’t come easily to most people.
Over time, you form habits and your underlying perspective of life changes. Then, the causes of stress no longer seem so urgent.
Medication
In general, stress itself is not treated with medication, although certain symptoms might require medical management. That being said, there may be underlying conditions that are triggering or exacerbating the stress.
Conditions like depression and anxiety disorders require treatment and in these cases medication may support the therapeutic process. Antidepressants and anti-anxiety medication form part of a holistic toolbox for treating mental illness. As the underlying conditions are alleviated, you may experience significant stress relief.
What to Expect With Untreated Chronic Stress
What happens if you do not treat chronic stress?
If you do not use stress management strategies or seek professional help, chronic stress won’t go away on its own.
Many people believe that they do not need to address chronic stress because they are still managing to function at a high level. Unfortunately, the longer it is left unaddressed, the bigger an impact it has on your life.
Potential consequences of unmanaged stress include:
- Anxiety and depression
- Poor performance at work or school
- Burnout at work and at home
- Physical health problems, including cardiovascular disease and a weakened immune system
- Impaired relationships
When to Seek Help
Stress is normal but chronic stress becomes problematic. So, when is it time to seek help?
You should consider getting professional help from a therapist or mental health professional if stress is impacting your daily life, whether in terms of your mental wellbeing, relationships, meeting responsibilities, or both.
