How to Manage High Stress Times

We all feel stress on a regular basis- it’s a normal part of being human- but we also cycle through periods of high stress in our lives where it can feel like we’re barely hanging on. It can be challenging to manage life during times of high stress, like moving, buying and selling a home, becoming a parent, getting a puppy, saying goodbye to a loved one and managing their affairs, managing an illness, or losing a job. Before we dive into how to manage high stress times, let’s get clear on a few basic details about stress.

What is Stress?

Stress is how our bodies, hearts, and minds respond to pressure. Sometimes that pressure can be positive and motivating, and sometimes it can be negative and leave us feeling stressed out.

How Does Stress Affect the Body?

Brain (Cognitive)

Depending on the level of stress, it can reduce the capacity of the brain to retain information, impacting our long and short-term memory. It also becomes difficulty to learn new information when stressed, as the brain shifts into survival mode and shuts down the parts that are not essential for life-preservation. On top of that, it can become increasingly difficult to focus when stressed, especially when experiencing intrusive thoughts.

Body (Physical)

Stress impacts multiple systems in the body. Stress impacts the endocrine system, altering the hormones produced by the body. Several of the body’s systems shift in response to this change in hormones. For one, the effectiveness of the immune system is reduced, which leaves people who are often stressed more prone to frequent illness. The cardiovascular system is also impacted by the sympathetic nervous system kicking into gear, which means the person experiences an increased heart rate and their veins narrow and contract, putting stress on the heart and other organs. Stress can impact the digestive system, too. Some people will experience an increased appetite while others might lose their appetite. The ability to absorb nutrients from the food consumed can be impacted as well.

Heart (Psychological)

Emotionally, stress can leave us feeling focused, clear, and motivated when positive, and unsure of ourselves, full of doubt and worry about what’s to come in the future when it’s negative stress. You might feel stretched thin, overwhelmed, and unable to juggle all that’s on your plate. Chronic negative stress can be the highway to anxiety, depression, and anger.

Types of Stress

Stress can be considered positive or negative, and it can sometimes have elements of both woven into it. The formal names for the two types of stress are eustress and distress. Eustress is positive stress and distress is negative stress.

Eustress can feel like excitement, eagerness, or anticipation, and it is helpful and contributes to our well-being overall. It can come from small challenges, new experiences, or major life changes. For some people, some examples might include traveling, graduating, becoming a parent, starting a new relationship, getting married, or beginning a new job. Eustress has a positive effect on the brain, body, and heart, leaving people feeling motivated, encouraged, resilient, and focused.

Distress is the experience of being stressed out or overwhelmed. The demands of the situation outweigh the resources we have available to respond to the situation. It’s that feeling of the cards are stacked against you, and it has a negative effect on the brain, body and heart. It might leave you feeling distracted, drained, or irritable, and experiencing intrusive thoughts, difficulty sleeping, changes in eating habits, and increases in heart rate and blood pressure. Some examples that can cause distress for people include illness, traumatic events like a car accident, being exposed to violence or crime, worrying about finances, poverty, unemployment, the death of a loved one, and conflicts in relationships.

Interestingly enough, some of the same examples used to described eustress can also create distress because part of how stress is determined to be positive or negative comes from an individual’s perspective and understanding of the stressful situation.

What Causes Stress?

Stress can be caused by anything internal or external that causes us to feel pressure, but stress is subjective. There are three important factors to hold in mind when considering what causes stress: a person’s resources, a person’s perception of the situation/stressor, and the circumstances of the situation.

Resources

Each person has a different collection of resources that help them respond to stressors. Some of these resources are emotional regulation skills that help them manage their emotions during stressful times, and others are external resources, like time, money, and a community of people. Our emotional regulation skills are wired into us from how we were parented as children, but much like external resources, we can work to gather new resources over time intentionally.

Perception

Our thoughts and our feelings are connected, and how we think about something can play a role in how we approach it. That’s why some people love parenting and focus more on the positive aspects of parenting while others feel chronically stressed out, overwhelmed, and inadequate, complaining about the negative parts more often. This is the case for most situations. When we perceive a situation to be threatening instead of a challenge to tackle, stress tends to feel negative. Of course, there are positive and negative aspects of nearly everything in life, so nothing is all good or all bad to begin with- it’s really our perspective that influences how we perceive something.

If you’re a curious person, you might be wondering how we have automatic settings for perceptions to begin with. A lot of this can come from our experiences growing up. One way is by seeing how our parents model responding to stress. Another way default settings are established for responding to stress is through our felt experiences as a child:

Do we feel alone with big feelings?
Does someone respond to us with kindness and patience when we need help?
Are we punished for making mistakes?
Does it feel like our caregivers have time for us and want to be with us?

If a child is left alone with big feelings, responded to with anger and impatience, punished for mistakes, and feels like an inconvenience, they’re liked to grow up feeling chronically overwhelmed. The dial will be set to “stress feels negative” for them because it as been for the majority of their life.

Circumstances

Objectively speaking, many high stress events can be positive or negative depending on the circumstances. For example, getting a promotion at work can cause eustress, particularly if the individual feels like a valued and important part of the team and they’re supported and have the resources needed to perform well in the new position. Getting promoted in a work environment where the culture is cut-throat and there are inadequate support resources is more likely to produce distress, however.

Symptoms of Stress

I’ve referenced many of the symptoms of stress throughout the post so far when describing what happens in the body when stressed, but here’s a neat little organized list:

Increased heart rate
Increased blood pressure
Difficulty falling asleep and/or staying asleep
Changes in appetite
Tension in the body or aches in the body (shoulders, jaw, glutes, toes, neck, etc).
Stomach aches, diarrhea or constipation as the digestive system works to respond to the changes in hormones caused by stress
Difficulty concentrating
Forgetfulness
Exhaustion
More prone to illness as the immune system is impacted
Racing or intrusive thoughts
Feeling worried, overwhelmed, and/or negative
Procrastinating

Chronic Stress

Chronic stress is the kind of stress that feels never-ending. In fact, you might not even know you’re experiencing chronic stress, especially if you grew up in a stressful family environment because it would feel normal to you. It might not only feel but be never-ending in that case, because you can’t work on something to shift it unless you’re able to identify and accept it. Chronic stress comes from spending a significant amount of time engaging with people and activities that are out of alignment with ourselves.

Here are are some examples of chronic stress causes:

Poverty
Racism
Working a job that doesn’t fit you
Working in a toxic environment
Working multiple jobs to make ends meet
Staying in an unfulfilling relationship
Being a child in a family where our needs are not responded to or met

When you receive the messaging over and over again so that it alters your biology that you’re not valued, wanted, or adequate, that’s chronic stress. Chronic stress causes inflammation in the body. In the brain, the hippocampus is affected, impacting a person’s capacity to absorb new information and retain old information. People will chronic stress also have a higher chance of developing cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, hypertension, obesity, arthritis, addictions, and metabolic conditions.

Inflammation also alters the body’s hormonal system. Cortisol is the hormone released by the body during stressful times. Prolonged release of cortisol is connected to mood disorders, like anxiety and depression.

Adrenal fatigue is another condition associated with chronic stress, but there is yet to be an agreement from the medical community on if this condition is real or not. Functional medicine acknowledges and treats adrenal fatigue (I was diagnosed with it in 2015, which is how I learned I had been experiencing chronic stress for the large majority of my life). Based on what I know and understand from polyvagal theory and my own experience working to recover from adrenal fatigue, this condition is worth considering. Getting the results from the DUTCH hormone test in 2020 solidified this for me, because it’s easy to see that I have insufficient levels of cortisol being produced throughout the day since my body and brain have experienced so much stress for so long that they’re unable to keep up with the expected hormonal response.

How to Manage High Stress Times

Now that we’ve covered the basics on stress, let’s explore some helpful tools for managing times of high stress. By high stress, I mean a level of stress beyond a single, short-lived event, and less than chronic stress. I’m talking about the time between selling your home and buying another, when a loved one is hospitalized, when your family pet is diagnosed with a terminal illness, when you lose your job, etc. It’s a time of high stress that has a clear beginning and clear ending.

Remind yourself that the situation is temporary

Nothing last forever, for better or worse. It can be really helpful to have that context in mind when sitting through times of high stress. While a situation cause permanent changes in your life, the feeling of high stress is temporary and things can eventually return to a lower-stress state, most likely.

I have a mantra when I find myself in high stress times: “It’s just for now, not forever.” While I don’t want to pull myself out of the present moment too much and obsess about the future, I have always been the kind of person who needs to know that challenges will not last forever. Case in point: I failed the timed face-down prone float in Navy boot camp several times until I was paired with a Recruit Division Commander who would give a periodic countdown. I just need to know when I can breathe again in high stress times (quite literally in the case of the prone float). Times of high stress come and times of high stress go.

Lean into your self-care routine

Navigating times of high stress is one of the reasons to build and follow a solid self-care routine. Think back to a time when you have been super stressed in the past. What did you want to do to decompress during and after this high stress time? We often engage in activities that aren’t so helpful and kind to our bodies, minds, and hearts, like staying up late to binge-watch tv, treating yourself with a lot of processed sugar, or downing a bunch of alcohol. None of it really helps you feel better, but it serves a purpose because it gives you an escape from the stress- you either get to avoid it or numb it with these sorts of activities. Most of these activities either work to keep the nervous system in a heightened state to continue the stress response, or to totally shut us off from feeling the body’s stress response.

Generally, what we need is to help our bodies shift out of the stress response by turning on the parasympathetic nervous system, and those sorts of activities are what we often build into self-care routines. Some activities that help shift out of a state of stress include mindfulness, deep breathing, and singing or humming.

Having a regular self-care routine is so important to help you process and reduce stress on a regular basis. It’s also essential to have in place for when you encounter times of high stress. You don’t want to waste energy and brain power trying to come up with ideas to help you regulate during times of high stress, so lean into what you already know works for you.

Let go of “perfect” and accept reality

Part of living a meaningful life is getting clear on your values and holding yourself accountable to living out those values day in and day out. Often, we find a way to weave acceptance and reality into our values in some capacity; otherwise, we set ourselves up for failure. Regardless of how we commit to living a meaningful life, it is undeniable that living a “perfect” life is not realistic or attainable. Letting go of high expectations and the idea that things need to be “perfect” is immensely helpful during times of high stress.

When we’re stressed and anxious, we seek control because it helps us feel more powerful. In times of high stress when it feels like everything can be out of control, it’s natural to want to try to have control over something. When we’re grasping at straws and desperate to take control of anything and everything, it’s a recipe for more stress. The same goes for when we have rigid standards and want everything to go a specific way. This makes even more sense when we hold in mind that many high stress situations aren’t things we seek out by choice, so we have very limited control over the larger themes in the situation.

When thought through intentionally, it can be empowering to know what you realistically have control over in high stress situations, as well as what you can’t control. Letting go of “perfect” and knowing what is within reason for you to control can help you get through times of high stress without piling on additional burdens.

Get clear on your priorities

High stress periods are not the time to take on extra tasks. On the contrary, during times of high stress, your schedule and obligations need to be pared down. This occurs naturally in some situations, like if you’re sitting at the hospital with a loved one, rearranging your schedule to attend a funeral, or becoming a parent. Each of those events requires a level of prioritizing the most important and urgent tasks in order to reduce obligations and reorganize your schedule.

While the collective generally recognizes those periods of high stress and is accommodating for the most part, other high stress times go unaddressed while we carry a heavy burden. Sometimes people with chronic illnesses carry on like normal, not wanting to feel weak or inadequate; sometimes people who work in a toxic environment keep showing up every day because they think this is the best job they can get; sometimes people stay in unhealthy relationships because they feel undeserving and unworthy deep down; sometimes parents try to do and be everything for their children. There are plenty of circumstances that cause high levels of stress where obligations go unaddressed.

If you’re reading this blog, it’s because you want to have improved relationships, feel valued and worthy, and connect to a supportive community. One of the ways you can work toward that, towards living a meaningful life, is by regularly checking in with your priorities and making sure your obligations align with what’s most important to you. Ultimately, our priorities in this world often turn out to be something along the lines of feeling loved and connected, feeling like how we spend our time and energy matters, and feeling valued. When we get pulled into doing things and checking boxes, it can be so easy to lose sight of what really matters to us.