Everyone experiences stress from time to time. There are different types of stress—all of which carry physical and mental health risks. A stressor may be a one-time or short-term occurrence, or it can happen repeatedly over a long time.
Some people may cope with stress more effectively and recover from stressful events more quickly than others. In a dangerous situation, stress signals the body to prepare to face a threat or flee to safety.
In these situations, your pulse quickens, you breathe faster, your muscles tense, and your brain uses more oxygen and increases activity—all functions aimed at survival and in response to stress. In non-life-threatening situations, stress can motivate people, such as when they need to take a test or interview for a new job.
Coping with the impact of chronic stress can be challenging. Because the source of long-term stress is more constant than acute stress, the body never receives a clear signal to return to normal functioning. With chronic stress, those same lifesaving reactions in the body can disturb the immune, digestive, cardiovascular, sleep, and reproductive systems.
Some people may experience mainly digestive symptoms, while others may have headaches, sleeplessness, sadness, anger, or irritability. Over time, continued strain on your body from stress may contribute to serious health problems, such as heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, and other illnesses, including mental disorders such as depression or anxiety.
If you take practical steps to manage your stress, you may reduce the risk of negative health effects. Here are some tips that may help you to cope with stress:. You should seek help right away if you have suicidal thoughts, are overwhelmed, feel you cannot cope, or are using drugs or alcohol more frequently as a result of stress. Your doctor may be able to provide a recommendation. Resources are available to help you find a mental health provider.
Anyone can become overwhelmed. If you or a loved one is having thoughts of suicide, call the confidential toll-free National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at TALK , available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Mayo Clinic does not endorse companies or products. Advertising revenue supports our not-for-profit mission. Any use of this site constitutes your agreement to the Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy linked below. A single copy of these materials may be reprinted for noncommercial personal use only.
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American Psychological Association. Accessed April 9, Stress and your health. Department of Health and Human Services. National Institute of Mental Health. Seaward BL. The nature of stress.
In: Essentials of Managing Stress. Olpin M, et al. Stress Management for Life. Cengage Learning; Creagan ET expert opinion. Mayo Clinic. April 14, People often use the word stress interchangeably with anxiety, feeling anxious, fearful, nervous, overwhelmed, panic, or stressed-out.
It flushes the body with hormones to prepare systems to evade or confront danger. The body is an intelligent operating system, but the body can not determine the difference between life threatening external threat from imagined or perceived non-life threatening stressors.
The body reacts the same either way. The body produces significantly greater quantities of the chemicals cortisol, adrenaline, and noradrenaline. The Neurobiology of stress is a complex operating mechanism. According to American Psychological Association APA , there are 3 different types stress — acute stress, episodic acute stress, and chronic stress. The 3 types of stress each have their own characteristics, symptoms, duration, and treatment approaches.
Stress management can be complicated because each of the 3 different types of stress can present as single, repeated, complicated, or chronic. Acute stress is usually brief. It is the most common and frequent presentation. Acute stress is most often caused by reactive thinking. Negative thoughts predominate about situations or events that have recently occurred, or upcoming situations, events, or demands in the near future. For example, if you have recently been involved in an argument, you may have acute stress related to negative thoughts that are repetitive about the argument.
Or you may have acute stress that is about an upcoming work deadline, again the stress is thought induced. However, most often when the thinking induced stress is reduced or removed the stress will subside too. People who frequently experience acute stress, or whose lives present with frequent triggers of stress, have episodic acute stress.
The individuals who frequently suffer acute stress often live a life of chaos and crisis. They are always in a rush or feel pressured.
They take on many responsibilities, and usually can not stay organized with so many time demands. These individuals are perpetually in the grips of acute stress overload. In addition, Type A personality presents as reactive with hostility, and almost always a deep-seated insecurity about performance.
These personality traits create frequent episodes of acute stress for the Type A individual. They have core beliefs that the world is a dangerous, unrewarding, punitive place where something awful is always about to happen.
These negative binge thinkers also tend to be over aroused and tense, but are more anxious and depressed than angry and hostile. They are often diagnosed DSM-5 with generalized anxiety disorder. Episodic acute stress requires intervention on a many levels. The treatment requires professional help spanning many months.
Most often the lifestyle and personality characteristics are so ingrained and habitual that these individuals may see nothing wrong with the way they conduct their lives. It is common for these individuals to blame their problems on other people and external events.
Frequently, they see their lifestyle patterns, and their patterns of interacting with others, and their ways of perceiving the world as an essential or integral component of their personality and therefore are often resistant to seek professional psychological help. These individuals can be very resistant to change their behaviors and thinking patterns. It is common for these individuals to only seek psychological treatment when physical pains and discomforts become too much.
Chronic stress is the most harmful type of stress. If chronic stress is left untreated over a long period of time, it can significantly and often irreversibly damage your physical health and deteriorate your mental health. For example, long term poverty, repeated abuse in any form, unemployment, dysfunctional family, poor work environment, substance abuse, or an unhappy marriage can cause significant chronic stress.
Chronic stress can also set in when an individual feels hopeless, does not see an escape from the cause of stress, and gives up on seeking solutions. Chronic stress can be caused by a aversive experiences in childhood or traumatic experiences later in life. There is change in the hardwiring of the neurobiology of the brain and body. Chronic stress is grinding stress.
It wears people away day after day, year after year. Chronic stress destroys lives, bodies, and minds. It wreaks havoc through long-term attrition. It is the stress of poverty, dysfunctional families, violence, abuse, trauma, despised job, ethnic rivalry, war. When a person never sees a way out of a miserable situation, feels anxiety of unrelenting demands and pressures for seemingly interminable periods of time.
With no hope, the individual gives up searching for solutions. Some chronic stressors or triggers stem from traumatic early childhood experiences that become internalized and remain forever painful and present. Early childhood experiences profoundly affect personality; often resulting in core belief systems that are created by causes of unending stress for the individual e.
When personality or deep-seated convictions and beliefs must be reformulated, recovery requires active self-examination with professional psychological help.
Good news is psychological treatment is very effective. The worst variable of chronic stress is that some people habituate to it. They almost forget it is there. In some ways, one could say it is an adaptation in the form of a ultimate psychological defense mechanism. People are immediately aware of acute stress because it is new. However, individuals with chronic stress frequently ignore all of the signs and symptoms because it is old, familiar, and also because often they feel helpless and hopeless.
Chronic stress kills through suicide, violence, homicide, heart attack, stroke and, perhaps, even cancer. People wear down to a final, fatal breakdown.
Their physical and mental resources are depleted through long-term attrition. The signs and symptoms of chronic stress are difficult to treat, but not impossible to treat. How we react to a difficult situation will affect how stress affects our life and our physical and mental health.
A person who feels they do not have enough resources to cope will be more likely to have a stronger reaction that triggers significant physical and mental health problems.
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