Take our Burnout Test

Find a therapist to overcome stress

The stress response involves psychological and physiological changes.

Stress itself is adaptive, but problems occur when the body does not get a chance to recover.

Evidence-based strategies can help the body recover after repeated stress activation.

This is the second post in my series on stress. Read the first one here.

Mortgage payments. Looming layoffs. An upcoming medical procedure. Growing tensions at home.

One worry after another races through your mind on the drive home from work. Just then, your phone rings. A voicemail from your boss: “I need to see you first thing tomorrow in my office.”

By the time you get home, you have a pretty bad headache. Before your partner says anything, you mumble, “I'm really stressed out.”

But what is stress, really?

Generally speaking, stress is a psychological and physiological response to demands and perceived threats that require coping or adaptation.

This “alarm” (i.e., the stress response) can be useful, of course. It helped our ancestors navigate threats to survival: finding food, escaping predators, protecting what they had, and dealing with conflicts in their social groups.

The issue is that this system, which evolved to protect us from threats to survival, is easily and repeatedly activated by modern pressures. It is activated by situations that are perceived as uncertain, uncontrollable, or threatening to things we value (e.g., our finances, health, relationships, etc.): Unpaid bills. Traffic jams. Unanswered emails. Ring. Ring. Ring.

A system for survival, not daily life

There are two interacting systems in the stress response: the sympathetic-adrenal-medullary (SAM) system and the........

© Psychology Today