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Christmas closed: Tuesday, December 24, 2024 – January 1, 2025
Christmas closed: Tuesday, December 24, 2024 – January 1, 2025
Your body is amazingly designed to respond to danger.
Imagine a tiger charging toward you. In a split second, your nervous system doesn’t stop to hold a committee meeting. Your brain recognizes the threat, your sympathetic nervous system shifts into high gear, and hormones such as adrenaline (epinephrine) and norepinephrine help prepare you to fight, flee, or respond. Your heart beats faster. Your blood pressure rises. Your breathing changes. Blood and energy are directed toward the muscles and away from functions that can wait. Your attention becomes intensely focused.
This is not a problem. This is brilliant biology. The problem begins when your brain can create the alarm without the tiger. And these days, we have become remarkably good at doing just that.
A threatening event isn’t always something we can see, hear, smell, taste, or touch. The brain can respond to a perceived threat, something that hasn’t happened yet, something that happened yesterday, or even something we simply imagine might happen.
We’ve talked before about how much of what we fear never actually comes to pass.
Read more here →
Examples could be:
That wonderfully productive activity known as worrying about something that hasn’t happened yet
The body’s stress systems respond to psychological stress as well as physical threats. The sympathetic nervous system and the adrenal glands work together to mobilize the body for action. Adrenaline is an important part of this rapid response, while the slower hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) system, including cortisol, helps coordinate a longer-lasting stress response.
And here is an important distinction: adrenaline itself doesn’t simply sit in the bloodstream for days. Catecholamines such as adrenaline are cleared relatively quickly, generally within minutes. The bigger concern is what happens when the alarm system is repeatedly switched on, again and again and again, with too little opportunity for recovery.
In other words, the problem isn’t necessarily one big burst of adrenaline. It’s living in a pattern of repeated alarm.
Picture yourself sitting at your desk, chafing under the pressures of the day. You aren’t running from anything. You’re not wrestling a bear. You’re not even particularly active. But inside, your body may be responding as though something important is threatening your safety.
Without even realizing it, you may notice:
Then you move on to the next problem. And the next. And the next.
This is where modern stress research becomes especially interesting. Scientists now use the term allostatic load to describe the cumulative physiological burden that can develop when the body’s systems are repeatedly challenged by stress and don’t have adequate opportunity to return to balance. It involves much more than adrenaline alone—it can include changes involving the nervous, hormonal, metabolic, cardiovascular, immune, and inflammatory systems.
A 2024 systematic review found that greater allostatic load is associated with cardiovascular disease risk, while other reviews have connected chronic stress and physiological dysregulation with problems involving sleep, metabolism, gastrointestinal function, and immune regulation.
That’s a lot of responsibility for a body that was simply trying to protect you!
This brings us to the old idea of “burning off” adrenaline. There is truth behind the concept—but there’s more to it. Physical activity absolutely can be a healthy way to help regulate stress. Exercise temporarily activates many of the same stress systems, but regular physical activity is also associated with improved stress regulation and may help the body become more resilient to stress.
Research has found associations between physical activity and healthier patterns of cortisol regulation, although the relationship is complex. Exercise is not necessarily a magic eraser for chronic stress.
Nutrition plays a role here too — certain foods and plant compounds can help support your body’s stress response from the inside out.
We’ve written more about that here →
AND, let’s not make exercise another way of avoiding the real issue. If you spend all day creating stress through your thoughts, emotions, expectations, and reactions, and then spend an hour exercising simply to “get rid of” what you’ve created, you may be treating the symptom rather than changing the pattern.
Exercise is wonderful medicine. And it isn’t the only medicine your body needs.
The body needs both activation and recovery. We were designed to respond to stress—and then return toward balance. That means learning how to tell your nervous system, “The emergency is over.” Sometimes that means physical movement. Sometimes it means slow, relaxed breathing. Sometimes it means stepping outside and getting a little perspective. Sometimes it means laughing. Sometimes it means prayer. Sometimes it means forgiving someone. Sometimes it means deciding that the email can wait until tomorrow.
And sometimes it means recognizing that the thing keeping you in a state of alarm isn’t what is happening around you—but what is happening inside your own mind.
Research on mindfulness and related mind-body practices continues to explore this connection. Recent systematic reviews have found reductions in perceived stress with mindfulness-based interventions, although the strength of evidence varies among populations and outcomes. A 2023 systematic review also found that a single session of breathing, meditation, or yoga-based practices reduced acute stress reactivity in many of the studies reviewed.
We aren’t completely helpless in the face of stress. We can practice recovery.
Perhaps one of the most powerful things we can do is become aware of the messages we continually send to our own nervous system. Messages like:
Those thoughts may seem harmless, but the body doesn’t always know the difference between an actual, immediate threat and a mind that repeatedly rehearses one.
So, perhaps we can begin changing the message:
This isn’t about pretending that problems don’t exist. It’s about refusing to make every problem a psychological emergency.
There will always be things to do. There will always be people who disagree with us. There will always be something that could go wrong. And there will always be another email. But your body doesn’t need to live as though every email is a charging tiger!
Let’s be realistic. The goal isn’t to eliminate stress. That’s probably impossible—and perhaps not even desirable. Stress responses are protective, adaptive, and necessary. The goal is to become better at responding to stress and recovering from it.
When the body needs to rise to the occasion, let it rise. When the occasion is over, let the body come back down. Move when you need to move. Rest when you need to rest. Breathe. Laugh. Pray. Get outside. Change the thought. Change the response.
And when you find yourself carrying yesterday’s frustration, tomorrow’s worry, and today’s pressure all at the same time, remember:
Want to go deeper on resetting your body’s stress patterns?
Discover B.E.S.T. →
Link to Morter March Monday Rebroadcast
