The effects of stress are pervasive because your body is not designed to function well when you are stressed. Chronic stress will shorten your life, worsen your mental health, decrease the quality of your relationships, and reduce the success you experience at work, school, and on the sports field.
Your body communicates it is stressed so you can avoid the effects of stress
The body communicates that you are experiencing stress in two primary ways:
- Your emotions
- Your energy level
Emotions are an Effect of Stress
Your emotions communicate whether or not you are experiencing stress. Positive emotions like joy, love, eagerness, and happiness communicate that you are, in-that-moment, not stressed. That is the purpose of your emotions. To let you know when you are at your optimum (no stress) and when you’re not yet at your optimum so you can take action to move toward experiencing less stress.
“Action” doesn’t always involve physical action. In modern times, the best action is often a change of perspective about the situation.
When you change your perspective, your emotions change. By comparing your emotions prior to the change of perspective to the emotions you feel after you change your perspective, you can immediately know if you’re moving in the right direction.
What is the right direction?
The right direction is the direction that causes less stress.
Here’s an example.
A parent who is worried about their teenager driving by themselves. They work themselves up into quite a state:
I’m so worried about Nathan. He could get in an accident. What would I do if he was hurt? Oh my gosh, he could be permanently disabled by an accident. Or, he could kill someone. I don’t want Nathan to drive by himself. It’s too dangerous.
This parent understands that the negative emotions they feel are indicators of an increasing level of stress. Once they pause and think about what they are thinking (a process called metacognition), they realize that the stress is self inflicted. Because they understand the effects of stress, they take the time to adjust their thoughts:
It’s normal to worry about a child who hasn’t been driving long. But, Nathan will be fine. He has a good head on his shoulders. He follows the no-texting rules. It’s daytime, the weather is good, and he’s by himself so no one will distract him. The likelihood is that the effects of stress put me in more danger than Nathan is in as long as I worry about worst-case scenarios. I’m going to calm down and be more mindful of what I’m thinking.
The Effects of Stress Increase and Decrease Your Energy
If you pay attention to how you feel when you think a variety of thoughts, you will notice that your energy level decreases when you think disempowered thoughts and increases when you think empowered thoughts. Your energy level is another way your body communicates when you are experiencing stress.
Dis-empowered Example
In this example, you have to do something that you don’t think you are good at doing:
I know I need to call Jon and apologize for what happened the other day. I just don’t want to do it. I was going to do it on Monday and I didn’t. Monday night, I promised myself I’d do it Tuesday, but I didn’t do it yesterday either. I need to do this but I’m afraid I’ll make things worse. It feels very awkward and I don’t do well with awkward conversations.
Can you feel the emotions (dread) and low energy for doing this task? Do you think they will actually make the call today?
Now, while avoiding this call, the person might have done lots of things where they exerted energy. Maybe they fixed a nice dinner for their family, weeded the garden, went skateboarding, or volunteered for habitat for humanity. Their lack of energy was a lack of energy for the thing they don’t want to do.
Moving Past the Effects of Stress
Low energy doesn’t mean they shouldn’t do it. It means they need to change their perspective about it before they do it. If they don’t change their perspective, they’re likely to just continue procrastinating because the effects of stress make doing something you don’t think you’ll do well difficult to do.
Empowered Perspective
I’m dreading calling Jon to apologize for the other day. I’m not sure what to say. I don’t want it to be awkward. I just need to approach the call from the perspective that I’ll find a way to communicate how sorry I really am and that any awkwardness will be worth the end result I’ll achieve once I’ve communicated clearly. It might be difficult to communicate what I want to say but if I just keep working at it, I’m sure I can communicate clearly.
Even though the person still feels trepidation about making the call, they also feel sure they can achieve the result they want. Do you think this person will actually make the call today?
Why Does Your Body Have Redundant Ways to Communicate that You’re Stressed?
Your body has redundant systems because the effects of stress negatively affect every area of your life. The effects of stress are reflected in every aspect of your life including:
- Behavioral changes
- Including decisions that you make about exercising and engaging in risky behaviors.
- Energetic changes
- Psychological changes
- Genetic changes
- Epigenetic changes can turn on gene expression for diseases that would have remained dormant in the absence of chronic stress
- Relationship changes
- Sleep problems
- Physical changes
- Including, but not limited to, weight management, food choice, and the way the body processes the foods you consume
- The decline of physical health
- Cognitive changes
Details about the effects of stress in each of the above areas can be seen in this chart:
Our articles on the effects of stress on physical health, mental health, and criminal behavior provide more in-depth information.
Great News!
When you take research from multiple areas, it becomes clear that chronic stress is at the root of many undesired outcomes. The effects of chronic stress make people sicker and rob them of years of potential healthy life while making the years they have less enjoyable.
The reason this is good news is because there are ways to manage stress that are far more effective than the methods used in the past. The research that re-defined emotions as feedback that lets us know how stressed we are has only been around for a dozen years.
I’ve spent those years perfecting ways people can use that knowledge to increase the quality of their life. During Joy Walk 2020, I will share the techniques with people in free Joy Walk talks I give as I walk across America. If you don’t want to wait, my book, Mental Wellness Made Easy, provides you with all the information you need to begin using these life-changing, stress-reducing strategies today.
What This Article Deliberately Ignores
In order to keep this article easy to read and understand, I ignored “eustress” which is a healthy form of stress. Eustress is stress about something desired. If you’re acting in a play and you’re eager and excited about it, you’re experiencing eustress.
I ignore eustress in most of my work because it does not contribute to the detrimental effects of stress caused by other types of stress. Because stress immediately effects our biology and the chemical balance in our bodies, researchers have been able to identify how stress effects our mind and body with far more precision than they could in the past.
Eustress is not harmful so I ignore it in my writings and talks.
Other Considerations about the Effects of Stress
A question for you. Would Nathan be more likely to experience a car accident if he was stressed than if he was calm or happy?
The answer is that individuals who are stressed are more likely to experience an accident. This is true of driving accidents as well as accidents at work and accidents resulting in injuries while playing sports.
This means that teaching your child healthy stress management skills can make a major difference in their experiences. It also means that limiting driving when someone is stressed is a smart choice.