WTF Is Stress?

May 10

People are starting to catch on that chronic stress is really bad for your health. But “stress” is so broad and vague, and incredibly misunderstood.

A theme I’ve seen in working with many of my clients is that many of them are experiencing significant chronic stress, but most of them don’t realize or acknowledge it.

I used to be one of those people. I never thought of myself as a “stressed” person. When I pictured stress, I imagined someone anxious, frantic, emotionally volatile, panicked, overwhelmed, unable to cope. Since I didn’t experience those things, I assumed I wasn’t stressed.

But looking back, my mind had become an expert at overriding stress. I didn’t mentally or consciously feel it because I buried it. So instead, I carried it in my body. A lot of it.

So my body did what bodies do: it tried to get my attention through subtle messages first: symptoms, tension, fatigue, inflammation, dysregulation. And when I continued ignoring those signals, it got louder and louder until I couldn’t ignore it anymore.

I think a lot of people are doing the exact same thing. We’ve been taught a very narrow image of what stress looks like. We associate it with the visible chaos I described—panic attacks, spiraling, emotional breakdowns, frantic energy. So if someone is still functioning, still productive, still composed, still showing up to work, still exercising, still achieving, they conclude: “I’m fine.”

But chronic stress often doesn’t look chaotic at all. Sometimes it looks like being highly capable, hyper-independent, productive, disciplined, emotionally controlled, and/or “high functioning.” Sometimes the nervous system adapts so well to survival mode that the stress becomes invisible to the conscious mind. The brain suppresses, intellectualizes, pushes through, and disconnects from bodily signals in order to keep functioning. Over time, the body continues carrying the load while the mind stops recognizing it as stress altogether.

So instead of emotional panic, the stress often shows up physically: gut issues, chronic fatigue, insomnia, hormonal imbalance, headaches, inflammation, jaw clenching, anxiety, brain fog, inability to relax, irritability, and more…

The body often speaks long before the mind catches up. And I think part of the reason for this is that we’ve become incredibly disconnected from the concept of root cause. Western medicine has a tendency to treat symptoms in isolation rather than asking deeper questions about why the body is struggling in the first place. There are pills for sleep, anxiety, headaches, digestive issues, and just about any other physical manifestation of stress. And sometimes those things can absolutely help.

But the bigger issue is that symptom management is often much easier than true self-confrontation. Addressing the root cause of chronic stress is rarely convenient. It may require changing the way you live, slowing down, feeling emotions you’ve spent years avoiding, setting boundaries, grieving, leaving unhealthy environments or relationships, acknowledging burnout, admitting that the life you’ve built no longer feels sustainable. That’s way harder than taking something to temporarily relieve the symptom.

So we’ve made it psychologically safer to say:

“My stomach is messed up.”
“My hormones are off.”
“I’m just tired.”

Than to say:

“My life is exhausting me.”
“I’m deeply disconnected from myself.”
“I haven’t felt truly safe, grounded, or regulated in a very long time.”

And I think we’re paying the price for that disconnect.

I recently read and loved When the Body Says No by Gabor Maté that talks a lot about these ideas. The premise is both simple and profound: the body often expresses what the mind suppresses. While some people hear ideas like this and immediately dismiss them as “woo woo,” there is actually a growing body of scientific research exploring the relationship between chronic stress, trauma, emotional suppression, the nervous system, inflammation, and chronic illness.

We now know that trauma and chronic stress can alter immune function, hormone regulation, inflammatory responses, and even gene expression. Studies like the ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences) research have repeatedly shown that people with significant childhood trauma are at a dramatically higher risk of developing chronic health conditions later in life.

And perhaps most interestingly, women account for nearly 80% of autoimmune disease cases. Why? There are likely biological factors involved, but many researchers and physicians, including Gabor Maté, also point to social and emotional conditioning. Women are often rewarded for self-sacrifice, emotional suppression, caretaking, people pleasing, and disconnecting from their own needs in order to maintain relationships and keep the peace.

In other words, many women are conditioned to chronically abandon themselves.

And this is where I think people also misunderstand stress: stress is not just about what happens to you. It’s also about what your nervous system perceives as unsafe, overwhelming, unresolved, unpredictable, or emotionally inescapable, and whether your body ever gets the chance to truly process and recover from it.

Obviously the major life events I referenced earlier can absolutely dysregulate the nervous system. But chronic stress is not always created by dramatic events.

Sometimes the stress is not coming from one major event, but from deeply internalized coping mechanisms and survival strategies that were formed long ago.

Many of the ways people move through the world — hyper-independence, people pleasing, overachievement, emotional suppression, perfectionism, chronic urgency — are not random personality traits. They are often adaptive responses that once helped someone feel safe, loved, accepted, or in control.

And the tricky part is that many of these patterns are highly rewarded by society.

The high achiever gets praised. The selfless person gets admired. The emotionally “easy” person gets accepted. The hyper-independent person gets called strong.

But beneath many of these patterns is a nervous system that never fully learned how to relax.

This is also why stress management tools and nervous system regulation practices can be so powerful. Breathwork, meditation, therapy, movement, sleep, time in nature, emotional processing, boundaries, rest, and genuine human connection are not just trendy “self-care” practices. They help teach the body that it is safe again.

Because healing is not just about removing stressors. It’s also about increasing the body’s capacity to move through life without remaining stuck in survival mode.

Over time, chronic stress often stops feeling like “stress” and starts feeling like personality, ambition, responsibility, adulthood, or simply “normal life.” Humans adapt to baseline conditions extraordinarily well. If someone has spent years in overdrive (navigating perfectionism, unresolved trauma, emotional suppression, people pleasing, overachievement, toxic relationships, loneliness, constant stimulation, or lack of rest) the nervous system eventually begins treating that state as normal.

Many people have forgotten what true regulation even feels like. And that’s part of what makes chronic stress so difficult to identify. Most people can recognize the obvious stressors: big life events, crises, heartbreak, trauma. But often it’s the quieter things that slowly wear the body down over time:

never feeling emotionally safe
constantly abandoning your own needs
suppressing emotion
living in chronic urgency
feeling disconnected from yourself
never truly resting
staying in environments or relationships that drain you
existing in a near-constant state of overstimulation

Many of these patterns are so normalized that we don’t even register them as stress anymore. But the body does. The more I learn about the body, the more I realize just how smart it is. And it usually has a lot to say—we just don’t always listen.

So the next time you find yourself wondering:

“What is wrong with me?”

Instead ask yourself:

“What has my body been trying to tell me that I have not yet acknowledged?”