What Causes Stress?

Sometimes, stress can be positive. Short-term stress, for instance, can be motivating and helpful in meeting challenges. A moderate amount of stress is actually desirable, according to the Yerkes-Dodson Law describing stress and efficiency;² indeed, if stress is too low, performance and efficiency can suffer. The Yerkes-Dodson law also warns that high stress negatively affects us.

Chronic, excessive stress can be damaging to our total well-being, including physical health and mental health. Knowing the causes of this negative stress can help you make positive changes to minimize and manage it. It’s important to know, though, that while the body’s stress response is universal, what triggers it is individualized and dependent on things such as life circumstances, age, developmental stage and one’s role in life.² What causes one person to feel stressed out might not bother someone else at all, and vice versa.

General causes of stress may include:

• Situations that threaten your sense of safety, health, or well-being
• Thoughts and emotions that involve a fear of loss (such as relationship, job, your health, or money
• Repetitive worry about something in particular or vague worries about many different things
• Uncertainty
• Perceived lack of control over one or more aspects of your life
• Habitual thought patterns that involve negative beliefs or a pessimistic outlook on life
• A lack of self-efficacy (the belief that you don’t have the resources or ability to deal with challenges)

Whether your stress is triggered by an external cause like a difficult circumstance, an internal one such as negative thoughts, or both, the triggers create a flurry of activity in your brain and body that is responsible for your stress reaction: that feeling of being stressed out and frazzled.¹

The Physiology of Stress: What Causes Stress Reactions

Your stress reaction, or what we often think of simply as stress, happens when something triggers your fight-or-flight reaction.

This is a body-wide reaction that involves your brain, autonomic nervous system, hormones, and other substances that affect a variety of biological functions:^2,3

• Your senses notice something bothersome
• The sensory input is processed by the thalamus in your brain
• The thalamus warns your amygdala, another brain region, that something negative is happening (the amygdala is an emotional center within the brain, responsible for feelings including fear)
• The amygdala and other emotion-related areas of the brain alert the motor cortex, which sends messages through nerve pathways, instructing muscles to tense and tighten to prepare to react to the stressor
• The amygdala also wakes up the hypothalamus, an area in the brain right above the brainstem
• The hypothalamus jumps into action and alerts the pituitary gland, causing it to send a chemical messenger called corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF) all the way down to the adrenal glands on top of the kidneys
• The adrenal glands join this reaction by releasing stress hormones such as cortisol, epinephrine (adrenaline), and norepinephrine (noradrenaline)
• Meanwhile, the part of the autonomic nervous system known as the sympathetic nervous system revs up and sends warnings through the spinal cord and out into the nerves throughout the body to further prepare you to flee from or fight the stressor
• As a result of all this activity, your senses sharpen, breathing rate speeds up, heart rate and blood pressure increase, and glucose and fats are released into the bloodstream to keep you on high alert for more danger
• Your immune system is also prodded into high gear and causes inflammation in your body just in case you are injured by the stressor and need to heal

A lot happens inside of you when you face something that causes stress. Your physiological reaction to a trigger leads to the symptoms of stress.

Symptoms of Stress

Because our entire system—body, brain (the physical organ), and mind (thoughts and feelings)—is involved in our stress reaction, we can feel many different types of symptoms of stress: cognitive (thought-based), emotional, physical, and behavioral.²

Cognitive symptoms of stress include:

• Constant or near-constant worry about one or many different things
• Difficulty concentrating
• Problems remembering things
• Troubles making decisions
• Brain fog, difficulty thinking clearly
• Decreased creativity or problem-solving ability
• Reduced sense of humor

Emotional symptoms of stress:

• Irritability, anger, or a short temper
• Increased crying spells or crying easily at little things
• Nervousness, feeling keyed-up or on edge
• Restlessness
• Loneliness
• Vague feelings of unhappiness
• Sense of purposelessness
• Feeling easily overwhelmed
• Decreased motivation

Physical symptoms of stress include:

• Muscle tension
• Pain anywhere in the body
• Fatigue
• Difficulty falling or staying asleep
• Palpitations
• Shakiness, tremors
• Increased sweating
• Ringing in the ears
• Teeth grinding
• Dizziness, with or without fainting
• Choking sensation and/or difficulty swallowing
• Digestive troubles
• Frequent need to urinate
• Decreased libido

Behavioral symptoms of stress:

• Difficulty starting or finishing tasks
• Using avoidance coping strategies to avoid people, situations, or tasks
• Criticizing others or making many negative statements about life in general
• Frequent brooding
• Fidgeting
• Emotional eating
• Substance use, including smoking
• Withdrawal from friends and family
• Isolation

Whether you experience many symptoms or just a few, the symptoms of stress are highly disruptive to life.¹ They affect us on all levels and disturb our sense of ourselves and our place in the world. Therefore, stress management is crucial to our well-being.

How Therapy Can Help You Manage Stress

If you are suffering because of stress, know that you aren’t alone. Everyone experiences stress. You don’t have to work your way through it by yourself; it’s okay to seek help from others, including professional therapists. A therapist can help you identify and better understand your triggers, deal effectively with concerns and problems underlying stress, and develop an action plan to manage stress in a way that works for you.⁹

Sometimes, people are hesitant to seek professional help for stress because they think that therapy is only for those with diagnosable mental health conditions. According to the American Psychological Association, therapy helps people of all ages and backgrounds address a wide variety of concerns, including life stressors in order to boost well-being.¹⁰

In working with a therapist, you can:^2,4,11

• Develop tools to help you manage your body’s stress reaction so you aren’t at the mercy of your stressors
• Boost your resiliency
• Make changes for a healthy lifestyle to keep stress at bay
• Learn new insights and form a new relationship with your triggers so you can use stress for positive outcomes
• Feel more in control of your life
• Discover ways to replace stress with a sense of meaning and purpose
• Identify and change negative thought patterns that both contribute to and result from stress