This week’s article is the third part of my Mental Health Awareness Month series, and today I want to talk about stress and the impact it can have on our mental health.
If you’ve followed my work for a while, you’ll know that I talk about stress a lot. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that stress sits at the core of many of the health, wellbeing, performance, and mental health challenges people experience today.
And in relation to mental health specifically, most people understand that stress can make them feel overwhelmed, anxious, or unable to switch off. But fewer people realise that stress can also influence the way we think, interpret situations, and experience the world around us.
Ultimately, if we’re living with chronic stress or constantly wired on stress hormones, it can affect the lens through which we see our lives.
Stress Is Designed to Keep Us Alive
The first thing to understand is that stress isn’t inherently bad, it’s actually a survival mechanism designed to keep us alive.
When we perceive a threat, whether that’s a mental threat or something physical like low or high blood sugar, our body releases stress hormones to help us deal with it. Those stress hormones sharpen our focus, they make us pay attention, they encourage us to zoom in on challenges and look for potential problems, risks, and threats.
From an evolutionary perspective, that’s incredibly useful – if there was a predator nearby or some kind of danger we needed to escape from, we would want our brains focused on that threat in order to survive. The problem is that our bodies and brains haven’t really evolved for the modern world we now live in.
The Problem With Modern Stress
As I’ve said many times before, our lives may be physically safer and more comfortable than they once were, but many of the things that create that comfort are actually working against our biology.
We now live in a world of constant stimulation: Artificial light, screens, notifications, traffic, work deadlines, financial pressures, information overload, poor sleep, blood sugar instability, lack of movement…and countless other small stressors that I often refer to as ‘microstressors’.
None of these things are necessarily huge on their own, although some of them can be. But together they create a level of chronic, unrelenting stress that many people now accept as normal. Because for many people, it is normal, culture normalises it, but unlike the stress our ancestors experienced, these stressors don’t really end, they just keep coming.
This also links closely to what I spoke about in last week’s article on movement and exercise, where historically, stress was usually paired with physical action. If there was danger, you fought, you ran, you moved. The stress response had a physical outlet, and there was a clear cycle of a stressful event occurring and then ending.
Modern stress is very different because many of us spend most of our day sitting down, mentally switched on, carrying stress physically and emotionally without any meaningful release for it. And unless we’re intentional about reducing stress, it simply accumulates.
Because the stressors keep coming, many people never fully return to a calm, regulated nervous system state or if they do, it’s not very often. So their nervous system stays switched on, their body stays alert, and eventually that starts affecting how they think and feel, in addition to their physical health.
How Stress Changes The Way We See Life
And this is the key point of today’s article: Stress hormones don’t just make us feel stressed, they affect the way we see and perceive things.
When we’re stressed, our brain naturally becomes more focused on potential threats, more focused on problems, and more focused on what could go wrong. Again, this is really helpful if you’re facing genuine danger. But when stress becomes chronic and you’re actually safe, we start viewing everyday life through that same threat-focused lens.
- We become more anxious.
- We overthink more.
- We notice more problems.
- We fixate on those problems.
- We become more reactive.
- We find it harder to switch off.
And because we’re constantly scanning for threats, we’re often more likely to focus on worst-case scenarios.
Another way to describe this is that stress narrows our attention and directs it towards everything that feels unsafe, uncertain, or problematic. And the challenge is that this can create a vicious cycle – the more stressed we become, the more threat-focused our thinking becomes, the more threat-focused our thinking becomes, the more stressed we feel… and round and round it goes.
This is often where rumination, excessive worrying, and anxiety can come from. The stress response fuels the thoughts, and the thoughts fuel the stress response.
Most people are familiar with the fight-or-flight response, but there are other stress responses too, including freeze and fawn.
Freeze can leave people feeling shut down, stuck, disconnected, numb, exhausted, or unable to move forwards. Some experts believe that, for some people, symptoms of depression may partly reflect a nervous system that has become stuck in this type of response.
Fawn can sometimes show up as people-pleasing, self-abandonment, hopelessness, or giving away our power in an unconscious attempt to feel safe.
The important point is that these are all protective responses, the challenge comes when the nervous system spends too much time in them.
Supporting Your Mental Health Starts With Supporting Your Nervous System
So why does all of this matter? Because I believe understanding stress is incredibly empowering.
Most people know they’re stressed, and most people talk about being stressed. But when we truly understand what the stress response is designed to do, and how it influences our thoughts, emotions, and behaviour, we can start working with our nervous system rather than against it.
And from a mental health perspective, if stress affects how we think, feel, and perceive the world, then reducing stress isn’t just about feeling calmer; it can fundamentally change how we experience life.
This is where the previous articles in this series become even more relevant, because managing stress isn’t just about relaxation, it’s about eating in a way that supports stable blood sugar, moving your body regularly, but not excessively, sleeping well, spending time outdoors, creating recovery time, setting boundaries, practising good time management.
All of these things, and more, help send signals of safety to the nervous system, and when the nervous system feels safer, people often find that they think differently, feel differently, and experience life differently.
So to summarise the main point of today’s article:
Stress doesn’t just affect how you feel, it affects the lens through which you see the world.
And while this can happen day to day, it can also become a long-term pattern if someone is living with chronic stress, which means supporting your mental health often starts with supporting your nervous system.
So if you’re feeling anxious, tense, negative, overwhelmed, stuck, pessimistic, or like everything feels harder than it should, it’s worth asking yourself:
“Is this really how life is right now? Or could this be how life looks and feels through a stressed nervous system?”
A Real-Life Example
I wanted to finish by sharing a piece of feedback from a lady I worked with recently.
Following a wellbeing webinar I delivered, her company offered employees the opportunity to book a one-to-one coaching session. During our 60-minute conversation, she described feeling anxious, stressed, irritable, overwhelmed, and unlike herself for quite some time.
Like many people, she’d assumed the answer was to push through, try harder, and simply learn to live with her anxiety. But when we looked more closely, it became clear that her nervous system was under a lot of pressure from things she hadn’t realised were affecting her stress levels and the way she was feeling every day.
We discussed some simple changes around stress, caffeine, eating habits, and recovery, and one week later, she sent me an email sharing how much better she was feeling after making the changes I’d suggested. Here’s part of that email:
“I am embracing what we spoke about last week and have made positive lifestyle changes. I am starting to feel the benefits and feel generally more alert and more in control of my thoughts and emotions. I caught myself laughing multiple times this morning at things that would usually make me irritable! Thank you so much for your time and help last week, Kate, you have helped me to find myself again.“
What I love about this feedback is that it perfectly illustrates the point of this article. The circumstances of her life hadn’t dramatically changed in one week, but her nervous system state had started to change.
And when that happens, as I shared above, people often find that they think differently, feel differently, and experience life differently.
Kate x
If you’d like support with any of this for yourself, or you’d like some training or wellbeing sessions for your team or organisation, feel free to get in touch.
