Table of ContentsView AllTable of ContentsHealthy StressWhen Does Stress Become ‘Toxic’?Signs & SymptomsStress' Impact on Your BrainHow Stress Affects ChildrenStress-Relief TipsCan the Effects of Toxic Stress Be Reversed?
Table of ContentsView All
View All
Table of Contents
Healthy Stress
When Does Stress Become ‘Toxic’?
Signs & Symptoms
Stress' Impact on Your Brain
How Stress Affects Children
Stress-Relief Tips
Can the Effects of Toxic Stress Be Reversed?
Close
Stressis a biological response to external or internal pressures. If the stressors are severe and persistent, stress can be considered toxic.
Healthy Stress Can Be Good for You
Stress is a universal occurrence and a normal experience. It can be positive or negative.
A 2015 study from the University of California, Berkeleyfound how acute levels of optimal stress, known aseustress, can benefit individuals and optimize alertness, behavioral, and cognitive performance to adapt to situations better.
Too Many Stressors Leads to Toxic Stress
If exposure to the stress becomes chronicor overwhelming, the body shifts into an ongoing stress response. Without an off switch to the stressor, the internal alarm bells remain activated—even after the threat is long and gone.
The Build-Up of Stress & Your HealthIn the face of toxic stress, chronically elevated cortisol and other physiologic and brain changes increase the risk of cardiovascular, infectious, inflammatory, metabolic and psychiatric disorders. In other words, as your stress continues to increase, your physical and mental health begins to decline.
The Build-Up of Stress & Your Health
In the face of toxic stress, chronically elevated cortisol and other physiologic and brain changes increase the risk of cardiovascular, infectious, inflammatory, metabolic and psychiatric disorders. In other words, as your stress continues to increase, your physical and mental health begins to decline.
Signs of Toxic Stress
Learning to identify how toxic stresscan affect one’s physicality, behaviors, and emotions is the first step to reducing its health risks.
There are common symptoms that can be a reflection of chronic stress, including but not limited to:
How Prolonged Stress Impacts Your Health
How Toxic Stress Affects Your Brain
The brain is the command center for the human nervous system and appraises the threat level of a stressor. At healthy levels of stress, it can apply the appropriate behavioral and physiological responses. However, once stress builds up, it impacts the capacity of the brain to respond to stress, and even impacts the functioning of the brain itself.
Your Brains Can Shrink
Chronic stress has been found to actually decrease brain volume, causing loss of synapses and impacting brain functions.
Your Critical Thinking Becomes Impaired
The prefrontal cortex,located at the front of the frontal lobe of the brain, is particularly susceptible to stress exposure. This region of the brain is involved in our higher-order cognitive functions. Toxic stress can cause architectural changes in prefrontal nerve cells resulting in loss of certain cognitive abilities.
Toxic Stress' Impacts Your Overall Neurobiology & Physical Health
To understand its full impact, it may be helpful to consider a few different examples of how toxic stress can negatively impact one’sneurobiology.
Maintaining the brain’s health so it can respond to stress properly is vital to your well-being.
How Toxic Stress Impacts Children
Toxic stress is overwhelming for individuals of all age groups, but it is particularly damaging for children.
Adverse Childhood Experiences and Stress
As a child’s brain develops,adverse childhood experiencescan alter the architecture in the brain, leading to impaired coping skills and debilitating long-term health effects. Without the proper emotional support from caretakers, toxic stress can create abnormal stress responses that might not reveal themselves for years.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), adverse childhood experiences can put one at riskfor future violence victimization and mental illnesses. An ACE (adverse childhood experience) score is a tally of various abuse, neglect, and other hallmarks of a rough childhood—the higher the score, the higher the risk for health issues.
The experiences that can contribute to toxic stress are events such as:
Tips to Relieve Stress
When you’re feeling overwhelmed, take a moment to pause and reach for a healthy coping response that will serve your body and mind.
Some possible techniques can look like this:
Doing these activities every day can help you promote and nurture a low-stress lifestyle.
The brain is plastic and has some ability to rewire itself back to healthy functioning, For neuroplasticityto occur, the brain needs to be optimally stressed.
How to Reverse the Effects of Toxic Stress
Although stress can induce neural changes in the brain, the brain is remarkably resilientand can often bounce back from stress. Toxic stress can be a factor in a person’s life, but one can take steps to reverse its impact with several stress management techniques:
Learning how to manage your response to toxic stress appropriately can help you tackle stress in the moment, and be better able to find balance and deal with stress when it emerges in the future.
A Word From Verywell
Building healthy and sustainable habits and practices to manage stress can allow you to get ahead of toxic stress and reduce its harmful effects.
What Are Stress Dreams?
18 Sources
Verywell Mind uses only high-quality sources, including peer-reviewed studies, to support the facts within our articles. Read oureditorial processto learn more about how we fact-check and keep our content accurate, reliable, and trustworthy.
Yaribeygi H, Panahi Y, Sahraei H, Johnston TP, Sahebkar A.The impact of stress on body function: A review.EXCLI J. 2017;16:1057-1072.
S R, ers, relations | M.Researchers find out why some stress is good for you. Berkeley News.
Ranabir S, Reetu K.Stress and hormones.Indian J Endocrinol Metab. 2011;15(1):18-22.
McEwen BS.Neurobiological and systemic effects of chronic stress.Chronic Stress (Thousand Oaks). 2017;1:2470547017692328.
Guidi J, Lucente M, Sonino N, Fava GA.Allostatic Load and Its Impact on Health: A Systematic Review.Psychother Psychosom. 2021;90(1):11-27. doi:10.1159/000510696
Heckman W.Learn the signs of excessive stress. The American Institute of Stress.
Arnsten AFT.Stress signalling pathways that impair prefrontal cortex structure and function.Nat Rev Neurosci. 2009;10(6):410-422.
Franke HA.Toxic stress: effects, prevention and treatment.Children (Basel). 2014;1(3):390-402.
Chronic stress puts your health at risk. Mayo Clinic.
de Celis MFR, Bornstein SR, Androutsellis-Theotokis A, et al.The effects of stress on brain and adrenal stem cells.Mol Psychiatry. 2016;21(5):590-593.
Can YS, Iles-Smith H, Chalabianloo N, et al.How to relax in stressful situations: a smart stress reduction system.Healthcare (Basel). 2020;8(2):100.
Li W, Ma L, Yang G, Gan WB.REM sleep selectively prunes and maintains new synapses in development and learning.Nat Neurosci. 2017;20(3):427-437.
How brain neurons change over time from life experience. Verywell Mind.
Kong F, Ma X, You X, Xiang Y.The resilient brain: psychological resilience mediates the effect of amplitude of low-frequency fluctuations in orbitofrontal cortex on subjective well-being in young healthy adults.Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2018;13(7):755-763.
Worthen M, Cash E.Stress management. In:StatPearls. StatPearls Publishing; 2022.
Release tension with this targeted meditation technique. Verywell Mind.
Meet Our Review Board
Share Feedback
Was this page helpful?Thanks for your feedback!What is your feedback?HelpfulReport an ErrorOtherSubmit
Was this page helpful?
Thanks for your feedback!
What is your feedback?HelpfulReport an ErrorOtherSubmit
What is your feedback?
