Stress serves an important purpose: it prepares your body for action in order to keep itself out of danger. But unfortunately, the kinds of challenges we experience today aren’t always best solved by that kind of decisive physical behavior. The result, if stress continues, can be a host of mental and physical problems, including depression.

What is stress?

Stress results from many different situations , but the form it takes is generally the same. That’s because stress never developed to help us to cope with the demands of the modern world – high workloads, relationship problems, money worries, problem colleagues and difficult commutes. In its evolutionary context, stress is our body’s mental and physical response to a direct, immediate threat. Its job is to enable us to take typically one of two simple behaviors: fight or flight.

That’s why we experience stress the way we do. Our heart rate rises and we start to breath faster, to supply oxygen to the muscles. We sweat, to cool our bodies from the coming exertion. We may feel cold, or nauseous, as blood is directed away from the stomach to more essential areas. A cascade of hormones makes us more alert and faster to react. Essentially, it’s a one-size-fits-all response to a threat. That means we can feel much the same symptoms whether we are physically challenged – perhaps by a mugger, or less directly and intentionally by a careless driver – or threatened emotionally or mentally.

Changing the way we think

Stress has mental and physical effects. As well as preparing the body for action, it alters the way we think. Our thinking becomes polarized, black-and-white, or ‘all or nothing’ as psychologists call it – enabling us to take fast and decisive action to deal with the potential threat.
 

When the threat genuinely is physical – that car that pulls out in front of you without warning, or an unexpected noise in the house you thought was otherwise empty – then that makes good sense. But in the more nuanced situations that we more regularly find ourselves in, this kind of all-or-nothing thinking doesn’t tend to do us any favors. Relationships, tricky work situations and the like demand a more measured response than the immediate quick-fixes that stress evolved to help us deal with.

Unfortunately, when a stressful situation goes on for a long time, so do the changes in our thought patterns. We become more anxious and irritable, more impulsive and less flexible in our thinking. We are harder on ourselves, because – in its original context – stress demands that we have to be: it’s what keeps us safe. Stress forces us to think in terms of do/do not; at risk/safe; pass/fail. If the source of stress is still present, then we self-evidently haven’t succeeded in keeping ourselves out of danger. One consequence is that we become far more prone to depression, as our failures are implicitly emphasized over and over as the source of the stress remains unchecked.

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and other techniques can be useful in overcoming this unhelpful way of thinking, but essentially, it’s worth remembering that stress is often our body’s best – but ultimately inappropriate and unhelpful – attempt to deal with a bad situation.

StressingOut.org, is a website providing self-help resources for stress, depression, anxiety and related conditions.