Do you know that your body and brain always remain under external and internal pressure. The pressure affects your body and especially brain in the form of stressors. Sometimes the stressors become persistent and severe that makes your stress toxic and more dangerous. Thus, toxic stress is another name of biological response to the external and internal stressors inside and outside your body.
In other words, toxic stress occurs when you experience prolonged and severe stressed situations without any support. The toxic stress causes many long-term health issues and impacts your mental development negatively. Research has explained a lot about toxic stress including, your body has a specific and systematic pattern to respond to a life event or a perceived threat. Everyone during their life span experiences stress to some extent. There are several techniques to cope with such challenges.
However, when the stress becomes persistent and affects your brain for prolonged time, it becomes toxic. If you don’t find any support during persistent stress situations, it affects your overall well-being and functioning as well. Studies show that children are significantly affected by toxic stress that causes reduction in their ability to develop coping skills during challenging events of life.
What is Toxic Stress?
Humans of all ages and gender experience stress. It’s natural but children are affected severely because they don’t have the ability to cope with it like adults. So whenever you or your loved one goes through a stressful situation, try to provide yourself and them with caregivers, parents, family members and friends to act as a buffer that not only provides support but also arrange a comfort zone. In this way you can reduce the negative impacts of stress on the body and mind.
However, lack of proper care and support in stressful situations can cause the underdevelopment of skills needed to stop your body’s stress response. This usually leads to toxic stress.
Therefore, it is concluded that toxic stress occurs when a person experiences an adverse stressful situation for a prolonged period of time. Adverse childhood experience (ACE) is the example of toxic stress where children in their early age experience highly stressful and traumatic situations.
Children affected by ACE usually go through some hash life events, such as:
- Experienced the death of a dear one like a parent or caregiver.
- Witnessed violence at home.
- Experienced discrimination like racism.
- Experienced physical or emotional neglect.
- Experienced homelessness or poverty.
- Experienced sexual, emotional or physical abuse.
- Witnessed separation or divorce of parents.
- Lived in a household where someone misused substances.
- Lived in a house where someone was experiencing any mental health issue.
What is Healthy Stress?
Stress is a natural and a normal experience around the universe. It is found in both forms i.e. positive and negative. According to some old studies, acute levels of optimal stress are beneficial for you as it not only optimizes your alertness but also promotes your cognitive and behavioral performances to adapt to situations in a better way. Thus, it is beneficial.
When Does Stress Become “Toxic”?
Stress phase occurs when your body responds to harsh situations by releasing neurotransmitters or hormones. These hormones or biochemical secretions from glands cause important physiological changes that are necessary for fight and flight response. Secreted chemicals cause the increase in the blood pressure and heart rate of the person along with the rapid respiration and muscle tension so that they may face the perceived danger. After confrontation of stress, the response to stress deactivates and your body returns back to a relaxed and balanced state.
Role of Stressors in Causing Toxic Stress
Chronic exposure to stress or an overwhelmed body shifting into an ongoing stress response leads to toxic stress. However, your internal alarm to activate the dress response remains activated without switching off the stressors. It continues even after the threat has gone.
How Stress is Related to Your Health?
When you face a stressful situation, the cortisol levels elevate chronically. In addition, the changes in your physique and brain increases the risk of cardiovascular, inflammatory, psychiatric, infectious and metabolic disorders. This means your stress leads to persistent and constant increase in your physical and mental health decline.
Signs of Toxic Stress
There are ,any signs that help you recognize the toxic stress, including:
- Experiencing regular headaches and stomach pain.
- Becoming withdrawn, particularly in young children.
- Experiencing difficulty in sleep.
- Wetting the bed.
- Experiencing nightmares.
- Feeling constantly anxious, on edge or on high alert.
- Engaging in harmful behaviors.
- Having regular tantrums.
- Getting easily agitated.
- Finding it difficult to relax.
Effects of Toxic Stress on Your Health
You can reduce the health risks related to toxic stress by learning how it affects your emotions, physicality and behaviors. It obviously affects your health badly.
According to studies, if a child experiences traumas in the first three years of life, he/she may be more likely to develop health conditions that affect their numerous body functions. Chronic stress can be recognized by multiple symptoms, such as:
- Fatigue.
- Substance abuse.
- Anxiety disorders.
- Headache.
- Depression or sadness.
- Muscle tension.
- Upset stomach.
- Anger or irritability.
- Chronic pain.
- Social withdrawal.
- Restlessness.
- Sleep disturbances.
- Feelings of overwhelm.
- Lack of motivation.
Some chronic conditions caused by consistent stress, include:
- Asthma.
- Cardiovascular disease.
- Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).
- Diabetes.
- Kidney disease.
Obesity or overweight. It also leads to some severe mental health conditions and symptoms like:
- Suicidal ideation or attempts.
- Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
How Toxic Stress Affects Your Brain?
Your nervous system is controlled by your brain. The brain commands your nervous system and appraises the threat level of a specific stressors. It brings many physiological and behavioral changes that occur as response to the stressors. Stress when occurs, it disturbs the functioning of the brain and makes it difficult to cope with the situation.
More dangerous effects of toxic stress to your brain include:
Shrinkage of Brain
Chronic stress causes brain shrinkage. This means the volume of the brain decreases leading to loss of synapses and disturbing brain functions.
Impaired Critical Thinking
The frontal lobe of the brain consists of the prefrontal cortex, which is specialized in suspension of stress. It is a highly ordered region of the brain that cis susceptible to stress exposure.Its cognitive function helps recognize chronic stress that causes architectural changes in prefrontal nerves of the brain. As a result, a person loses certain cognitive abilities.
Impacts on Physical Health and Overall Neuro-biology
Toxic stress negatively impacts your neuro-biology. For example:
Heightened Cortisol Response: It increases the risk of heart disease, high blood pressure,obesity, digestive problems,s and muscle tension.
Impaired Cognitive Abilities: It plays a crucial role in pathophysiology of mental disorders. It causes psychosis, PTSD, anxiety, depressive mood disorder, and behavioral dysregulations.
Maladaptive Changes to Brain Structure: Toxic stress occurs accompanied by certain structural changes in the brain leading to problems like learning impairment and memory loss.
Modified Gene Expressions: It causes disturbance in the patterns of genes off and on mode that leads to a wide range of health conditions.
Poor Coping Skills and Stress Management: It also inhibits your ability to manage challenging life events appropriately.
Unhealthy Lifestyles: Toxic stress causes the occurrence of several unhealthy lifestyles, such as a lazy and fatigued body tends to stay at rest for more time. This contributes to a variety of health issues like heart disease, cancer and depression.
A healthy brain can respond to stress properly which is necessary for your overall well-being. Therefore, maintaining your brain’s health is important.
Impacts of Toxic Stress on Children
Although toxic stress is damaging for all age groups, children are at more risk if they experience it. As a child, the brain experiences different childhood life events including, traumas, enjoyment or stressful situations. But remaining under a stressful situation causes mental and emotional damage.
Adverse Childhood Experiences and Toxic Stress
Some stressful events lead to debilitating long-term mental health effects like impaired coping skills, short-term memory loss or poor learning ability. Proper emotional support from the loved ones can reduce the abnormal stress responses created by toxic stress that may remain hidden for years.
Research found that childhood stress often causes mental illness including violence victimization in future. The adverse childhood experiences are usually recognized as negligence, abuse or inferiority complex.
Common childhood experiences that strongly take part in causing toxic stress include:
- Poor health.
- Ongoing exposure to daily chronic stressors.
- Life adversity in early childhood.
- Insatiable lifestyle due to separation between parents or someone from the family is in prison or disabled.
- Household dysfunction.
- Extreme poverty.
- Caretakers with mental health conditions or substance misuse problems.
- Food scarcity.
- Witnessing violence in the house or community.
- Childhood neglect.
- Childhood abuse.
- Painful divorce between parents.
- Parent’s deaths.
How to Support a Child Who’s Experiencing Toxic Stress?
Early intervention plays a vital role, when a child experiences toxic stress. A certified professional pediatrician can help the parents or caretakers to identify the triggers and effective ways to provide support.
Having an adverse childhood experience needs the artist’s professional advice to be treated carefully. Different ways to support these people include:
- Eat a balanced diet that contains almost all types of nutrients in enough quantity.
- Find space to talk openly about concerns with a parent or guardian.
- Perform physical exercise at least for 30 minutes a day to offset all types of stressors.
- Get enough sleep in a comfortable and calm environment.
- Learn the skill to shut down and relax by engaging yourself in a gentle hobby in leisure time.
All these tips can help you make a child feel safe and cared for. Try to learn about the stress signals related to your child so that you may help them to cope with the stressors and toxic stress.
Top Tips to Relieve Stress
The most effective way to relieve your stress is to pause everything for some time. Yes, whenever you need to get relaxed as a coping response to toxic stress, you should take a moment and leave all activities for sometime. Spending time with yourself without thinking about harsh realities of life can help your body and mind to get relaxed.
Some important strategies that can help you include:
- Practice mindfulness and min-body yoga poses.
- Register your physical body reactions while noticing if your breath constricts.
- Princess your thoughts, feelings and emotions, no matter how painful these are.
- Safeguarding your sleep habits as a sound and uninterrupted sleep schedule helps you regulate your metabolism, memory retention and learning skills. It also helps grow your dendrites in the brain that eventually helps in building strong coordination between your brain and other body organs.
- Incorporate physical activities in the form of light exercise to improve your physical health.
Adding these activities to your daily routine can promote a low-stress life. These activities help your brain to rewire itself back to a healthy state of functioning.
How to Reverse the Effects of Toxic Stress?
The brain is a resilient organ and tries hard to stop the occurrence of neural changes that stress causes. In this fight the brain often gets succeeded and bounces back from stress. Thus it is true that some stress management techniques can help your brain to reverse its impacts:
- Mitigating stressful tasks with other people and asking for help.
- Apply some body scanning techniques.
- Get support from loved ones and friends.
- Maintain healthy relationships.
- Talk therapy with a professional psychiatrist.
- Deep breathing exercises.
These techniques may help you tackle toxic stress in the moment so that you may be able to deal with your stress when it happens in future.
Conclusion
Getting ahead of toxic stress can become easy, if you build healthy and sustainable habits and practices that help you manage dress and reduce its harmful effects.
Whenever you go through stressful situations, you need caregivers who act as a buffer and provide you support and comfort. The techniques may help reduce pressure and negative effects on your mind and body.
In case you don’t receive proper attention or care, you may be struck into toxic stress. Therefore, being felt safe and cared for is important to reverse the effects of toxic stress. Taking some time to learn about the stress signals and triggers may help you understand how you can cope with and let go of stressors.
