Stress Management: Should I Go It Alone or See a Therapist?

Stress is your body’s internal reaction to external pressure. It’s the biological response that motivates you to deal with a problem or threat in your environment. It’s what pushes you to take action.

All humans and all other animals experience it—without it, we couldn’t survive. The stress response is what activates our “fight or flight” mode and helps us get away from danger. It primes us to move—either out of the way or into a confrontation.

When stress functions normally, it’s adaptive. You experience it for as long as you’re under threat, then return to a calm state when the threat has passed.

Unfortunately, modern life has pushed us into a maladaptive pattern where the body’s stress response system never completely turns off. This is because we’ve built stress into our everyday activities and environments. Noisy cities, high-intensity jobs, challenging social situations, the constant barrage of upsetting information we are always receiving, and other stressors keep us on “high alert” at all times.

In and of itself, stress isn’t a bad thing. It’s natural, healthy, and helps us survive. In the right amounts, it can even enhance well-being and drive personal growth. But when it’s severe, extreme, or constant, stress can cause a lot of harm.

Not all stress is bad stress. Eustress, or positive stress, is what you experience when you do something that’s challenging but enjoyable.

Eustress generates energy, keeps you engaged with life, and motivates you. It’s just enough to make you feel focused and buzzy with energy without making you feel anxious or unwell. Regular doses of it can help you grow into a more confident, capable person.

But getting too much of what might otherwise be good stress can eventually wear you down.

When stress overwhelms your capacity to cope, it becomes negative stress, or distress, which has the opposite effect of eustress.

Distress interferes with your ability to act. Chronic distress can become part of a negative cycle in which you struggle, experience a setback, then feel more stressed out and less able to function the next time. This kind of long-term, unresolved stress can have many negative effects on your life, impacting your work, health, and relationships.

There are three categories of stress that are based on how long the stress lasts. They are:

• Acute stress
• Episodic stress
• Chronic stress

Acute stress is a single episode of stress. It’s caused by specific circumstances that don’t last long. It can be positive or negative. For example, you might experience an episode of acute eustress when you ride a roller coaster and an episode of acute distress when you get into a fender bender.

Episodic stress refers to recurring episodes of acute stress. When you experience episodic stress, there are breaks in between episodes that give you a chance to recover. Whether you actually do depends on the type and severity of the stress (and how you were already doing before you experienced it).

Episodic stress can also be positive or negative. Episodic eustress may come from an experience or lifestyle you choose, while episodic distress can come from a run of bad luck, the consequences of a single powerful event, or an issue in your life you need to address.

Chronic stress is constant, ongoing stress that never really goes away. While episodic stress is like a series of single notes in a short, stressful melody, chronic stress is like a constant, droning hum.

Chronic stress is always negative because it never gives you the necessary breaks to recover from it. Toxic jobs, dysfunctional relationships, and a life packed with too many demands and not enough rest can all cause chronic stress. The relentlessness of chronic stress can lead to insidious health effects if it is not addressed.

Trauma is an extremely severe type of stress that has its own unique effects. We’ve written a special, in-depth article about trauma and trauma recovery that you can read here.

The effects of stress depend on the type of stress you’re experiencing and how severe it is. The effects of eustress or mild-to-moderate acute or episodic stress are short-term and usually not a significant concern. They can even be beneficial.

Short-term activation of the body’s stress response can help you condition your body and mind. Stress is at least partly to thank for the positive effects of exercise. Mentally, it helps you push past anxiety and internal resistance to get things done that improve your life.

In the process of getting through a stressful experience, you may learn something about yourself that boosts your self-esteem. You may walk away knowing how to do something you couldn’t do before and feeling a greater sense of mastery over your life.

But when you’re unable to resolve a problem, distress can set in, dampening your mood and health. If the problem persists over a long period of time, it can cause a pattern of chronic stress.

We’re wired to handle short bursts of stress, but over time, unresolved, chronic stress wears down the body and mind.

Among other psychological effects, chronic stress can hinder learning and lead to poor decision-making. It can cause anxiety and depression, worsen any existing mental health conditions, and trigger the onset of psychotic and manic episodes.

One of the first things you should do if you’re stressed out is see if you can do something about what’s causing you stress.

Sometimes even negative stress can be positive when it alerts you to an important change you need to make in your life. It might be time to get a different job, start saying “no” to new commitments, or tell your family you need more time for yourself each week to exercise, read, or meditate. Or it may simply be time to get that errand done you’re stressing out about!

You can’t always resolve the issues that are causing you stress, though. Some stressors are easier to address than others, and your personal actions can’t resolve the larger, collective sources of stress that affect us all. Toxic politics, contentious social issues, economic problems, and environmental disasters are just a few of the major issues that increase almost everyone’s stress level.

While you might not be able to solve all the world’s problems, when you’re stressed out about issues in your neighborhood, the country, or the world, there are things you can do.

Doing something to make a difference on any level, such as advocating, volunteering, caring for a neighbor, or donating to charity, can increase your sense of efficacy and help you feel better. (It does contribute toward solving the bigger issues in the world, too.)

Of course, this won’t fully resolve the stress you feel over these issues, but it does help. Something else you can do to lower your stress level is to build stress-reducing activities into your daily life.

Practicing self-care is an important part of coping with stress. Self-care includes any activities that naturally reduce your stress level, help you physically and mentally recover from overexertion, and increase your overall feelings of well-being.

Building restful and restorative activities into your day helps you release any stress you’re already experiencing. It also helps you develop resilience and increase your stress tolerance.

The most important thing is to make sure that your self-care regimen doesn’t become another source of obligation and something you dread and avoid. It’s important that you pick what actually works for you and not what you think you “should” be doing.

For example, cardiovascular exercise can be one of the best ways to bust stress, but it can also become a source of guilt and dread when your life is too busy, when chronic health problems put it out of reach, or when it’s simply not something you enjoy.

The key is giving yourself permission to do the things you actually enjoy and that help you relax, and to have the discernment to recognize when something you think is relaxing actually isn’t.

It’s also important to understand that self-care isn’t always enough. Sometimes there’s just too much stress to manage on your own, and sometimes the sources of stress are too deeply rooted, insidious, or intense to offload with a round of exercise or a night of reading.

When stress is overwhelming you, the best thing you can do is lean on your support network. Ask for help with stressful tasks and seek emotional support when you’re adjusting to major life changes.

Just being heard and cared for by a friend can go a long way toward helping you deal with stress. We’re not meant to go through life’s most difficult experiences alone.

As human beings, we’re wired for connection, and the simple act of connecting to someone—even when they don’t have great advice and can’t do much to fix the problem that’s stressing you out—lowers stress.

If you’re at a point in your life where your social support network is limited or unreliable, there are still ways you can reach out and get the help you need. You can look for free support groups, reach out to a spiritual community, call a mental health crisis line or warmline, or start seeing a therapist.

Seeing a therapist can make a huge difference when you’re going through a stressful period in your life. For one thing, a therapist can provide support in ways that your loved ones can’t.

Even the most well-meaning friends and family members can sometimes make things worse when they don’t respond well to what you tell them. They might be overwhelmed by what you’re going through and shut down, turn the focus back on themselves, or give you really pushy advice based on their personal politics or biases. They might insist that the “answer” is much simpler than it really is.

A therapist (well, at least a good therapist) doesn’t do any of that. Therapists are trained to set their personal biases aside. Their job is to listen closely, keep the focus on you, and provide feedback that guides you to your own answers. If a good therapist does offer an occasional bit of advice, it’s usually gentle and comes from a place of empathy rather than judgment and ego.

By providing a neutral perspective and a safe space to vent where you don’t have to hold anything back, a therapist can help you process emotion and gain insight into your situation.

They can help you dig into deep issues that are causing or exacerbating stress and help you figure out what you need to do to address them. They can teach you techniques that will help you resolve these stressful problems and ways to cope with stress you can’t resolve right away (if at all).

Therapy can help you build the confidence you need to set boundaries and say “no” when you need to. It can help you understand what you do and don’t want to do so you can make career and relationship choices that are more supportive and less draining.

Whatever you’re dealing with—and no matter how your support network is otherwise—with a therapist, you don’t have to go through stressful times alone.

Stress is a normal part of life, but no matter what “rise and grind” culture says, it’s not normal—or healthy—to be stressed out all the time.

Chronic stress is bad for your physical as well as your mental health. Over time, it can make you really sick—it can even contribute to health conditions that can kill you. While we all sometimes have to push to get through a challenge, ignoring your body’s need for rest and recovery on a regular basis can become a dangerous form of self-abuse.

The key to a healthy relationship with stress is making sure you take the time to recover after a stressful event. Self-care takes different forms for different people—whatever it looks like for you, the important part is that you can do it regularly.

Reaching out to community and loved ones is important, too. Connection helps you heal and recover, and not everything that causes you stress is a problem you can solve on your own. Other people can give you practical help when you need it, but the moral and emotional support they provide is just as important.

That said, friends and family can’t always provide the kind of support you need, and there are times in life when your support system isn’t as strong as you’d like it to be. When either is the case, consider seeing a therapist. Not only can a therapist provide emotional support, they can also help you address all of the different areas in your life that are causing you stress.

So, if you’re going through a stressful time and need support, reach out—the help you need may be only a call or click away.