Is Stress in Your Head or Your Body?
When we feel overwhelmed, anxious, or burned out, we often try to solve the problem by focusing purely on our thoughts: If I just think more positively, I’ll feel better.
While positive thinking is valuable, it often fails to stop chronic stress because stress doesn't just happen in your head, it’s happening in your tissues, your breath, and your nervous system.
The truth is that stress is both a bodily state and a thought process. It operates as a complex, constant feedback loop between your mental perception and your physical reality. Understanding this loop is the first step toward genuine nervous system regulation.
1. The Bodily State: Stress as a Physiological Response
At its core, stress is a powerful, involuntary survival mechanism managed by your Autonomic Nervous System (ANS).
This system has two main branches that act like a car’s accelerator and brake:
The Accelerator: The Sympathetic Nervous System
When your brain perceives any threat, a looming deadline, a difficult client, or a genuinely dangerous situation, it activates the sympathetic branch (the "fight or flight" system).
Hormones: The body instantly floods with cortisol and adrenaline.
Physical Preparation: Your body prepares for immediate, physical action: your heart rate and blood pressure soar, breathing becomes shallow, and blood flow is diverted away from digestion and toward your major muscle groups.
The Result: Muscles tense up, you feel wired or keyed up, and your ability to rest and digest shuts down. In somatic work, this is often where we find our "armour", chronic muscular tension held to prepare for a fight that never comes.
The Brake: The Parasympathetic Nervous System
This is the "rest and digest" system. When the threat passes, this branch is supposed to take over, lowering your heart rate, restoring normal breathing, and allowing your body to recover. In modern chronic stress, this hand-off often fails, leaving us stuck in an activated state.
2. The Thought Process: Stress as Perception
While the physical reaction is involuntary, the decision to activate the stress response starts with a cognitive appraisal, your brain evaluating a situation.
Stress, as a psychological event, is based on two primary perceptions:
A. The Perception of High Demand
The situation requires immense energy, focus, or time (e.g., "I have five deadlines and no help").
B. The Perception of Low Resources
You believe you lack the time, skill, energy, or support to meet that demand (e.g., "I don't think I can handle this").
When the perceived demands outweigh your perceived resources, your brain flags the situation as a threat, triggering the physiological stress cascade. This means you can be safe and sitting still, but if you think you're in danger of failure or overwhelm, your body reacts as if a tiger were in the room.
The Vicious Feedback Loop
The true challenge of chronic stress lies in the mind-body feedback loop:
Thought → Body: A stressful thought (e.g., "I'm not good enough") triggers a release of cortisol.
Body → Thought: The physical sensation of a racing heart and tense chest (the bodily state) sends signals back to the brain, which then interprets these physical signals as more anxiety, leading to more negative thoughts.
This loop keeps the sympathetic nervous system switched on, locking you into a cycle of anxiety, tension, and burnout, which is why talk therapy alone often feels incomplete; it addresses the thought but sometimes misses the physical lock-in.
How to Work with Both Sides of Stress
Real healing requires working with both the cognitive and the somatic side of the equation:
Working with the Body (Somatic Regulation)
This is about intentionally activating the parasympathetic system to show your body it is safe.
Slow, Deep Breathing: The quickest way to signal safety to your brain is through long, slow exhales, overriding the shallow breathing of the fight-or-flight response.
Movement and Shaking: Completing the "action" the body prepared for (shaking, mild exercise) can release stored adrenaline and muscular tension (armour).
Grounding: Feeling the weight of your feet on the floor or the chair beneath you anchors your awareness to the present moment, interrupting the frantic mental loop.
Working with the Mind (Cognitive Reappraisal)
This involves questioning the assumptions that trigger the threat response.
Question Your Resources: Instead of assuming failure, break down the demand and identify your actual resources. This changes the appraisal from "threat" to "challenge."
Boundary Setting: Recognising your limits and learning to say "no" reduces the external demands before they overwhelm your system.
By integrating both somatic and mindset work, you stop treating stress as an abstract feeling and start treating it as a physiological state you have the power to regulate.
