One of the most interesting things I have experienced while healing from chronic stress is realizing that stress seems to leave in layers.
When I first got out of the environment that had been causing me so much stress, I felt a huge release almost immediately. There was a sense of calm that I hadn’t experienced before. Some things changed surprisingly fast. I could sit still. I wasn’t nearly as restless. I started realizing that some things I thought were simply parts of my personality actually weren’t.
But that first feeling of relief was only one layer.
Over time, more tension has gradually started to leave. Some things that once bothered me barely bother me anymore. Other things have improved but are still there. And some of the stress responses I developed over many years are taking considerably longer to let go.
I grew up under a lot of stress. What is interesting is that I never really thought of myself as having a stressed personality. I didn’t walk around thinking, “I’m constantly stressed.” A lot of it was simply normal to me because it was what I knew.
Now that my life is calmer, I can see the difference.
I’m learning that getting into a safer and healthier environment doesn’t necessarily mean your mind and body immediately know what to do with it.
I also want to make an important distinction before going any further. Stress itself isn’t always bad. Some stress is normal, healthy and even necessary. It can motivate us, alert us when something is wrong and push us to take action. I’m not talking about everyday stress that comes and goes. I’m talking about chronic stress, when stress becomes ongoing and your mind and body don’t seem to get much opportunity to fully settle.
The First Time Someone Else Saw the Difference
I remember one of the first nights after I moved out. I was sitting on the couch watching a football game and sipping hot tea. There wasn’t anything particularly remarkable about what I was doing. I was just sitting there watching football.
The woman I was living with looked over at me, smiled and said she had never seen me so relaxed and that it was so nice to see.
That has stuck with me.
She had known me for about ten years and had seen me nearly every day during much of that time. She knew what I normally looked like. Apparently, the difference was noticeable enough that she saw it almost immediately.
I felt it too.
There was this sense of joy and peace that was almost foreign to me. Most of the time it felt amazing. But if I’m being truthful, sometimes it was uncomfortable too.
I wasn’t used to that much quiet inside of me.
I think that’s difficult to explain unless you’ve experienced it. We usually think that when stress goes away, relaxation should automatically feel completely natural. For me, it didn’t. Peace felt good, but it also felt unfamiliar. I was learning what it felt like to sit on a couch, drink tea, watch a football game and simply be okay.
Nothing needed to be fixed.
I didn’t need to be doing something.
I didn’t need to be preparing for what might happen next.
I could just sit there.
Looking back, that was probably one of my first glimpses of how much stress I had actually been carrying.
When Everything Seemed to Catch Up With Me
There was another part of those first couple of weeks that I remember clearly.
Initially, I felt incredible relief. Then, about a week and a half after leaving, I became immensely tired and got very sick.
Someone had actually warned me that after getting out of such a stressful environment, I might experience a period where I felt like everything caught up with me.
For so long, I had just kept going.
Then suddenly I didn’t have to keep going in quite the same way.
The exhaustion was especially striking. It made me wonder how tired I had actually been all along and simply hadn’t recognized it.
That experience is another reason I don’t think healing from chronic stress happens in a straight line. My first experience was tremendous relief. Then came exhaustion and illness. After that came more gradual changes that I am still noticing today.
Getting into a healthier environment didn’t instantly erase everything my mind and body had been carrying.
It gave me somewhere safer to begin letting it go.
What Changed When the Stress Started Coming Down
One of the reasons I can recognize the chronic stress more clearly now is because I can look at what has changed as the stress has come down.
I knew when I was upset or anxious, of course, but I didn’t understand how much tension I was carrying every day. So many of these things felt normal to me. I assumed some of them were simply parts of my personality.
Small changes in plans and schedules used to really bother me. After getting out of that environment, that gradually faded. Now changes in plans generally don’t bother me unless I am already under a lot of stress.
I used to be extremely restless and had trouble sitting still. That dropped to almost nothing after leaving. Perfectionism in certain areas has also gone down so much that it is basically a nonissue now.
There were feelings of anxiety, depression, hopelessness, shame and inadequacy. Those have improved substantially too.
One of the biggest changes has been that paranoid or suspicious feeling I used to carry. I would look for things to not be right or feel like something bad was coming even when I couldn’t necessarily identify what it was. That has probably improved by 85 percent. It’s not completely gone, especially when I’m already stressed, but compared to where I was, the difference is huge.
The feeling of constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop has improved tremendously too. I’m not constantly searching my surroundings or situations for evidence that something is about to go wrong. Occasionally those old feelings still show up, but now I’m much more able to recognize them for what they are instead of automatically following them.
Other things are taking longer. I still catch myself holding my breath. I still sometimes feel on edge. I’ve also experienced difficulty concentrating, completing tasks and remembering things.
I’m not listing these things to diagnose myself or suggest that everyone who experiences chronic stress will experience the same things. I’m sharing them because the changes have taught me something.
Some of the things I thought were just who I was weren’t necessarily who I was at all.
As the stress changed, so did I.
Even the Way I Slept Was Affected
Looking back, I believe even the way I slept was affected by the chronic stress and the environment I was living in.
For years, I could go from completely awake to asleep almost immediately. There wasn’t really a period where I gradually got tired. I was awake, and then I was asleep. And when I slept, I slept incredibly hard.
At the time, I thought that was just how I slept.
I don’t think I realized how tired I actually was.
What really made me connect it to my environment was what happened after I got out. That pattern changed.
Now I actually experience getting tired. I can lie down, relax, feel sleepy and gradually fall asleep. Even my sleeping position has become more relaxed over time.
That change has made me believe that the way I used to sleep was another layer of how chronic stress was affecting me. My body wasn’t necessarily telling me, “I’m stressed.” Sometimes it was showing me in ways I didn’t understand until those things started changing.
That’s been one of the strangest parts of healing from chronic stress. I didn’t recognize some of these things as stress responses because they were normal to me. I had lived with them for so long that I thought they were simply part of who I was.
It was only after my environment changed that I started realizing how many of them weren’t.
When Chronic Stress Starts Showing Up Physically
One of the biggest wake-up calls recently came from my dentist.
I have clenched and ground my teeth for years. I’ve dealt with TMJ problems and have even broken a tooth. At a recent appointment, my dentist looked at the amount of grinding and wear on my teeth and told me it was the kind of wear he would expect to see in someone around 60 years old.
I’m 27.
That was honestly kind of sad to hear.
He also showed me changes around my jaw and explained what he was seeing in relation to the forces my jaw has been under.
I’ve also experienced muscle tension and pain through my head, jaw, neck, shoulders and back. There have been headaches and migraines, stomach problems and episodes of chest discomfort.
For me, seeing actual physical wear on my teeth made the long-term effects of chronic stress feel a lot less abstract. I didn’t have control over a lot of the stress I experienced growing up, but now I’m dealing with physical things that developed during those years.
There is also a clinical side to this.
The American Psychological Association explains that the body’s stress response involves multiple systems. Muscles tense as part of that response, and chronic stress can be associated with persistent muscle tension and other physical problems. Stress can also affect the gastrointestinal, cardiovascular and nervous systems.
Research has also found an association between psychological stress and bruxism, which is clenching or grinding the teeth. That doesn’t mean stress is the only possible cause of bruxism or TMJ problems, but it helped me understand that the connection I was seeing between stress and my physical health wasn’t something I was simply imagining.
The Wear and Tear of Chronic Stress
There is a clinical concept that really helped me understand this better: allostatic load.
Our bodies are supposed to respond to challenges. When something requires our attention, the stress response helps prepare us to do something about it.
The problem is when the challenge doesn’t really stop.
Researchers use the term allostatic load to describe the cumulative burden on the body associated with repeated or chronic activation of the systems that help us adapt to stress. In simpler words, there can be wear and tear from having those systems activated again and again for long periods.
That helped something click for me.
If my mind and body had years to practice responding to stress, why would I expect them to completely unlearn those responses in a few months?
Safety Came Before Feeling Completely Safe
This may be one of the biggest things I am learning about recovering from chronic stress.
Sometimes circumstances change before our internal responses do.
I got out of the environment that had been causing me so much stress, and my stress level dropped significantly. But that didn’t mean everything connected to that environment immediately disappeared. For quite a while after leaving, I was still dealing with stressful situations connected to it.
Only fairly recently has much of that settled down.
That’s why I think my stress has been leaving in layers.
That first night on the couch was real. The peace was real. But it wasn’t the end of the process. It was one of the first layers coming off.
There was the immediate relief when I got out. Then there were changes that happened over the following months. Now there are things I am still noticing and working through.
Will I eventually stop grinding my teeth? Will I stop catching myself holding my breath? Will that lingering feeling of being on edge continue fading?
I hope so.
I also know that some things have already changed dramatically.
I don’t react to changes in plans the way I once did. I can sit still. I’m not carrying the same perfectionism. My anxiety has improved. My sleep has changed. Even the position my body naturally takes while sleeping has become more relaxed.
Those things might seem small individually.
Together, they tell me something is changing.
Some Stress Responses Have to Be Retrained
I’m also learning that healing from chronic stress isn’t completely passive.
Some things seem to improve simply through repeatedly experiencing safety.
Day after day passes and the thing I was preparing for doesn’t happen. A plan changes and everything is okay. Something unexpected happens and I can handle it. I make a mistake and the world doesn’t fall apart.
Over time, those experiences start teaching me something different.
Other things require more intentional work.
Sometimes I catch a thought and realize where it is taking me. Instead of automatically following that thought, I try to stop it and replace it with truth, Scripture or prayer.
Sometimes I have to ask myself a very simple question:
Is something actually wrong right now, or am I preparing for something to be wrong?
That has been an important distinction for me.
Sometimes the stress seems almost subconscious. I can know logically that everything is okay and still catch myself holding my breath, clenching my jaw or feeling on edge.
That’s when I have to remind myself that knowing I’m safe and learning to live like I’m safe aren’t necessarily the same thing.
What God Is Teaching Me About Peace
Philippians 4:6–7 tells us to bring our concerns to God through prayer, petition and thanksgiving, and then speaks about the peace of God guarding our hearts and minds.
I have started looking at that differently.
I don’t think peace means I should never experience stress. I don’t think having anxiety or feeling tension means I’m failing spiritually.
For me, part of learning peace has been recognizing what is happening inside me and learning where to take it.
Sometimes my body seems to react before I even consciously know what I’m stressed about. That’s why I’m trying to become more mindful of what is happening instead of simply telling myself, “There’s nothing to be stressed about.”
Because sometimes there isn’t anything obvious to be stressed about.
That doesn’t necessarily mean every part of me has caught up yet.
Galatians 5:22–23 describes peace as part of the fruit of the Spirit. I’m beginning to understand that peace differently too. I’m not trying to force myself to feel peaceful. I’m learning to walk with God while peace gradually becomes more natural.
Sometimes that means prayer.
Sometimes it means replacing an old thought with truth.
Sometimes it means realizing I don’t have to solve something.
And sometimes it means simply sitting in a peaceful moment without looking for what might ruin it.
The Goal Isn’t a Stress-Free Life
Nobody gets a stress-free life. I don’t think that should even be the goal.
There are responsibilities, deadlines, relationships, unexpected changes, losses and ordinary difficult days. Stress can motivate us. It can warn us. It can push us to address something that needs attention or finally take action.
That’s very different from believing we should simply accept chronic stress as a normal way to live.
Part of healing from chronic stress for me is learning the difference between stress that belongs to the life I’m living today and stress responses that developed because of the life I lived before.
I’m still figuring that out.
The goal isn’t to never feel stressed again. For me, the goal is learning how to recognize stress, respond to it in healthier ways and remove unnecessary stress where I actually have the ability to do so.
Removing the Stress I Can Control
Part of my healing now is looking at what stressors are actually present in my life today.
No one can control everything that happens. But I have more control over my life now than I did when I was growing up.
Maybe something needs to come off my schedule. Maybe I need to step away from an engagement or responsibility. Maybe a relationship needs different boundaries, or maybe I need to step away. Maybe I haven’t managed my time very well. Maybe I need more sleep. Maybe I simply need to stop for a while.
Sometimes I need prayer.
Sometimes I need to challenge my thinking.
Sometimes I need rest.
Sometimes I need to say no.
And sometimes professional help may be appropriate.
I’m learning that still healing from this, and still carrying some of the stress, isn’t a weakness or a failure. It’s part of healing. It’s part of the process.
Healing From Chronic Stress Takes Time
I think this is where I am right now.
I’m trying to identify the stressors that are still present in my life while also recognizing that some of what I’m experiencing may be patterns developed over many years that haven’t completely settled yet.
And I’m trying not to become impatient with myself about that.
I didn’t get to choose my environment as a child. I didn’t have control over many of the situations, emotions and stressors I experienced growing up.
But I have choices now.
I can pay attention to what is happening in my mind and body. I can challenge thoughts that aren’t true. I can pray. I can rest. I can change things that are within my control. I can ask for help when I need it.
And I can give myself time.
I am safe.
I don’t have to spend every peaceful moment looking for what might ruin it.
I don’t have to constantly wait for the other shoe to drop.
I don’t have to hold my breath.
And I don’t have to become completely relaxed overnight to prove that I am healing.
My life got calmer before I did.
Maybe that’s okay.
I’m a work in progress. I’m learning how to manage and alleviate stress instead of simply living inside of it. Some layers came off quickly. Others are taking longer.
I spent a lot of years learning how to survive stress.
I’m going to give myself the time and space to learn peace.