Understanding Stress

The body’s stress response is experienced in five phases:

Five Phases of the Stress Response

	Brain detects potential threat
	Brain unconsciously assesses ability to respond
	Brain narrows focus and prepares body to engage
	Body proceeds with fight, flight, freeze, or fawn
	Brain perceives threat as gone and returns to normal function

Stress causes a biological response. When your brain perceives that something in your environment is a threat it engages the amygdala, the part of your brain that responds to stress. Your amygdala then sends signals to rapidly increase glucose level, heart rate and blood flow.

This jolt in the system can be used to respond with fight (take on the threat), flight (run away from the threat), freeze (wait for threat to remove itself) or fawn (align with threat to ensure personal safety). Once the threat is gone, your body can rest and return to normal functions, giving you access back to your prefrontal cortex, the critical thinking part of the brain. 

Why do we need stress? 

The stress response has helped humans survive threats for generations. It gives our bodies what they need to react to intense situations, whether it is swerving to avoid a car accident or meeting an important deadline.

How does stress create problems? 

Problems start when we are constantly experiencing stress and never return to normal levels of functioning. With many overlapping stressors – like financial challenges, balancing work and caregiving, experiencing racism or bigotry, driving in dangerous conditions, etc. – we may never feel free from stress. 

Another complicating factor is that we are not all stressed by the same things. What triggers your stress response depends on who you are, your life experiences, and how your brain reacts without your awareness. This is influenced by past traumas and Adverse Childhood Experiences, which shape our adult lives in ways that sometimes fly under our radars. When our brain associates an event or object with past trauma, it triggers the stress response to make sure we survive the threat again. This is helpful when you’re running from a bear, but less so when you yell at a co-worker humming a song with bad associations from your childhood.