Most people who come to see us don’t say “I’m stressed.” They say they can’t sleep, or they snapped at their kid over nothing, or they sat in the car in the driveway for ten minutes because they couldn’t face going in. Stress rarely announces itself by name. It shows up as the things it gets in the way of: sleep, patience, the energy to walk through your own front door.
About one in five Canadians say most days are quite or extremely stressful (Statistics Canada), so if that’s you, you’re far from alone. What follows is a plain-language look at what stress is doing in the brain and body, why it makes you less like yourself, and what it actually means to get on top of it. None of it is a substitute for working through what’s underneath. But understanding the mechanism takes a lot of the shame out of it, and that’s a reasonable place to start.
Vista Counselling provides individual counselling in person at our Langley, BC office and online across BC.
Stress is a response, not a character flaw
When something registers as a threat (a conflict, a deadline, a memory, a phone that hasn’t rung), your brain sets off a cascade that ends in adrenaline and cortisol being released into your system. Heart rate climbs, muscles tighten, breathing quickens, digestion slows. Attention narrows onto whatever the problem is. This is the body’s short-term survival kit, and it is very good at its job. If a car pulls out in front of you, this is what gets your foot onto the brake.
The trouble is that the system was built for short bursts, with recovery in between. The same hormones that are protective in the moment become damaging when they’re switched on for weeks and months, which is why chronic stress is linked to problems with sleep, memory, immunity and mood (McEwen, 1998). The physiologist Bruce McEwen called this allostatic load: the wear and tear that builds up when the stress response keeps running without enough chances to come down.
That’s worth sitting with, because a lot of people treat their stress symptoms as evidence that something is wrong with them. Mostly, they’re evidence that a system doing exactly what it was designed to do has been asked to do it for too long.
Why you can’t think straight when it’s bad
If you’ve ever gone blank in an argument, or read the same email four times without taking it in, you’ve felt this directly.
The prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain behind your forehead that handles planning, perspective-taking, and holding your reactions in check, is unusually sensitive to stress chemistry. Even moderate levels of the stress hormones weaken its ability to do its job, while the same chemistry strengthens the amygdala, the brain’s threat-detector, and the fast, habitual reactions it drives. In effect, control shifts from the part of you that can think things through to the part of you that reacts (Arnsten, 2009).
This explains something people find baffling about themselves: you can know perfectly well that the thing you’re worried about isn’t a catastrophe and still feel like it is, or know exactly how you want to handle a conversation and then watch yourself handle it badly. That isn’t a lack of insight or willpower. It’s what a stressed brain does with insight and willpower. It makes them harder to reach, right when you need them most.
Revved up, or shut down
Stress doesn’t look the same on everyone, and it doesn’t even look the same on the same person from one week to the next.
For some people, and at some times, it goes up: racing thoughts, irritability, a startle at small noises, trouble falling asleep, a sense of being braced for something. For others it goes down: flatness, exhaustion, brain fog, pulling away from people, a feeling of being behind glass. Plenty of people cycle between the two: wired all week, then unable to get off the couch on Saturday.
Clinicians sometimes describe the range in between, where you can feel what you feel and still function, as a window of tolerance. It’s a useful picture, as long as you don’t treat it as a fixed size. The window narrows after a bad night, a hard shift, or a long stretch without a break, and it widens again with rest, with recovery, and with practice. A lot of what counselling does, over time, is widen it.
Why some people react harder than others
If your reactions seem bigger than the situation calls for, or bigger than other people’s, there are usually reasons.
The stress system is shaped by experience, and it is shaped most during the periods when the brain is still developing. Adversity early in life, and prolonged stress at any age, can leave the system quicker to fire and slower to settle (Lupien et al., 2009). That’s not damage in any simple sense. It’s a system that learned, accurately, that the world wasn’t always safe, and set its alarm accordingly. The problem is that the alarm doesn’t recalibrate on its own just because circumstances have changed. It can recalibrate, though. The same capacity for change that let the system learn to be on guard is what lets it learn something different later. The researchers who did the most to describe stress damage were also clear that recovery stays possible throughout life (McEwen & Akil, 2020), and that a stress system shaped by early adversity is a starting point, not a fixed outcome (Lupien et al., 2018).
The same is true of load in the present. Years of shift work, caregiving, a job where the bad calls come without warning, a relationship that’s been hard for a long time: any of these keep the system running without the recovery it needs. This is why we see so much of this pattern in first responders, and why what looks like burnout is often a stress system that has simply run out of reserve.
What “regulation” actually means
Regulation doesn’t mean being calm all the time. Nobody is, and a person who never had a stress response would not last long. Regulation means being able to come back: to get activated when something matters and then return to baseline afterwards, rather than staying stuck in either gear.
Some of what helps is straightforward and well supported. Slowing your breathing to around six breaths a minute, with a longer exhale than inhale, produces measurable shifts toward the body’s rest-and-recover state and lowers reported anxiety and tension (Zaccaro et al., 2018). A more recent pooling of randomised trials found a small-to-moderate reduction in stress from breathing practices, with the authors careful to note that the studies so far are uneven in quality (Fincham et al., 2023), which is about the right level of confidence: it helps, and on its own it isn’t always enough. Movement helps, and so does sleep, though telling a stressed person to sleep more is rarely useful advice on its own. Being with someone who is steady helps a great deal. We wrote about why in Why Talking Helps.
You may have read that regulation has to happen in a fixed order: body first, then feelings, then thinking. In practice it isn’t that tidy. Sometimes a slow breath is what makes room for a thought; sometimes putting words to what’s happening is what lets your shoulders drop; sometimes it’s a walk, or a conversation, or finally saying no to something. Psychological and physical are not two separate systems taking turns. What matters is having more than one way in, and knowing which ones work for you.
When it’s more than stress
Everyday stress responds to everyday measures: rest, movement, saying no, talking to someone. If you’ve been doing those and you’re still not coming back, that usually points to something the stress is sitting on top of. That might look like exhaustion that doesn’t lift after a holiday, feeling braced all the time, or reacting to the present with the full force of something from the past. Often that’s anxiety, sometimes depression, and quite often it’s unprocessed trauma that the stress system is still responding to.
That’s the work we do. Rather than trying to manage the stress response from the outside, we work with what’s driving it, using approaches like EMDR, IFS and AEDP, matched to you rather than the other way around. Some people also choose to add NeurOptimal neurofeedback alongside counselling. Kevin has offered it since 2009, and many clients find it helps them come down after long stretches of stress, which gives the rest of the work more room.
If you’ve recognised yourself in any of this, you don’t need to have it figured out before you get in touch. You can book a first appointment online, or reach out with questions first.