Chronic Stress and the Body: How It Gets Stuck, and How the Body Leads Us Back
Many people know that stress is unhealthy. But what does it actually mean when stress takes hold in the body? When it goes beyond a racing mind or a tense feeling. What if your body can no longer relax, even though you want it to?
Stress Dysregulates
Stress is not a new phenomenon. What has changed is that for more and more people, it is shifting from a short-term response to a constant state of alertness. A state so familiar that we only recognize it when the body begins to protest.
Long-term stress that comes with feelings of unsafety, helplessness, or exhaustion. Even without an acute traumatic event it can cause a similar physiological dysregulation. It disrupts sleep, appetite, mood, and self-care.
As psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk writes:
“The entire organism is thrown into disequilibrium.”
That dysregulation—that loss of internal balance—is initially protective. Acute stress mobilizes energy to respond. But what if the situation you are in doesn’t allow for an acute response? If the threat is abstract, yet ongoing? Like the email you open late at night. The look from your manager. The unspoken expectation. The staff shortages. The “temporary” tasks that became permanent. The responsibilities. The worries that don’t let go. And meanwhile, the connection with yourself and others becomes thinner.
How Stress Builds Up
As early as 1936, Hans Selye described how the body responds to long-term strain. His General Adaptation Syndrome describes three stages:
Neurophysiologist Stephen Porges built on this with the Polyvagal Theory. His model shows how the autonomic nervous system constantly scans for safety, and switches between connection, fight/flight, or freeze.
It shows us that when we feel safe, we can connect, attune, and restore. But as soon as our system detects danger—whether it’s a look, a full inbox, or an ethical dilemma—the physical response follows: tension in the shoulders, headaches, a feeling of nausea. People with chronic stress often get stuck in a survival state, even when the real danger has long passed.
As one client recently said: “I want to relax, but I honestly don’t know how anymore.”
What Chronic Stress Does to the Body
Long-term dysregulation leaves its mark:
What we often see in practice is that people try to suppress stress with behaviors that ultimately trigger more stress and undermine their health further. Comfort eating. Smoking to unwind. Wine to force the shift from work to rest. The body becomes increasingly dysregulated, until stress is no longer a mental state but a physical one. That shoulder tension that won’t go away. Gaining or losing weight. More sick days. Or worse.
What Healthcare Often Overlooks
Still, stress is rarely recognized as a primary cause. It gets reduced to a side issue, to “something everyone deals with,” or worse: to a personal failure. This creates a blind spot—in healthcare, in policy, and in ourselves.
As physician and author Gabor Maté writes:
“One of the most persistent and calamitous failures handicapping our health system is an ignorance—in the sense either of not knowing or actual active ignoring—of what science has already established. …people cannot be dissected into separate organs and systems, not even into ‘minds’ and ‘bodies.’”
Despite growing evidence for the interconnection between body and mind, an integrated approach is still often missing. Prevention doesn’t start with pills but with regulation. And regulation begins with awareness.
In many care systems, the body-mind connection remains underexposed—even for the professionals working in it, who are increasingly overwhelmed and have less and less time to recover. As a result, real help often arrives only when physical damage is already visible, while prevention could have been simpler, sooner, and more cost-effective.
Learning to Regulate Starts with Feeling
There are simple, proven ways to strengthen your stress regulation and reduce chronic stress. One of the most effective and accessible practices is the body scan.
The body scan is a systematic way of bringing attention to your body—from toes to crown—without judgment. You simply observe what you feel. And it is precisely that gentle, non-reactive attention that has been shown to interrupt stress patterns. Research shows the body scan can support lasting changes in brain networks involved in stress and anxiety regulation.
Especially for beginners, the body scan is a powerful tool. It doesn’t require experience or perfect focus—only the willingness to pause and tune into yourself.
Want to get started? Find the Body Scan exercise here.
“We have the ability to regulate our own physiology …through such basic activities as breathing, moving, and touching.”
– Bessel van der Kolk
Psychophysical Guidance as Prevention
At Breathe Move Touch, I offer psychophysical guidance: a combination of body-oriented techniques and psychosocial methodology. Grounded in a strong scientific foundation and years of practical experience with complex cases.
What I’ve seen over the years is that much suffering could be alleviated—or prevented—through relatively simple support such as stress regulation. But our system isn’t (yet) built for that.
If you’re looking for support that includes:
Feel free to reach out for an initial phone consultation.
Bibliography
De Mönnink, H. (2009). De gereedschapskist van de maatschappelijk werker: Cliëntgericht multimethodisch maatschappelijk werk (Derde, herziene druk). Elsevier
Giroux, C., Ahlers, D., & Miawotoe, A. (2023, October). Polyvagal approaches: Scientifically questionable but useful in practice. Journal of Psychiatry Reform, 10(11). Retrieved from https://journalofpsychiatryreform.com/polyvagal-approaches-scientifically-questionable-but-useful-in-practice/
Jackson, M. (2014). Evaluating the role of Hans Selye in the modern history of stress. In D. Cantor & E. Ramsden (Eds.), Stress, shock, and adaptation in the twentieth century. University of Rochester Press. NCBI Bookshelf. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK349158/
Lieberman, D. (2021). Exercised, The Science of Physical Activity, Rest and Health. Penquin Random House UK.
Maté, G., & Maté, D. (2022). The myth of normal: Trauma, illness and healing in a toxic culture. New York, NY: Avery.
McEwen, B. S. (2007). Physiology and neurobiology of stress and adaptation: Central role of the brain. Physiological Reviews, 87(3), 873–904. https://doi.org/10.1152/physrev.00041.2006
Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company.
Sapolsky, R. M. (2017). Behave: The biology of humans at our best and worst. New York, NY: Penguin Press.
Schmidt, H. H. H. W. (2022). The end of medicine as we know it – And why your health has a future. Springer, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95293-8
Van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. New York, NY: Viking.
Wildschut, M. (2017). Psychologie van gedrag in organisaties. Boom.
