Stress is hard to avoid. Here are 3 ways to reduce its negative effects. | Expert Opinion

“Everything around me is in flames. It’s just stress and more stress, and nothing I do seems to make a difference,” a patient told me. “I feel I’m on a hamster wheel. I run and run, but I can never get anywhere. So, I run faster. There’s no point to it, but I don’t know what else there is to do.”

Stress is hard to avoid. We find ourselves facing constant deadlines and never-ending demands at work and home — which push us to be hyperalert — and feeling that we are stuck in a situation that will never improve. Worse yet, we worry that if we stop swimming, we’ll sink. To complicate things more, we are bombarded by troubling information about the world, feeding into our insecurities and anxieties and making it harder to relax our minds.

Stress can affect us on multiple levels — physically and mentally — particularly if it becomes the norm for long periods of time. But we can take some steps to ease stress in our lives and feel better.

Biologically, strain and adversity can lead to excessive stress hormone release, potentially resulting in increased inflammatory markers in the blood. This suggests that the body is in reaction mode, attuned to something in the environment that is potentially problematic and requiring heightened attention. Stress can affect health measures, increasing chronic illness risk and cellular markers of accelerated aging.

Stress affects the brain as well. One of our main stress hormones, cortisol, binds to the emotional response areas of the brain (such as the amygdala) and keeps them on overdrive. The need to be constantly worried and on alert can lead to an increase in excitatory receptors in the emotional brain neurons — a genetic and molecular adaptation that maintains the level of stress felt necessary to match the environment’s demands.

Heightened brain preparedness can begin early on — for instance, when there is significant adversity in childhood, overactivation of the amygdala puts pressure on other brain areas to develop faster to increase awareness of one’s surroundings and try to dampen emotional arousal. The typical “infantile amnesia” period (roughly the first three years of life, when lasting conscious memory registration is minimal, given brain immaturity) can get shortened, as the environment is pushing us to pay attention and encode memories sooner, since our survival may be threatened.

When we are stressed, it naturally affects how we think and behave. Challenging life events can shape our beliefs and cognitions so that we expect more of the same, leading us to feel discouraged and further on edge.

This negativity bias can cause us to read into things and interpret them through a pessimistic lens. Individuals with a history of traumatic stress, for instance, may be overly vigilant about their surroundings — which increases the chance of overestimating the potential threat posed by a person or situation, given how strongly harm is expected. In such circumstances, even neutral stimuli can be interpreted as negative or dangerous, leaving the individual in a place where it takes a lot for something to feel safe, with little room for grayness.

When emotions drive thinking, it can be easy to get stuck in negative ruminations, especially if we remain engaged with the things feeding our stress. An example of this is doom-scrolling — a persistent consumption of negative news. Continued exposure to such information can fuel anxiety, fear, discouragement, mistrust, and the entrenched belief the world is fundamentally damaged or dangerous.

Stress can also dampen our response to pleasurable and rewarding things, making it challenging to find any enjoyment or fulfillment. This feeds into a vicious cycle of pessimism, heightened tension, worry, and an inability to reframe distressing thoughts.

However, stress can be mitigated with some steps.

As described by my patient, stress can make us feel like the only option is to run faster, that there is no other way. Yet, nothing changes, and problems just seem to re-create themselves.

Engaging in lifestyle-oriented activities such as exercising, nurturing healthy relationships, meditating, or even slowing our minds with controlled breathing can break up this constant noise of our stressed minds, allowing some space to consider a different way of being.

As my patient suggested, we can easily find ourselves trapped in a stressed place from which no escape seems possible. While external pressures can contribute to this, it is often the case that we make choices that keep us stuck. We tend to select environments and interactions that reinforce particular ways of being, conditioning our routines to maintain heightened stress.

This can be driven by factors stemming from childhood, such as unreasonable expectations we have internalized or being told by significant figures in our lives that the world is a broken place, shaping a pessimistic outlook and an inability to feel settled.

We can ask ourselves, “Does life need to be this way?” If so, “Why?” Many of us view seeking balance as a failure, and easing up as quitting. My patient struggled with this, as he had internalized a very demanding and unforgiving template from early life, requiring sacrifice and a work ethic that was impossible to satisfy.

Processing these dimensions (for instance, in therapy) can deepen our understanding of their origins and help find ways to make more flexible choices.

For people who have trouble decreasing media consumption, purposefully creating exposure to positive information can help balance the negative slant we are commonly exposed to.

Learning of acts of goodness, for instance through “kindness-scrolling,” can help counteract adverse mood effects resulting from negative news exposure. There are some online news outlets that selectively report positive, uplifting events.

It is not about overcorrecting in the opposite direction or ignoring what is happening around us, but rather balancing distressing content with equally relevant positivity. Good things do also happen in this world.

Christopher W.T. Miller, MD, is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst practicing at the University of Maryland Medical Center and an associate professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. He is the author of “The Object Relations Lens: A Psychodynamic Framework for the Beginning Therapist.”