5 Steps to Deal With Chronic Stress During COVID (and Beyond)

Image courtesy of Ben White via Unsplash.

Our bodies are built to handle immediate and short-lived challenges. What tends to wear us down are the long-lasting challenges. And the most insidious ones are the long-lasting, low-grade challenges—their effects are almost never immediate, but build up over time. 

Dealing with the ongoing stressors of a global pandemic is a textbook illustration of this kind of long-term, ongoing challenge. It’s a near-perfect example of chronic stress, with daily tasks being just a little bit harder, and daily events being laced with fear and caution.

But what exactly is chronic stress—and why does it matter? Let’s define it, and help you figure out how to best deal with it, now and beyond COVID-19.  

What Is Chronic Stress?

There is no hard and fast rule for what separates acute (or short-term) stress from chronic (or long-term) stress. In general, acute (originally meaning sharp or severe) stress has a sudden onset, with most of the effects dissipating within 3 months (think falling and breaking a bone). Chronic stress tends (but doesn’t have) to have a gradual onset, with the effects lasting months, years, or a whole lifetime if you don’t interrupt the patterns causing those effects.

COVID-19 impacts fall right into the chronic stress category. While the repeated, daily fears of getting sick or of triggering someone else’s fear and being reported for not following distancing or masking rules are certainly triggers themselves, it’s deeper than that.

The real sticky bit is the persistence and duration of the message of stress and fear. The virus is constantly covered on every news station, shows up on every social media platform, and casts a shadow over every in-person interaction we’ve had for the last six months. Every one of our senses is repeatedly being reminded of fear: We SEE the masks on others’ faces, and the signs of fear when someone gets too close or coughs in public. We FEEL masks on our own faces. We HEAR reports about the dangers of the virus via TV, our phones, and the radio.  

Fear is an insidious stressor.

On top of that, your body is smart. It will always get more efficient at the things it does repeatedly. The more often you perceive pain, the more efficient your pain receptors will become. The more often you perceive fear, the more efficient your body will be at running the fear pattern, and the more it will default to that response. The more often you throw your arms up in the air for a victory pose, the more efficient your brain and body will become at feeling like a badass (seriously—power posing has been studied).

The Impact of Chronic Stress

When faced with a challenging stimulus, your body has many neuro-chemical options for how to gear you up to deal with it. It can use cortisol, testosterone, dopamine, adrenaline, noradrenaline (and more). And, it won’t just use one. It’ll mix up a chemical cocktail unique to you, your current situation, and your experiences and genetics—and your personality, neuro-chemical makeup, past experiences, scars (both physical and mental), sensitivities, and resiliencies.

This unique cocktail of chemicals is designed to work short-term to promote life-saving actions.  They result in increases in fat and sugar in the blood; increased heart rate, blood pressure, and breathing rate; suppression of necessary but non-urgent body functions like healing and digestion; and increased tone in soft tissues.

In the long-term, these changes aren’t so beneficial. They can lead to diabetes, high cholesterol, hypertension, heart disease, irritable bowels, brittle tendons and bones, and an inability to heal from injuries.

What Are Your Chronic Stress Symptoms?

It’s well-documented that two people can experience the exact same event at the exact same time and retain two entirely different memories of the event. That difference results not from the stimulus (the event), but from the way your body responds to it. 

Translation? Your stress response is more unique to you than your fingerprint: Your fingerprints rarely change, but your stress response changes some every day.

You can usually look back and connect the dots to see how you reacted, but forecasting how your body will handle stress is tricky. Where one person experiences a migraine, a second person might get stomach pain and diarrhea. A third person will respond to that same stress with a flare up of shoulder pain, and a fourth will have no outward stress symptoms at all—until they have a heart attack at age 40.

5 Steps to Deal With Chronic Stress

The most important tactic to tackle chronic stress is to disrupt the pattern. Ongoing stress always has a repeated pattern that leads to your unique response. Sometimes it’s obvious and sometimes it’s not (and it’s almost always ways easier to see the dysfunctional patterns in other people than it is to spot them in yourself).

Disrupting the pattern will interrupt your body’s response, and guide you away from its well-worn reaction. It’s not always easy, but it is possible—follow these 5 steps to give it a try.

1: Identify one of your stress-response patterns. 

This could be the headache that you have at the end of each week day, or the jaw pain you have almost every Sunday night. What physical or mental symptoms do you have regularly? Make note of it.

2: When you notice that pattern starting to happen, interrupt it.

You’re literally going to try and interrupt whatever symptom you’re having. While there are many options for how to do this, my favorite comes from Mel Robbins and it’s called the 5-Second Rule. It’s a quick and easy method for kicking your executive planning brain (the prefrontal cortex for my fellow nerds out there) into gear and allowing it to override the emotional part of your brain. This allows you to choose what action to take next with a clearer, more centered mind.

Here’s how: Count backward from 5. When you reach zero, physically move your body to a different position. This change helps circumvent the pattern you’re in. That’s it.

3: Level yourself out with some box breathing.

This is a favorite of Navy Seals during training and missions where they need to maintain a steady, calm, alert state. It serves to calm your body and mind, diffusing high emotion states while still leaving you alert enough to plan your next moves.

To try it: Inhale for a 4 count. Hold your breath for a 4 count. Exhale for a 4 count. Hold your breath for a 4 count. Repeat if necessary. The “count” can be in seconds if you’re stationary; steps if you’re running, jogging, or walking; or any other fairly steady rhythm. I’ve used my heartbeat as the counter when meditating.

4: Use your new calm, level-headed state to identify what may have triggered your stress response.

On an index card or post-it, write down things that may have triggered this stress pattern for you.  Sometimes this is easy, and other times it’s tricky. 

Maybe you notice that your headaches are worse on Tuesdays and Thursdays after long Zoom conference calls. Or perhaps your jaw pain always seems to happen on Sunday evenings after you’ve had Sunday dinner with your mother-in-law.

5: On the other side of the card or post-it, write down that challenge’s opposite, no matter how far-fetched it may seem.

This is called reframing and can be the mother of all Jedi mind tricks. It puts you in a perfect state to shift patterns that aren’t working for you. Human brains don’t like inconsistencies, so directly opposing one of your own beliefs or patterns in writing creates a state where your brain will explore the options for your new set of conditions. Try to focus your opposing thoughts on the challenge and choices that you can make and actions that you can perform. 

For example:

My stress response: I leave my mother-in-law’s house with a headache and intense jaw pain every week.

Challenge: I spend the whole evening with my jaw clenched, holding my tongue while my mother-in-law makes passive aggressive comments about everything from my parenting to my cooking.

Possible opposites:  

• I don’t go to my mother in law’s house for dinner any more.

• I will start speaking my mind instead of (literally) holding my tongue and clenching my jaw.

Fair warning: Old and deeply held patterns tend to fight back. They can trigger feelings of anger, resentment, shame, and/or fear when you start to poke at them. These can, in turn, trigger some of the very stress patterns you’re trying to interrupt. If this happens, it usually means that you’ve hit on a real issue for yourself, and support from a therapist or counselor can be beneficial to more deeply explore the roots of your patterns.

If your stress response includes chronic pain or illness, I might be able to help. You don’t have to live with the symptoms that a global pandemic (or other ongoing stress) can cause—reach out to learn more.