What is emotional stress?
Stress is a normal reaction to the pressures of everyday life. Worry, fear, anger, sadness and other emotions are also all normal emotional responses. They are all part of life. However, if the stress that underlies these emotions interferes with your ability to do the things you want or need to do, this stress has become unhealthy.
What are the warning signs and symptoms of emotional stress?
Symptoms of emotional stress can be both physical, mental and behavioral.
Physical symptoms include:
- Heaviness in your chest, increased heart rate or chest pain.
- Shoulder, neck or back pain; general body aches and pains.
- Headaches.
- Grinding your teeth or clenching your jaw.
- Shortness of breath.
- Dizziness.
- Feeling tired, anxious, depressed.
- Losing or gaining weight; changes in your eating habits.
- Sleeping more or less than usual.
- Gastrointestinal problems including upset stomach, diarrhea or constipation.
- Sexual difficulties.
Mental or behavioral symptoms include:
- Being more emotional than usual.
- Feeling overwhelmed or on edge.
- Trouble keeping track of things or remembering.
- Trouble making decisions, solving problems, concentrating, getting your work done.
- Using alcohol or drugs to relieve your emotional stress.
How can I better cope with emotional stress?
There are many techniques that can be tried to help you better manage your emotional stress. Try one or more of the following:
Take some time to relax: Take some time to care for yourself. Even if you can devote only five to 15 minutes a few times a day to relax, take a break from reality. What activity helps you relax? Some ideas include:
- Read a book.
- Download and listen to a “calm” app (sounds of nature, rain) on your computer or phone.
- Take a walk. Practice yoga.
- Listen to music, sing along to a song or dance to music.
- Enjoy a soothing bath.
- Sit in silence with your eyes closed.
- Light a scented candle.
Practice mindfulness: Mindfulness is learning how to focus your attention and become more aware. You can learn to feel the physical changes in your body that happen in response to your changing emotions. Understanding this mind-body connection is the first step in learning how to better manage your stress and how emotions affect your body. Mindfulness can also help you focus your mind on the immediate – what can I do to bring my mind and body to a place of calmness. If you can figure out what helps you feel more calm and relaxed in that moment, you know you’ve figured out one of your stress triggers and what works to manage it.
Distract your mind and focus on something else: Focus your mind on something other than what’s causing your stress. Do something fun. Watch a funny movie, play a game, engage in a favorite hobby (paint, draw, take pictures of nature, play with your pet). Volunteer for an activity to help others. Do something with people you enjoy.
Try journaling: Journaling is the practice of writing down your thoughts and feelings so you can understand them more clearly. It is a method that encourages you to slow down, pay attention, and think about what is going on in your life – and your feelings and reactions to these happenings. Since journaling can reveal your innermost thoughts, it can reveal your emotional stress triggers. You can identify and then replace negative thoughts and feelings with behaviors that are more positive. Journaling is a healthy and positive way to face your emotions. When you confront your emotions, healing or change can begin.
Practice meditation: Meditation is another way to actively redirect your thoughts. By choosing what you think about, such as positive thoughts or warm, comforting memories, you can manage your emotions and reduce your emotional stress.
When should I get help for my emotional stress?
If you have any of the symptoms of emotional stress and have tried one or more of the remedies discussed in this article and haven’t found relief, seek professional help. If you feel overwhelmed and can’t manage your emotions and stresses on your own, seek the help of a professional. Don’t stay “frozen” or feeling like you’re holding your breath waiting for your feelings to be over. If you are stuck in a rut and can’t get yourself out, seek professional help.
Counselors and mental health therapists are trained professionals who can find ways to help you cope, reduce the effects of emotional stress, help you feel better and become more functional in your day-to-day activities.
If you or a loved one have thoughts of suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255). They are available 24 hours/day, seven days a week.
What else can I do to help myself better manage emotional stress?
In terms of your general health, which affects your ability to manage and cope with stress, you need to take care of yourself the best that you can.
- Get quality sleep. Aim for seven to nine hours of sleep each night. Relax before bedtime with a soothing bath, some reading time or warm cup of chamomile tea. Learn other ways to sleep better.
- Maintain a healthy diet, such as the Mediterranean diet.
- Exercise regularly.
- Connect with others. Keep in touch with people who can help support you, both practically and emotionally. Ask for help from family, friends or religious or community groups you are associated with.
Emotional stress can be particularly painful and be challenging to deal with. It can take more of a toll that many other forms of stress. Part of the reason is that thinking about a solution, or discussing solutions with a good friend—coping behaviors that are often useful and effective in solving problems—can easily deteriorate into rumination and co-rumination, which are not so useful and effective.
In fact, rumination can exacerbate your stress levels, so it helps to have healthy strategies for coping with emotional stress as well as redirecting yourself away from rumination and avoidance coping and more toward emotionally proactive approaches to stress management.
Causes of Emotional Stress
Relationship stress carries a heavy toll on our emotional lives and creates strong emotional responses. Our relationships greatly impact our lives— or better or for worse.
Healthy relationships can bring good times, but also resources in times of need, added resilience in times of stress, and even increased longevity. However, conflicted relationships and ‘frenemies’ can make us worse off in our emotional lives, and can even take a toll physically.
Relationships aren’t the only cause of emotional stress, however. Financial crises, an unpleasant work environment, or a host of other stressors can cause emotional stress, which sometimes tempts us toward unhealthy coping behaviors in order to escape the pain, especially when the situations seem hopeless.
Perhaps one of the more challenging aspects of coping with emotional stress is the feeling of being unable to change the situation. If we can’t change our stress levels by eliminating the stressful situation, we can work on our emotional response to it.
Coping With Emotional Stress
Fortunately, while you can’t always fix these situations overnight, you can lessen the emotional stress you feel, and the toll this stress takes on you. Here are some exercises you can try to effectively cope with emotional stress.
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Practice Mindfulness
When we feel emotional stress, it’s also often experienced as physical pain. You may feel a ‘heavy’ feeling in the chest, an unsettled feeling in the stomach, a dull headache.
It’s common to try to escape these feelings, but it can actually be helpful to go deeper into the experience and use mindfulness to really notice where these emotional responses are felt physically. Some people notice that the pain seems more intense before dissipating, but then they feel the emotional and physical pain is lessened.
Distract Yourself
Common belief used to be that if we didn’t express every emotion we felt (or at least the big ones), they would show themselves in other ways. In some ways, this is true. There are benefits to examining our emotional states to learn from what our emotions are trying to tell us, and ‘stuffing our emotions’ in unhealthy ways can bring other problems.
However, it’s also been discovered that distracting oneself from emotional pain with emotionally healthy alternatives—such as a feel-good movie, fun activities with friends, or a satisfying mental challenge—can lessen emotional pain and help us feel better.
Block Off Some Time
If you find that emotional stress and rumination creep into your awareness quite a bit, and distraction doesn’t work, try scheduling some time—an hour a day, perhaps—where you allow yourself to think about your situation fully and mull over solutions, concoct hypothetical possibilities, replay upsetting exchanges, or whatever you feel the emotional urge to do.
Journaling is a great technique to try here, especially if it’s done as both an exploration of your inner emotional world and an exploration of potential solutions. Talk to your friends about the problem, if you’d like. Fully immerse yourself. And then try some healthy distractions.
This technique works well for two reasons. First, if you really have the urge to obsess, this allows you to satisfy that craving in a limited context. Also, you may find yourself more relaxed the rest of the day because you know that there will be a time to focus on your emotional situation; that time is just later.
Practice Meditation
Meditation is very helpful for dealing with a variety of stressors, and emotional stress is definitely in the category of stressors that meditation helps with. It allows you to take a break from rumination by actively redirecting your thoughts, and provides practice in choosing thoughts, which can help eliminate some emotional stress in the long term.
Talk to a Therapist
If you find your level of emotional stress interfering with your daily activities or threatening your well-being in other ways, you may consider seeing a therapist for help working through emotional issues. Whatever the cause of your emotional stress, you can work toward lessening and managing it and feeling better in the process, without losing the ‘messages’ that your emotions are bringing you.
If you or a loved one are struggling with stress, contact the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) National Helpline at 1-800-662-4357 for information on support and treatment facilities in your area.
For more mental health resources, see our National Helpline Database.
