9 Things that Cause Chronic Stress

Today I’m going to share about what causes chronic stress.

Stress is caused by stressors. These are the things that trigger your stress cycle. Your stress cycle happens automatically, meaning if you are exposed to something that causes you stress, your stress cycle will start whether you want it to or not. I talk more about your stress cycle here.

Stressors are unique to each person, meaning what causes you stress may not cause the next person stress and so on. You may experience stress from something someone else said, from an item on your to-do list, from that email that just popped into your inbox or simply by thinking of a memory and/or worrying about a future event.

When your body notices a stressor, it automatically switches on the stress cycle. You don’t have a choice in this decision. This causes your body to prepare to fight, flight or freeze by shifting all its energy towards surviving the enemy = the stressor. 

This stress response process makes absolute sense when you’re faced with a life or death situation such as a bear attack but seems like a bit of an over-reaction when you’re cut off in traffic. Unfortunately, your body only sees a threat (a stressor), it can’t weigh the difference between the situations.

When you experience stress in small amounts it can actually help increase your performance. Meaning you may be more focused on a task you're doing, have a flurry of really awesome ideas for the project your working on, or power through your to-do list to meet the deadline that’s looming.

When you experience stress in large amounts it can actually decrease your performance. This is when it can become chronic and negatively affect your health and well-being. It can cause you to struggle with sleep, concentrating, look towards unhealthy coping behaviours, etc.

While stressors are unique to each of us, here’s 9 things that cause chronic stress, but ultimately, any type of stressful event can cause chronic stress if you don’t manage it well and complete your stress cycle.

9 Thing that Cause Chronic Stress

1. You aren’t in control of how things are going
2. You lack support
3. You aren’t working towards a goal that makes sense to you
4. You aren’t able to take a break
5. Your boundaries are being ignored
6. You have unclear job expectations
7. You’re in a dysfunctional work environment
8. You’re workload is too much and you don’t have enough resources
9. Moral and ethical dilemmas/distress

The trick with stress is what you do with it when you’re experiencing it. For your body to stay healthy, it needs a balance of stress with relaxation. It needs time to recover from the stressful event before it can face another stressful event, or especially the same stressful event.

Having a variety of stress management and stress cycle completion strategies to use when you experience stress can help you avoid stress from building up and becoming chronic. Ultimately, it can help you avoid experiencing burnout. If you are curious to learn more about burnout, check out this post on "What is Burnout".

If your stress has become too much for too long, my eBook "A Way Out of Burnout" offers simple and practical steps so you can start healing from burnout today.