During the pandemic, life was all about survival. We humans were constantly in fight or flight mode to avoid getting sick while protecting our families from illness, surviving financially, and agonizing about how this would impact our kids.
Since then, our society has never fully recovered. We’ve gone from racial protests to political strife, climate disasters, and the lasting mental health repercussions of isolation from one another for far too long.
As a result, says Aditi Nerurkar, a lecturer at Harvard University and author of The 5 Resets: Rewire Your Brain and Body for Less Stress and More Resilience, around 96 percent of us are facing at least some level of burnout, the mental exhaustion caused by chronic stress.
“Chronic stress has become the new normal,” says Nerurkar. “And it manifests in the body in many different ways.”
Read More: The Biology of Stress in Your Body
How Do You Know If You’re Too Stressed?
Caused by longterm activation of the body’s fight or flight response, which causes stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol to remain elevated in the body, our stress response can lead to both physical and mental health symptoms.
For some, stress can cause aches and pains, headaches, digestive issues, shortness of breath, anxiety, depression, sleep problems, and issues with memory and focus. Other mental health symptoms might include getting lost in negative thought loops or thinking catastrophically, a thought pattern that imagines the worst possible outcome to a situation.
“You might replay something upsetting over and over again or rework a problem in a way that doesn’t help with problem-solving,” says Jennifer L. Taitz, a clinical psychologist and author of Stress Resets: How to Soothe Your Body and Mind in Minutes.
You might also do things to take the edge off in the short term, like procrastinating or having a cocktail, when “in the long term, these strategies can backfire,” says Taitz.
How To Do a Stress Reset
The goal in doing a stress reset is getting out of flight or flight mode, which is run by the amygdala, the small almond-shaped structure deep in the brain that’s responsible for your survival. When the brain is running normally, it’s centered at the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain just above the forehead that’s responsible for complex behaviors, emotions, and thoughts.
The reason you reach for calorie-dense comfort foods, alcohol, or your phone when you’re stressed is because the amygdala is designed to meet your pressing needs, not your future needs, and it’s unable to think in the long term.
Setting Digital Boundaries
Nerurkar says that one of the first steps that you should take when it’s time for a stress reset is setting digital boundaries. Doom scrolling through your phone on news sites or social media amps you up. Still, we’re more likely to want to doom scroll when we feel stressed.
“When we were all cave people living in tribes, you had a night watchmen who would scan for danger while the rest of the tribe slept,” says Nerurkar. “But in modern times, we’re our own night watchmen and we scan for danger by scrolling through our phones.”
Even though it makes us feel worse, when we’re stressed, we keep doing it. While we might call it mindless scrolling, it has a very negative impact on the brain.
Nerurkar recommends gray scaling your phone or turning it on black and white mode, especially at night. Keep your phone off your nightstand so you don’t scroll first thing in the morning, which can set the tone for the day, or right before bed, which can disrupt your sleep.
Protect Your Sleep At All Costs
Sleep is vital to controlling stress levels, and so often, we’re quick to sacrifice it. Avoid waiting until your kids go to bed and then scrolling through your phone. This, says Nerurkar, is called “revenge bedtime procrastination,” a product of our hustle culture that causes us to stay up late into the night because we crave time alone. As a result, we dive deep into our devices late into the night. The next day comes like a slap in the face. We’re exhausted, which puts us back into survival mode.
By scheduling brain breaks during the day, amounting to several 10-minute breaks where you’re at rest, walking, stretching, reading a book, etc., you can avoid revenge bedtime procrastination because you won’t feel as out of breath at the end of the day.
Stop Multitasking
This, says Nerurkar, is one of the most important tools for reducing stress because “multitasking is a myth.” It weakens the prefrontal cortex and reduces productivity, cognition, memory, and your ability to solve complex problems, she says.
It’s a fallacy that has led us astray for far too long. So, no matter what you’re doing — whether it’s writing, reading, eating, or talking on the phone — do only that. You can also try “time blocking” instead, spending 15 minutes on one task, taking a short break, and starting on task number two. And then move onto tasks three and four with breaks in between.
In the end, the human body was not made to take on modern-day stress levels. It was meant to escape the saber-toothed tiger and then chill out, or hunt the mammoth and then relax. And if you don’t take steps to allow your fight or flight system to normalize, you’ll eventually pay the price.
Read More: Feeling Stressed? You May be More Likely to Believe in Spooky Phenomena
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Sara Novak is a science journalist based in South Carolina. In addition to writing for Discover, her work appears in Scientific American, Popular Science, New Scientist, Sierra Magazine, Astronomy Magazine, and many more. She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Journalism from the Grady School of Journalism at the University of Georgia. She’s also a candidate for a master’s degree in science writing from Johns Hopkins University, (expected graduation 2023).
