Six Tips For Overcoming Emotional Stress

Stress is an emotion and a physiological response that helps humans react to threats in their environment. The stress response helped our ancient ancestors survive in the face of dangers like animal predators. Today, however, the same mechanisms of the stress response might be triggered in reaction to a tight work deadline or relationship conflict, where it’s less likely to be helpful. 

Since research shows that chronic stress can potentially have significant negative impacts on mental and physical health, finding ways to manage it can be crucial. Below, we’ll take a look at emotional stress in particular, plus six tips that may help you deal with emotional stress in a healthy way. 

For example, while nearly avoiding a car accident could trigger stress that results from a sense of danger, getting into a fight with your partner and worrying about a breakup could trigger emotional stress. In the latter scenario, you may not be in any physical danger as in the first, but you may still experience the stress response coupled with other emotions like sadness or regret.

Mental, behavioral, and physical symptoms

It’s possible to experience physical, mental, and/or behavioral symptoms of stress. However, note that each person may process and exhibit symptoms differently. Some people may display a few visible, common symptoms, some may display many, and others may exhibit rarer or more unusual symptoms that they may not recognize as resulting from stress. Symptoms may also change with time and circumstances. Regardless of how they may or may not manifest, the effects of stress can have a significant impact on a person’s overall health and well-being.

Below are a few of the many possible physical symptoms of stress: 

• Headaches
• Muscle tension
• Grinding of the teeth 
• Dizziness
• Shortness of breath
• Rapid heart rate
• Chest pain or tightness 
• Weight fluctuations
• Changes in eating habits
• Sleep disturbances
• Gastrointestinal distress

Next, these are a few of the many potential mental or psychological symptoms of stress: 

• Difficulty concentrating
• Finding it challenging to manage feelings
• Feeling overwhelmed
• Irritability 
• Memory challenges 
• Disproportionate emotional reactions

Finally, someone may also experience behavioral symptoms like these in response to stress:

• Drinking alcohol in excess or using other substances to cope
• Inappropriate emotional responses to conflict
• Unusual discomfort with everyday social situations

If you are struggling with substance use, contact the SAMHSA National Helpline at (800) 662-4357 to receive support and resources. Support is available 24/7.

Tips for managing stress

The first step to coping with emotional stress is often to recognize that it’s occurring, which is where mindfulness can come in. Next, it can be helpful to find ways to express the emotions that are causing you stress and find healthy ways to cope with difficult feelings and relax. Learn more below.

1. Develop a mindfulness practice

Mindfulness is a nonjudgmental awareness of your thoughts, feelings, and sensations in the present moment. Cultivating this awareness can help you realize when you’re feeling emotional stress so you can engage in coping strategies. Research suggests that regularly practicing mindfulness meditation helps reduce stress levels in many cases for this reason. To do so, you could listen to a guided meditation track, go on a walk and take care to notice the sights, sounds, and smells along the way, or simply pause during your workday to take a deep breath and notice how your body feels.

2. Reach out to your support system

Experiencing overwhelm and stress often makes a person feel isolated—like they’re the only ones experiencing these feelings. Asking a friend or family member if you can vent to them or doing something fun together to take your mind off your troubles could both be beneficial strategies to combat feelings of isolation or loneliness due to stress. Plus, research suggests that having close social connections can actually increase stress resilience.

3. Find healthy ways to express your emotions

Rumination, or engaging in a loop of excessive, repetitive thinking about a negative topic or feeling, is generally not constructive and is closely associated with mental health conditions like generalized anxiety disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). If you find yourself in a thought loop like this because of emotional stress, it can help to find a more productive way to express yourself and get those thoughts and feelings out. Pouring yourself a cup of chamomile tea, getting comfortable, and writing about your emotions in a journal or creating art about how you feel could be options worth trying.   

4. Exercise

An ever-growing body of research suggests that regular physical activity can be a powerful way to reduce stress. For one, it promotes the production of endorphins that induce well-being and relaxation. It can also improve sleep and benefit your digestive, cardiovascular, and immune systems. In addition, exercise offers an opportunity to focus mindfully on the body instead of being preoccupied with negative, unhelpful thoughts. 

5. Pick up a hobby

While ignoring your stress altogether may not be healthy, regularly spending time on a hobby or activity that brings you joy can provide a restorative respite. Joining a sports league, a book club, or an improv class are examples of popular hobbies you might enjoy. Or, you might explore creative activities like painting, poetry, songwriting, or sculpting, which could supply an extra therapeutic benefit by integrating self-expression with self-care.

6. Speak to a therapist about emotional rollercoasters

While the above tips may be helpful in overcoming emotional stress, this feeling can sometimes be difficult to cope with on your own. It can be overwhelming to the point that it’s difficult to put your emotions into perspective, potentially leading to rumination or reactive behaviors, which can lead to more stress. 

When chronic emotional stress goes unaddressed, it may also lead to more severe mental health challenges, including depression and anxiety disorders, which often require treatment to resolve. In addition, emotional stress can sometimes be a symptom of trauma or a trauma-related disorder, which a therapist can help you address as well.

Seeking therapy for stress 

The primary treatment for many types of stress is psychotherapy, or talk therapy. The most common modality today is cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). With CBT, a psychotherapist works with the client to gain perspective on potential biases in their thinking that may cause complications in behavior, interactions, and emotions. During the process, the client can learn to cope with difficult situations by thinking critically and with directed intention. The end goal of many treatments for emotional stress is not to avoid or eliminate your emotions but to recognize and understand them when they appear. 

If you experience barriers to therapy, such as societal or familial stigma, scheduling constraints, or nervousness about meeting with a provider in person, you might prefer to pursue therapy online through a platform like BetterHelp. You can get matched with a licensed therapist according to your preferences and then meet with them via phone, video call, and/or in-app messaging from anywhere you have an internet connection. Research suggests that engaging with a qualified therapist virtually can provide similar outcomes to in-person therapy in many cases.