Stress is a natural part of life, but when it becomes constant, it can drain your energy, cloud your mind, and block your sense of peace. Everyone experiences stress — from caring for loved ones to managing work, health, or unexpected changes. While you can’t always control what happens around you, you can learn how to find balance within it.

In this blog, we’ll explore what stress really is, how it affects your body and mind, and why chronic stress can silently shape your health, emotions, and decisions. You’ll also discover powerful stress relief techniques—from daily lifestyle habits to holistic approaches like Reiki and Energy Healing, which calm the nervous system, clear emotional tension, and restore your body’s natural healing rhythm.

Understanding stress is the first step toward transforming it. With awareness, compassion, and the right support, stress can shift from something that controls you into a signal guiding you back to balance, clarity, and inner peace.

What is stress?

Stress is the physical or mental response to an external cause, such as a sick, aging parent, federal shutdown, or having an illness. You may have a a one-time or short-term occurrence, or you may experience it repeatedly over a long time. While you cannot control the external stress that finds its way into your life, you can control how you manage your reaction to stress and learn ways to calm the overactive mind.

How you manage stress is vital. Does it motivate or paralyze you?

Anxiety is your reaction to stress and often occurs when there is no current threat. If you believe your stress has moved into anxiety, read Free Yourself: Stop Anxiety, Panic Attacks, and Overthinking.

Everyday Stress vs. Chronic Stress

Stress itself isn’t the enemy. Everyday stress—like running late, preparing for a presentation, or juggling work and family—can motivate you to act, focus, and get things done. Stress is your body’s response to life’s demands, whether they be happy or frustrating. “Good” stress improves performance as you learn and grow.

Have you ever been called “sensitive”? There is nothing emotional about your stress response. It’s hardwired in your DNA (ancestral trauma) and how you learned to deal with stress from family and other social experiences, most frequently in childhood.

“Negative” stress causes your body responds with its natural “fight or flight” response. Your heart beats faster, adrenaline rises, and you get the extra energy to push through. Once the moment passes, your body usually resets: your heart rate slows, your breathing deepens, and your mind relaxes.

But when stress doesn’t let up, it becomes chronic stress. That’s when the body and mind stop returning to balance, and the cycle of damage begins.

Chronic Stress

Chronic stress is very different. This happens when stressors don’t let up—financial struggles, caregiving, toxic relationships, or ongoing job pressure. Instead of returning to balance, your body stays stuck in survival mode, and that’s when you slowly wear down and damage begins to build.

Just as important—someone in chronic stress stops making good decisions.

Health Effects of Stress: What Happens in the Body

Mentally, you may notice an overactive mind, worry, anxiety, and a general feeling of chaos in your life.

• Everyday stress: Activates the “fight or flight” response, increasing heart rate, blood pressure, and adrenaline for a short burst of energy.
• Chronic stress: Keeps your body in this high-alert state for days, weeks, or months. Stress hormones like cortisol remain elevated, which can weaken your immune system, disrupt sleep, cause tension headaches, and even affect digestion.

Short Term Effects: fatigue, poor focus, frequent colds, or irritability
Long Term Effects: higher risk of heart disease, diabetes, digestive issues, chronic pain, and even memory loss.

When stress becomes chronic, your body is flooded with cortisol, the main stress hormone. Chronic stress doesn’t just live in your mind—it creates physical stress on nearly every system in your body:

• Nervous system: Constant adrenaline and cortisol keep your nerves in overdrive, making it harder to calm down or sleep.
• Cardiovascular system: Blood pressure and heart rate stay elevated, increasing the risk of heart disease and stroke.
• Digestive system: Stress reroutes blood flow away from digestion, causing stomachaches, constipation, diarrhea, or even ulcers.
• Immune system: High cortisol weakens immunity, leaving you vulnerable to frequent colds or slower healing.
• Respiratory system: Stress can trigger shallow breathing, hyperventilation, or worsen asthma symptoms.

And perhaps most alarming: stress can literally poison the brain. According to Brain Longevity by Dharma Singh Khalsa, M.D. with Cameron Stauth:

“The stress response can also literally poison the brain—because it causes excessive secretion of the adrenal hormone cortisol. Cortisol is released at about the same time adrenaline is. However, it stays in your system much longer than adrenaline does, and that creates a terrible problem. Cortisol gives your hippocampus, as well as other parts of your brain, a highly destructive ‘toxic bath.’ It can be so destructive that your brain may never again recover absolutely all of its cognitive function.”

This explains why people with chronic stress often experience brain fog, memory problems, and slower thinking.

Cortisol Burnout and Dopamine Stacking

When stress is constant, your body drowns in cortisol while your brain craves quick relief. That’s when dopamine steps in. Your brain looks for “pleasure hits” from scrolling, binge-watching, overeating, overworking, or other habits that numb pain. This cycle—cortisol burnout plus dopamine stacking—can create long-term exhaustion and emotional instability.

In the short term, these habits numb discomfort. You may feel wired and tired. But in the long term, the constant rise and crash of cortisol and dopamine can lead to:

• Brain fog
• Mood swings and anxiety
• Muscle pain and fatigue
• Poor sleep quality
• Feeling like you’re always on high alert
• Burnout and deep exhaustion

Science shows this cycle can create deep exhaustion, often called cortisol burnout.

Effects on the Mind and Emotions

• Everyday stress: You might feel temporarily anxious, frustrated, or distracted until the stress passes.
• Chronic stress with cortisol burnout: Constant inner noise. Your mind stays wired and tired. Anxiety and depression may appear. Negative inner dialogue—“I can’t handle this” or “I’m failing”—becomes constant. It’s not just a thought pattern; your brain chemistry is out of balance.

Spiritual Effects

Chronic stress doesn’t just wear down the body and mind—it also clouds your spirit. People often feel cut off from their intuition, joy, and sense of purpose. The soul feels heavy, as though light and possibility are out of reach. This loss of connection and feeling hollow or hopeless is as damaging as the physical effects.

From Medical to Spiritual Healing

“Wendy and Rodrigo are absolutely fantastic. Wonderful, sweet and caring human beings. They will help you with different aspects of your healing, and they will make you reconnect with the deepest parts of yourself. Every time I feel anxiety, stress, confusion, lack of clarity or a big major event is coming to my life, I do not think twice to go to them. If you need any type of healing, I highly recommend them!” — DAVID G

Doctors often recommend rest, exercise, nutrition, sleep, and mindfulness to reset the nervous system. These work—but if stress feels “locked in,” deeper support may be needed.

This is where Reiki and Energy Healing come in. Reiki helps switch your body out of survival mode into rest and heal mode—pulling out the pain and stress. Energy Healing clears built-up stress and emotional root causes that contributed to how you handle stress. As you clear your chakras, aura, and nervous system, the body responds.

Many clients describe a session as hitting a “reset button”: the brain fog lifts, the heart softens, and the body breathes again. Spiritually, Reiki reconnects you with your higher self, restoring trust, peace, and a deep sense of safety. Over time, it unwinds chronic stress, heals the toxic patterns, and replaces them with balance, clarity, and joy.

Spiritually, Reiki reconnects you with your inner calm and higher self. It restores trust that you’re safe, supported, and capable of healing. Over time, Reiki and Energy Healing can unwind chronic stress patterns, break the cortisol-dopamine burnout cycle, and open the door to true rest, joy, and renewal.

Daily Lifestyle Stress Relief Tips

• Move Your Energy: Give yourself or receive Reiki or Energy Healing to holistically clear and reset your body, mind, and spirit. Learn how here.
• Mindset: Every thought either builds or destroys. Notice your thoughts and train your mind into positivity. Reinforce positivity. Push through when you notice avoidance. (National Institutes of Health)
• Gut-Brain Connection of a Healthy Diet: Your digestive system and brain constantly communicate through nerves and hormones—so eating a healthy, balanced diet supports not only digestion but also mood, stress resilience, and mental clarity. (Cleveland Clinic)
• Movement of 15-20 minutes daily: Decrease your stress chemicals and increase feel-good chemicals.
• Sleep: You go to your Angels in sleep. Dreams process and discard negative thoughts and emotions. Physically, sleep cleanses your brain and body toxins.
• Social: Connecting with others boosts your thinking and improves your health and mood. (Harvard Health)
• Connect with your purpose: Connect consciously with whatever you do. Give momentum to every action. Do something that is meaningful. It literally changes your brain’s filtering system so you begin noticing synchronicities and opportunities, people, habits that align with your vision.

✨ In short

Everyday stress comes and goes. Chronic stress—especially when tied to cortisol burnout and dopamine stacking—reshapes your body, mind, emotions, and spirit. With awareness, lifestyle changes, and healing practices like Reiki, you can break the cycle, reset your system, and return to balance.

About Wendy Wisner: Your Reiki Master & Intuitive Energy Healer

Wendy Wisner is an Intuitive, Spiritual Healer, Jin Kei Do and Usui Reiki Master, and educator. She runs Radiant You, a holistic wellness center, that offers Reiki and other types of energy healing as well as Reiki Master, Intuitive Energy Healer, and Energy Clearing certification programs. Wendy blends energy healing with Divine insights to guide your release of limiting beliefs to heal your body and emotional wounds from trauma. With Wendy, you reignite your passion for life as you rediscover the radiant you within—healing your emotions and relationships.

With expertise in Reiki, Chakra Healing, Intuitive Energy Healing, Sound Healing, Energy Clearing, Psychic Spiritual Readings, Dowsing, and Access Bars, Wendy empowers clients to heal themselves and others.

Restore your belief that, “I’ve got this” with Wendy Wisner or Rodrigo Ortiz as your Reiki Master, Intuitive Energy Healer, or teacher to heal yourself and others. Rodrigo provides healing in Spanish. If you first language was Spanish, consider this to unlock those childhood traumas in the language they were created. Both Rodrigo Ortiz and Wendy Wisner are Reiki Masters in the Usui Shiri Hyoo and Reiki Jin Kei Do traditions.

All services complement allopathic medical and psychological care provided by traditional healthcare practitioners.

Connect With Us

Radiant You Healing | Reiki Healing | Energy Clearing | Chakra Balancing | Holistic Wellness
Falls Church, VA | In Person and Virtual Sessions Availabl

All services complement allopathic medical and psychological care provided by traditional healthcare practitioners.

Read the next blog: How Chronic Stress Cause Emotional Wounds that Rewire Your Brain