Highlights
- There are two main types of stress: acute stress and chronic stress. Prolonged stress can be very harmful to your mental and physical health.
- Chronic stress has been shown to lead to health problems like high blood pressure, weight gain, and an increased risk of stroke. These can all become deadly over time.
- In some cases, severe stress can also lead to sudden death. But these cases are rare.
- You can learn to manage chronic stress levels now in order to protect your health in the future.
Stress is an unavoidable part of life. Although it isn’t always a bad thing, long-term or severe stress can be dangerous. You may already know about its harmful effects on your health, but can stress kill you?
Stress can sometimes — rarely — contribute to sudden death. These cases are rare, but the effects of chronic stress need to be taken seriously. These effects might not kill you suddenly, but they can build up over time and contribute to preventable causes of death.
Here, we’ll give you the science behind whether stress and anxiety can kill you — so that you can equip yourself with the right information to take care of yourself and your health.
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Types of Stress and Their Impact on Health
We talk about stress as if it’s a bad thing — and, in many forms, it can be — but that’s not always the case. Stress is a normal part of life, an evolutionary biological response that humans have developed over millennia to help us deal with very real threats and dangers.
There are two main types of stress: acute stress and chronic stress. They differ in important ways.
Acute Stress
This type of stress usually comes in short, intense spurts. It is the initial spike of stress that you experience when you’re faced with something that feels threatening or dangerous. However, the signs of acute stress fade once the danger has passed.
Every single human being in the world experiences acute stress. It typically isn’t associated with major health risks and can help us get through difficult situations. For example, if you’re about to rear-end the car in front of you, you might feel a surge of acute stress that helps you act quickly and step on the brakes. Or you might experience it when your boss tells you they’d like to speak with you.
Chronic Stress
Chronic stress, however, is linked with many different negative health consequences. It happens when you experience stress consistently over a long time. It may not feel as intense as the short bursts of acute stress, but it’s always lingering. For example, you might not feel as anxious as you did when your boss first calls you into their office, but you always feel a sense of dread when you go to work. You’re stressed about projects and deadlines, even when there are no specific dangers or threats.
Reports show that
Psychological and Emotional Stress
Emotional, or psychological, isn’t a biologically separate type of stress. When you’re “feeling stressed” emotionally, for example, because of relationship problems, you’re likely experiencing chronic stress. It feels like an emotional response, but there are also biological responses happening in your body that you may not be aware of.
What Happens to the Body During Stress
We often think of stress as an emotional reaction, but it’s actually a physiological one. The term stress refers to a physical response — called
These bodily changes are triggered by the release of a stress hormone called cortisol. When our brains pick up on danger, it activates our sympathetic nervous system, which then pumps out hormones like adrenaline, epinephrine, and cortisol.
Some changes in our bodies that happen due to the stress response include:
- Our heart beats faster and harder to get more oxygen in our muscles and other vital organs, which allows us to be stronger and quicker.
- We start to breathe more rapidly, and the smaller airways in our lungs open wider, which allows us to take in as much oxygen as possible.
- Our senses, like vision and hearing, get sharper.
- Blood sugar is released from temporary stores, which supplies our bodies with more energy.
- Body systems that aren’t immediately necessary to fight the danger, like our immune system and digestive system, get slowed or shut down.
These changes happen so quickly that you don’t even notice them.
How Chronic Stress Affects Mental and Physical Health
The reason why chronic stress is so harmful for us is that our bodies aren’t designed to have their stress response activated over long periods of time.
These bodily changes were evolutionarily developed to help us to help us deal with immediate stressors. When the threat has passed, the parasympathetic nervous system is supposed to kick in to interrupt all of these changes. The parasympathetic nervous system puts the brakes on the stress response and relaxes your body.
When you’re continuously under significant stress, and your parasympathetic nervous system isn’t taking over, your body is upholding all of these changes over a longer period. Research consistently shows that this can be harmful to your physical and mental health. None of your body’s systems can work well under chronic stress.
Some of the ways that
- High blood pressure
- Inflammation in the arteries
- Increased risk of heart attack and stroke
- Digestive problems, including gastrointestinal diseases like irritable bowel syndrome (IBS)
- Weight gain
- Increased risk of developing mental health disorders like depression and anxiety
- Muscle tension and chronic pain
- Increased risk for developing substance use problems
- Sleep problems, which are linked to other health problems
- Reduced fertility
- Disruptions in hormones
Can Stress Lead to Death?
There are some claims out there; for example, that stress can kill you in your sleep. This is unlikely to happen. Although stress has very harmful effects on your health that need to be taken seriously, it’s relatively rare — but not impossible — for stress to lead to sudden death.
But stress, especially chronic stress, does play a large role in many causes of death.
Some of the main causes of death that stress can contribute to either directly or indirectly include:
- Heart problems: Living with chronic stress, especially over a long period of time, can increase your blood pressure. High blood pressure is linked to several different heart diseases and problems that can end up being fatal, like increasing your risk for a heart attack or stroke.
- Infection and illness: Prolonged stress also weakens your immune system, which can make you more susceptible to infections. It may also take you a longer time to recover from illnesses.
- Lifestyle habits: Chronic stress is also linked to poor lifestyle habits, like overeating, smoking, drinking, and more. These behaviors may end up being fatal in the long run.
In addition, although they’re relatively rare, there are certain instances in which stress has been known to contribute to sudden death.
Takotsubo Cardiomyopathy
Takotsubo cardiomyopathy, also called broken heart syndrome, is when the left ventricle — the heart’s main blood-pumping chamber — gets weakened. This usually happens because of severe stress. Experts think that the surge in stress hormones, like adrenaline, during very stressful events causes changes in the heart muscles, which leads to a weakening in the chamber.
For example, people have developed takotsubo syndrome after:
- The sudden and unexpected death of a life partner
- Surviving a natural disaster
- Surviving an assault
- Getting a physical illness or surgery, or having a sudden onset of symptoms like an asthma attack
- Getting into an accident
- An intense argument
Takotsubo cardiomyopathy can feel like a heart attack, and its most common symptom is chest pain. Most people with takotsubo syndrome don’t die, and recover with no long-term heart damage. But some people can develop complications — like fluid buildup in the lungs or heart failure — that can end up being fatal.
Karoshi Syndrome
There is also a phenomenon called karoshi, which is a Japanese term that means “death by overwork.” It’s often linked to Japanese workers, but it happens in other parts of the world as well. Karoshi is thought to happen due to a combination of chronic and intense job-related stress, long working hours (over 55 hours a week), and malnourishment.
People who die by karoshi are often so stressed and working such long hours that they’re barely sleeping or eating. The combination of these factors can lead to sudden death through heart attacks, stroke, and other causes.
The World Health Organization and the International Labor Organization estimated that around 750,000 people died in 2021 of karoshi syndrome.
How to Recognize Dangerous Levels of Stress
Any level of chronic stress can have consequences for your health if it lasts for a long time: it doesn’t even need to be severe to be harmful. This is why it’s so important to be able to recognize the signs of chronic stress, for example:
- Frequent headaches that are unexplained by an underlying medical condition
- Muscle pain or soreness
- A hard time falling or staying asleep
- Fatigue during the day, either because you’re not sleeping well or even when you do
- Feeling on edge, snapping at others, or mood swings
- Changes in appetite
- Difficulty with focusing, staying organized, or remembering things
- Using alcohol, nicotine, or caffeine more often to cope
- Stomachaches, nausea, or changes in bowel habits — this could even turn into gastrointestinal conditions like IBS
- Being more prone to colds or infections
- Feeling overwhelmed, hopeless, or burnt out — like nothing you do matters
Methods for Reducing Stress and Preventing Dangerous Consequences
Although you can’t avoid all stress completely, chronic stress isn’t inevitable. There are stress management strategies you can use to be more conscious of your stress levels.
Practice Intentional Relaxation
Typically, with acute stress, your parasympathetic nervous system kicks in after the threat has passed to relax your body. The good news is that even when this doesn’t happen automatically (which leads to chronic stress), you can intentionally activate your parasympathetic nervous system by relaxing your body yourself.
Use evidence-based relaxation techniques. Some examples include deep breathing as well as progressive muscle relaxation. These methods have been found to decrease cortisol levels and help your body get out of the stress response.
Get Enough Sleep
Being sleep-deprived can increase your stress levels. Unfortunately, sleep deprivation and stress can get locked in a vicious cycle. The more sleep-deprived you are, the higher your stress levels — but the more stressed you are, the more difficult it can be to sleep well.
Try to prioritize getting restful sleep as much as you can. Practice good sleep hygiene habits, and try to avoid screens close to bedtime. Try to go to sleep and wake up around the same time every day. If you live with a sleep disorder like insomnia, then treatment may be needed as well.
Exercise
Exercise has also been shown to be one of the most effective ways to lower stress levels. Any aerobic activity can help — you don’t need to go to the gym if that’s not sustainable for you. For example, you can try dancing, walking with your dog, gardening, or jogging with friends. Exercising regularly can keep your stress levels down and make you more resilient when you come up against inevitable challenges.
Make Time for Leisure Activities
In today’s hustle culture, you might feel like you have almost no time to yourself. However, spending time on leisure activities is an important part of your overall stress management strategy. Find the time to engage in activities that you enjoy — that you find relaxing and fun. Schedule these activities into your routine, just like you’d schedule tasks for work.
Get Mental Health Treatment
Sometimes, we need extra support to reduce stress. A qualified healthcare professional can help you identify the things in your life that may be causing you to feel stressed and learn new strategies to cope with those triggers. Therapists can help you reframe the thinking patterns that might be contributing to your stress, which is part of an effective treatment method called
Stress alone doesn’t usually need medication, but if your stress levels are linked to other mental health conditions like insomnia, anxiety, or depression, then medications might be helpful as well.
Get Support
If you’re under a lot of stress, then you deserve support.
At MEDvidi, you can see a licensed health professional within 24 hours to talk about your stress and the different ways you can manage it. They can prescribe medications if necessary and walk you through treatment options and healthy coping skills. You don’t need to manage stress on your own, book an appointment to get help tailored to your needs.
