What Is Stress?

Here, we explain how stress and the stress response develop. Both Gold Standard EFT and Optimal EFT address this stress response.

What Is Stress?
Stress refers to situations, events, or circumstances that cause tension, pressure, or discomfort. This can include anything from a work deadline, financial issues, or illness to positive events like a wedding or promotion. Essentially, stress is the external stimulus or challenge that puts your mind and body under pressure.

The Stress Response
The stress response is how your mind and body react to stress. When faced with a stressful situation, your body automatically activates a series of physical and hormonal reactions. This is known as the fight-or-flight response, which involves an increased heart rate, rapid and shallow breathing, muscle tension, and the release of hormones like adrenaline and cortisol. This response is designed to prepare your body to act quickly in the face of danger or challenges.

How Does the Stress Response Arise?
In any situation perceived as threatening or dangerous, your body responds with the fight, flight, or freeze reaction (often referred to as the "Fight, Flight, Freeze" response). This reaction is triggered by the amygdala, part of the limbic system in the brain (responsible for generating and regulating emotions).

This fight, flight, or freeze reaction is a stress response that everyone knows and can recognize. Symptoms can manifest in various combinations and intensities, including a racing heart, rapid breathing, dry mouth, trembling, tunnel vision, nausea, a sinking feeling in your stomach, feeling "frozen in place," or being "paralyzed with fear." This is a completely normal physiological reaction that enables your body to fight or flee. The "freeze" response, too, evolved to increase the chances of survival. For example, animals sometimes drop to the ground and appear "dead," only to react with intense shaking, trembling, and deep breathing (the discharge) once the danger has passed. After this discharge, they can move on without lingering effects.

Humans essentially function in the same way. Under normal circumstances, the fight, flight, or freeze reaction subsides once the danger has passed. However, this is not always the case. In situations perceived as life-threatening, where you feel powerless and unable to act, and no discharge occurs, the link between the event and the stress response can remain intact. As a result, your body can no longer fully relax.

There’s another mechanism at work as well: even when discharge does occur, your brain "remembers" the stress symptoms that helped you survive a (seemingly) life-threatening situation. This information is stored for future use, so your body knows how to respond immediately if a similar situation arises.

The Creation of a Conditioned Stress Response
This process leads to a conditioned stress association that can continue to affect you. In the present, something triggers you - often unconsciously - because it reminds you of what happened in the past. Your body then reactivates the "corresponding" stress response, which manifests in the symptoms mentioned earlier. However, it can also result in other physical complaints or symptoms. Chronic stress and prolonged exposure to stressful situations can ultimately lead to various illnesses.

This is why addressing stress as much as possible is so crucial. EFT is particularly successful and remarkably effective in this regard.