Hawaii Island Recovery 
Stress and anxiety are common life experiences, and there is no fully escaping either in daily life. Whether or not a person is living with a diagnosed anxiety disorder, continuing to manage the emotional effects of traumatic experiences, or navigating a stressful work environment, relationships, or period in life, stress and anxiety are universal experiences. However, while experiencing stress and anxiety is common, it is still important to address their effects to prevent these challenges from negatively impacting daily life, mental health, and behaviors. Unaddressed stress and anxiety, regardless of their source, can lead to long-term effects. Talking to a professional may be necessary to overcome the long-term effects.
The Effects of Stress and Anxiety
For many, feelings of stress and anxiety can be very apparent. Stress can manifest as a psychological and physical response to unwanted stimuli, with feelings of pressure, muscle tension, and physical and emotional fatigue. Anxiety also often accompanies stressful situations, further complicating the scenario through excessive feelings of worry, doubt, or even fear, alongside elevated heart rate, sweating, or shaking. These feelings result not just from external stresses and stimuli, but also from assumptions about potential negative consequences, thinking of worst-case scenarios rather than objectively looking at the situation.
For many, experiences with stress and anxiety are short-lived, and often tied to specific events, situations, or contained within a certain time frame. However, persistent feelings of stress and anxiety are also possible, with regular exposure to stressful situations embedding these feelings in a person’s brain and body. Unaddressed stress and anxiety, whether from intense sources like trauma, the result of a diagnosed anxiety disorder, or simply a deluge of stressful situations in daily life, can lead to long-term negative effects.
Even after the immediate effects of stress and anxiety have subsided, they can still leave lingering effects, subtly changing a person’s behaviors, beliefs, or affecting mental health and emotional resilience to cope with stress in the future. With stress and anxiety being so ubiquitous, addressing their potential long-term effects and working with a professional may be necessary to prevent further negative effects on a person’s well-being.
Common Sources of Stress and Anxiety in Daily Life
As nice as it would be, there is no true “escape” from all forms of stress or anxiety. It is a common experience that will continue throughout each person’s lifetime, and expecting to live a life truly devoid of these challenges is unrealistic. However, familiarizing oneself with the common sources of stress and anxiety can be the first step in creating a plan to address potential long-term effects. While not all people will experience stress and anxiety in the same situation, or to the same level as others, understanding some common sources of stress can prompt a person to look at their own lives and explore potential stress and emotional impact in their lives.
Professional and Academic Settings
Looming deadlines, performance reviews or tests, or pressure to perform consistently in professional and academic settings can be emotionally challenging. Multiple stresses from work or school are also possible, with various projects all culminating into an intimidating workload. Difficult coworkers, demanding bosses, strict teachers, and toxic work environments can also add to these stresses and persistent feelings of anxiety.
These stresses also commonly align with difficulty maintaining a healthy work-life balance or school-life balance, with workplace and academic expectations overtaking personal interests or self-care necessities like rest, sleep, hobbies, or social life. They can even affect one’s diet if they don’t have the time or energy to eat or eat healthily.
Social Pressures
Stress and anxiety may also be related to social events and functions. For some, this manifests as social anxiety disorder, bringing feelings of nervousness, fear of judgment, and avoidance of social activities in favor of self-isolationist tendencies. However, social stress and anxiety can also result from difficult coworkers, conflict in personal relationships, drama, or feeling misunderstood by others, leading to further anxiety, doubt, or self-criticism.
Financial Stress
Finances can be a difficult subject and can lead to feelings of stress and anxiety that can permeate each day. Sudden changes in income, looming debts and bills, uncertainty on how to pay for necessities like groceries, rent, or even feeling unable to afford personal hobbies or opportunities, can all bring intense levels of stress that can dictate a person’s thoughts. Anxiety about the future is also common, especially if a person feels they are not able to save for upcoming life events, like feeling unable to retire.
Additionally, sudden financial emergencies can also come with a deluge of stress or anxiety. Not only can unexpected expenses bring feelings of stress and anxiety, but these emergencies can also have additional financial stresses, such as a sudden vehicle or home repair, or unexpected medical bills.
Additional Stresses and Anxieties
There can also be sources of stress and anxiety that can permeate daily life in a variety of other ways. Persistent negative news stories or living in a politically divided neighborhood can bring constant feelings of tension to daily life, especially when paired with the use of social media or “doomscrolling,” or looking through many negative news stories in downtime. Inconsistent dietary routines and meals can also affect a person’s mental health, making it difficult to challenge feelings of stress and anxiety.
Held Beliefs
Lastly, stress and anxiety can also be self-inflicted through unhealthy perspectives, mentalities, or beliefs. Many of these stresses and feelings of anxiety can even become self-fulfilling, with expectations of stress and anxiety leading to perceiving things in this light, creating an unhealthy cycle of difficult emotions. Feelings of low self-esteem, perfectionist mentalities, overthinking situations, catastrophizing situations, black-and-white thinking, or an intense fear of failure or perceived failure can all bring daily stress and anxiety into daily life while also carrying long-term effects.
A Collection of Challenges
Stress and anxiety can feel overwhelming, from how they make a person feel to their myriad sources that can all impact daily life. Those living with persistent feelings of anxiety rarely ever experience only one kind, with stress seeming to make its way into many areas of daily life. Various stresses and sources of anxiety can also build on each other, making it difficult to address a single source of stress or the root cause of these difficult feelings.
Likewise, experiencing stress or anxiety in one area of life can also lower a person’s emotional resilience, making them less likely to cope with stresses or anxieties in other areas. For example, a difficult workplace environment can lead to intense stress, affecting how a person perceives themselves and levels of self-criticism, compromising self-care outlets or quality rest, even when no longer in the workplace.
The Short and Long-term Effects of Unaddressed Stress and Anxiety
Feelings of stress and anxiety can stay with a person. Without a dedicated outlet for processing and releasing these pent-up feelings, they can continue to fester in a person’s brain, continuing to impact thoughts, behaviors, and emotional well-being. Stress and anxiety can come with a wealth of immediate effects. However, even after these immediate effects subside, there can still be new challenges to overcome until confronted and addressed alongside supports and trained professionals.
Immediate Effects on Your Health
Recognizing the immediate effects of stress and anxiety on your life is still important, and can be crucial information when discovering the underlying sources of stress in daily life. While the immediate effects of stress and anxiety will vary from person to person, there are some consistent symptoms to consider. These include:
- Elevated heart rate
- Shaking
- Doubt
- Fear
- Paranoia
- Inconsistent breathing patterns
- Muscle tension or hypertension
- Sweating
- Nausea
- Gastrointestinal issues
A compromised ability to focus or make decisions in the face of stress and anxiety is also common, making it difficult to break from cycles of stress and anxiety or to confront the sources of these challenges.
These immediate effects of stress and anxiety typically pass in time if a person can remove themselves from the situation or stressful environment. However, that doesn’t mean a person’s experiences with these challenges are over. Over time, these stresses and challenges can continue to accumulate, leading to many long-term effects and potentially necessitating a professional treatment program or therapy to address them.
Long-Term Effects of Stress and Anxiety
Stress and anxiety will not simply “go away” on their own, even if the immediate effects of these challenges have passed. It is also possible that a person may not realize how persistent stress and anxiety have affected them long-term, with changes being subtle or beneath the surface. However, these changes can lead to many unexpected challenges if left unaddressed.
Restructuring the Brain
One way the brain reacts to stress and anxiety is by releasing the stress hormone cortisol, increasing heart rate, alertness, and triggering a person’s fight-or-flight response. However, over time, the brain can become accustomed to these stressful states and even adopt an unhealthy level of anxiety as a new “normal.” Increased baseline anxiety levels, even when not feeling the immediate effects of stress and anxiety, are possible as the brain adapts to persistent stress and anxiety.
Likewise, the emotional impact of stress and anxiety and the mental fatigue that comes with it can also make it difficult to regulate emotions, leading to further increased anxiety or making it difficult to manage feelings of anger or hopelessness. It can also compromise the brain’s emotional resilience, or the ability to “bounce back” from otherwise minor stresses.
Psychological Effects
Long-term stress and anxiety can also lead to deeply ingrained psychological effects. Avoidance behaviors, whether conscious or unconscious, can become common, with a person avoiding certain places, people, or situations to prevent further difficult feelings. This can also lead to feeling socially withdrawn or avoiding social situations, risks, or new experiences.
These psychological effects of long-term stress and anxiety can also lead to physical or emotional isolation from others. Lowered self-esteem, becoming highly critical of oneself, feeling overwhelmed, feelings of personal doubt or worthlessness, and more are also possible and can become prevalent traits as a person feels the continued effects of anxiety and unhealthy expectations, even developing into depression or anxiety disorders like generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) or panic disorder.
Physical Effects
Long-term stress and anxiety affect a person’s physical well-being as much as their emotional wellness. Lowered energy levels and physical fatigue are common, and compromised sleep schedules can lead to further physical ramifications. Digestive issues and a weakened immune system are also possible in long-term situations.
Expecting the Worst
Persistent stress and anxiety can prime a person’s beliefs and perspective to expect further challenges in daily life, reshaping their plans and attitude for the day ahead. Waking up already feeling tense, feeling pessimistic or hopeless about a given situation, or already feeling emotionally drained are all common effects of long-term stress and anxiety. Likewise, the idea of a positive or stress-free situation can also become difficult to believe in, with a person not trusting times of calmness or positivity. This can lead to an exceptionally pessimistic outlook that can define how a person sees the world, and make it difficult to enjoy personal things like hobbies, relationships, rest, or self-care.
Substance Abuse as a Coping Strategy
These immediate and long-term effects of stress and anxiety present a myriad of challenges, and overcoming their effects can be difficult, especially without effective support. However, self-destructive coping strategies can further exacerbate the situation. While self-destructive coping strategies can come in many forms depending on the person, substance use and abuse can be a common, if dangerous, way of attempting to “push down” these difficult feelings.
The use of drugs or alcohol to either detach from stressful thoughts and feelings or to force the brain to release dopamine in an attempt to “feel better” is common. However, a reliance on these substances to address persistent stress and anxiety can quickly develop into an unhealthy relationship or reliance on these substances, often at the expense of other healthy coping strategies.
Having to use more of a substance as tolerance develops, or engage with these substances more frequently, can quickly develop into addiction and lead to an increase in risk-taking behaviors, including driving under the influence or using drugs or alcohol at places where stress is common, such as during the lunch break at work or in public spaces.
Finding Treatment in Hawaii for Stress and Anxiety
While isolated feelings of stress and anxiety are completely normal, those experiencing the long-term effects of stress and anxiety may benefit from a professional treatment program. Hawaii Island Recovery can empower this kind of change, and contacting any of our professionals or a local treatment facility to explore potential healing options may be necessary.
Professional therapeutic approaches like cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), motivational interviewing (MI), and effective mindfulness practices are all instrumental in navigating the long-term effects of stress and anxiety, challenging held beliefs while empowering each person to explore personalized healing options and ideas in a safe environment.
A professional treatment program can also lead to practical life skills and grounding strategies for improving emotional resilience in recovery. Coupled with a consistent routine, goal-setting skills to manage expectations, and learning to practice self-awareness, compassion, and gratitude can all go a long way in overcoming negative self-beliefs and perspectives born from these long-term effects.
Hawaii Island Recovery also offers a comprehensive treatment program for overcoming co-occurring disorders, or those living with both a mental health disorder, like anxiety, and a substance use disorder. Professional addictionologists and mental health professionals working in tandem to explore personalized needs, as well as educate each person on how substance abuse and mental health disorders can continue to facilitate each other, is necessary to effectively tackle these challenges, improving the chances of profound change and preventing relapse throughout each person’s healing journey.
While there is no “quick fix” to stress and anxiety, nor is there a way to completely eliminate them from daily life, there are ways to process and healthily release these challenges. Overcoming the long-term effects of stress and anxiety, while also developing a collection of personalized strategies to navigate their effects when stressful events arise again, is part of a truly transformative approach to preventing self-destructive coping strategies and creating a healthier emotional state.
Stress and anxiety are ubiquitous, but they still demand effort to address. At Hawaii Island Recovery, we understand the unique challenges that come with prolonged exposure to stress and anxiety and their long-term effects. We are also committed to helping you overcome these challenges alongside self-destructive coping strategies like substance use to begin your journey to a healthy life. Each program with us is catered to your needs, helping you explore the effects of stress and anxiety on your life and emotional health. Dedicated dual diagnosis treatment, mindfulness practices, and a supportive and relaxing atmosphere among the Hawaiian landscape and communities are all part of helping you overcome stress and anxiety with us. Learn more at (866) 390-5070.
