Stress, and how to live with it well
A deep, honest guide to what stress does to your body, why some of it is good for you, what genuinely helps when it is too much, and why most of what is sold to "lower your cortisol" misunderstands the whole thing.
Start here
Stress has become the thing everyone agrees is ruining their health, and the thing an entire industry now promises to remove for you. There are teas to lower your cortisol, supplements to calm your nervous system, and a steady stream of content suggesting that stress is a toxin you must purge to be well. Most of it misunderstands what stress is.
Here is the reframe this whole guide is built on. Stress is not a flaw in your body or a poison to be flushed out. It is one of the most finely tuned survival systems you have, and in the right amount it sharpens you, motivates you, and helps you rise to things that matter. The problem is not stress itself. The problem is stress that never switches off, and a culture that has taught you to be stressed about being stressed.
So this guide does two things at once. It takes chronic, grinding stress seriously, because the long-term health effects are real and worth respecting. And it pushes back, gently but firmly, on the idea that all stress is bad and that you can buy your way out of it. The honest path runs between those two, and it is more reassuring than either the fear or the false promises.
You cannot eliminate stress, and you would not want to. The goal is not a stress-free life, which is neither possible nor healthy, but a life where stress rises when it should and settles when it should. The things that genuinely help are mostly free and familiar: movement, sleep, connection, time outdoors, and a handful of skills you can practise. No supplement fixes a stressful situation, and "lowering cortisol" is not the meaningful target the internet makes it out to be.
What stress actually is
Stress is your body's response to a demand or a threat. Faced with a challenge, real or anticipated, your body shifts into a state designed to help you meet it. Understanding that machinery, briefly, makes the rest of this guide much clearer and defuses a lot of the fear around the word.1
Two systems, two speeds
The response comes in two waves. The first is near-instant: your nervous system releases adrenaline, your heart rate climbs, your breathing quickens, your senses sharpen. This is the familiar fight-or-flight surge, and it happens in seconds. The second wave is slower and hormonal, driven by a chain running from the brain to the adrenal glands, often called the HPA axis, which releases cortisol to keep energy available while the demand lasts.1
Cortisol has become a villain in popular culture, which is unfair to a hormone doing an essential job. It is not a stress toxin. It follows a natural daily rhythm, high in the morning to help you wake and get going, low at night to let you rest, and it helps regulate energy, immunity, and much else besides.2 You need cortisol. The issue is never its mere presence, but a pattern where it stays elevated because the demands never stop.
The system is built to switch off
The crucial design feature is that this whole response is meant to be temporary. A threat appears, your body mobilises, you deal with it, and then everything returns to baseline. In the classic illustration from the biologist Robert Sapolsky, a zebra sprinting from a lion is under enormous stress for ninety seconds, and then, once safe, goes calmly back to grazing.3 The stress response did its job and switched off cleanly.
Human stress is often different not because our machinery is different, but because our threats are. A looming deadline, a difficult relationship, or a worry about money does not resolve in ninety seconds, and we can keep it alive in our minds for weeks. The system built for short bursts ends up running continuously. That, rather than stress as such, is where the trouble begins.
Stress is a survival response with two waves: a fast nervous-system surge and a slower hormonal one involving cortisol. Cortisol is a necessary hormone with a normal daily rhythm, not a toxin. The response is designed to switch on for a threat and switch off afterwards. Human trouble comes when modern, long-running worries keep a short-burst system running all the time.
Why stress is not the enemy
This is the part most stress content leaves out, and it may be the most useful idea in the guide. Not all stress harms you. In the right dose and the right context, stress is not just tolerable but beneficial, and treating every flicker of it as dangerous can make things worse.
Stress and performance follow an inverted U. Too little leaves us flat and unchallenged; a moderate amount sharpens focus and engagement; too much, sustained too long, tips into overwhelm. The aim is the useful middle, not zero.
The useful middle
Researchers have long described a relationship between arousal and performance shaped like an upside-down U. Too little pressure and we are flat, bored, and unmotivated. A moderate amount sharpens attention and drives us to prepare and perform. Only when it becomes too intense or too prolonged does performance fall away.4 The nerves before an interview, the push of a deadline, the focus a challenge brings, these are stress doing something for you, not to you.
Your beliefs about stress matter
Here is a genuinely striking line of research. How you think about stress appears to influence how it affects you. In one well-known study, people who viewed stress as enhancing rather than debilitating showed better outcomes, and large population work has suggested that high stress was associated with increased health risk mainly among people who also believed stress was harming them.5 This should be read carefully rather than turned into a slogan, since it does not mean serious chronic stress is harmless if you simply think positively. But it does suggest that a low-grade panic about stress itself is worth letting go of. Treating normal, manageable stress as a catastrophe is its own kind of burden.
Challenge, and recovery
There is even a case that deliberately taking on manageable challenges, and recovering from them, builds resilience over time, much as a muscle adapts to load. The key word is recovery. Stress followed by genuine recovery is how we grow. Stress without recovery is how we wear down. Almost everything useful in stress management is really about protecting the recovery, not eliminating the stress.
If you take one thing from this section, let it be permission to stop fearing ordinary stress. Feeling your heart race before something that matters is not a warning sign. It is your body preparing you, exactly as designed. The work of this guide is not to help you feel nothing, but to help the system settle again afterwards.
When stress turns chronic
All of that said, chronic stress is genuinely worth taking seriously, and this is where honesty cuts the other way. When the stress response runs continuously, without the off switch ever being fully pressed, the same system that protects you in the short term begins to exact a cost.
Scientists describe this accumulated wear as allostatic load, the price the body pays for being kept in a state of alert for too long.6 It is not one dramatic event but the slow accumulation of a system that never gets to stand down. Over time, sustained stress is associated with a range of effects: on the heart and blood pressure, on immune function, on sleep, on mood, on appetite and weight, and on the gut.1 Long-term psychological stress has been linked in careful studies with greater susceptibility to illness and with markers of faster cellular ageing.7
Two honest clarifications matter here. First, "associated with" is doing real work in those sentences. Chronic stress is one contributing factor among many, interacting with genetics, circumstances, and behaviour, not a single lever that alone determines your health. Second, the effects that get quoted most dramatically often come from severe, sustained stress over long periods, not from an ordinary busy fortnight. The aim is to take real chronic stress seriously without catastrophising a hard week.
The practical signal to watch for is not the presence of stress but its persistence and the loss of recovery. Feeling wired but exhausted, sleeping poorly for weeks, losing your appetite or reaching constantly for food, becoming short-tempered or numb, catching every cold going round, these are the signs that the system is not switching off, and they are worth responding to rather than pushing through.
Chronic stress, the kind that never lets the body return to baseline, accumulates as wear over time and is associated with effects on the heart, immunity, sleep, mood, and the gut. These links are real and worth respecting, while remembering they are contributing factors rather than certainties, and that the concern is persistent stress without recovery, not an ordinary demanding week.
Sleep, gut, and the loop
Stress does not sit in isolation. It is wired into the rest of your health, and understanding those connections is genuinely useful, because it means improving one area often helps another.
Stress and sleep
Stress and sleep feed each other in both directions. Stress makes sleep harder, and poor sleep lowers your capacity to handle stress the next day, which is how a few bad nights can spiral.8 This loop is one of the most common engines of a bad patch, and it is also a hopeful one, because intervening on either side tends to help the other. Our Sleep 101 guide goes deep on the sleep half, including why the racing mind at bedtime is so common and what actually calms it.
Stress and the gut
Anyone whose stomach has turned before a big moment already knows stress and digestion are linked. This is the gut-brain axis at work, the two-way communication line we cover in our Gut Health 101 guide.9 Stress can genuinely unsettle the gut, and gut discomfort can feed back into how you feel. It is a real connection, and also one where the marketing runs ahead of the science, so it is worth keeping both the reality and the limits in view.
Why this is good news
The interconnection sounds daunting, but it works in your favour. Because these systems are linked, you do not have to fix everything separately. Sorting out your sleep eases stress. Managing stress helps your gut. Moving your body improves all three. The pillars support one another, which means small, sustained improvements tend to compound rather than stay isolated.
If your stress, sleep, and digestion all feel off at once, that is not three separate problems requiring three separate purchases. It is usually one interconnected pattern, and the same foundational habits, movement, daylight, decent sleep, real food, and connection, improve all of them together. Start with whichever feels most within reach.
What actually works
Here is the encouraging part. The interventions with the strongest evidence for managing stress are almost all free, and most of them help your wider health at the same time. None is a quick fix, and their power is in being practised regularly rather than reached for in a crisis.
Movement
Physical activity is one of the best-supported stress interventions there is. Regular exercise is consistently associated with lower anxiety and better mood, and it works through several routes at once, using up the physical products of the stress response, improving sleep, and providing a genuine shift of state.10 It does not need to be intense or lengthy. A brisk walk counts, and consistency matters far more than intensity. For many people this is the single highest-value habit on the list.
Time in nature
Spending time outdoors in natural surroundings has a measurable calming effect, and the research on it has grown genuinely convincing. A large study found that people who spent at least around two hours a week in nature reported significantly better health and wellbeing than those who spent none, with the benefit appearing whether the time came in one visit or several.11 You do not need wilderness. A park, a garden, or a tree-lined street all count, which makes this one of the more accessible tools available.
Connection with other people
Social connection is one of the most powerful and most underrated buffers against stress, and the evidence tying strong relationships to better long-term health is remarkably robust.12 Talking to someone you trust, feeling part of a community, or simply not facing things alone genuinely changes how stress lands. In a culture that often frames stress management as a solo optimisation project, this is a needed correction: other people are not a distraction from managing stress, they are one of the main ways it is managed.
Mindfulness and meditation
Mindfulness-based approaches have a reasonable and growing evidence base for reducing stress and anxiety. A careful review found that structured meditation programmes produced modest but real improvements in anxiety, depression, and stress-related symptoms.13 The honest framing is "modest but real," not "transformational," and the effect comes from regular practice rather than the occasional session. It also does not suit everyone, and that is fine. It is one good tool among several, not a requirement.
The skill of managing thoughts
Much of what makes stress persist is not the situation itself but the way the mind circles it. Approaches drawn from cognitive behavioural therapy, which work on the patterns of thinking that keep stress alive, have strong evidence for anxiety and stress-related difficulties.14 You can learn elements of this from good books or courses, and for persistent difficulty it is available as a structured therapy, which we come back to later. The core insight is empowering: you cannot always change the stressor, but you can change your relationship to it, and that is a skill rather than a fixed trait.
The best-supported stress tools are movement, time in nature, real human connection, mindfulness practised regularly, and skills for working with unhelpful thought patterns. All are low-cost, most improve your wider health too, and none works as a one-off. Their strength is in being woven into ordinary life rather than saved for emergencies.
Breathing and the body
One category deserves its own section, because it is the closest thing to an in-the-moment tool that has real science behind it: using your breath and body to talk directly to your nervous system.
Unlike most of your stress response, which you cannot control by will, breathing is a lever you can operate directly, and it connects to the systems that govern arousal. Slow, deliberate breathing, particularly extending the exhale, can genuinely shift you towards a calmer state within minutes.15 This is not mysticism. It is a physical route into a system that is otherwise largely automatic.
A recent controlled study compared different brief breathing practices with mindfulness meditation over a month and found that short daily breathwork, especially a pattern built around a long, slow exhale sometimes called the physiological sigh, improved mood and lowered physiological arousal, in some measures more than meditation over the period studied.15 It is one study rather than a settled literature, and worth holding as promising rather than proven, but it fits well with the long-established calming effect of slow breathing.
The practical appeal is obvious. It is free, always available, invisible to others, and works in the moments you most need it, before a difficult conversation, in a spike of anxiety, when you cannot sleep. A simple version: breathe in through the nose, add a second short sip of breath to fill the lungs, then let a long, slow breath out through the mouth, and repeat a few times. You do not need an app or a course to try it.
Structured breathwork has become popular partly through science communicators, and the underlying principle, that slow breathing calms the nervous system, is well established. The specific claims about particular patterns being clearly superior rest on a small and young body of trials. Treat breathing as a genuinely useful, no-risk tool worth practising, while keeping a light hold on any one precise protocol being definitively best.
Supplements for stress
This is a large and fast-growing market, built heavily on the promise of lowering cortisol and calming your nervous system in a capsule. As with our Supplements 101 guide, we will be plain about the evidence for each. The overarching point first: no supplement resolves a stressful situation, and none is a substitute for the free tools above. At best, some may offer modest support alongside them.
Magnesium
Contributes to normal psychological function and a reduction of tiredness and fatigue · EFSA-authorised roles
Magnesium is the most defensible option here, partly because it has genuine EFSA-recognised roles in normal psychological function and in reducing tiredness, and partly because many people's intake sits a little low. A review of the evidence for magnesium and subjective anxiety found suggestive but not conclusive support, most plausible in people who were low to begin with.16 It is not a sedative and will not dissolve a stressful week, but for someone whose diet is low in magnesium-rich foods, it is a reasonable, low-risk thing to consider.
Situational The most grounded choice, especially if dietary intake is low. Modest support rather than a solution.
Ashwagandha
An adaptogenic herb. No EFSA-authorised stress claim.
Ashwagandha is the headline supplement of the stress boom. Several small trials have reported reductions in perceived stress and in cortisol, which is the basis for the marketing.17 Honesty requires the caveats: the trials are mostly small and short, several come from parties with an interest in the result, and long-term safety is not well established. There have also been reports of liver injury linked to ashwagandha products, and it is not appropriate in pregnancy, or for people with thyroid conditions or on certain medications, without medical advice. There is a real signal here, wrapped in genuine reasons for caution.
Limited case Some genuine evidence, a weak trial base, and real safety caveats. Not a casual daily default, and worth a professional conversation first.
L-theanine
An amino acid found in tea. No EFSA-authorised stress claim.
L-theanine is associated with a calmer, less jittery alertness, and small studies suggest it may modestly ease stress-related symptoms in some people, without sedation.18 The evidence base is small and short-term, so expectations should be modest, but it has a good safety record, which is part of its appeal. If you drink tea, you are already getting some.
Limited case Low risk, mild and inconsistent benefit. Most plausible for in-the-moment mental restlessness.
Rhodiola
An adaptogenic herb. No EFSA-authorised stress claim.
Rhodiola is traditionally used for fatigue and stress, and some small trials suggest possible benefit for stress-related tiredness, but reviews consistently describe the evidence as limited and the trial quality as weak.19 It sits firmly in the promising-but-unproven category, and as with any active botanical, it is worth checking for interactions if you take medication.
Limited case Traditional use and early hints, weak evidence. Try if curious, do not rely on it.
Notice that nothing here earns a strong verdict, and that the loudest-marketed options are among the weakest evidenced. The consistent lesson across the whole stress-supplement market is that these are, at most, small effects layered on top of the fundamentals, and they work least well as a substitute for addressing what is actually causing the stress. If your stress has been heavy for a long time, the useful step is support from a doctor or therapist, not another bottle.
Food and stress
Diet and stress interact, though more modestly and less directly than a lot of "eat this to beat stress" content implies. The honest version is worth having, because it steers you away from both fatalism and false promises.
Overall pattern beats magic foods
There is growing interest in the link between diet and mental wellbeing, and the pattern that keeps emerging is a familiar one: diets rich in vegetables, fruit, whole grains, legumes, fish, and unprocessed foods, and lower in ultra-processed foods, are associated with better mood and lower rates of depression.20 A notable trial even found that dietary support improved symptoms in people with depression.21 There is no single anti-stress food. There is a broadly healthy pattern, the same one from our Nutrition 101 guide, that quietly supports mood too.
The stress-eating loop
Stress reliably changes how we eat, often pulling us towards energy-dense, sugary, and comforting foods, through both hormonal and emotional routes.1 This is deeply human and not a failure of willpower. It helps to notice the pattern without shame, and to make the easier choice more available rather than relying on restraint in a stressed moment. Being kind to yourself here works better than being strict.
Caffeine and alcohol
Two everyday substances deserve a mention because they interact directly with stress. Caffeine amplifies the physical side of the stress response, so if you are already wired and anxious, a large coffee can tip you further, and cutting back is worth testing. Alcohol is widely used to unwind and genuinely takes the edge off in the moment, but it worsens sleep and can heighten anxiety the next day, quietly feeding the loop it seems to relieve. Neither needs to be eliminated, but both are worth watching when stress is high.
There is no anti-stress superfood. A broadly healthy dietary pattern supports mood as well as physical health, stress tends to push eating towards comfort foods in a way best met with kindness rather than strictness, and caffeine and alcohol both interact with stress in ways worth watching when it runs high.
Should you test cortisol?
Cortisol testing has become a popular wellness product, sold as a way to measure your stress and guide a plan to lower it. For most people, it does not deliver what it promises, and it is worth understanding why before spending money on it.
Cortisol is genuinely difficult to interpret outside a clinical context. It swings across the day by design, high in the morning and low at night, and it responds moment to moment to ordinary things: a rushed journey to the appointment, a poor night's sleep, even the mild stress of the test itself.2 A single reading, or even several, can be hard to make meaningful sense of, and there is no simple "stress score" that a home kit can reliably hand you.
The popular idea of "adrenal fatigue," in which chronic stress supposedly exhausts your adrenal glands so they underproduce cortisol, is worth naming directly. It is not a recognised medical diagnosis, and a systematic review found no scientific support for it as a condition.22 This matters because a great deal of cortisol testing and supplement selling is built on that unproven idea. The feelings people describe, the exhaustion and depletion, are real. The proposed mechanism and the products sold to fix it are not well founded.
There is an important exception. Genuine medical disorders of cortisol exist, where the body produces far too much or too little, and these are serious conditions diagnosed and managed by doctors with proper testing. If you have symptoms that worry you, that is a reason to see a doctor, which is an entirely different thing from a wellness cortisol kit. For everyday stress, how you actually feel and function tells you more than any home cortisol reading, and costs nothing.
Before paying for a stress or cortisol test, ask what you would do differently with the result. If you already know you are under sustained strain, the actions, movement, sleep, connection, support, are the same regardless of the number. If something feels medically wrong, a doctor and clinical testing are the right route. The consumer test tends to sit awkwardly between the two, adding cost and worry without changing what helps.
Where the advice overreaches
Stress is fertile ground for overreach, precisely because it is real, uncomfortable, and universal. Here are the claims we think have travelled furthest past the evidence.
"Cortisol is a toxin you must flush out"
Cortisol is an essential hormone with a normal daily rhythm, not a poison.2 The whole framing of "detoxing" or "resetting" your cortisol misunderstands the biology. You do not want low cortisol; you want a healthy rhythm and a system that switches off after a genuine demand. Products promising to purge cortisol are solving a problem that does not exist as described.
"Cortisol is making your face puffy"
The viral idea of "cortisol face," in which everyday stress supposedly causes facial swelling you can fix with lifestyle tweaks, is not supported. Marked facial changes from cortisol are a feature of genuine, rare medical conditions of hormone excess, which require diagnosis and treatment, not a symptom of an ordinary stressful month.2 Taking a real clinical sign and applying it to everyday stress is a classic overreach, and it sells a lot of products.
"Adrenal fatigue is why you are exhausted"
As covered above, adrenal fatigue is not a recognised diagnosis and lacks scientific support, even though the exhaustion people feel is entirely real.22 The label points you towards tests and supplements rather than towards the things, rest, recovery, and sometimes medical assessment, that actually address why you feel depleted.
"All stress is bad for you"
The evidence points the other way: moderate, temporary stress can be beneficial, and how you view stress shapes its effects.45 The message that every ounce of stress is damaging is not only inaccurate, it can add a layer of anxiety about stress itself that makes things worse.
"This supplement will lower your stress"
The supplement evidence is modest at best and cannot address the actual source of stress.16 A capsule that promises to resolve stress is selling the feeling of doing something more than a genuine solution.
The tells are consistent. Be cautious when a normal hormone is framed as a toxin, when a sign of a rare medical condition is applied to everyday life, when an unrecognised diagnosis is used to sell tests and pills, when all stress is declared uniformly harmful, and when the fix conveniently narrows to a product. Real stress science is more nuanced: some stress is good, chronic stress matters, and the best responses are mostly things you do rather than things you buy.
When it is more than stress
Everything so far assumes ordinary, if difficult, stress. Sometimes it is more than that, and knowing the difference matters, because these situations call for real support rather than self-management, and reaching for that support is a strength, not a failure.
Burnout
Burnout is a state of exhaustion, cynicism, and reduced capacity that develops from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed, and it is now formally recognised as an occupational phenomenon.23 It is more than being tired after a hard week. If work has left you persistently depleted, detached, and unable to recover even when you rest, that is worth taking seriously, and it usually needs changes to the situation itself, not just better coping.
Anxiety and depression
Stress, anxiety, and low mood overlap, but anxiety disorders and depression are distinct, treatable medical conditions, not simply severe stress.14 If worry has become constant and hard to control, or if low mood, loss of interest, or hopelessness have settled in for weeks, that goes beyond what a stress-management guide can address. Effective help exists, including talking therapies and, where appropriate, medication, and seeking it early tends to make things easier, not harder.
The treatment worth knowing about
For persistent stress, anxiety, and related difficulties, structured psychological therapy, particularly cognitive behavioural therapy, has strong evidence and is widely recommended as a first-line approach.14 It is practical and skills-based rather than open-ended, and it is available through healthcare systems across Europe as well as privately and, increasingly, through evidence-based digital programmes. Many people who would benefit never seek it, often because they assume their stress is not "bad enough." If it is affecting your life, it qualifies.
If stress has tipped into something heavier, please treat that as a reason to speak to a doctor or a qualified professional rather than something to push through alone. If you ever feel unable to cope, or have thoughts of harming yourself, contact your doctor, local emergency services, or a crisis helpline in your country without delay. Asking for help early is one of the most effective things a person can do, and you deserve support with this.
Building a calmer life
Pulling it together, managing stress well is less about crisis tactics and more about a life with enough recovery built into it. Read this as a menu, not a checklist, and change one thing at a time. Trying to overhaul everything is, ironically, stressful.
Protect the recovery
- Guard your sleep, since it is the foundation your stress tolerance rests on. Our Sleep guide covers how.
- Build genuine pauses into your day, not just collapse at the end of it. Short, real breaks beat one long recovery you never quite reach.
- Take on challenges, then let yourself recover from them. Growth lives in that rhythm, not in constant load.
Use the free tools
- Move your body regularly, in whatever form you will actually keep doing.
- Get outside, aiming loosely for a couple of hours in nature across the week.
- Tend your relationships, and let people in when things are hard, rather than facing it alone.
- Practise a calming skill, whether breathing, mindfulness, or working with your thoughts, when things are calm, so it is there when they are not.
Watch the amplifiers
- Notice how caffeine and alcohol interact with your stress, and adjust when it runs high.
- Be kind about stress-eating rather than strict, and make the easier choice more available.
- Let go of the anxiety about stress itself. Ordinary stress is not an emergency.
Know the line
- If stress has become chronic, unrelenting, and is affecting your life, treat that as a reason to seek real support.
- Burnout, persistent anxiety, and low mood deserve professional help, and reaching for it early makes things easier.
The instinct under stress is often to add more: more discipline, more products, more optimisation. Usually the answer is the opposite. Pick the single most restorative thing you have been neglecting, sleep, movement, time outdoors, or connection, and protect it. One recovered habit does more than a shelf of stress supplements, and it is something you can sustain rather than abandon.
The honest summary
Stress is not the enemy, and a stress-free life is not the goal. Your stress response is a survival system that, in the right dose, sharpens and motivates you. The real target is not zero stress but a system that switches on when it should and settles when the demand has passed, with enough recovery to keep the whole thing in balance.
Chronic, unrelenting stress genuinely matters, and it deserves to be taken seriously rather than pushed through. But the response to it is mostly unglamorous and free: move your body, protect your sleep, get outside, stay connected, learn a calming skill or two, and be gentler with yourself than the productivity culture around you suggests. The supplements are modest at best, the cortisol tests promise more than they deliver, and much of what is sold to "reset" your stress is solving a problem that does not exist as described.
So take the pressure off, including the pressure to be perfectly calm. Some stress is part of a full life, some recovery is what keeps it sustainable, and knowing when it has become too much, and reaching for real help then, is not weakness but wisdom. Your body knows how to handle stress. Mostly, it just needs you to let it rest afterwards.
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- Thau L, Gandhi J, Sharma S. Physiology, cortisol. StatPearls. Treasure Island (FL): StatPearls Publishing; 2023.
- Sapolsky RM. Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers: The Acclaimed Guide to Stress, Stress-Related Diseases, and Coping. 3rd ed. New York: Holt Paperbacks; 2004.
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- McEwen BS. Stress, adaptation, and disease: allostasis and allostatic load. Ann N Y Acad Sci. 1998;840:33-44. doi:10.1111/j.1749-6632.1998.tb09546.x
- Epel ES, Blackburn EH, Lin J, et al. Accelerated telomere shortening in response to life stress. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2004;101(49):17312-17315. doi:10.1073/pnas.0407162101
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- Cryan JF, O'Riordan KJ, Cowan CSM, et al. The microbiota-gut-brain axis. Physiol Rev. 2019;99(4):1877-2013. doi:10.1152/physrev.00018.2018
- Stubbs B, Vancampfort D, Rosenbaum S, et al. An examination of the anxiolytic effects of exercise for people with anxiety and stress-related disorders: a meta-analysis. Psychiatry Res. 2017;249:102-108. doi:10.1016/j.psychres.2016.12.020
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- Salve J, Pate S, Debnath K, Langade D. Adaptogenic and anxiolytic effects of ashwagandha root extract in healthy adults: a double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled clinical study. Cureus. 2019;11(12):e6466. doi:10.7759/cureus.6466
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- Cadegiani FA, Kater CE. Adrenal fatigue does not exist: a systematic review. BMC Endocr Disord. 2016;16(1):48. doi:10.1186/s12902-016-0128-4
- World Health Organization. Burn-out an "occupational phenomenon": International Classification of Diseases. Geneva: WHO; 2019.
This guide is for general education. It is not medical advice and not a substitute for a conversation with your doctor or another qualified professional. If stress has become persistent and overwhelming, or is accompanied by low mood, constant anxiety, or thoughts of self-harm, please seek support from a doctor, a qualified professional, or a crisis service in your country. Individual needs vary, and what works for one person may not work for another.
