Toxic Stress Response
Toxicity is the quality of being very harmful or unpleasant in a pervasive or insidious way. It is also the quality of being poisonous, which has undeniable biological impacts on both the body and mind. Have you ever heard of stress being described as “toxic”? Like numerous other conditions, excessive stress could be lethal if left unaddressed or untreated. According to acesaware.org, scientific evidence demonstrates that chronic high doses of adversity experienced during critical and sensitive periods of early life development can lead to long-term disruptions in brain development - especially in the absence of trusted, nurturing caregivers and safe, stable environments. Immune, hormonal, and metabolic systems can all become detrimentally altered. These adverse childhood experiences were dubbed “ACEs” by a 1990s CDC-Kaiser Permanente study showing a correlation between excessive exposure to stressful environments and negative outcomes later in life.
In the early 2000s, the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child coined the term “toxic stress,” explaining how ACEs trigger biological reactions from the excessive activation of stress response systems on a child’s developing brain, as well as the immune system, metabolic regulatory systems, and the cardiovascular system. Toxic stress from ongoing, high doses of adversity can become embedded in a person’s traits and behaviors.
What happens when your body experiences high stress? Normally, when you perceive a threat, your body’s stress response goes on high alert. Your brain sends signals to your body that trigger a survival reaction (fight-freeze-or-flight) by releasing stress hormones causing your heart rate and blood pressure to elevate and breathing patterns to change. These stress hormones regulate your blood sugar, oversee memory formation, influence inflammatory responses, and affect tissue repair. Nonessential body processes become suppressed, affecting immune responses, digestive, reproductive, and growth process functions, and brain regions that control mood, motivation, and fear.
Once a perceived threat has passed, hormone levels return to normal, your heart rate and blood pressure return to baseline, and other systems resume their regular activities.
With toxic stress, the threats, or perceived threats, are ongoing, causing the fight-freeze-or-flight response to stay turned on, holding the body in a continuous survival reaction state.
Stress is considered toxic when it starts impacting your physical and mental health. When understanding the body functions influenced by stress hormones, one can easily see how health can be negatively affected under prolonged exposure to them. Short-term toxic stress can negatively affect health and behavior, leading to anxiety, sadness, problems concentrating or remembering things, behavioral problems, alcohol and drug use, other risk-taking behaviors, and greater susceptibility to viruses such as the common cold.
In the long term, overexposure to stress hormones disrupts almost all the body’s processes, causing harmful brain and body changes and raising the risk of lasting effects on both mental and physical health. Long-term toxic stress can lead to depression, asthma, chronic pain, heart disease, autoimmune disorders, certain cancers, and neurodegenerative disorders. It can lead to unstable work histories as adults, struggles with finances and jobs, increased risk of incarceration, and the repeating of these patterns generationally.
Experiencing ACEs can trigger all of these stress response systems. When a child experiences multiple ACEs over time, especially without the support of caring adults acting as a buffer, the experiences will trigger an excessive and long-lasting stress response, which can have a wear-and-tear effect on the body and mind, like pressing your foot on the accelerator of a car engine for days or weeks at a time, wearing a person down.
Understanding the causes and impacts of adverse experiences earlier in life can help us to make positive changes toward better outcomes later in life. Now that these links and connections have been identified and we are finding ways to get the information out to people at all levels, taking steps to correct or at least reduce the frequency and impact of these unfortunate situations is the necessary next move. Building a community that works together to develop ways of caring for our children, grow their resilience, and maximize their potential and trust in one another will, in turn, build trust and resilience for the future of us all.