Your Stressors Aren't Going Anywhere. Your Stress Response Can.

Has anyone ever told you that you need to reduce your stress? A doctor, a friend, a well-meaning article? And did you nod along while privately wondering how on earth you were supposed to do that, when none of the things causing it were going anywhere?

That question is what this article is about. It's the talk I prepared for Saturday's Well-Being Discovery Event, "Stress, Your Beauty & the Power of Touch," and in case you didn't hear it, I wanted to share it here.

By the end, you'll know how to recognize when you're in chronic stress, what it's actually doing inside your body, why you have far more say over it than you've probably been told, and why something as simple as slow, gentle touch turns out to be one of the most direct ways to help.

It begins with a little audience participation, and yes, that works through a screen too. Hold up a hand, and for every question you answer yes to, put a finger up.

In the past week:

• Have you woken up concerned with what you needed to do that day, or what you did not do yesterday?

• Have you had trouble falling asleep because your brain keeps going over what you need to do, or what you didn't do?

• Have you felt overwhelmed by what you want or need to do?

• Have you found yourself being more irritable?

• Have you felt like you were pushing your own needs aside to take care of what someone else needed?

• Have you had difficulty concentrating, remembering things, or making decisions because you had too much going on inside your mind?

• Have you had an upset stomach, a backache, or a headache due to tension?

• Has someone asked how you were, and you said "fine," because you just didn't want to explain what's actually going on for you?

You may have needed your second hand by the end, and that's alright. Now take a look at how many fingers you have up. If it's more than three, guess what: you are likely stuck in a chronic stress cycle, and you may not have realized it until just now.

Before you put your hands down, take a moment to notice your body as it is right now. Are your shoulders relaxed, or are they up around your ears? Is your jaw tight, or is your tongue sitting loosely on the bottom of your mouth? Are you breathing down into your stomach, or up into your chest?

If that surprised you, you're in very good company.

So many people don't even realize that they're in chronic stress, because somewhere along the way it stopped feeling like stress and started feeling like an ordinary Tuesday.

Here's what's actually happening, and I want to be clear that the stress response itself isn't bad. It's one of the most intelligent things your body does. It was designed to be brief: your heart rate goes up, your muscles brace, and your energy goes toward whatever will get you through the next few minutes. Then it's meant to switch off again.

The trouble only begins when it gets stuck, and chronic stress is simply what we call it when that switch never quite makes it all the way back.

A single yes doesn't mean anything is wrong, of course. Sometimes you're tired simply because you didn't sleep enough. But a whole week of yeses is a pattern, and patterns are worth getting curious about.

What your body does with all that

When your body believes it needs to get through something, it makes some very sensible budget decisions, and anything long-term gets moved to the waiting list. That works beautifully for a few minutes. It's when the waiting goes on for months or years that the effects start reaching into places most of us would never think to connect with stress.

Your thinking changes. Under stress, your brain is using the part of itself that is wired for survival, not the part that handles reasoning, evaluating, and thinking things through. That's a wonderful arrangement if you need to jump out of the way of a car. It's much less helpful when you're facing a hard conversation or a complicated decision, and it's a big part of why difficulties feel so much harder to deal with when you're already stretched.

Your body stops listening to its own alarms. This is the one I find most fascinating. When your stress response gets kicked up again and again, it's almost like the little boy who cried wolf. Cortisol normally helps keep inflammation in check, but after enough spikes your body won't respond to it the same way, and inflammation has more room to linger. Something similar can happen with insulin, which is why chronic stress so often travels with difficulty controlling blood sugar and a reduced metabolism.

Your gut changes. I mean that quite literally. Chronic stress can shift the makeup of the bacteria living in your digestive tract, something called gut dysbiosis, which helps explain why stress so often shows up as a stomach that just isn't right.

Your muscles stay braced. A body that's ready for something holds more tension, and over time the neck, shoulders, jaw, and back forget how to fully let go.

A few more things end up on that waiting list:

• Healing. Repair is a rest-state job. A body that stays braced tends to mend more slowly.

• Regeneration. Skin and tissue renew themselves less efficiently, which is one reason a long stressful stretch can show up on our faces before we've admitted to it anywhere else.

• Fluid. Things that are supposed to keep moving tend to linger instead, which is where a lot of puffiness comes from.

• Weight. Stress hormones influence appetite and where the body stores energy, so weight can shift even when nothing about how you eat has changed.

• Words. Under stress, the brain leans on its fast, reactive regions and away from the parts that handle language and reasoning. That moment mid-sentence when a perfectly ordinary word just leaves? That.

And then there's my own specialty, the skin. Under chronic stress, your skin has a reduced ability to repair itself after sun damage and environmental exposure, and more water is able to pass out through it, so it has a harder time staying hydrated. That's often what's behind skin that suddenly seems dry, reactive, or slow to bounce back when nothing about your routine has changed.

I don't share any of this to worry you. None of it is a verdict; it's simply information. Your body isn't being dramatic, and it isn't letting you down. It's doing triage with the signals it has been given.

Stressors are not the same thing as stress

This is my favorite part of the talk, because it's the part that tends to change how people think about their own lives.

Most stress advice comes down to "reduce your stress," which sounds lovely until you try to work out what exactly you're supposed to cancel. The job? The teenagers? The aging parents?

So many people think that they can't reduce their stress because of outside events. But those outside events are stressors, and they are not the same thing as the actual stress response.

Stressors are what happens around you: the inbox, the diagnosis, the person who needs you at 6 a.m. and again at 11 p.m. The stress response is what happens inside you: the bracing, the racing, the body getting itself ready for something.

We don't always get a vote on the first one. We do have more say in the second than most of us have ever been told, and that's where stress resiliency comes in. Resiliency doesn't mean being tougher, and it certainly doesn't mean feeling nothing. It describes how readily your body comes back down after it has gone up.

So the question I'd invite you to sit with is this: could the same full life land in a body that recovers from it more easily? I find that a far more useful question than "how do I get rid of my stress?"

And this is a really good thing, because it means that even when we can't change what is happening around us, there are things we can do to "manage" our stress. Remember, the stress response isn't bad. It only causes trouble when it gets stuck, so what we're really doing is helping the body finish what it started and come back down.

How I found my way to touch

I didn't come to any of this through skincare. I came to it as a patient.

I have an autoimmune disorder, and my doctor kept telling me that I needed to reduce my stress. So I started researching how a person actually does that. I found studies on the effects of yoga on the body. I learned that the types of foods you eat can help balance your stress responses.

And then I stumbled upon one particular study that blew the doors wide open for me on massage and the effects of gua sha.

Why touch speaks the body's language

Have you ever told yourself to relax? If you have, you already know how well that works. The body doesn't take instructions very well, but it does respond to sensation.

What that study explores is a particular kind of nerve in your skin called a C-tactile afferent, and to understand why it matters, it helps to know that we have more than one kind of touch nerve.

Most of the nerves in our skin are there to report the facts. They tell the brain, quickly and precisely, "hey, you're being touched," along with where and how firmly.

The C-tactile nerves do something different. They carry the feeling of the touch, the emotional response to it. They let the brain know, hey this is danger touch or this is sensual touch or this is comforting touch.

They respond best to one very specific thing, which is slow, gentle touch, and when they're active the message that reaches the brain is less "something is on your arm" and more "this touch is safe." It's the kind of touch we instinctively use to comfort a baby or someone we love.

So when the body receives slow, gentle touch, what it hears is that you are safe, and you can relax.

Once the body receives that message, it can begin moving out of get-through-it mode and into rest and digest, which is the state where everything on that waiting list finally gets its turn. Isn't that fascinating? What does it isn't a thought or a mindset. It's a hand, moving slowly.

The face and scalp are a particularly good place for this conversation to happen. These fibers have been recorded in the skin of the face, and they live in hair-bearing skin, which describes your scalp rather well. They're also where so many of us do our holding: the jaw, the brow, and that band of tension that wraps around the head by late afternoon.

The science here is still young, and I'd rather stay curious about it than oversell it. What I can tell you is what I see in my room: people settle, their breathing drops lower, and they often leave feeling lighter than when they walked in.

What changes when someone does this for you

You can absolutely use slow, gentle touch on yourself, and I encourage it. But there is something different about receiving it.

Most of the women I work with spend their days giving exactly this kind of touch. They smooth a child's hair, rub a partner's shoulders, hold a parent's hand in a waiting room. Very few of them can remember the last time it came back in their direction.

When someone else is doing the work, your body doesn't have to plan the next movement or keep track of the time. You aren't the one setting the pace, so you can't hurry it along. All that's asked of you is to lie there and let those nerves receive the message, again and again, for long enough that your body starts to believe it.

That's usually the moment I notice from my side of the table: the breath that finally drops, the jaw that lets go, the shoulders coming down from where they've been living. For that hour, nobody needs anything from you, and your body gets to practice what coming back down feels like.

Which brings me to a question that's really just for you.

So, where does your stress show up?

You don't have to know which treatment you need. You only have to notice where your body is doing the talking.

In a head that won't get quiet. The new Scalp Rituals open October 21, and reservations are open now. Reserve yours here

On your skin. A facial, where we look at what your skin is communicating and give your nervous system an hour off at the same time. Book a facial

In your tight shoulders, your jaw, your back. Massage, for the kind of tension you've stopped noticing you carry. Book a massage

And if you read this far and simply thought, "oh, that's me," that counts too. Noticing is where all of this begins.