We often associate stress with pressure, chaos and feeling overwhelmed.
And these are the areas of our lives that we address to manage stress.
There’s nothing wrong with that.
But it’s not 100% right either.
The quality of your stress management strategy depends on how your stress responses are being triggered.
That can look a lot different to stress management strategies that focus on relieving yourself from pressure, chaos and feeling overwhelmed.
Here’s the kicker:
The brain doesn’t differentiate much between physical threats and emotional ones.
Emotional pain can trigger biological stress responses in the body. In fact, unresolved emotional wounds — such as rejection, betrayal, abandonment, or perceived criticism — can activate the brain’s stress system just as intensely as external situations that are chaotic, pressuring and overwhelming.
If you were deeply shamed as a child, for instance, or betrayed in a relationship, the brain stores that experience — and becomes hyper-alert to similar threats in the future.
Emotional wounds invite chronic stress.
Chronic stress is the number #1 facilitator of almost every physical and mental health issue on the planet.
We should probably start addressing our stress management strategies.
The stress response is better known as the “freeze-fight-flight” mechanism. It is controlled by the sympathetic nervous system, part of the central nervous system in which memories of your past are stored and retrieved.
Memories of your past are stored in the hippocampus, your mental filing cabinet. The hippocampus communicates with the amygdala. These are the chiefs in command of your emotional brain.
If the information in your filing cabinet perceives your emotional structure could be disturbed, the hippocampus alerts the amygdala of a potential threat.
The amygdala then commands the hypothalamus to release the stress hormones, cortisol and adrenaline.
This prepares the body to either fight, flee, or freeze.
The scientific literature shows that stress is triggered in one of three scenarios:
In each of these scenarios, the nervous system can feel a perceived sense of helplessness, which stress research has shown is a potent trigger for biological stress responses.
When helplessness becomes a learned behaviour in childhood, the psychological state of an adult becomes maladaptive. People don’t learn how to manage stressful environments.
Subsequently, stress responses become chronic and take their toll on your mental and physical health.
Thought-Provoking Quote
“A child whose parents punish or inhibit this acting-out of emotion will be conditioned to respond to similar emotions in the future by repression. The self- shutdown serves to prevent shame and rejection. Under such conditions, Buck writes, “emotional competence will be compromised.... The individual will not in the future know how to effectively handle the feelings and desires involved. The result would be a kind of helplessness.”
~ Gabor Mate, When The Body Says No (2019)
When an emotional wound is triggered — say, by a harsh comment or a perceived rejection — the amygdala lights up. It senses danger, even if the threat isn’t life-threatening.
The prefrontal cortex, responsible for logical thinking and emotional regulation, often gets overridden in these moments.
When this happens, people tend to react strongly or irrationally to seemingly small things: a cold tone of voice, being ignored, or receiving feedback can make them angry, run away or go into a mental paralysis.
Moments like these can seem innocuous to the observer. But to the emotionally wounded individual, the dysregulation is causing inner turmoil.
When old wounds are reactivated, the body is flooded with stress chemicals, tension, and emotional overwhelm.
When emotional wounds are re-triggered frequently — and never processed or healed — the stress response becomes chronic. The body stays in a prolonged state of alert, which leads to:
Research has shown that emotional trauma, especially in early life, changes the way the brain and nervous system develop — often leading to an overactive stress response and underactive soothing systems.
When your body is functioning properly, inflammation is protective. It’s your immune system’s way of fighting off threats, clearing out damaged cells, and starting the healing process.
But when inflammation becomes chronic, silent, and widespread, it signals a deeper issue — and often precedes conditions like:
Heart disease
Type 2 diabetes
Autoimmune disorders
Depression and anxiety
Alzheimer’s and cognitive decline
Even cancer
The good news is, the brain can be rewired to heal emotional wounds by developing emotional intelligence and stress management strategies that shift your mindset from surviving to thriving.
Through practices like developing a growth mindset, self-observation and self-awareness, compassion, gratitude and acceptance, to name a few, we can begin to reconstruct neural networks and avoid chronic stress.
By becoming aware of our emotional wounds, the nervous system can self-regulate and balance. Moreover, addressing the root cause of emotional wounds, enables us to shift from a reactive to a responsive attitude.
This doesn’t mean we never feel triggered, but we’re no longer held hostage by the stress response triggered by a fear-induced limbic system.
Emotional wounds are real, and they leave a lasting imprint on the brain and body. When left unhealed, they can keep the stress response firing — often in ways we don’t consciously recognise.
But healing is possible. And it starts with understanding that emotional pain isn’t “all in your head” — it’s stored as memory in your nervous system.
