Stress and anxiety are often thought of as mental struggles, but what happens when your mind feels fine, yet your body is in distress?
Many people experience physical symptoms of stress and anxiety without feeling mentally overwhelmed. This disconnect between body and mind can be confusing, but it's more common than you might think.
Stress can manifest purely as physical symptoms, even when a person doesn’t feel emotionally distressed. This often happens in people who are highly resilient, used to pushing through challenges, or unaware of the subtle ways stress affects them.
What Are the Physical Symptoms of Hidden Stress?
- Digestive issues – bloating, nausea, stomach pain, diarrhoea, or constipation
- Headaches
- Fatigue
- Weakened immune system – frequent colds or slow recovery from illness
- Heart palpitations
- Irregular heartbeat
- Breathing difficulties (for example, feeling as though you can’t get enough air)
- Feeling dizzy and light-headed
- Neck and shoulder tension
- Clenched jaw
- Grinding your teeth (especially at night)
- General aches, pains and tense muscles
- Shaking hands and legs
- Excessive yawning
- Skin reactions – breakouts, rashes, or eczema flare-ups
- Chest tightness
- Sweating or hot flushes
- Pins and needles
- Restlessness
- Ringing in the ear
- Tingling or numbness in the arms, fingers, toes, or around the mouth
- Feeling sick
- Frequent urination
- Changes in sex drive
Why Does This Happen?
It happens because the stress response is unconscious.
Your body processes stress even when your mind doesn’t register it.
Long-term exposure to low-level stress (such as work pressure, family responsibilities, or unresolved emotions) can trigger the nervous system without causing noticeable mental anxiety.
In addition, even when the mind is involved, some people are conditioned to suppress their emotional distress. There's a mind-body disconnection. Instead of having mental anxiety, they develop physical symptoms as the body's core way of signaling distress.
What Can You Do About It?
Start Listening to Your Body
Pay attention to patterns. If physical symptoms persist despite no obvious medical cause, consider whether stress could be the underlying issue.
Practicing body scan meditation is a great way to enhance your mind-body connection.
Practice Body-Based Stress Reduction
To calm down your body, try and test a range of methods and discover what works for you:
- Breathing exercises
- Practicing mindfulness and meditation
- Yoga
- Spending time in nature
- Listening to alpha-wave inducing sounds (such as nature sounds, binaural beats, or calming music)
- Massage
- Exercise
- Limiting stimulants like caffeine
While trying these practices sporadically can offer temporary relief, true change comes from consistency. Just like building muscle through regular exercise, training your body to stay calm requires repeated practice. You need to engage in these practices on a regular basis to rewire your nervous system.
Address the Root Causes
Are you overworking? Not sleeping enough? Experiencing relationship problems? Tackle the problem head on, one small step at a time. Your body will thank you.
The GROW Planner inside The Mental Wellbeing Toolkit is designed to help you break down problems into small steps and plan your way towards a better future.
Release Suppressed Emotions
Writing in a journal, talking to a friend, or working with a therapist can help bring unprocessed emotions to the surface.
The power of writing about your thoughts and feelings was demonstrated in a famous study by James Pennebaker in the 1980s. In the study, he gave a group of participants the following instructions:
“For the next 4 days, I'd like you to write your very deepest thoughts and feelings abou the most traumatic experience of your entire life or an extremely important emotional issue that has affected you and your life. In your writing, I’d like you to really let go and explore your deepest emotions and thoughts. You might tie your topic to your relationships with others, including parents, lovers, friends or relatives; to your past, your present or your future; or to who you have been, who you would like to be or who you are now. You may write about the same general issues or experiences on all days of writing or about different topics each day. Don’t worry about spelling, grammar or sentence structure.”
They did this for 15 minutes for each of the four days. Compared to people who wrote as factually as possible about neutral topics, people who wrote about their thoughts and feelings made significantly fewer visits to a physician in the following months.
Further studies have replicated this, demonstrating that writing leads to significant improvements in several biochemical markers of physical and immune functioning.
One theory is that writing helps you process ‘stuck’ emotions in your body. Suppressing emotions is thought to be physically taxing – a type of bodily stressor. You may wish to try the above exercise out yourself for the next four days.
Summary
Just because your mind doesn’t feel stressed doesn’t mean your body isn’t carrying stress. Recognising and addressing these hidden signs can improve both physical and mental wellbeing.
Focus on:
- Tuning into your body
- Exploring body-based stress reduction methods
- Addressing stress triggers
- Processing your emotions through methods like journaling
You've got this!
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