How to recognise symptoms of stress — and how to reduce them

In week two of our summer wellbeing series, we ask what we can do to reduce our stress.

Not all stress is bad, but when it happens regularly it can have negative effects Picture: iStock

Do you ever find yourself clenching your jaw so tightly it hurts? Or notice that your breathing has become faster and your heart is racing? Have there been times when your stomach was constantly upset, either from nausea, heartburn, diarrhoea, or constipation?

Chartered counselling psychologist Margaret Forde (positivepsychology.ie) says these are all symptoms of stress.

“When something triggers our body’s emergency mode, there’s a physiological response,” she says. “Our heart beats more quickly to pump more blood to the muscles. Our breathing speeds up to get more oxygen to the brain. And our digestive processes stall as our brain diverts energy to the muscles and organs that will get us out of what it perceives as danger.”

Margaret Forde: Lonely people tend to struggle with stress more than others.

There can be psychological, emotional and behavioural symptoms too. Among those listed by Forde are difficulty concentrating, feelings of worry and anxiety, social withdrawal, and trouble sleeping.

Dr Natalia Putrino, a psychologist and chartered member of the Psychological Society of Ireland, explains that short irregular bursts of stress can be beneficial.

“Stress enables us to react fast to genuine danger,” she says. “It also boosts our motivation and sharpens our focus in situations like job interviews or when we play sports or have to meet an important deadline.”

Dr Natalia Putrino, a psychologist and chartered member of the Psychological Society of Ireland

This positive form of stress, which is usually short-term and feels exciting, is known as eustress. However, it can easily tip over into distress. Putrino says this tipping point comes when the stress is persistent and creates “a chronic stress response that can cause people to burn out, develop anxiety or mood disorders, or become more prone to ill health.”

A 2021 US study concluded that high levels of the stress hormone cortisol caused inflammation, which increased the risk of inflammatory conditions like arthritis and diabetes.

People all over the world are suffering this negative impact. So much so that the World Health Organization declared stress “a health epidemic” in 2019.

The problem appears to be particularly acute in Ireland, with a 2025 report declaring us as some of the most stressed-out people in the world. Based on a survey of 35,515 individuals, across 40 countries, it found that 93% of us struggle with stress.

Put your stress to the test

Putrino recommends starting with an easy-to-use online screening test to determine our levels of perceived stress — the PSS-10 test [exa.mn/stress-test].

Another option is to track our emotions at set points of the day every day for a week. “This makes us more aware of the situations that cause us stress and how we tend to respond to those situations,” she says.

Forde believes that taking time to consider our responses can prompt us to modify them. “We don’t have to continue responding to stress in the same ways we’ve always done, especially if those ways aren’t healthy. I think of stress as a noise in your head you can’t get rid of, and I know some people try to silence that noise with alcohol, drugs, food, or risky behaviour, but there are more constructive responses.”

Many of those responses such as grounding ourselves in our physical senses, distract us from stress by bringing us out of our heads and into our bodies.

“Grounding involves naming five things you can see, four things you can hear, three things you can smell, two things you can touch, and one thing you can taste,” says Forde.

Plunging into the sea or even holding an ice cube to your face can also serve as what Forde calls “a circuit breaker because the cold is momentarily all you can think about”.

Another tactic is five minutes of intense exercise. Forde says squats, skipping, jumping jacks, and dancing are all great at “jolting us out of a state of stress”.

Putrino suggests breathing exercises, which are useful because they can be practised anywhere. “All you have to do is focus on breathing deeply and lengthening your exhalation,” she says. “Your slowing breath will slow your heart rate and calm your nervous system.”

Reframing your thoughts can help too. Putrino gives the example of missing a bus to remind us that we can all control how we react to stressful events in our lives.

“Missing the bus could ruin our day by making us fixate on the negative,” she says. “But I would always try to find the silver lining. Maybe I’d walk to the next bus stop and tell myself it’s an opportunity to get extra steps in.”

A 2025 US study shows that having strong social connections can be a powerful tool in countering stress.

“Lonely people tend to struggle with stress more than others,” says Forde. “So try to nurture your relationships.”

Putrino suggests allowing for recovery after stressful situations because “we all need time to recharge so we can better respond to stress going forward”.

Her tips for recharging include switching off from devices and enjoying activities where the focus isn’t on being productive. “It could be listening to music, doing a jigsaw or going for a walk in nature,” she says. “A 2010 study from Japan demonstrated that when people spent time in the forest, they had lower levels of cortisol, lower pulse rates, and lower blood pressure than when they spent time in urban settings. And you don’t have to go to the forest to get these benefits. You get the same impact in your local park.”

Make the world less stress-inducing

Dr Brian Hughes is a professor of psychology specialising in stress psychophysiology at the University of Galway.

“Rather than teaching people techniques for how to live in a stress-inducing world,” he says, “I prefer to focus on how to make the world less stress-inducing.”

Dr Brian Hughes is a professor of psychology at the University of Galway.

He advises two ways of doing this. One is choosing what he calls “problem-focused coping” over “emotion-focused coping”.

“Stress is something we feel in response to real-world problems like struggling to pay bills in a cost-of-living crisis,” he says. “Whether we respond to that feeling of stress by avoiding it through watching TV or scrolling social media or managing it through breathing exercises, we only succeed in making the emotions associated with stress go away in the short term. We’re not engaging with the root cause.”

“Problem-focused coping” involves making a practical plan to tackle that root cause.

“Start by listing the steps you need to take,” says Hughes. “Then identify the people who will help you take them, and reach out to those people. Identify information you need and get it. Identify services that will help and access them.”

The second way to make the world less stress-inducing, according to Hughes, is for us all to talk more about stress.

“I’d like to hear more conversations about the injustices that are at the root of modern-day stress and the actions that will counter them, like joining a union, voting for political parties with progressive policies, or engaging with others who want to change the world for the better,” he says.

“Stress is part of life. We won’t ever eradicate it, and nor should we even want to. But there are plenty of stress-inducing problems in the world today that we could work together to resolve. We just have to take collective action to do so.”

Homework

For your second July challenge, we are setting you the following three tasks:

1. Identify when you are stressed;

2. Experiment to discover which techniques help you overcome your emotions in the moment;

3. Stop to consider whether it would help to make a plan to reduce your stress in the long term.