You may be meeting deadlines, making decisions and keeping up with your daily responsibilities, but that doesn’t necessarily mean your body is coping well with stress. According to neurosurgeon Dr Jay Jagannathan, chronic stress often hides in plain sight, silently affecting the brain and body long before obvious signs appear. In a July 13 Instagram post, he explained why prolonged stress shouldn’t be ignored.
“Chronic stress can look completely ‘normal’ for a long time. You continue working, making decisions, communicating and handling your usual responsibilities. But your nervous system returns to a fully relaxed state less and less often,” says Dr Jagannathan.
What happens in the body during chronic stress
Dr Jagannathan explained that when the body experiences stress, the sympathetic nervous system and the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis become activated. “The body increases the release of cortisol and catecholamines to respond more quickly to pressure. In the short term, this mechanism is useful. The problem begins when it stays active for too long.”
According to him, prolonged activation of the stress response can gradually affect several aspects of physical and mental health, including:
- Attention and memory
- Sleep architecture
- Pain perception
- Muscle tone
- Heart rate
- Emotional reactivity
Why chronic stress is often overlooked
Dr Jagannathan noted that people frequently experience these symptoms individually without realising they could stem from the same underlying cause. “Poor sleep is blamed on the schedule. Headaches are blamed on fatigue. Irritability is blamed on personality. Difficulty concentrating is blamed on a busy workload. But they may all be linked to the same prolonged stress response.”
The neurosurgeon concluded with an important reminder that staying productive isn’t always a sign of good health. “The uncomfortable truth is that being able to function under stress does not mean your body is handling it without consequences.”
About Dr Jay Jagannathan
Dr Jay Jagannathan is a board-certified neurosurgeon specialising in cranial and spinal surgery, with expertise in minimally invasive spine procedures. Trained at the University of Virginia and Wayne State University, he also completed advanced fellowships at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Auckland City Hospital in New Zealand.
