What Stress, Anxiety, Depression, and Burnout Do to Your Nervous System

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The nervous system was built for short bursts of danger — a predator, a fall, a genuine emergency — followed by a return to calm. It wasn’t built for a slow drip of stress that never quite lets up: the inbox that refills the moment it’s empty, the worry that resets each morning before your feet hit the floor. Chronic stress puts real strain on the nervous system, because the system doesn’t have a setting for “threat that lasts for years.”

When anxiety, depression, or burnout stay in place for a long stretch, that mismatch becomes measurable. McEwen (1998) described this using the concept of allostasis — the process by which the body maintains stability through change — and allostatic load, the wear that accumulates when that process runs too often, too long, or fails to shut off. His central point still holds: the same stress mediators that protect the nervous 

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“Your nervous system doesn’t know the difference between a work deadline and a threat to your life. It just knows to stay on.“

More recent research has traced part of this mechanism directly into the brain. Lei et al. (2025) reviewed how prolonged activation of the HPA axis — the hormonal loop connecting the brain to the stress response — drives neuroinflammation in the hippocampus, a brain region central to mood regulation and memory. Their review helps explain something many people notice but can’t quite name: why long stretches of stress, anxiety, or depression don’t just feel exhausting, but seem to change how clearly a person can think, remember, and regulate their own mood over time.

This is part of why a dysregulated nervous system isn’t something most people can simply decide their way out of. It got that way gradually, usually for good reasons — real pressures, real losses, real demands — and it tends to need something relational to recalibrate, not just willpower.

If your nervous system has been stuck in “on” for longer than you can remember, it doesn’t have to recalibrate alone. That’s what this work is for.

REFERENCES

McEwen, B. S. (1998). Protective and damaging effects of stress mediators. New England Journal of Medicine, 338(3), 171–179. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJM199801153380307

Lei, A. A., Phang, V. W. X., Lee, Y. Z., Kow, A. S. F., Tham, C. L., Ho, Y.-C., & Lee, M. T. (2025). Chronic stress-associated depressive disorders: The impact of HPA axis dysregulation and neuroinflammation on the hippocampus—A mini review. International Journal of Molecular Sciences, 26(7), Article 2940. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijms26072940