Understanding Stress: Acute vs. Chronic
We need not view stress as a big bad wolf, because not all stress is bad. God designed our bodies and brains to experience it. Healthy stress increases focus. It can help us become more social as we connect with others. It can enhance learning as we replay a stressful situation in our minds to make sense of it and learn from it so that we can better handle a similar situation in the future. Learning from stressful experiences is a resilience trait.
Neither should we view stress as poles of a single continuum from bad (threat/distress) to good (challenge/eustress). Rather, both challenge and threat can occur in a single event. For any given stressful experience, both a positive and a negative response can simultaneously occur.
For example, let’s say on your way to work you wreck your car. No one gets hurt, but you total your car. During the few seconds leading up to and during your accident, hormones and neurotransmitters flood your brain and body and you experience significant stress. Yet as time passes, the stress chemicals in your bloodstream and brain dissipate. As a result, you will think more clearly to reappraise the situation.
Acute stress can improve our performance without harming our bodies or brains. It motivates us to take action to get things done, meet deadlines, focus on a task, pay attention in class, and react quickly in a threatening situation (like slamming on your brakes to avoid a wreck). Although a life situation may instantly evoke a stress response, our stress levels will usually return to baseline after the event. God created us this way so that we could survive when threatened.
Chronic stress IS the big bad wolf. Chronic stress means stress caused by unremitting threatening conditions and events (real or imagined) when we are on high alert for long periods. It creates distress, which causes negative thoughts, memories, and emotions, as well as negative body and brain effects, to stick with us longer.
Unhealthy stress responses that engage the brain’s emotional accelerator (the sympathetic nervous system) were consequences of the fall. Perhaps God initially wired Adam and Eve’s stress circuits to only respond to pleasurable experiences that evoked good stress (eustress).
We experience positive emotions from eustress, for example, when we feel challenged to complete a task at work and finish it well. Such a task may have challenged us, but responding to the challenge satisfied us because completing a task evokes the release of dopamine, one of the brain’s “feel good” chemicals, into our brains.
In the garden Adam and Eve, although they felt challenged to care for the garden, experienced no threat to their safety. They didn’t need any brain circuits to initiate the fight-or-flight response. Yet after the fall everything changed. The fall rewired their brain circuits or brought to life existing survival circuits that lay dormant before the fall. As a result, sin in Adam’s and Eve’s hearts now evoked new stressful emotions—fear and guilt—and they hid from God.
Faith-Based Tools for Understanding Stress and Rewiring the Brain
Stressful difficulties and tests in life give us opportunities to rewire those damaged threat circuits we inherited from Adam and Eve. When we respond to stress in God-honoring ways and yield to the Holy Spirit’s direction in the moment, God will change our brain circuits to better match their original intended purpose before the fall.
Adapted from Stress Less: 9 Habits from the Bible and Brain Science to Build Resilience and Reduce Anxiety – Biblically Sound – Research Informed by Charles Stone. (©2025). Published by Moody Publishers. Used with permission.
