The Extraordinary Effect of Ordinary Acts on the Stressed Body
There’s a moment, usually sometime after a second deep breath or a few steps into the open air, when the tightness around your chest begins to loosen its grip, and the thoughts that were shouting deadlines and worries start to lower their voices. Although they haven’t fully vanished, they’ve made just enough space to put some distance between you and your stress.
For me, that moment often comes with the small ritual of opening my yellow journal and hearing the scratch of pen against paper. Other times, it’s taking a stroll under the sun and humming to the steady rhythm of my own footsteps. These aren’t grand solutions to stress, but small, ordinary acts. And yet, the ways that they control your body’s response to stress is nothing short of extraordinary.
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Introduction to the Stress Response
When your brain perceives a threat (and “threat” can mean anything from an exam to an unanswered email), it activates the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis. This involves signals travelling from your brain to your adrenal glands, immediately sending cortisol and adrenaline circulating through your body. Cortisol and adrenaline are chemical messengers released by your body in response to stress. As a result, your heart rate increases, your muscles tense and your mind is trapped in a state of heightened alertness. This is a system designed by evolution for human survival.
The problem with the stress that overwhelms us is not because the stress response exists, but because our body doesn’t always know when to turn it off. This is where those small acts, like journalling, taking a walk or doing something you genuinely enjoy physiologically change you.
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How Journalling Reduces Chemical Messenger Release
On the surface, I love to journal because it quiets the chaotic worries in my head. But physiologically, journalling interrupts the stress response through the action of putting thoughts into words. For example, when you begin to label a chaotic motion instead of just feeling it, such as writing “I feel overwhelmed by this deadline,” your brain’s fear center, the amygdala, significantly calms down.
This is because the act of labelling activates your prefrontal cortex, the brain’s regulatory center, which dampens activity in the amygdala and eases the signal from your hypothalamus, the part of your brain that initiates stress responses through activation of the HPA axis. The threat hasn’t vanished, but your brain registers that it is being acknowledged. As a result, the hypothalamus sends signals that stop your adrenal glands from pumping out cortisol and adrenaline. By decreasing the body’s emergency response, your heart rate decreases and your blood pressure lowers, effectively helping reduce stress.
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How Taking a Walk Clears Chemical Messengers from the Body
I find that taking walks outside also relieves me from stress, but it works along a slightly different pathway. When you walk, your muscles rhythmically contract and relax, which increases your blood flow and helps release tension in the body. The steady and repetitive motion stimulates your vagus nerve, which sends signals to your body that it is safe to shift out of emergency mode. Over time, your liver and kidneys continue their ongoing work of breaking down and clearing the adrenaline and cortisol that have built up in the bloodstream. Together with the brain’s reduced output of these chemical messengers, less and less remain in the body.
Furthermore, natural settings have been shown to quiet rumination in the brain, which is the loop of repetitive worrying and negative thoughts that keeps your body in a stressed state. This happens partly due to the Attention Restoration Theory (ART), which proposes that natural environments, such as the warmth of the sun and the sound of rustling leaves, engage involuntary attention. Unlike screens or city traffic that demand constant and effortful focus, these soft sights and sounds require no mental strain, therefore giving your directed attention a chance to recover.
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Conclusion
Different activities relieve stress through different physiological pathways. Journalling and taking walks are two examples. One helps calm the amygdala to stop your brain from pumping out cortisol and adrenaline, while the other allows your organs to clear them from your blood. But underneath it all, these simple activities all work the same way in helping you relieve stress; they reduce the chemical messengers in your body and give your HPA axis a break. Perhaps what is so brilliant about the body is that you do not need grand gestures to coax it back into balance. Small and ordinary things are enough to free you from stress, and in doing so, return you to yourself.
