If you’ve ever felt stressed out (and who hasn’t?), you already know that being under pressure can affect your body, either by causing a headache, muscle tightness, or flutters in your chest, making you feel down in the dumps, or leaving you ravenous for chocolate or robbed of all appetite.

There are both short-term and long-term physical effects of stress. Learning how to manage stress effectively can help to reduce both varieties.

How Acute Stress Affects Your Body

When you experience an acute or sudden onset of stress — maybe you’re running late, working on a tight deadline, driving in bad weather — your body may react in the following ways:

• Muscle tension
• Shortness of breath and/or rapid breathing and hyperventilation (people with breathing disorders may have an event triggered by stress)
• Increased heart rate, stronger contractions of the heart muscle, and elevated blood pressure — what’s known as the fight-or-flight response
• Sweating
• Gastrointestinal distress (bloating, nausea, gas, diarrhea or constipation, or even vomiting)
• Dry mouth

Most people can take these kinds of physiological changes in stride. “Cortisol is released when you feel stressed, but the level of this hormone should go back down when the stressful event is over,” says Jennifer Haythe, MD, a cardiologist at Columbia University’s Irving Medical Center in New York City. 

When the stress subsides, the body relaxes, and these symptoms go away.

There are instances of acute stress that can be more serious and have a more profound effect on your body. Stress-induced cardiomyopathy — an uncommon form of cardiomyopathy also known as broken heart syndrome — is a weakening of the heart’s left ventricle (its main pumping chamber) that usually results from severe emotional or physical stress. Although the condition is relatively rare, the vast majority of cases are in postmenopausal women.

“Cardiomyopathy can occur in very stressful situations, such as after a huge fight, the death of a child, or other major triggers,” Dr. Haythe says. “Patients come into the emergency room with severe chest pain and other symptoms of what we call acute heart failure syndrome, though their coronary arteries are clear. They can be very sick, but with treatment, most of the time, people recover.”