Surprising ways that stress can show up in runners – and how to deal with it
This is part two of our four-part series of stories exploring stress, the nuances that come with the psychological and physiological response and its relationship with running.
For a lot of people, running is a form of stress relief – and that’s great! The research around exercise and stress shows that staying active will help you to handle the stressful things in life more effectively.
That said, exercise is also a stress inducer, in that it breaks down your body in the moment. The growth phase – the gains – don’t happen until you stop exercising and allow your body to adapt to that stress. 'When you’re training, you want to purposefully stress your system slightly beyond your capabilities so you can grow,' explains Rachele Pojednic, associate professor and director of exercise science at Norwich University in Vermont, USA. 'A little bit of stress is good for your body, but too much is detrimental.'
There’s a fine line to walk when you’re using a stressor to help relieve stress, so it can be hard to tell when you're doing too much. What's more, your body can’t tell the difference between physical stress, like exercise, and the mental or emotional stress that comes from working on a big project, for example, or caring for a sick family member. 'As your stress hormones shoot up and your body tries to figure out how to best cope with whatever is causing that stress, everyone reacts differently,' explains Amy Morin, a psychotherapist and mental strength trainer.
While it’s easy to downplay the symptoms of stress, it's important to recognise them – especially since so many of these symptoms can negatively impact things that influence your running performance, like sleep, nutrition and focus. Some people might find it difficult to sleep, some may lose their appetite and others might feel paralysed and unable to get anything done. As such, understanding how stress in other areas of your life affects you is as important as understanding the impact of the physical stress that comes with your training load.
Here, we've highlighted some of the less obvious stress symptoms for runners to look out for, plus advice on how to better manage and relieve that tension.
5 surprising stress symptoms
1. You doubt yourself
Stress creates anxiety, says Morin – and anxious feelings lead to anxious thoughts. Can you hit your target paces? What’s going to happen if you can’t squeeze in today’s scheduled run? Are you good enough to hit your goal on race day? 'When we think that way, we look for evidence that reinforces that – and we screen out evidence to the contrary,' explains Morin explains. This sets us up for a downward spiral of self-doubt.
An element of control also comes into play. You want to hit your paces or force yourself to do your workouts, for example, because staying on top of your training may make you feel in control when every other aspect of your life feels like chaos. But, perfectly hitting every workout on your training plan isn’t the answer. In fact, 2018 research published in the Journal of Sports Sciences found that perfectionism is a predictor of injuries in athletes. So, scaling back or removing some of the pressure you’re placing on yourself will actually help you and your running performance more in the long term.
2. You feel unmotivated to run
If running is one of the ways you cope with stress, losing your motivation to run can be pretty destabilising – but that's a pretty normal symptom. 'When we’re experiencing stress, our fatigue goes up and our ability to recover goes down,' says Morin. A 2023 study published in Life found that people with a higher level of psychological stress reported lower levels of exercise participation, with a 2014 review in Sports Medicine also determining that stress may have an impact on exercise adoption, maintenance and relapse.
Physiologically, 'that burnout effect is going to have a direct relationship with metabolism,' says Pojednic. 'It’s going to activate your hypothalamus [the area of the brain that produces hormones responsible for body temperature, heart rate, hunger and mood], causing changes to hormones, including cortisol. That could become maladaptive: it’s going to change the way in which you burn glucose in your system; it can lead to the initiation of things like insulin resistance, which is going to have a direct effect on the muscles that you’re relying on to do activity; it can cause weight gain, which can be demotivating; and it can lead to increased susceptibility to infections.' All of this can make you less likely to want to run.
3. It takes longer for you to recover from a workout
Remember that exercise is a stressor, which means it acutely increases inflammation. This is a positive reaction in certain doses. But, when you’re training and dealing with chronic stress – another source of inflammation – you start to tip the scales in the wrong direction.
'Your immune system only has a certain capacity for stress,' says Pojednic. Once your cumulative burden of stress – also known as your 'allostatic load', according to research published in Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics – exceeds your ability to cope, it will lead to poorer health outcomes.
A 2012 study in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise noted that both life event stress and perceived stress can impair muscle recovery. Essentially, explains Pojednic, 'your body doesn’t have the capacity to repair your muscle. And if you’re not rebuilding that damaged tissue, continuing to train day after day further degrades it.'
When you’re in a state of high inflammation, your body also tends to be at an elevated temperature, which prevents you from getting a good night’s sleep – the single most important factor in exercise recovery, according to 2019 research published in the International Journal of Sports Medicine.
4. You constantly need to run to the bathroom
For most runners, GI distress is diet-related. However, as found by a 2017 study published in the Journal of Sports Sciences, which assessed 150 runners, perceived life stress and anxiety levels do positively correlate with gastrointestinal distress.
Research published in Integrative Medicine builds upon this. According to a 2019 study
, exercise releases stress hormones like cortisol, and chronically elevated cortisol levels may lead to impaired digestive function – in other words, compromised absorption of micronutrients, abdominal pain or discomfort and local and systemic inflammation.
But, stress-related GI issues are not just about running to the bathroom, says Morin. 'For some people, it’s about losing their appetite – for others, it’s about diarrhea and vomiting,' she explains. And, as any runner who’s ever frantically looked for a toilet mid-run knows, this creates even more stress.
5. You’re running for external validation
There are a tons of benefits to running, but when you’re doing so just to log activities on Strava or Instagram and get 'recognition', you’re more likely to experience higher levels of stress levels and develop obsessive exercise habits. This has been found by a 2020 study published in Information Technology and People.
'For a lot of people, running is their identity,' says Morin. 'So, when you’re struggling, what do you do?' Looking for external validation can be tough, because it naturally invites comparison. 'We know that social comparisons definitely affect our wellbeing, especially when they reinforce the idea that "Everyone else is doing better than I am,"' she adds.
How runners can cope with stress
If you’ve been struggling with any of these symptoms, or you’re dealing with other common indicators of stress—you’re edgy and irritable, you can’t focus, you’re getting headaches—then it might be time to make a change. Understanding how to better manage your stress will boost your performance and make you feel better overall. Here’s what to do.
1. Be aware of your cumulative stress load
Just like you track your weekly training volume, you should be cognizant of your cumulative stress load—not just from exercise, but from other areas of your life. “People are generally terrible at compartmentalizing stress,” says Morin. “Life stress will spill over into other areas of your life, and we often underestimate our ability to manage that stress.”
It’s really important to be able to look at what’s creating stress in your life (even things that seem as minor as wearing a running watch or using social media), and, if you can’t eliminate something, to figure out ways to adapt your training to accommodate moments of higher stress. For example, if you’ve been on edge about a big presentation at work all week, maybe that’s not the best week to do a super intense speed workout.
2. Pay attention to your body
Too often, runners override their body’s cues in favour of what their training plan or their wearable device recommends. It’s crucial to understand what is or isn’t normal for you. “It sounds very simple, but paying attention to your body requires understanding things like ‘I’m tired because I’ve done some good training’ and ‘I’m tired because I’m overdoing it,’” says Pojednic.
The goal is to do just enough work that you find that sweet spot that’s most beneficial, she adds—“but when you’re in a moment of stress and overwhelm, it’s really easy to blow through those cues and not want to rest because it’s a place that you need to sit in, which can be really uncomfortable.” But isn’t running all about getting comfortable with being uncomfortable?
3. Understand that it's fine to take a step back
A lot of runners are drawn to the sport because it requires consistency. But training plans aren’t meant to be written in permanent ink; they should be flexible and adaptable to your life, because sometimes things come up.
“You have to know that if you have something really stressful going on, you also need to understand what will be relaxing and recharging,” says Morin—and it’s not always running.
Only you really know how stress affects you, so only you can come up with the right way to manage that stress. That may mean taking an unplanned week off from running, or scaling back your workouts, or leaving your watch at home, or deleting the Strava app. “It’s about asking yourself ‘how do I control the things I can control?’ and create that balance the best you can,” says Morin.
4. Track you resting heart rate
It’s very easy to get overwhelmed by the sheer number of data today’s wearable devices provide, but if there’s one metric that can be a good indicator of how your body is handling stress, it’s your resting heart rate, says Pojednic. Your resting heart rate is a measure of how many times your heart beats in a minute while you are at rest (usually first thing in the morning).
Your average resting heart rate should be a range—usually between 60 and 100, but it can be as low as the 40s for active people. But “this data point is important to keep an eye on, especially if you’re in periods of physical or mental stress,” says Pojednic.
While it can change day to day depending on things like alcohol consumption, traveling to a higher altitude, or a bad night’s sleep, a continuous increase of 10 beats per minute or more can be an early sign of elevated stress levels, overtraining, or sickness. When you notice this higher heart rate, it’s probably time to take a rest day or at least back your workout down to a recovery run and try something like meditation, getting more sleep, or your tried-and-true wind-down method.
5. Talk to a professional
Running can only go so far as a coping mechanism for stress. Using running to escape your stress—a form of “self-suppression”—can lead to negative effects, including exercise dependence, a 2023 study published in Frontiers of Psychology determined.
“If your stress is affecting your functioning—in that you can’t sleep, your appetite has changed a lot, it’s affecting your ability to work, all those kinds of things—for more than two weeks, I would suggest going to talk to a mental health professional,” says Morin.
A professional can not only help you get to the bottom of what’s causing your stress, they can also help you develop better tools for dealing with it—in the moment and over the long-term. A psychologist, psychiatrist, or licensed professional counselor would be the best person to help you deal with stress-related concerns, whether they’re related to sports performance or life in general.
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