This feature was written by Studio MSP writers. While some of our advertisers were sourced, no advertiser paid to be included.
Your Brain on Stress
When your community experiences a threat that challenges your sense of safety, your brain’s hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis jumps into action. The hypothalamus alerts the pituitary gland to secrete adrenocorticotropic hormone, which in turn signals your adrenal glands to release cortisol and adrenaline, activating your body’s sympathetic nervous system and putting you in “fight or flight” mode.
You don’t have to be the one experiencing the threat to feel the effects, either. “Vicarious trauma”—taking on the emotional impact of someone else’s trauma through news coverage, social media, or personal connections—takes a comparable toll.
“Our bodies are going to react very similarly physiologically if we are hearing about a threat or if it’s right in front of us,” explains Gabrielle Mauren, a psychologist at HealthPartners.
Mauren adds that this makes perfect evolutionary sense when it comes to maintaining safety because “emotions are contagious. Human beings are a group culture. We like to cluster together. We always have. If one person is not doing well, then their stress becomes contagious.”
“At the neighborhood level, research suggests that violence and instability are not just ‘psychological’; they can become biologically embedded.” —Tracy Ronning, Minnesota Adult and Teen Challenge
How We Break Down
The challenge comes when that stress sticks around for long periods of time. When people no longer trust the safety of where they live, work, attend school, or play, the nervous system may remain in the “fight or flight” state, something Dr. Grace Totoe, medical director and CEO of Minneapolis Health Clinic, calls “scanning mode.”
Totoe says the heightened state “makes people more irritable; more exhausted; more likely to misread neutral cues as threatening; and less able to access reflection, patience, and flexibility. In plain language: When the body is busy trying to survive, it is harder to self-soothe, think clearly, and stay emotionally balanced.”
Dr. Chad Puffer, psychiatrist and medical director of outpatient services at PrairieCare, adds that living in that chronically stressed-out state eventually induces physical changes like “elevated cortisol levels, an increased heart rate, and heightened inflammatory responses, which can impact sleep, digestion, immunity, and even long-term cardiovascular health.”
In turn, these changes can bring on anxiety, depression, or burnout. They can also become part of a neighborhood’s collective DNA.
“At the neighborhood level, research suggests that community violence and instability are not just ‘psychological’; they can become biologically embedded,” says Tracy Ronning, director of outpatient clinical services at Minnesota Adult and Teen Challenge. “Studies have linked neighborhood violence and chronic neighborhood stress with altered cortisol patterns and other biomarkers of allostatic load, which is the wear and tear that accumulates when the body keeps adapting to stress for too long.”
That allostatic load even makes our bodies more susceptible to addiction as a coping strategy.
“From a biological standpoint, stress and addiction run through many of the same brain circuits, so when stress hormones stay elevated for long periods of time, the brain becomes more sensitive to relief and reward,” explains Rannon Arch, director of co-occurring clinical services at Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation.
It’s also hard for the brain to tell whether those good feelings are substance-induced or occurring naturally. “All the brain does is feel the pooling of dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin—those chemicals that make things calm and soothing,” Arch says. “Unfortunately, then, alcohol or drug use can start to feel like the fastest way to regulate overwhelming emotions.”
Cue the addiction you never saw coming. You’d be in good company, too. Minnesota Adult and Teen Challenge treatment director Alyssa Cunningham says local addiction levels in the past five years are the worst she’s seen in her 14 years in the field.
“There is a great deal of coping being done that is not healthy,” Cunningham says, adding that red flags for a habit turning into a dependency can vary from isolation, behavior changes, excuses to use a substance, and “it is legal” statements to more subtle signs. “For example, if you have a friend that always dresses to the tens, hair done, etc., and they start to change that, watch it closely,” she advises.
Stressed? Try these expert-backed ways to regulate your nervous system.
“Describe in as much detail as you can what you see. Worry lives in our short-term memory, which can only hold roughly seven pieces of information. (That’s why our phone numbers are the way they are with the dashes.) This exercise floods your short-term memory with neutral information so you can’t worry at the same time.” —Gabrielle Mauren, HealthPartners
“Splash cold water on your face or place a cold compress on your forehead or the back of your neck. Temperature changes can quickly calm the body’s stress response.” —Lane Pederson, Mental Health Systems
“Take a short walk or stretch. It releases endorphins and helps regulate stress hormones.” —Dr. Chad Puffer, PrairieCare
How We Heal
Fortunately, pursuing mental health care and recovery treatment is approaching the cultural mainstream. One challenge in that shift is a tremendous growth in the number of people seeking care—a good problem to have. In response, Minnesotans have more ways to access services than ever before, from telemedicine for everyone with an internet connection (call it the pandemic’s “silver lining”) to inpatient and outpatient mental health and recovery programs that streamline care across systems so patients don’t have to cobble together their own care plans. Community organizations offer safe, supportive spaces for healing in the company of people experiencing similar challenges. Medically backed relaxation and meditation apps like Calm and Headspace are lowering our stress and upping our mindfulness literacy. Additionally, anyone who calls 988 from a Minnesota area code receives confidential mental health and crisis support from one of four specialized centers in the state.
Lane Pederson, owner of Mental Health Systems, says new treatment plans are taking a more holistic, wraparound approach driven by our growing knowledge of how trauma manifests. “Earlier approaches often focused mainly on thoughts and emotions or relied on exposure techniques that asked clients to revisit traumatic experiences in session. What we now understand is that trauma affects emotions, thinking patterns, the nervous system, the body, memory, and relationships all at the same time.”
Pederson sees the most effective approaches beginning to integrate these systems and giving patients self-regulation skills that can help them feel more grounded and capable. “Treatments that combine distress tolerance skills, mindfulness, and nervous system regulation are showing very promising results,” he says. (Pederson’s upcoming book, Integrative DBT for Complex Trauma Recovery, is a deep dive on this very topic, offering practical skills for helping people move forward after trauma.)
The key, of course, is taking some sort of action. Across the board, among the most common barriers to treatment is a patient’s self-imposed sense of “comparative suffering”—their perception that their trauma or problem isn’t as bad as someone else’s, so it doesn’t warrant attention.
“You don’t have to wait for things to fall apart like someone you maybe know before getting help yourself,” Arch says. “Mental health and substance use disorders, they’re usually chronic in nature, and they’re progressive, so year over year they tend to get worse if you don’t start to actually speak to them and start getting the support that you need.”
Cunningham, who has experienced substance dependency firsthand, says comparing herself to others was especially detrimental. “For me, I compared as a manipulation tactic, and the more I did this, the worse I was able to get in my use because ‘I was still doing better than this person or that person.’ However, I was not. I would suggest only seeing your life and how your choices and use are impacting you and your life goals, values, and needs.”
No matter what stress-induced symptoms a person is experiencing, Arch is a huge proponent of narrowing one’s focus. “What that means is limiting your news intake, staying connected to supportive people, and really doubling down on the daily routines that stabilize your nervous system,” he explains. “Maybe that’s trying to maintain your water and food intake, or getting enough rest, or taking appropriate hygiene measures, or moving your body. Do things that help keep you in rhythm with life and help regulate you.”
“Stress and addiction run through many of the same brain circuits, so when stress hormones stay elevated. . . the brain becomes more sensitive to relief and reward.” —Rannon Arch, Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation
This article originally appeared in the May 2026 issue of Mpls.St.Paul Magazine and was supported by:
Prairie Care, multiple metro locations, prairie-care.com
Rock Bridge, Lakeville, Maplewood and Minnetonka, rockbridgecounseling.org