If the smoke alarm in your house were beeping frantically, you would spring into action. If your car alarm started whirring loudly, you would investigate. And if a tornado warning was issued for your neighborhood, you would almost certainly take cover.
Yet we’re not so fast, experts agree, to react to the alarm bells ringing in our own body, letting us know we need to slow down.
"The problem is, we become conditioned early on to stop listening to our bodies," said Jennifer King, an assistant professor of applied social sciences and assistant director of the Center on Trauma and Adversity at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. That means we might miss important signs that manifest when we’re navigating prolonged, repetitive or unpredictable stress—the kind that affects many of us. "A cascade of changes happen in the body when the stress response is activated in a sustained way," King added. "When the dose is too big, and there’s not a clear beginning or end, that causes wear and tear on the body."
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