When Stress Makes It Harder to Think
With the growing epidemic of mental health diagnoses in our current world, much research is going into answering the how’s, why’s and what’s of stress. We not only want to understand how stress impacts our mental health, but what to do about it. In our clinic, we deal with the impact of stress on our patients’ health every single visit and every single day. For some, the primary stress comes from a chronic illness and how it impacts life while for others, illness may not be the primary driver of stress. While the intensity of the stress varies from patient to patient, every single one is faced with some level of stress, and each patient’s emotions are influenced by this stress and their responses to it. Without addressing this stress and its emotional impact, we don’t see as robust of a recovery for them as we could.
For quite a few of our patients, many others before us have tried to help them overcome the stress and its emotional symptoms with little success. Those without the debilitating effects of chronic illness have a hard time understanding what life with chronic illness is like and sometimes oversimplify the road to emotional recovery. Even well-meaning medical providers, caught up in a rushed schedule, often cannot slow down long enough to realize their simplistic reassurances and their “miraculous” medicines are not working. In the end, many with ongoing emotional symptoms surrounding their illnesses are left out in the cold, either blamed for those symptoms or simply dismissed as lost causes.
The reference research study out of New Edith Cowan University reviewed international research on the effects of stress in those with various mental health diagnoses and came up with very helpful findings. While many contemporary therapies like cognitive behavioral therapy depend on executive functioning skills (this includes cognitive flexibility, working memory, response inhibition, and others) to help depressed or anxious individuals, the study reveals that these exact skills are impaired in those individuals. This finding means that we may be trying to get patients to use a skill that is already hampered by stress. It’s like asking someone to run on a sprained ankle before they can even walk. Talking and reasoning them out of their emotional struggles will not be as effective as we or they hope when this executive functioning is impaired.
This research supports our understanding that we need an individualized approach not only to our patients’ biochemical processes, but to their emotional coping mechanisms. Some patients can approach the stresses of their illness and life more consciously and can think their way through and over emotional challenges. Others need to approach their emotional struggles more subconsciously through limbic retraining methods before they can do so on the conscious level. Over all of this, regardless of which approach is used, they need the reassurance of God’s watching over them. We all need reminders to seek Him for restoration regardless if such restoration comes through a medical or counselling process or both.
Helping our patients restore healthier, more abundant lives requires this wholistic approach where we address inflammation, infections, toxins, deficiencies, and metabolic issues simultaneously while carefully supporting them through the emotional roller coasters of chronic illness and pointing them to God as their ultimate provider.
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Original Article:
T.M. Scott, Joanne M. Dickson. Effects of acute stress on executive functions in depression, generalised anxiety and borderline personality disorder. Journal of Affective Disorders Reports, 2025; 20: 100917 DOI: 10.1016/j.jadr.2025.100917
Thanks to Science Daily:
Edith Cowan University. “How stress disrupts emotion control in people with mental health conditions.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 22 May 2025. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/05/250522125408.htm>.
Sanctuary Functional Medicine, under the direction of Dr Eric Potter, IFMCP MD, provides functional medicine services to Nashville, Middle Tennessee and beyond. We frequently treat patients from Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Ohio, Indiana, and more... offering the hope of healthier more abundant lives to those with chronic illness.
