Acute vs Chronic Stress and What We Can do About Both…

New Year means new audition season, new meetings, new projects, new shoots, and all the new stress that comes along with them!

Stress is our body’s normal and natural way of responding to the demands of our environment. And making art is very demanding! Regardless of role, project, or level, telling stories will always be stressful. 

One way to help navigate our experience of stress is to determine what’s acute and what’s chronic.

Say we get a last minute audition, that’s our stressor. In response to that stressor, we cram our sides, clear our schedule, show up to our appointment, do the audition. And when the audition is over, we’re able to relax and go back to our daily lives.

This is acute stress, it’s short-term. Acute stress can cause big or small stress responses, but once it’s over, the stress dissipates. A single audition is an acute stressor. When the audition is done, we no longer feel that stress and can come back to baseline. Closure practices are great at helping us speed this along, recover, and come back home to ourselves. Our bodies are great at handling acute stressors.

Where we tend to have more difficulty is when the stressor doesn’t go away. That’s when the stress goes from being acute to chronic.

Chronic stress is long term stress where we can’t always fully come back to baseline because the stressor is present in our lives. It’s like being on a 9-month grueling tour schedule where we’re in a different city every week. Or auditioning and being in final callbacks for months but not booking. Only when we finish the tour contract or book a job, will that stress then be over and we can fully recover.

So why is it important to know the difference?

Well, a lot of us in the U.S. have the go-to response of pushing through, of throwing more energy at the stress. Which if we’re dealing with acute stress, may be a great option for us! In that one-off audition, we throw some energy at it to get through, raise the stakes, then do a closure practice and recover after it’s over.

With chronic stress though, if our only response is to throw energy at the stress over and over again, we will burn out. And we cannot change the conditions of the stress if we are constantly exhausted by it. Instead, we need to learn how to reclaim our energy and recover as we go. So tools, practices, self-care, community care, rest, recovery…and if you want help integrating those into your artistic practice, I got you.

Stress can narrow our focus so even just naming whether it’s acute or chronic has a lot of benefit. Naming it in the moment can help us widen our perspective, which then gives us more agency. We can then choose how we want to respond, rather than just automatically throwing more energy at it.

Widening our perspective also helps us build more self-compassion! When we’re able to discern what’s acute and what’s chronic, we can see the bigger picture. If it’s short-term, we can reassure ourselves that this isn’t forever and help ourselves recover by planning our closure practices.

With chronic stress, we can stop judging ourselves for our stress responses. There’s only so much we can do if the stressor is still in our daily lives. So coming back to baseline might not be a realistic (or helpful) goal. Instead, we can focus on smaller recoveries as we go. Over time, this will allow us to reclaim our energy and fully see the bigger picture. Then we can start to change it.

So the next time you feel yourself stressed out, ask is this acute or chronic stress?

What can I give myself right now to get through?

And when can I recover, even just a teensy bit?