Have you ever noticed your heart racing before a big presentation or important meeting? That quickened pulse is your body’s way of responding to stress, a totally natural process that helps us rise to the challenge. But what happens when stress, anxiety, or low mood become part of your everyday life? Could these emotional states quietly shape how your body handles stress, even if you’re not aware of it?
Why Study Stress and the Heart?
Stress is a normal part of life. In small doses, it’s even helpful. It sharpens our focus and pushes us to perform. But when stress becomes chronic, or if we struggle to recover from it, it can take a serious toll on both our mental and physical health. One way this toll shows up is in the body’s physiological stress response, particularly heart rate.
We have looked at two main measures: how high your heart rate spikes during stress, and how quickly it returns to normal afterwards. These reactions are controlled by systems in the body, which work together to help us respond to (and recover from) stressful situations.
Psychological disorders, like anxiety and depression, have been suggested as some key contributors to this effect on stress responses. There has been a common trend in how they can delay heart rate recovery, and depression can blunt your heart’s response to stress; but interestingly, previous research has shown mixed results on whether anxiety causes a blunted, or increased, cardiovascular response to stress. I wanted to find out; how does psychological distress affect stress reactivity and recovery in everyday people, not just those with diagnosed mental health conditions?
What Did I Do?
I asked 48 university students to complete a stress test, basically, they have to defend a topic to the researcher, and complete math problems with a time limit. This can cause some social stress, imagine being in a job interview or a spoken exam!
Throughout the test, I recorded participants’ heart rate continuously, looking at:
- Peak heart rate: the biggest jump from resting levels during the stressful task.
- Heart rate recovery: how quickly their heart rate returned to normal afterwards.
Each participant also filled out a questionnaire, which measures depression, anxiety, and stress symptoms.
Importantly, none of the participants had clinical diagnoses, they were what we call a non-clinical sample, meaning I was looking at how people with low levels of symptoms, or none at all, might still have physiological effects.
What Did I Find?
There were no statistically significant associations between participants’ self-reported levels of depression, anxiety, or stress and their heart rate responses, either during the stress task or in the recovery period. In other words, people who reported feeling more psychologically distressed didn’t have stronger (or weaker) heart rate reactions to the stressor, and they didn’t recover noticeably faster or slower than those with lower scores.
That said, one subtle trend stood out: participants with higher anxiety scores showed a slight tendency toward greater heart rate increases during stress. While this pattern didn’t reach statistical significance, it’s still worth noting.
Why This Matters: Even When the Results Aren’t “Significant”
At first glance, a study with mostly non-significant results might seem underwhelming. But in psychological research, null findings can be just as important.
Many past studies on stress and physiology have focused on people with diagnosed mental health conditions, often finding either exaggerated or diminished cardiovascular responses. By shifting the focus to healthy students, my study offers insight into the grey area; individuals who experience symptoms but aren’t clinically unwell.
These findings suggest that in non-clinical populations, common emotional distress may not drastically alter basic cardiovascular responses to stress, at least not when using simple metrics like peak heart rate or short-term recovery slopes.
This slightly positive trend seen in anxiety reactivity has also been associated with acute anxiety symptoms, rather than chronic ones; in other words; if you experience anxiety symptoms for a long time and at a high rate, it can cause this blunted heart response similar to depression; but in the short-term, it elevates your reaction to stressful situations; this is most likely what is happening in these non-clinical populations.
Where Do We Go From Here?
Stress and mental health are complex and deeply personal. Understanding how they affect the body isn’t just about diagnosis, it’s about prevention. If we can spot early warning signs of poor recovery or dysregulated stress responses, we can intervene sooner with tools like stress management training, therapy, or lifestyle changes.
Future research might dive deeper into this gap between non-clinical and clinical psychological distress with a wider range of responses, to see if we can understand the levels that may trigger these strong physiological stress responses.
For now, this study reminds us that stress can affect your body, and the care we need to give to ourselves and those around us, but it also shows that non-clinical distress doesn’t always show up in obvious ways. Understanding these nuances is key to building more holistic, preventative approaches to mental health, while also giving a hopeful outlook; if anxiety, depression, and stress can be treated quickly and effectively, we may be able to decrease the impact on the heart and the body.
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References
Chida, Y., & Hamer, M. (2008). Chronic psychosocial factors and acute physiological responses to laboratory-induced stress in healthy populations: A quantitative review of 30 years of investigations. Psychological Bulletin, 134(6), 829–885. https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/a0013342
Kirschbaum, C., Pirke, K. M., & Hellhammer, D. H. (1993). The ‘Trier Social Stress Test’—A tool for investigating psychobiological stress responses in a laboratory setting. Neuropsychobiology, 28(1–2), 76–81. https://doi.org/10.1159/000119004
Lovibond, S. H., & Lovibond, P. F. (1995). Manual for the Depression Anxiety Stress Scales (2nd ed.). Psychology Foundation. https://doi.org/10.1016/0005-7967(94)00075-u
McEwen, B. S. (1998). Protective and damaging effects of stress mediators. New England Journal of Medicine, 338(3), 171–179. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJM199801153380307