We all experience stress from time to time - whether it's a looming deadline at work, arguments with family members, or difficulties making ends meet financially. Short term stress can even be beneficial in small doses, helping us meet challenges and get things done.

However, when stress becomes chronic and ongoing, it takes a significant toll on our mind and body. Our immune system, which is designed to protect us from illness, can actually be weakened by long term activation of our stress response.

To understand how chronic stress impacts immunity, it helps to know a bit about how our stress system works. When we perceive a threat, whether real or imagined, our brain triggers a complex reaction known as the stress response. The hypothalamus activates the sympathetic nervous system, which increases heart rate and blood pressure to prepare the body for fight or flight. It also signals the adrenal glands to release hormones like cortisol and adrenaline into our bloodstream.

Cortisol, in particular, plays a key role in modulating inflammatory and immune responses. In small, time-limited bursts it helps energy mobilization and returns our body to homeostasis once the threat passes. But under chronic stress, cortisol levels remain elevated for prolonged periods. Our brain essentially has the stress response stuck "on", as renowned trauma therapist Bessel van der Kolk explains, because it perceives danger even when none exists externally.

This constant drip feed of cortisol and other stress hormones takes a toll on our immune defenses. According to pioneering epigeneticist Bruce Lipton, chronic stress creates an internal environment that favors inflammation over immune protection. It causes immune cells like lymphocytes and natural killer cells to become less effective at fighting viruses, bacteria and tumors. At the same time, inflammatory cytokines like interleukin-6 increase and wreak cellular damage over the long term.

The consequences of this immune dysregulation can be serious. Many studies have linked prolonged stress to susceptibility to colds, flu and other infections. It also exacerbates allergic and autoimmune conditions like asthma, irritable bowel disease and rheumatoid arthritis by enhancing inflammatory pathways. Perhaps most alarmingly, stress may even influence cancer progression by impairing immune surveillance of malignant cells and promoting tumor growth.

As physician Gabor Mate emphasizes, chronic stress is often rooted in unresolved trauma - whether from childhood adversity, past abuse, or ongoing toxic relationships and environments. Traumatic experiences become embedded in our subconscious mind and alter the way our stress response system develops. They prime the body to remain in a constant state of hypervigilance, unable to distinguish between real and perceived threats. Over time, this takes a biological toll as hormones are dysregulated and inflammatory processes take hold.

The impact of early life trauma is particularly profound. Adverse childhood experiences like neglect, abuse or family dysfunction have been shown to influence disease risk decades later through epigenetic changes - chemical modifications to our DNA that alter gene expression without changing the underlying genetic code. Stress experienced during sensitive developmental periods can essentially program the body for a pro-inflammatory lifestyle and weakened immunity over the lifespan.

When stress is ongoing and chronic rather than short-lived, our immune defenses are continually compromised. Cortisol and other stress hormones essentially put our body into survival mode, prioritizing rapid responses to perceived danger over long term immune protection and repair. This leaves us vulnerable to infections, autoimmune flares, and even cancer if the underlying causes of chronic stress - such as unresolved trauma - are not addressed.

Making lifestyle changes to manage stress is important, but for some, deeper therapeutic work may also be needed to overcome trauma's enduring effects on health and wellbeing.

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