When Running on Empty Has Been Your Baseline for Too Long.
Chronic stress isn't a bad week or a difficult season. It's when your nervous system has been in overdrive for months or years, and you can't remember what not being stressed actually felt like. Therapy offers a space to understand what's happening and find sustainable ways to shift it.
Book a free 15-minute consultationShelby Doherty-Sirkovich, RP, MACP · CRPO #12083 · CCTS-I · Accepting new clients
Adults Who Have Been Running at Capacity for Too Long and Can Feel It Catching Up
- You're managing a high volume of demands (work, family, finances, relationships) and the cumulative weight of it has been building for longer than feels reasonable.
- You've tried the standard advice. Better sleep, less screen time, exercise, saying no more often. Some of it helps temporarily. None of it has changed the underlying state.
- The stress has become physical. Your body is giving you signals you've been overriding, tension, sleep disruption, lowered immunity, a general sense of wearing down.
- You suspect some of what keeps you overloaded isn't just circumstance. Patterns around perfectionism, overcommitment, or difficulty with boundaries have something to do with it: but you haven't had space to look at that honestly.
- You're worried about where this leads if it doesn't change. You're not in crisis, but you can see the trajectory, and you don't want to wait until you are.
You don't need to be at a breaking point to start. Most people come in before that, when they can see where things are heading and want to address it while they still have some capacity. The consultation is the right place to figure out whether this is a fit.
Therapy is one form of support. If chronic stress is accompanied by symptoms that may indicate burnout, anxiety, or depression, your family doctor is a useful first stop for a full picture. If you are in crisis, the 9-8-8 Suicide Crisis Helpline is available 24/7 by call or text. In an emergency, call 911. For Ontario community and social services, call 211.
When Your Nervous System Has Been in Overdrive for So Long It's Become Normal
Chronic stress isn't about one difficult project or a hard month. It's what happens when your nervous system has been under sustained pressure for months or years (juggling work demands, relationship difficulties, financial pressure, health concerns, family responsibilities, or all of the above) and hasn't had a real opportunity to recover. Your body has adapted to the elevated baseline. The alarm is no longer loud; it's just always on.
You're functioning, but it takes everything you have. Sleep is poor, irritability is high, concentration is unreliable. You're exhausted but wired, always bracing for the next thing. The advice you keep receiving about self-care feels insulting when you're already at capacity.
Therapy here works with both the practical factors keeping you overwhelmed and the nervous system dysregulation that has built up over time. This is not about adding more to your plate. It's about understanding what's actually happening and finding sustainable ways to shift it: not strategies that require time and energy you don't have.
A Few Sentences. See if Any Land.
You're tired all the time, but your mind won't stop at night. You lie awake running through the list, or running through the same concern, and nothing resolves.
You're irritable in ways that surprise you. Snapping at people over things you'd normally let go. Then feeling guilty about it, which adds to the load.
Physical symptoms are accumulating. Headaches, muscle tension, digestive issues, getting sick more often than you used to. Your body is telling you something your schedule won't make room for.
You can't remember the last time you felt genuinely relaxed: not just distracted, but actually at rest. That feeling has been absent for long enough that you've stopped expecting it.
Everything feels urgent and overwhelming, including things that objectively shouldn't. Your capacity to triage has narrowed. You're operating in a state of constant low-grade emergency.
Concentration and decision-making are harder than they used to be. You're not less capable, your brain is maxed out and doesn't have the bandwidth it normally would.
You know something needs to change. You just don't know where to start, or how to make room for it without dropping something else you can't afford to drop.
Working with Both the Practical Stressors and the Nervous System Responding to Them.
Chronic stress has two layers: the circumstances creating pressure, and what prolonged exposure to that pressure has done to your nervous system. Therapy here addresses both. In practice, sessions might focus on:
- Understanding your stress response. How your nervous system has adapted to constant pressure, why you can't relax even when you have time, and what your body is actually trying to communicate.
- Identifying what's actually within your control. Not "just stress less": but an honest look at what can be changed, what needs to be accepted, and what the difference between those two things actually is in your specific circumstances.
- Working with overcommitment and boundaries. Chronic stress often involves taking on too much, difficulty saying no, or consistently putting other people's needs ahead of your own. These patterns have roots worth understanding.
- Building nervous system regulation skills. Practical, accessible tools that work with your body's stress response: not theoretical self-care, but techniques that fit into your actual life and actually shift your physiological state.
- Addressing underlying patterns. Perfectionism, people-pleasing, difficulty delegating, fear of letting others down. Chronic stress usually has roots in how you learned to manage demands, and those roots are worth looking at.
The approach is trauma-informed and integrative, drawing from ACT, DBT, somatic work, and psychodynamic therapy, based on what is most useful for each person. We pay attention to whether the stress is situational or more pattern-based, because sometimes the circumstances need to change, sometimes the approach to circumstances needs to change, and usually it's both.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Stress is a normal physiological response to demands and typically resolves when the situation changes. Chronic stress occurs when the stress response is sustained over weeks or months without sufficient recovery, and the nervous system remains in an elevated state even in the absence of an immediate stressor. The distinction matters because chronic stress has cumulative effects on physical and mental health that temporary stress does not.
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Sustained stress maintains a physiological state that is costly to the body regardless of sleep quantity. The nervous system does not distinguish between rest and actual recovery if it remains in a vigilant or activated state. This kind of exhaustion is often a signal that the system needs more than time off.
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Indicators include persistent sleep disruption, physical symptoms like headaches or digestive issues without a clear medical cause, increasing irritability or emotional reactivity, difficulty concentrating, and a sense that rest no longer restores you. If stress is consistently affecting your functioning and your usual coping is not working, it is worth exploring.
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Stress is both a physiological and psychological experience, and therapy can address dimensions that lifestyle changes alone often cannot reach. This includes working with the beliefs, relational dynamics, and internal drivers that sustain stress beyond the immediate circumstances, as well as building capacity for recovery rather than just productivity.
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Sustained stress is associated with increased vulnerability to anxiety and depression, and it can amplify existing difficulties. It can also maintain a pattern of over-functioning that itself becomes a source of ongoing strain. Addressing chronic stress often involves looking at the full context of a person's life rather than treating it as a standalone issue.
More on Navigating Chronic Stress
Individual therapy for chronic stress, across Ontario
I work with adults across Ontario navigating chronic stress, including stress that has been building for long enough that it has become the baseline. My approach is trauma-informed and integrative, and I hold the Certified Clinical Trauma Specialist – Individual (CCTS-I) credential from the Arizona Trauma Institute.
Chronic stress rarely exists on its own. It tends to be tangled up with how you learned to manage demands, what you believe about your own needs, and patterns that have been in place for a long time. That's the territory we work in together: practical and deeper-rooted at the same time.
If any of this resonates, a free 15-minute consultation is the place to start. It is a low-pressure conversation to see whether what I offer is a fit.
Book a free 15-minute consultation- Registered Psychotherapist, CRPO #12083
- MA Counselling Psychology, Yorkville University
- BSc Psychology (Hons), University of Toronto
- CCTS-I, Arizona Trauma Institute
- Certificate in Alternative Dispute Resolution, York University