Stresses are a fact of life and there are varying stresses people may experience at any given time. While any stress can potentially impact your health, some are much more harmful than others. Stress can either be short-term or lingering, long-term stress. The latter is considerably more detrimental to one’s health.

Examples of short-term stress might be failing to make a scheduled appointment on time, gearing up to make a presentation to a group, or having a car break down on the way to work. Stresses of this kind are usually short-lived and are part of everyday life. Your amygdala, a group of cells in the temporal lobes of your brain, which create the flight or fight response when stimulated, can usually handle these limited stresses without significantly impacting the functioning of your normal body systems. Your body can normally cope with these because you know you have some control over these situations, and you also recognize they will be gone after a given time.

Lingering, long-term stress, or what is called chronic stress comes from situations you may encounter such as living in an abusive relationship or working in a career you disdain and from which you derive no satisfaction. Stresses of this nature can be extremely destructive because they weaken one’s immune system, thus giving rise to increased risk of digestive problems, depression, and a host of diseases, including cancer. According to a 2014 article, Anil K. Sood, MD, Professor of Gynecologic Oncology and Reproductive Medicine at MD Andersen says, “Chronic stress also can help cancer grow and spread in a number of ways.” He notes that stress inhibits anoikis, which is a process that kills diseased cells. Chronic stress can also increase the body’s blood supply, which can speed the development of cancerous tumors.16

Every worry, burst of anger, or anxiety triggers the body’s amygdala. If you are in a continuing stress situation, your amygdala is constantly being stimulated, and this prevents your body from being in a healing mode. This means you are in a continual flight or fight mode and subject to destructive reactions that may occur as a result. Only when you are in a peaceful, relaxed situation can your body’s healing mechanisms function properly.

So to combat disease, or the potential for disease, it becomes critically important to keep chronic stress out of your life. Trying to alleviate chronic stress through meditation or by some other approach to relaxing your body, at some time during the day, may help but realize this is only a band-aid approach if you’re going to go right back into the high-stress mode for the rest of the day. What one literally must do is find a way to remove oneself from the toxic situation that is currently triggering your flight or fight response. Could that, for example, actually mean walking away from a job that you’ve been working at for a long time and yet detest? Yes, and as drastic as that may sound, it may well be a life-saving move on your part.

Your immediate reaction to this idea may be this is not something I could possibly do and, admittedly, it may take some soul-searching to make the commitment to change the unpleasant circumstances in which you find yourself. But, think again, because even though the thought of making such drastic changes may initially be traumatic, remember that you are moving from a situation where you have no control to one where you can envision the opportunity for an increased degree of control over your life. Should you make such a bold step, plan ahead, and secure a new position before leaving your current one. Further, do not burn your bridges behind you. Trust me, simply leaving a distasteful job behind will give you all the satisfaction you need. Additionally, as you contemplate this transition, there should be a sense of relief because you know going forward you will have the opportunity to be in a new and satisfying environment. Thus, it may become incumbent upon you to determine how and when you will move to a new job or when you will leave an unhealthy relationship to prevent your health from being drastically impacted negatively! While I spent 30-plus years in a variety of very personally rewarding educational scenarios, I also spent two years in a toxic environment, which kept my amygdala mostly on high alert. Once the decision was made not to continue in that environment, the process of preparing to make the transition became something to look forward to. I can assure you functioning in a distasteful role is a very recognizable phenomenon and when awareness takes place, you need to make the commitment to do whatever it takes to remove yourself from that situation. Making the commitment to extricate oneself from that toxic role is the difficult part. After that, the rest of the process becomes uplifting. It’s amazing what a physical and emotional transformation takes place when you are able to “get that monkey off your back!”

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