When Tess Kearns and her husband started an all-natural catering company in Chicago last year, the responsibilities of running a new business and raising two kids were super-consuming. “I found myself with a late mortgage and not enough business and racing to learn new skills to keep it all going,” says Tess. “But I didn’t feel like I was worn-out. I just felt like I had a heavy load to carry.”
Then her memory began to slip. “I’d meet someone for a second or third time and not recognize them,” she says. “I needed to write to-do lists so I wouldn’t forget tasks, but then I’d lose the lists. I was in my 40s, and I was afraid I had early-stage Alzheimer’s.”
Tess didn’t have dementia: She was careening toward burnout. Memory blips are just one of the body’s clues that it’s stressed to the max. But we’re often operating at such a fast pace that we don’t even notice the signs. “Our bodies try to tell us to slow down, and we just don’t listen,” says Alice Domar, PhD, founder of the Domar Center for Mind/Body Health in Waltham, Mass. “If you ignore the distress signals for too long, they can turn into health problems.” Watch out for these biological tip-offs that it’s time for a breather.
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You keep drawing blanks
When you’re under stress, your adrenal gland pumps out cortisol, and research has shown that this fight-or-flight hormone can hinder your powers of recall, making it tougher to access stored facts (including so-and-so’s name and where you left your phone).
Add late nights or insomnia to the mix and your recollection may get even slipperier. “During sleep, your brain replays whatever you learned that day and moves it into long-term storage,” explains Sandra Ackermann, PhD, a postdoctoral researcher in biopsychology at the University of Zurich. If you don’t get enough shut-eye or you go to bed with your cortisol levels still spiking, that process of encoding details is disturbed.
Tess finally connected her spaciness to burnout at a networking event, where a Reiki therapist spoke about how stress can make the body go haywire. “I went in for a session, and while I was there I felt peace and calm,” says Tess. “It may sound ‘woo woo,’ but I got my focus back. Shortly after that, we had our best business month yet.”
RELATED: 17 Ways to Age-Proof Your Brain
Your cuts take forever to heal
Whether you graze your knuckle with a vegetable peeler or develop a nasty blister on a long-distance run, expect to wear a Band-Aid for a while if you’re overtaxed. “When you get an injury, your immune system engages right away, sending signals to produce collagen, form a blood clot and recruit cells to protect against germs,” explains William Huang, MD, assistant professor of dermatology at Wake Forest University School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, N.C. “But when you’re stressed, your body has higher levels of chemicals called glucocorticoids, which suppress your immune system and make healing slower.” Researchers from Ohio State University studied this effect in the caregivers of dementia patients: They found that people shouldering such responsibility healed 24 percent more slowly than those in a control group.
Your cramps are lethal
You already know that stress can make your period late. That’s because when the hypothalamus, the regulatory center of the brain, senses that your body is running on empty, it can delay the release of an egg, shifting your whole cycle offtrack.
But for some women, feeling frazzled may make PMS worse as well. In a National Institutes of Health study, researchers followed 259 women for more than a month and quizzed them on how often they felt, for example, nervous or not in control of their lives. Those who reported more stress early in their cycle were more likely than relaxed women to have moderate to severe symptoms before and during their period. (Because killer cramps are just what you need right now.)