The Killer We Carry

I remember the first time I learned that stress could kill you.

It was the early 2000s, a time that feels like a different planet now. I was fresh out of high school, wide-eyed and walking into my first year of college. I was full of hope and potential, still convinced I had all the time in the world to figure it all out.

The air felt lighter then.

This was before 9/11. Before social media rewired our lives and we all started measuring our worth in likes. MySpace hadn’t been created yet, and a still-in-high-school Mark Zuckerberg hadn’t yet dreamed up Facebook. Cell phones were clunky and only used for calls and texts. We printed directions from MapQuest and hoped we didn’t miss the turn. We drove with one hand on the wheel and the other flipping through CD binders.

It was the era of low-rise jeans, Blockbuster movie nights, burned CDs, and the slow agonizing wait of dial-up internet.

Back when I thought stress meant pulling an all-nighter for a paper I’d procrastinated, arguing with my parents about curfew, deciding what cryptic song lyric to use for my AIM away message, or navigating 3-way calling drama.
In the rearview of life, I can see those things for what they were, minor annoyances. Inconveniences. Background noise.
But back then? They were everything.
It all felt so big. So consuming.

If I’d known how fast and dramatically the world would change, how much heavier things would become, I might’ve let myself enjoy it more.
I might’ve let the small things stay small.
Maybe I would’ve stopped holding back sooner. Maybe I would’ve been braver and bolder rather than waiting for the perfect moment.

But I didn’t know.
None of us did.

The Day Stress Became a Threat
We were just dipping our toes into adulthood as college freshmen. Still holding onto the last remnants of the safety and naivety of adolescents, while also trying to jump headfirst into the freedom and independence that came with crossing the threshold of turning 18. It was in that in-between place, half kid, half grown, when my freshman sociology professor handed us the assessment that would shake my core. It was the Life Change Index Scale (The Stress Test).

 
Forty-three life events, including death, divorce, changing work conditions, moving, and even vacations, each carrying a score.
We totaled our points and compared our numbers.

“If your score is over 300,” he said, “that predicts you’ll probably get sick within the next two years.”

I don’t remember my score now, but I remember how this information made me feel. The baseline anxiety I’d carried for so long that it had become my normal suddenly made its presence known. The air suddenly felt thicker. The walls felt closer. I internalized my emotions as I  sat there quietly, but I still vividly remember the reaction of another student as he outwardly spiraled about this newfound information (Hi Dan!), processing his own stress about stress right there in real time.

I started thinking of the big stresses I had been through, losses, and heartbreaks, and started counting the months in my head. That number wasn’t just a score; it felt like a countdown.

That was the moment I realized stress wasn’t just an emotion or a fleeting feeling.
It started feeling like a threat, not something you just got over easily.  It was something that could live in your body. It could cause damage. It could stay. 

This day left an imprint, and from then on out, I would stress about stress in addition to the thing I was stressing about.  It became background noise, always humming underneath, but it didn’t stop me from moving forward.

Eventually, I landed in a master’s program for forensic psychology. I was always fascinated by the outliers, the ones who lived outside the lines of what we call normal.

And maybe, on some level, studying criminals made me feel safer.

If I could understand the danger, maybe I could stay a step ahead of it.

What the Killers Taught Me
I dove headfirst into the darkness and learned this: Serial killers aren’t usually the rage monsters TV wants you to believe. Most are not impulsive, random, or always overtly violent. 

They’re often methodical.
They plan. They rehearse. They escalate over time. They wear masks to blend in, sometimes to charm, sometimes to disarm. They have patterns, or what’s called modus operandi, and they often leave behind signatures: ritualistic behaviors that reveal their psychological imprint.
I’ve spent years reading case files, understanding the patterns of people who destroy others on purpose.
Bundy. Manson. Dahmer.
The names that give people nightmares. The ones who dominate documentaries and true crime podcasts. The ones who terrorize communities and fracture families.

But the most prolific killer I’ve ever encountered doesn’t have a face.

It’s stress.

It’s chronic and it’s everywhere. It erodes you quietly.
It blends in the background until it’s done its damage.
It chips away at you, slowly and methodically.

Even when you know what to look for, you can’t always outrun it.

If a person did what stress does, we would name the harm.

Chronic Stress Fits the Profile

Stress has become so normalized that we don’t see it as the threat it is. Or maybe we’re just so used to it showing up uninvited that we’ve stopped even noticing it.

Like other killers, I’ve learned that stress also has a pattern.
It lingers in your body, causing slow, systemic damage that wears you down over time.
It’s patient, calculated, and rarely caught in the moment.

By the time you realize what it’s doing, the damage is already underway.

The science says:

• Chronic stress floods the body with cortisol and adrenaline, survival chemicals which are life-saving in a crisis, but toxic when they never shut off.

• It raises blood pressure and inflames the arteries.

• It weakens the immune system, making the body more vulnerable to infection and disease.

• It disrupts sleep, erodes memory, and messes with your ability to emotionally regulate.

• It hijacks the HPA axis, burning out the adrenal system and wrecking thyroid and hormonal balance.
  

If I were building a case file, here’s what I’d say:

Stress leaves its mark. It leaves damage you can measure.

It leaves evidence written in your labs, your scans, and your symptoms.

The crime scene isn’t out there.

It’s here, inside my body, and it's probably in yours too.

Case File: Stress

Alias: The Silent Killer
Classification: Chronic Biological Threat
Known Modus Operandi:

• It quietly slips in through everyday life, through the small stuff, the daily grind, the things we tell ourselves just have to push through.

• It embeds itself quietly, showing up and staying long enough to feel normal.

• Stress wears people down over time through it’s slow and steady presence.

• Leaves evidence that’s easy to miss, until your body starts raising alarms that you can no longer ignore

Behavioral Profile

Targets Rest First:
Stress rarely strikes in broad daylight. It prefers the quiet hours.
It’s known for interfering with sleep, when the body should be healing, making it hard to fall asleep, hard to stay asleep, and is especially fond of those early morning ambushes when your defenses are down and your mind is wide open. Stress rarely lets its targets rest.  3 AM wake-ups are a consistent pattern.

Leaves Traces in the Gut:
Reports consistently show nausea, stomach pain, appetite shifts, and gastrointestinal flare-ups. It blends in with other suspects but is rarely an innocent bystander.

Observed Pattern: Tension and Pain
Stress likes to dig in.
It’s found in clenched jaws, stiff necks, tight shoulders, and unexplained headaches. It settles into the body, causing tension and pain.

Documented Emotional Shifts: Mood Volatility
Stress is unpredictable.
It sharpens tempers, triggers emotional swings, and pulls sadness out of nowhere. Targets often report reacting “out of character.” Known to escalate without external provocation.

Persistent Symptom: Chronic Fatigue
Victims report energy depletion with no significant improvement over time. It leaves exhaustion that no amount of sleep seems to solve. By the time the victim notices, rest is no longer enough.

Cognitive Impairment: Signature Fog
Stress clouds judgment and slows mental processing.
Witness statements include forgetfulness, concentration issues, and moments of disconnection, commonly referred to as “brain fog.” Stress prefers to work in the background, but its fingerprints are all over this one.

Physical Presentation: Racing Heart
Stress often mimics cardiac emergencies.
Elevated heart rate, chest tightness, shallow breathing, it presents as panic, but often goes undiagnosed due to chronic exposure. Stress knows how to disguise itself.

Endocrine Disruption: Hormonal Imbalance
Stress doesn’t just leave surface marks.
It infiltrates the body’s hormonal systems, causing menstrual irregularities, adrenal crashes, and thyroid dysregulation. The long game is its specialty.

Known Coping Patterns: Self-Numbing
Stress has a way of driving people toward avoidance.
Scrolling, emotional eating, alcohol use, and overworking all show up on the scene. Not as direct accomplices, but as the fallout. Stress stays hidden under the coping mechanisms it creates.

Crime Scene Evidence:

Stress doesn’t make a scene. It slips in, unnoticed. If you slow down, if you really pay attention, you’ll see its fingerprints everywhere.

It leaves quiet, trace evidence on your body, in your blood, in the way you stop feeling like yourself.

 The Body:

• Cardiovascular Damage: Chronic stress raises blood pressure, thickens arteries, and lays the foundation for heart disease.

• Immune System Suppression: Stress weakens your body’s defenses, making you more vulnerable to infection and disease.

• Hormonal Disruption: Long-term stress hijacks the HPA axis, throwing hormones, thyroid, and adrenal function into chaos.

• Neurological Impact: Chronic stress shrinks the hippocampus, fractures sleep, spikes anxiety, and leaves lasting neurological scars.
  

Victim Profile:

• High-functioning worriers.
  People who carry the weight quietly, who look “fine” on the outside but are struggling inside.

• Caregivers.
  The ones holding it all together for everyone else. The ones who can’t put it down, even when they’re breaking.

• People living in prolonged uncertainty.
  Those waiting for the next shoe to drop, the next diagnosis, the next call that changes everything.

• Overachievers.
  People addicted to productivity, who believe rest is earned and stress is a badge of honor.

• People with unresolved trauma.
  The ones whose nervous systems have never had a chance to feel safe.

• Those who tell themselves, “I can handle it.”
  Until they can’t.

• Chronic fixers.
  The ones who believe they can problem-solve their way out of anything, even biology.

Known Associates:

• Burnout

• Insomnia

• Anxiety

• Guilt

• Grief

Caution:
Stress is easy to miss because it slides in quietly, finds its place in your routine, and convinces you that carrying it is just part of being alive. It becomes familiar long before it becomes dangerous.
Stress doesn’t always pick its victims.

Sometimes, we invite it in.

If a person inflicted this kind of slow, cumulative harm, we wouldn’t tolerate it.
We’d call it abuse. We’d press charges. We wouldn’t explain it away.

Instead, we carry stress like a necessary burden, like something we’re supposed to endure. Stress is necessary, in short bursts. It’s a survival system, designed to spike, to save us, and then to shut off. When that survival system stays switched on, it stops protecting us and starts to wear us down.

Living Inside the Crime Scene

It’s easy to build a case file, to think of stress as a hypothetical.  It’s much harder to admit when you’re the one living inside it.

I’ve seen the evidence of stress in my own life.
It’s made its presence known in my sleepless nights, my racing heart, my blood pressure creeping higher, the hormone crashes, the brain fog I can’t shake that causes words to be just out of reach. It’s in the tension that’s settled into every muscle.
I’ve spent so long living in this neurotic loop, not just feeling stressed, but stressing about what the stress is doing to me. Worried that I’m damaging myself in the process of trying to save someone else. 

It’s a chokehold I know too well.

The impact of stress isn’t new knowledge to me. I coach other people through it, yet I stay caught in it myself.  The worst part is that I know I should manage it better. I know the protocols, the tools, the ways to cope.
That’s the insidious part of stress, though; it doesn’t just flood your system, eventually it freezes you. It leaves you knowing exactly what would help, but too paralyzed to actually do it. I know I should breathe through it, walk it out, journal, meditate, drink green tea, and move my lymph.
I can feel the damage accumulating anyway, and the guilt comes next.
When you know this much about your own biology, every stressed-out moment feels like sabotage.

It’s exhausting to be this self-aware. 

All of those feelings about myself seem so trivial when I think about my husband. If stress can break down someone healthy, I can’t begin to imagine what it’s doing to a body already fighting for its life, already pushed to its limits.

That’s the part that haunts me. That’s the part I can’t let go of or make peace with.

I can’t forgive what stress is doing to him, not when I would give up everything, burn every plan, cut loose every comfort, if it meant protecting him from one more ounce of this weight.

I’ve watched him get crushed by this, blow after blow, setback after setback.
Not just by cancer, but by the weight of preventable stress.
By careless people. By broken systems. The absence of those who should’ve been fighting for him alongside me.

I know, deep in my bones, that this is killing him, too.
Stress isn’t a theory to me, it’s a biological reality that can be measured. It shows up in his labs and ER visits.
It’s his inflammation markers rising. It’s his gut flaring, his diverticulitis igniting under added pressure. It’s his immune system losing its ability to fight when he needs it most.

His body is already in a life-or-death battle.
It shouldn’t be diverting precious resources to manage stress responses.
Every single immune cell should be targeting the cancer.
But instead, his body is split, burning energy fighting stress-induced damage just to keep him upright.

He’s already fighting one killer.
He shouldn’t be fighting two.

When people add to his load, they’re tipping the scale in the wrong direction. When I see someone piling on, whether they mean to or not, I don’t see an accident.

I see a hand on the weapon. 

I wonder how easily we would name it as harm if it left visible bruises, but because it’s stress, because it’s invisible, people turn away and call it life, as if that makes it any less cruel.

I can’t turn away. How can I when I have to carry the weight of what is left behind?
I will never call this harmless, because I’ve seen the damage up close, and I can’t unsee it.

Where I Land

I wish I could tell you I’ve figured it out. That I’ve hacked my way to inner peace. That I’ve banished my cortisol demons and taught my body how to feel safe again.

The truth is, I’m a work in progress.
There’s no quick fix for this, no perfect ending here.
I can’t tie this up with a lesson or a solution.
Here’s what I do know:
Coping is not weakness, it’s rebellion.
It’s facing this silent killer every single day and saying, “You don’t get to have all of me.”

And the smallest ways I resist?
They matter.
Even the smallest pushback is me pulling the weapon out of its hand.

Day by day, I’m learning to outsmart stress.

To catch it sooner.

To loosen the grip before it tightens.

It doesn’t get to own me.

It doesn’t get to write the ending.
Choosing softness, rest, breath, that’s how I fight back against the killer I can’t fully outrun.
And if that’s the fight I get to win? I’ll take it. 

Sources

The research and resources below informed this article. Each one supports the physiological impact of chronic stress and its long-term effects on the body and mind.

• American Heart Association. (2021). Psychological Stress and Cardiovascular Disease: An Update from the American Heart Association. Link

• Verywell Mind. (2023). How Stress Affects the Immune System. Link

• National Institutes of Health. (2022). Stress Effects on the Body. Link

• Harvard Health Publishing. (2018). The Stress Response and How It Affects You. Link

• MDPI Cells Journal. (2023). Chronic Stress, Neuroinflammation, and Brain Changes. Link

• Herman, J. P., McKlveen, J. M., Ghosal, S., Kopp, B., Wulsin, A., Makinson, R., ... & Myers, B. (2016). Regulation of the Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenocortical Stress Response. Comprehensive Physiology, 6(2), 603–621. Link

• Dartmouth College. (n.d.). Life Change Index Scale (The Stress Test). Link