It’s certainly both. “Anxiety” it’s your brains response to given sensory input and tends to trigger a release of cortisol and in more extreme situations adren

It’s certainly both. “Anxiety” it’s your brains response to given sensory input and tends to trigger a release of cortisol and in more extreme situations adrenaline. While cortisol and adrenaline are normal responses it’s a very slippery slope and they can have extremely negative effects on the body. The dangers of to much of these hormones come from both chronic exposure for normal sensory inputs like stress at work or school on a daily basis or constant instability like parents fighting regularly to single acute episodes like an extreme traumatic event. Traumatic events tend to alter neural pathways so moving forward even non stressful sensory input can trigger these strengthened pathways putting people in non stressful environments in chronic states of stress. It’s helpful “not to think about it” whatever “it” is, but it’s often involuntary especially for those that suffered a trauma, as there’s always the risk that you are unknowingly responding to it without even thinking about it and it’s often hard to connect the dots. The other issue is everything in the body is a feedback loop and hard to break or change. For example even just sitting in a chair all day will shorten you hip flexors, causing unnoticeable discomfort but your brain will notice and respond with release of cortisol which will in turn cause tightening of muscles and myofacia, that will further release cortisol in response to those bodily stresses, and on and on it goes with all kinds of “referred pain” (I hate that term) you do notice in maybe your neck or shoulder(s) or back. And good luck at that point you’ll be treating the area in pain that’s not even actually causing the pain only leading to more chronic stress over the inability to make the pain go away. If you work in an office my guess is you have physical pain, and you can ask anyone else in the office and odds are they have physical pain, and my bet dollars to donuts from arthritis to bursitis to joint pain the vast majority with simply blame it on getting old or some posture issue and not a single one will realize the physical pain and bodily conditions are directly related to stress.