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Areas › Your body › Your nervous system
You hold together through the push, and the moment it stops you are in bed with something. Often it was already brewing while you were still going. Plan for it rather than being surprised by it: leave a soft day or two after anything big instead of filling that space with all the catching up you postponed. And stop reading it as weakness at the finish line.
'and remove the burden' (Quran 94:2). The lifting of a weight is its own event, and a body takes a while to arrive after it.
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A meta analysis of chronic stress and the stress hormone system found that the pattern of cortisol depends on the kind of stressor and how long it has lasted, with prolonged stress often producing flattened rather than raised output. The hormone side of this is genuinely dynamic rather than one directional. That work is about hormone patterns, not about why you catch a cold after your exams, which remains the accessible teaching version of the idea.
Miller GE, Chen E, Zhou ES. (2007). If it goes up, must it come down? Chronic stress and the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical axis in humans.. Psychological bulletin doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
While you are running on stress hormones the immune response is held down, and when they fall it starts up again and you feel it.
Feeling worse as things get safer is confusing, and it is common. When the guard finally comes down, whatever it was holding down gets felt.
Before picking a calming technique, work out which way you are off. Revved up and shut down need opposite things.
A useful picture: the parts of your brain are sections of an orchestra. In dysregulation they are playing different tunes at different speeds. The aim is timing, not repair.