Toxic stress definition

Toxic stress means strong, frequent, or prolonged experience of adversity without adequate support.

Toxic stress means strong, frequent, or prolonged experience of

Toxic stress means a condition in which an individual is in a

Examples of Toxic stress in a sentence

• Toxic stress from ACEs can change brain development and affect how the body responds to stress.

• Toxic stress can disrupt brain architecture and other developing organs and puts individuals at increased risk for stress related diseases, cognitive impairment, behaviour problems and physical and mental health challenges (Centre on the Developing Child at Harvard University, 2007; Centre on the Developing Child Harvard University, 2011; National Scientific Council on the Developing Child, 2007a).

• Toxic stress develops when children and their communities experience prolonged adversity such as economic hardship, community disinvestment, the ongoing fear of violence, and constantly being reminded that they don’t fully belong in our society.

• Toxic stress can result from strong, frequent, or prolonged activation of the body’s stress response systems in the absence of the buffering protection of a supportive adult relationship (Shonkoff 2012).

• Toxic stress in child development can occur when tolerable stressful experiences are not moderated by adequate adult support or when they become chronic.

• Toxic stress undermines cognitive functioning, as well as appropriate regulation of feelings and behaviours (Van der Kolk, 2014), which in turn, can have significant negative consequences for wellbeing (Kearns & Creaven, 2017).

• Toxic stress causes specific behavioural profiles, including increased externalising behaviours, decreased executive function and emotional dysregulation.9,26–29Author ManuscriptWhile prior work indicated that preschool-aged Flint children have average adaptive function,13,14 the current study indicates most Flint children in this sample have lower levels of adaptive function than their peers.

• They place people at a higher risk for negative health outcomes and substance use.• Toxic stress and academic failure feed into a cycle of self-defeating behavior and long- term emotional distress.• Children are vulnerable to substance abuse during periods of transition and prolonged idle time.

• Toxic stress and children's outcomes: African American children growing up poor are at greater risk of disrupted physiological functioning and depressed academic achievement.

• Toxic stress is the mala- daptive and chronically dysregulated stress response that occurs in relation to prolonged or severe early life adversity.

More Definitions of Toxic stress

Toxic stress also means that something bad happens, like those events in “tolerable stress”, but where the individual lacks internal resources or external support systems, and, as a result, there is a lack of sense of control that leads to a chronic physiological dysregulation that promotes pathophysiology and results in something called “allostatic load” and “overload”, described below. Lack of control has been one of the defining features of psychological stress that leads to disease (Cohen et al., 2007). As a result, when toxic stress situations are prolonged, mental and physical health disorders develop over time. In this review, we use “stress” as an overall term for the body’s need to adapt to life experiences, particularly those that fall into the categories of “tolerable” and “toxic” stressors that differ in duration, severity, and degree of perceived control leading to some degree of allostatic load or overload.