What Five Years and 100+ Patients Taught Me About Stress
I studied Traditional Chinese Medicine and graduated in it, then spent the next five years working in a health department, seeing patients along the way. Somewhere past the hundredth one, a pattern became impossible to ignore: strip away the injuries — the sprained ankles, the slipped discs, the stuff that happens from a fall or a bad lift — and what’s left is stress. Around 90% of everything else traces back to it.
That’s not a stat I pulled from a study. It’s just what kept showing up, case after case, patient after patient.
Hours worked don’t predict who walks in the door
Here’s the part that surprised me even after years of seeing it: the person clocking 70 hours a week isn’t necessarily worse off than the one clocking 40. Sometimes it’s the opposite. I’ve treated people with demanding, high-hour jobs who were doing fine, and people working a “normal” schedule who were falling apart.
Hours are just a number. What actually wears a body down is how much tension is packed into those hours — the deadlines, the arguments with a boss, the constant low hum of worry that doesn’t switch off when the laptop closes. Someone can work fewer hours and carry more of that weight than someone working nearly double the time in a calmer environment.
We used to move. Now we mostly think.
The other shift I keep coming back to is how different work looks now compared to a generation or two ago. People used to spend their days doing something physical — farming, building, hauling, standing. The body did the work, and when the day ended, there was often a kind of natural exhaustion that came with it.
Now most of us sit. We use our brains all day and barely move our bodies. And that changes what shows up as illness. Back when work was physical, the problems people came in with were physical too — worn joints, strained muscles, injuries from labor. Today the labor has moved into the head. We’re solving problems, answering messages, holding a hundred small worries in our minds at once, and our bodies just… sit there. Still. Tense. With nowhere for any of it to go.
That’s the part that gets missed. Stress doesn’t just live in the mind — it lodges in the body. And if the body never moves, it never gets the chance to release what the mind has been generating all day.
The pattern I see over and over
Someone comes in with a tight neck, headaches, trouble sleeping, a stomach that’s been off for weeks. On paper, none of it looks connected. But almost every time, once we talk it through, there’s a job, a relationship, a financial worry, something sitting underneath it all, and the body has been quietly absorbing the impact.
The physical injuries I treat are usually straightforward. Something happened, something got hurt, we fix it. It’s everything else — the vague aches, the fatigue that sleep doesn’t touch, the digestive issues with no clear cause — where stress is almost always part of the story.
What I’ve taken from this
I’m not saying hard work is the enemy, or that a demanding schedule automatically means poor health. I’ve seen plenty of evidence against that. What matters more is whether a person has some way to process what they’re carrying, and whether their body gets to move enough to work through it.
If there’s one thing five years in that department taught me, it’s that health isn’t really about how many hours you put in. It’s about how much stress you’re holding onto, and whether you’re giving your body any chance to let it go.