Chronic, Ongoing Stress

Contents

Intro

Stress in a nutshell - start here!

Deep dive - the science behind chronic stress

1. The science is conclusive
2. Stress itself
3. The Fight/Flight defence system
4. The world of chronic ongoing stress
5. The stress timeline
6. Supporting naturally - OptimaPLUS (Alleviate/Detox/Fortify) wellness programme

"Healing is a process that always starts with stabilisation. Until the body's stable it cannot heal. The body then needs to detoxify and remove the roadblocks. The body also needs to get the nutrients that it needs to repair itself. When you have this combination in place the body can truly begin to heal."

Dr Nuzum, Toxicologist, Doctor of Naturopathic Medicine

Stress isn’t just a feeling - it’s chemistry.

When stress becomes chronic, the body’s built-in 'fight/flight' system never switches off. The adrenal glands continually flood the body with the stress and survival hormones - cortisol and adrenaline, while the non-essential body functions -digestion, immunity, and repair processes - are shut down, to shift the energy to where it's needed - survival. Over time, this relentless cycle drains energy, disrupts the gut, and sets off a cascade of health issues to eventual shut-down.

Does this sound like your horse?

• Always on edge, jumpy or anxious
• Flat, depressed, or 'shut down'
• Tight muscles, or girthy
• Loss of appetite or condition
• Fussy eating, bloating, or loose droppings
• Prone to ulcers, infections, or laminitis flare-ups
• Lacking the spark in in the eyes
  

How to support naturally

• Stabilise first: create calm routine, quiet companionship, consistent turnout, and ad-lib forage
• Feed clean: low-sugar, high-fibre diet with balanced minerals and good salt source.
• Rebuild gut health: start gentle detox and biome support before introducing targeted nutrients.
• Encourage movement: slow, relaxed exercise aids circulation and hormone balance.
• Support adrenal and nervous systems: adaptogen herbs such as Withania, Rhodiola, Schisandra, and Liquorice Root help normalise cortisol release.
• Think long-term: restoring homeostasis takes time - healing begins once stability returns.
  

🚩 Stress red flags & next steps

• Loss of appetite, rapid weight loss, or dull, withdrawn behaviour → veterinary check-up for ulcers, infection, or metabolic dysfunction.
• Persistent girthiness, acid smell in breath, or foul droppings → likely gastric/colonic inflammation — consider gut assessment.
• Ongoing anxiety, isolation, or repetitive stress (box walking, weaving, cribbing) → review environment and turnout — social contact is medicine.
• Sudden collapse, seizure, or extreme distress → call your vet immediately.
  

Bottom line

Chronic stress unravels the whole system - gut, hormones, immunity, mind. But with time, consistency, and the right functional-medicine approach - Alleviate / Detox / Fortify - you can help your horse move from tired and wired, to balanced, resilient, and bright-eyed once again.

Next step?

Explore our OptimaCARE detox programme for a simple, structured way to help bring your horse back into balance, or our OptimaPLUS programme if a deeper alleviate/detox/fortify programme is need.

Meanwhile...

Want the full science and support framework behind chronic stress? Here's our Deep Dive...

Deep Dive into Chronic Ongoing Stress

The science is conclusive

The word 'stress' itself is so broad that it really doesn't capture the full impact of stress. However, there's a great analogy to describe stress - stress can be 'likened to a thread that unravels the whole sweater of life, and if you pull on that thread too hard, everything collapses.'

You may have heard of the term 'adrenal fatigue'. If there's a state of chronic stress, the adrenal glands are being beaten up by the pituitary gland to work overtime, so the body's energy plummets and it becomes difficult to manage anything. The body's going to feel tired and wired, all at the same time.

A horse isn't meant to experience chronic, long-term, stress. In the wild, horses live and grow together as a family group supporting each other, feeding together for hours on end and roaming across desert, prairie and tundra at a slow walk for 20-30 miles each day. The only day-to-day stress they may experience is (a) either food shortage, so they simply move on until they find some more, or (b) a whiff of a predator, which they can outrun. There may also be the occasional dominance stress from herd members who squabble to take over the herd leader position, but that's pretty much it. Their stressors are short term, and quickly recoverable from.

Compare this to the human-controlled domestic horse. Many are weaned too early, or they're taken away from their family at a young age, when a human (predator) then takes over the running of their life. They're then either isolated or only allowed contact with limited horses they're not related to, who they may not get on with and spend their time trying to get away from. Different breeds speak different body languages, i.e. put a haffy in with an icelandic and they simply can't communicate. It can take anything up to 6-months for a horse to interpret a strange horse's body language, to where they can eventually kind-of understand each other.

They're then only permitted to mooch around a small outside area compared to what their body is naturally designed for (20-30 miles/day), usually walking no more than 1-2 miles/day, with limited food of the wrong type, i.e. monoculture neon-green grass leaves instead of a multi-species diverse stemmy grass range with herbage. They're then often kept in a walled box overnight where they'll walk no more than 400-meters over a 12-hr period if they're lucky.

Meanwhile... they have metal nailed to their feet before being forced to move in ways that are unnatural for them, while being exposed to loud, often claustraphobic, fear-inducing environments that they're unable to run away from, because they're physically restricted by tight straps around their mouth with a metal bar wedged through their lips, and a human sitting on top of them pulling on that metal bar, while digging their heels (or worse, metal) into their ribs to tell them where to go, what to do and how to do it. If they try to express any discomfort/fear/stress, they're often beaten - which they also can't run away from. Their stress levels rocket up, often alongside the 'naughty' or 'dangerous' labels.

(Is this the right moment to quietly mention the saying, "A horse doesn't have bad intentions - they only react?")

As if all this isn't bad enough, they're also fed a pro-inflammatory, poor-nutrient high starch/sugars bulk-filler diet in a bowl, alongside nowhere near enough coarse forage (which should only ever be hay - the only source of the appropriate fibre their hindgut needs, but very often they get acidic hindgut-dysbiosis-triggering haylage), so very often they're left standing for hours in that walled confinement with no forage which makes their gut seriously hurt. Unlike our human stomach, which only produces acid when we eat, a horses stomach continually produces acid, so if there's no food they're going to get acid burn.

Eventually their physical and mental struggle becomes so overwhelming that their whole body starts to break down as the survival hormones - adrenaline and cortisol - are triggered. Cue serious, long-term, chronic stress.

We, as in the dominant human, can't say that a horse has been domesticated by us long enough to be 'used to it'. Horses have been on the planet for millions of years. Us? A mere few thousand. And the physiological design of the ancient wild horse remains exactly the same as our modern-day domesticated horse. That's not to say that these days there haven't been beneficial advancements in how we keep our horses, but it still contradicts our horses' ability to express, and react to, their natural instincts and behaviours.

And this is all when the owner/carer is nice. We won't even go where they're not, as we're all too aware of the many, many horse rescue centres and dreadful cruelty afflicted at the hands of some people.

At chronic levels, stress is relentless, cumulative, and utterly debilitating. Whatever the cause, which can be anything from pain or trauma to isolation or malnourishment, a stressed state triggers a cascade of negative chemical reactions, which over time shuts off the immune system to the point of meltdown. And once stress becomes chronic, every vital system in the body is affected.

Unless the symptoms are addressed quickly, the body's HPA-axis (Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenal) automatically triggers its inbuilt survival process, commonly known as the Fight/Flight response. This releases a systemic flush of negative stress hormones - think of cortisol as the foghorn hormone - which over time, if they remain continually switched on, becomes a syndrome in itself where gut health, brain chemistry and immunity breaks down. Result? The whole body starts heading towards shutting down.

"When there is perceived danger and threat, your body initiates a stress response via the nervous system, your “flight/fight response. This gives a signal to rapidly secrete cortisol and adrenaline which can prompt a rise of sugar in your blood via the liver, so you’re basically ready to fight for your life."
 Hannah Alderson, hormone specialist and registered nutritionist.

The horse is now in real trouble. Their whole body's equilibrium, its vital force, immunity, homeostasis, is completely out of kilter and exhausted. Be in no doubt whatsoever that the whole body needs serious help to get it balanced again.

Stress itself

Before you start panicking about thinking you need to wrap your horse in cotton wool to prevent any of this bad stuff happening, let me assure you of something - homeostasis is continually disturbed by stress. The causes are multi-fold, i.e. external stress such as temperature changes, loud noises, or that proverbial pheasant leaping out from the bushes, or it could be internal stress such as pain or anxiety. However, the biggest cause that we find for chronic, ongoing stress is usually poor diet, lack of nourishment, lack of the essential nutrients in the diet - from my client enquiries, the most common reason coming up is the latter, very often inherited from a former owner's management.

It's when stress becomes this ongoing state that there’s a Bigger Picture going on. It’s not just about taking a pill or two, or changing to a healthier diet and all will be well; we’re talking a whole-body dysfunction where the entire organism is unbalanced, so we need to dig deep within the whole body.

And while everything happens at cellular level, everything starts with the gut, because in order to sustain life or fix an internal problem, we need to put a fix-kit into the body, via the mouth and into the gut system for it to work its magic. Trouble is though, when stress is involved, the fix is an even Bigger Picture, because one of those stress hormones, cortisol, has shut the gut down, so it's not in any kind of a fit enough state to manage any fix-kit.

So, digestion is now disrupted, which means there's now inflammation at cellular level - very likely there's an ulcerogenic state erupted as well, so throw red-raw pain into the mix, spreading a whole lot further than just the injurious site, thanks to the nerves in the body which radiate pain in every direction.

If the fire isn’t put out, the continuing inflammation of a system, especially the gut - the very system upon which all health relies on to fuel the very survival of the organism - triggers a cascade of further stressful cellular disruption in the immune system as a whole, because remember, it’s trying to work really hard in an attempt to maintain homeostasis.

Which means ... the immune system and other organs are trying to pick up the slack from the non-functioning gut, so they themselves become overworked and overburdened, and eventually the whole organism will stall, and head for a major crash.

The fight/flight defence system

Now we get to what stress actually does physiologically to the body, where the cause(s) has put it in a state of dis-ease (the body being ill at ease) where it’s throwing out presenting symptoms. These are the Red Flags that Something’s Not Right.)

If we ignore these symptoms at the acute stage, they develop into chronic dis-ease, which is the degenerative breakdown of various systems of the body at cellular level, which as we now know, if left untreated take the body, as a whole, down the path of meltdown. And in order to survive, the body will now kick in its own survival kit - enter the Fight/Flight defence system.

This is very much part of the stress scenario - the Fight/Flight response is the body’s natural stress defence system that kicks in when it needs help to basically survive. So we now need to understand what’s actually happening to the body when it’s in the Fight/Flight state, because again, if it becomes uncontrolled, it’s not pretty.

Put simply, fight/flight is when the body’s sympathetic nervous system goes into autopilot to either fight, or fly, from a perceived threat. Basically the central nervous system goes into full alert, which sends messages called nerve impulses to the relevant organs to ready themselves for the threat.

By now the endocrine system, which is a series of glands that secrete chemical regulators called hormones, has got involved. If something is threatening homeostasis, the endocrine system instantly tells the adrenal glands to secrete specific hormones to put the body in survial mode - on red alert to fight or fly, and specifically two major stress hormones. Meet cortisol - the stress hormone which affects the central nervous system, digestion and kidney function, and adrenalin - the survival hormone, which basically keeps the body functioning while the brain is planning how to deal with the ‘threat’.

The body's now in emergency survival mode

This all goes on behind the scenes automatically – there’s nothing that either horse or human can do about it. And so the body becomes ‘wired’; eyes and brain are focused only on the ‘threat’, and blinkers are up in readiness to fight or fly.

This is all well and good if we’re talking about a short-term temporary threat, i.e. the pheasant flapping out of the hedge which in reality is a 10-headed monster with lots of wavy arms and big teeth about to eat horse, so horse leaps in the air while turning into a fire-breathing-dragon, rigid and snorting, trying to decide quickly whether it needs to fight said monster or better still, run for the hills. Fast. With you still on top ...

Once the danger’s gone, whether we’ve fought or flown, hormone levels eventually return to normal and calm ensues - it's thought to take about an hour. As adrenalin and cortisol levels drop, the heart rate and blood pressure return to baseline levels and the body resumes its regular activities. And b-r-e-a-t-h-e ... Homeostasis is restored.

This is all absolutely normal - the natural stress response, the fight/flight reaction that the body is hard-wired to do, has done its job of protecting against threat or attack, and switched itself off. So far so good. But what if that fight/flight reaction doesn't switch itself off? And if not, how come it doesn't? Welcome to ...

The world of chronic ongoing stress

This is where it all goes wrong. The central nervous system and endocrine system have decided they still need to fight for survival and stay switched on, so a bit more biology - we now have to look beyond the adrenals to the entire hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, aka HPA axis. Sorry …

The hypothalamus is a small, but incredibly important gland in the brain that regulates energy, stamina and more, and it works in harmony with a much more important master controller gland, the pituitary. The hypothalamus relays hormonal messages to the pituitary along a pathway called the HPA axis.

From there, the pituitary directs key systems in the body which signal the adrenal glands to produce those stress hormones when needed. And ...if there’s constant, ongoing stress, the hypothalamus recognises that this is a permanent state so it’s going to keep signalling the pituitary gland to keep pumping on the adrenals.

This process now compounds upon itself by overloading the body with continuing nerve impulses and excessive cortisol/adrenalin, and what makes matters worse is that cortisol binds itself to the hippocampus, the region of the brain that's responsible for 'memory', and slowly wears it down (hence why stress management is so important).

Every system is now working on overtime, and trust me, a lot of energy is now being used. The body is becoming exhausted - we're now entering the 'adrenal-fatigue' phase, and we're heading for a whirlwind of havoc right at the top of the organismic level.

Here's what actually happens

At the first sign of a threat, the hypothalamus sets off a complex alarm system in the body. Through a combination of nerve impulses (central nervous system) and hormone signals (endocrine system), this alarm prompts the adrenal glands to release adrenalin and cortisol.

Adrenalin, the primary survival hormone, increases the heart rate, elevates blood pressure and boosts energy supplies. Cortisol, the primary stress hormone, increases glucose in the bloodstream and enhances the brain's use of it – reason being that glucose is the brain’s main fuel source. You’d think that’s all that’s needed for a short-term threat, but cortisol doesn’t stop there.

Cortisol now switches off certain functions that it doesn’t consider either essential or energy zapping. After all, for fight/flight mode it needs the body on full Red-Alert, with all energy available to either fight or fly. So, cortisol now alters immune system responses by suppressing the digestive system - I mean, who needs digestion when there’s a tiger on your tail? And ... you've all probably seen it, in shutting down digestion it also instructs the bowel to empty. Happens in humans too ... 😉 Sorry, shouldn't chuckle ...

Now it communicates with regions of the brain that control mood, motivation and fear:

• First up, cortisol floods digestion with acid to shut it down as we need all hands on deck to fight or fly.
• Next, that same acid seeps onto the skin so if we get bitten into we won’t taste too good to the tiger.
• Now the blood thickens and coagulates so if we get bitten we won’t bleed to death.
• And … bowels evacuate pretty much automatically so the body's now primed and ready for only one thing - the predator. How often have you seen the tail go up and the rest follows?
• Adrenalin and cortisol levels continue to increase to basically dump acid into the body continually.
• And ... the immune system gets put on the back burner because who cares if we get sick if we’re about to get eaten?

If that original temporary threat doesn't go away, and the fight/flight response doesn't get switched off, the long-term activation of the stress-response system - and the subsequent overexposure to cortisol and adrenalin - disrupts almost all of the body's processes on a continual basis.

Over time, that initial ‘wired’ feeling turns to brain fog and exhaustion – it’s too much for the body to maintain the energy to stay this wired, but all this cortisol and adrenalin, twinned with exhaustion and a switched-off digestive system, is now triggering a negative cascade on the whole system; cue tired and wired at the same time.

Let's also not forget that a horse, being a prey animal, also has an incredible survival instinct, so through all this they’re naturally trying to be stoic, strong and brave, which in itself is exhausting on an already fatigued state.

By the time they've reached loss of appetite/condition, they're now really, really struggling to keep up. The light would have gone out of their eyes and they're nearing the point of giving up. The whole body and brain is now literally ‘depressed’, as in no longer functioning.

Everything is linked:

• Over time the immune system becomes deficient, so the body’s lost its army – it’s now susceptible to every pathogenic threat out there.

• The vitality of the central nervous system, also a very major player of immunity, is basically in survival mode and literally can no longer cope with any other spook that crops up.

• The organism is mainly running on adrenalin and falling apart from cellular to system level everywhere.

I did say it wasn't pretty. And once we're at this point, as if you're not depressed enough, it's all downhill from here ...

The stress timeline

• We've already established that ongoing stress leads leads to the internal organ system becoming exhausted. From here on, normal body function has become sluggish - circulation (the life force) is now acidic, digestion has been switched off so there's no assimilation or absorption of nutrients from food to keep the body thriving, and the immune system is in bits.

• The adrenals will now be working overtime on survival autopilot, trying to hold everything together by releasing more and more adrenalin, which means much-needed restorative rest is impossible - it's just not happening.

• Now begins the cyclic toxic effect. Because the body’s exhausted it has no energy to either fight or fly, so the adrenaline isn’t being burnt off, which results in the body ending up in a state of anxious alert but brain-fogged with it, because the body’s completely worn out and now highly acidic.

It’s a really detrimental cycle of systemic events, but some good news now - it can be turned around. However, it’s not just a case of introducing some ‘fun’ or ‘happiness’ into the day; it’s a long-term rebalancing process that takes time - after all, we're talking whole-body damage here.

• We need to implement a quality rest, relaxation and sleep pattern which will restore calm to the body. This will gradually reduce the fatigue and slowly switch the gut back on, which means the body can gradually be nourished back to health again. Emphasis on slowly and gradually.

• Cells start to regenerate again, hormones settle and begin to rebalance the metabolism again, and immunity and sanity start to restore. Good link …

• Horses’ sanity is all based around them being allowed to express their natural behaviour, and this occurs when being given freedom to move and with other equine buddies to play, groom and socialise with. This releases the pleasure hormone, dopamine, which will instantly have a profound effect on calming the adrenals. The cortisol release will diminish, and the body and brain won’t feel so anxious.

• The improved, calmer mental state means that the body will be naturally willing to venture around a bit more, which will trigger hunger again.

• Now we focus on strengthening immunity. The gut needs a major clean-up and the microbiome needs repopulating in order to digest and assimilate the food nutrients ready for absorption, which will start to rebuild the body. Up to 80% of immunity is built from the gut microbiome so as the gut gets healthier, immunity gets stronger and eventually, health and homeostasis is restored.

Let’s now pull this all together.

A stressed system is a seriously non-functioning one. It destroys gut health, upon which whole-body health and immunity relies. The feed nutrients won’t be getting to the body’s cells to maintain optimum health and movement, so the physiological self – the functioning self - is exhausted.

So, let’s move forward with the tools to transform your horse’s health for good with the Functional Medicine approach for your horse - alleviate, detox, and fortify.

Supporting naturally - OptimaPLUS (Alleviate/Detox/Fortify) wellness programme

A reminder of Dr Nuzum's quote - "Healing is a process that always starts with stabilisation. Until the body's stable it cannot heal..." - this is where we start.

Alleviate

A stressed body is an inflamed body, which urgently need stabilising. so we start the programme with alleviating - stabilising  - the symptoms, by gently returning the body back to a calm and de-stressed state. This is all about alleviating and stabilising the pain/inflammation and stress here. While a horse is inflamed and shut down, their body's natural role is completely focused on this so we need to alleviate and stabilise these pathways to allow the body to start to repair itself.

Detox

Once the alleviation stage is underway - allow a few days - we can then start the detox. It’s pointless throwing expensive fix-kits at a horse while the toxic overload is still blocking the body's basic function to heal, so we start with a full gut regeneration programme to reconnect the gut:mitochondria connection and re-establish the beneficial biome colonies.

This process starts with boosting cellular energy, opening internal drainage pathways, and safely removing toxins without overwhelming the body. A proper protocol must also support the body’s detoxification organs - liver, kidneys, lymph nodes, and the circulatory systems - lymph and blood, so that the toxins can be flushed out, drained away and excreted. All explained in full in our Detoxification page.

Fortify

Along the way we fortify - nourishing the body back to optimum health with a clean diet, and reassessing environment and lifestyle, removing the stressors. When you fortify a body, you truly transform it.

• We start by relooking at the diet - feedbowl and forage - no bulk fillers, no haylage, no soaking hay.
• Mineral balancing, to balance the horse's body chemistry by supplementing the missing nutrient nuts and bolts back into the diet - see our EquiVita/VitaComplete mineral balancer range.
• Linseed (micronised) for the Omega-3 (included in our VitaComplete range)
• Salt (included in our VitaComplete range)

This is all covered in the Feeding our Horses Healthy section off the main menu at the top of the page, and specifically the Why what we feed has to be right page, plus you'll see our feed recommendations there as well. A quick heads-up, recent research (2020) now shows that there are equine-appropriate minerals versus questionable minerals, all covered in our blog post, Minerals, and it's All Change.

Every horse’s story is different - but the pathway back to balance is always the same: alleviate, detox, fortify. With the right support, even the toughest cases can turn a corner. Help your horse move from stress to stability with our gentle Functional Medicine approach — Alleviate. Detox. Fortify.

Click on the SHOP link below to see our Stress product range.