Anticipatory Stress: Why Just Expecting Stress Can Hurt Your Brain

Have you ever woken up already dreading the day ahead? Even before stepping into work, your body may start reacting as if the stress has already begun. This reaction is known as anticipatory stress, and recent research shows that it can affect your brain and body — even if the stressful event never actually happens.

In this article, we’ll explore what anticipatory stress is, how it impacts your working memory, and why it may be just as disruptive as real stress.

Key Takeaways

• Anticipatory stress happens when your body reacts to stress before anything stressful has happened — purely based on expectation.
• Research shows it can impair working memory, making it harder to focus, think clearly, and perform well at work.
• Morning anticipation has a particularly strong effect because the brain treats upcoming stress as imminent.
• In small amounts, anticipation can help you prepare — but if it happens often, it drains mental energy and increases long-term stress risk.
• Recognizing this pattern early helps prevent the “stress-before-stress” cycle from turning into chronic stress or burnout.

What Is Anticipatory Stress?

Anticipatory stress refers to the physical and mental stress response that occurs when you expect a stressful situation. It doesn’t require the presence of a real stressor — just the anticipation is enough to trigger changes in your brain, hormone levels, and performance.

Unlike chronic stress, which builds over time, or acute stress, which happens in the moment, anticipatory stress kicks in before an event even begins.

The Study: How Expecting Stress Affects Memory

A 2019 study from Pennsylvania State University investigated how expecting a stressful day can impair working memory — the mental space we use to hold and process information in real time. This is crucial for learning, decision-making, and productivity.

Researchers followed 240 adults (ages 25 to 65) for two weeks using smartphone-based check-ins. Each day, participants:

• Rated how stressful they expected their day to be
• Reported how stressed they felt throughout the day
• Took short tests to assess their working memory

Key finding:

Participants who expected a stressful day in the morning performed worse on working memory tests, regardless of whether stressors actually occurred.

In other words, the anticipation alone was enough to impair brain function.

It’s important to note that this study doesn’t claim to explain every aspect of anticipatory stress. Instead, it’s a clear scientific illustration of a phenomenon many people recognize in daily life: the body can react to what we fear might happen just as strongly as to what actually happens.
Other research supports this broader idea — that expectation, worry, and perceived threat can meaningfully shape how the brain and body respond to everyday challenges.

Timing Matters: Morning Stress Hits Harder Than Evening Worry

The researchers found something interesting: evening worry about the next day’s stress did not have the same effect.

Why? It seems that worrying at night — when the stressor still feels distant — doesn’t activate the same level of physiological response. But once morning comes and the perceived stress is imminent, the body reacts more strongly.

This makes morning anticipation a key trigger for cognitive disruption during the workday.

Why Does Anticipatory Stress Impair Memory?

From an evolutionary perspective, stress helps us prepare for challenges. When your brain senses a threat — even a future one — it ramps up energy release, sharpens attention, and suppresses non-essential functions.

Unfortunately, one of the first things to take a hit is working memory. This is because high stress narrows attention and increases distractibility — making it harder to retain and manipulate new information.

While this might help in a fight-or-flight scenario, it’s not ideal when you need to stay focused, learn, or solve problems at work.

Limitations of the Study — and What It Still Tells Us

While the study was well-designed, it relied on self-reported stress and working memory tasks. It did not measure objective physiological markers like cortisol, the body’s primary stress hormone. Including biological data would have strengthened the findings.

Still, the consistency of results — across ages and different days — supports the idea that anticipatory stress is a real, measurable phenomenon that affects mental performance.

Is Anticipatory Stress Always Bad?

Not necessarily. In moderate amounts, anticipatory stress can help us prepare — mentally rehearse, double-check tasks, or arrive early. It gets the body ready for action, like warming up before a workout.

But if it happens frequently, or if the stress you're expecting doesn't actually occur, this preparation turns into wasted energy. You feel depleted for no reason. Over time, this can lead to:

• Lower cognitive performance
• Emotional fatigue
• Increased risk of chronic stress conditions like anxiety, high blood pressure, or burnout

The Vicious Cycle of Stress Expectation

One of the most dangerous effects of anticipatory stress is that it feeds itself. If you start your day worried, your performance may dip — and that dip creates real problems, which in turn make you more likely to expect stress again tomorrow.

This negative feedback loop can eventually lead to:

• Poor concentration
• Mistakes at work
• Reduced confidence
• Even more stress

That’s why breaking the cycle early is so important.

Anticipatory Stress Deserves Attention

Anticipatory stress isn’t “just in your head,” and it’s not simply worrying too much. It’s a real physiological response that can affect your memory, mood, productivity, and long-term health — even if the stressful event never actually happens.

The takeaway? Stress at work doesn’t always begin at your desk. It can start the moment you open your eyes.

Recognizing this pattern is the first step. By identifying how and when you anticipate stress, you can start developing strategies to interrupt the cycle — and protect your cognitive energy for the challenges that actually matter.

A final reflection — and a possible next step

Anticipatory stress often isn’t triggered by what’s happening right now, but by what your brain expects to happen next. When the stress system stays activated too long, even neutral moments can start to feel heavy or draining.

If you recognize this pattern, Trapped in Overwhelm is a short, practical guide designed for moments when stress builds before anything has actually gone wrong.
It offers small, manageable shifts that help you regain a bit of stability and space — enough to notice what’s happening before the stress spiral takes over.

👉 Download the free guide: Trapped in Overwhelm

FAQs

What is anticipatory stress?
Anticipatory stress is the physical and mental stress response that happens when you expect a stressful situation, even before it occurs. The brain treats the anticipated threat as if it were real, triggering changes in attention, hormones, and bodily tension.

Is anticipatory stress the same as anxiety?
Not exactly. Anxiety is a broader emotional state that can persist without a specific trigger.
Anticipatory stress is specifically linked to upcoming situations and tends to spike when the event feels near or unavoidable — such as before work, presentations, meetings, or deadlines.

Is anticipatory stress harmful?
Occasionally, it can be helpful because it prepares you to perform. But when it happens frequently, it can:

• impair concentration and working memory
• increase fatigue
• reduce daily performance
• contribute to chronic stress and burnout

If mornings already feel stressful before the day even begins, it’s a sign your nervous system is doing too much “preparing” and not enough recovering.

Why does anticipatory stress affect working memory?
Stress narrows attention and directs resources toward perceived threat. This reduces the brain’s capacity for holding and processing information in real time — which is exactly what working memory does. That’s why anticipating stress can make people feel distracted, forgetful, or mentally slower, even without anything “bad” happening yet.

Can anticipatory stress be reduced?
Yes. Recognizing the pattern is the first step. Anticipatory stress can be reduced by improving predictability, regaining a sense of control, supporting recovery, and gradually retraining the nervous system not to stay in “survival mode” unnecessarily. Small, steady changes can already make mornings feel lighter and improve cognitive energy.