Stress can be defined as the psychophysical response an individual puts into action to adapt to a dangerous situation or to tasks perceived as excessively demanding. This leads to both physiological and psychological overload, whose intensity varies from one individual to another, since everyone has a different capacity to perceive, react to, and withstand stress.
From a physical standpoint, the stress response is associated with increased secretion of hormones, including glucocorticoids, catecholamines, growth hormone, and prolactin. The purpose of this process is to boost the mobilization of the body's energy resources and enable the individual to cope with this new situation.
Even though there are objective stress factors (the illness or death of loved ones, the end of relationships, a change of job, financial problems, relocations, moving house), it is above all the subjective way of experiencing them that determines their intensity. This helps us understand that the same event is perceived, handled, and processed differently depending on each person's character and on the moment in life at which it occurs.
A present situation, in fact, can easily become the screen onto which unconscious traumas from the past, not sufficiently worked through, are projected, traumas that present themselves with different intensity for each person (or for the same person at different times).
The same mechanism underlies the stress caused by subjective events, that is, events that are not generally considered stressful: everything related to motherhood, for example.
For some women, it can be a source of stress because it awakens repressed anxieties and fears that surface from a physiological situation, one capable of bringing back to the surface unconscious conflicting experiences and desires tied to their own history in the womb and in early childhood.
The question of «whether stress experienced during pregnancy can have physical and/or emotional repercussions on the child» should therefore be reframed. Stress, in fact, is only the warning sign, the consequence of the deep turmoil affecting certain expectant mothers: it is above all what causes it, something they are often unaware of, that can be harmful to the fetus's health.
Stress, despite the physical changes that come with it, can be seen as a valuable warning bell that, if one tries to suppress it without working on the causes that produced it, risks resurfacing both before and after birth, and negatively affecting the relationship with the child.
References: Ranabir, 2011, Indian J Endocrinol Metab; S. McEwen, 2008, Eur J Pharmacol