chokehold of stress
- noun
- Informal
:
estrés abrumador
- Many people experience the chokehold of stress when balancing demanding jobs and personal responsibilities.
Examples
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The chokehold of stress left him exhausted and unable to sleep for weeks on end.
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The chokehold of stress made it hard to breathe.
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During her divorce, he was caught in the chokehold of stress and struggled to focus at work.
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I felt a chokehold of stress during the exam.
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Many people experience the chokehold of stress when balancing demanding jobs and personal responsibilities.
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The chokehold of stress left him exhausted and unable to sleep for weeks on end.
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During her divorce, she was caught in the chokehold of stress and struggled to focus at work.
Synonyms
48
3.3
A state of worry or nervousness caused by difficult situations
A situation that feels tense and stressful and needs careful handling
A situation with a lot of stress and worry that makes people feel under pressure
Antonyms
How Stressful
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning is directly inferable by combining 'chokehold' (a constraining, suffocating grip) with 'stress' via the standard 'X of Y' noun phrase, so a learner who knows both constituents can readily interpret it as stress that constrains or suffocates. This is a transparent, image-based metaphor that follows common compositional and cross-linguistic patterns (e.g., 'stranglehold/grip of X'), making it predictable rather than idiomatic.
Etymology
Chokehold of stress comes from a strong image: a chokehold is when an arm squeezes someone's throat so they can hardly breathe, and stress is the thing doing the squeezing. So the phrase means 'feeling so overwhelmed and trapped by stress that you can't think or relax'.