nerve-racking

SMART Vocabulary: related words and phrases

Causing anxiety and worry
alarming
alarmingly
bite
catch up with someone
come back to bite someoneidiom
disturb
dread
frighten
frighten someone/something away/off
get/go beyond a jokeidiom
give someone the jimjamsidiom
give someone the jittersidiom
oppressive
rattle
roost
stressfully
suspenseful
suspensefully
suspensive
swatting

stressful | American Dictionary

stressful
adjective
us/ˈstres·fəl/
causing worry and anxiety:
Working in the emergency room of a major hospital is highly stressful work.

stressful | Business English

stressful
adjective
uk /ˈstresfʊl/us
a stressful situation or event is difficult to deal with and makes you feel worried and unhappy:
stressful for sbThe relocation was extremely stressful for all concerned.
Exams can be a stressful time for students.
a stressful job/workplace/working environment
find sth stressfulMost people find job interviews pretty stressful.

Examples of stressful

stressful
In contrast, survival was not reduced under stressful rearing conditions.
He clearly found running the shrine very stressful: he lost weight and his hair started to fall out.
Perhaps surprisingly, the authors found that only one-quarter of the respondents felt that caring for grandchildren was either very or extremely stressful.
This strongly points in the direction of side effects of the stressful water tank technique as being responsible for the induced effects.
Factors preceding the onset of meningococcal disease, with special emphasis on passive smoking, stressful events, physical fitness, symptoms of ill health.
Coping with stressful events in older children and adolescents.
We estimated the additive and environmental genetic variances by considering three generations reared under either stressful or favourable conditions.
Moving into unfamiliar and often stressful school settings coincides with pubertal changes and the search for identity.
Overwhelming our exstudents respond that it is the most stressful but important and educationally useful part of the course.
These results suggest maternal depression may influence child behavior through its association with a more stressful social context.
Table 1 makes it clear that the government brought substantial numbers of prosecutions only at a few particularly stressful moments.
In other words, stressful life events that occurred shortly after divorce appeared to significantly increase vulnerability to depressive symptoms among children of divorced parents.
On the contrary, the effects of stressful life events and social support were slightly augmented and not diminished by the inclusion of cortisol.
The parents (indirectly) and the offspring (directly) benefit because the offspring's needs are satisfied without the cost of unwanted attention and a stressful display.
Women were approximately three times more likely than men to experience major depression in response to any stressful life event.
These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.