Managing Stress – You’re Doing it Wrong

Last week, a client described leaving a meeting embarrassed by their own sharp responses to colleagues. They described how much less patience they felt when others were speaking, “I couldn’t seem to hold back, I just kept interjecting where I normally would be listening. And forget asking questions, I don’t think I asked one.” A few days later, they said, the same experience showed up at home. “I’m normally pretty flexible with my kids at night and I kept criticizing them, I hate showing up like that.”

Subtle morning dread, sleep problems, irritability in meetings and higher distractibility are the slowly growing signs of a chronic stress response. If you are pushing relentlessly to perform under pressure and managing stress through only short bursts of relief, your performance is suffering, and burnout may not be far behind.

Recovery Isn’t a Luxury, It’s a Training Requirement for Performance

I often ask clients to engage in a thought experiment:

Finish the following sentence with whichever automatic association your brain makes, “Recovery is ….”

Before reading on, try it yourself. Close your eyes, feel free to even say it out loud and see what your brain produces as an automatic association. 

Clients often notice the words their brain finishes that sentence with and report, with a look of subtle horror, “weak, a waste of time, not productive”. I assure them, it’s completely understandable that a human who finds enormous success through incredible effort would have developed this assumption. And, we need to acknowledge right now that this assumption is at best inaccurate, at worst lowering your performance. While the denial of the need for recovery and stress balance may get you success early in life, biology charges a very high price to keep this pattern going.

The High Price of Relentlessness

As we discussed in our recent post, The Neuroscience of Not Losing Your Shit, allostasis is the body’s ability to adapt to change, to flexibly meet demand. When your body employs the stress response beyond the short term to weeks, months or years, the demand of allostasis slowly causes wear and tear, building up over time to what we call allostatic load. 

• The body is designed to adapt with allostasis to short term stressors or high demands, over minutes, hours or days. 
• When the stress response is deployed over weeks, months and years, maladaptive shifts in the body’s cardiovascular system and immune systems can contribute to chronic disease risk.
• Allostatic load shows up as higher levels of inflammation, higher resting heart rate and higher blood pressure.
• Chronic allostatic load heightens irritability by keeping the body in a prolonged stress-response state, which dysregulates key systems like the HPA axis and reduces cognitive and emotional resilience. This makes it harder to manage minor stressors, resulting in a lower frustration threshold and increased reactivity in everyday interactions.

Stress debt is an excellent metaphor for allostatic load precisely because, just like financial debt, not all debt is bad. Sometimes, we need to put in long hours and lots of travel for weeks or months to close a deal, open a new office or train a new team. And, just as we might need to borrow money to grow, we need to lean on allostasis to see us through this time. However, just as we would need to pay back financing for business growth, we need to plan to pay back stress debt with intentional recovery to prevent allostatic load from creating long-term chronic health and performance problems.

Consistency is the Key

The more practiced a routine, the more automatic it becomes through stronger neural connections. The more automatic a routine is, the more resilient it is to high stress and changes in life demands. When most folks save for retirement, they decide an amount to set aside year after year. This somewhat boring, automatic routine rewards that relentless investor with outsized, exponential yields.

Like retirement, your body benefits from small, consistent and strategic routines. We are not talking hours a day, we are talking minutes. Pick one, and add it in. Start small and build over time for sustainable, long-term habits. 

Small Investments with Significant Yield

Over time, the following practices not only yield short-term results of a lower stress response and lower allostatic load, but can train your nervous system to reduce overall stress reactivity and increase resilience. By investing a small amount of time in these practices consistently, you can actually increase your body’s capacity to take on future challenges. These routines don’t just lower stress—they build the cognitive capacity for clearer decisions, faster problem-solving, and more effective leadership under pressure.

• Sleep 7+ hours – There is no “one amazing trick” that can compensate for sleep deprivation.
• Meditate 10 minutes a day – Strengthen your prefrontal cortex reliably, which increases cognitive control and decreases stress reactivity. I’m personally a big fan of the app, The Way for a daily (or nearly daily) practice.
• 5-10 minutes of breathwork – You can reliably lower your heart rate, and train your nervous system for lower reactivity (helpful in meetings) through low, slow breathing. When you extend your exhale in a way that emphasizes the diaphragm, your heart rate slows, and parasympathetic activation reduces your acute stress response—often within minutes.
• Ask a question – If you are curious enough to ask a question, you have managed your stress enough to reduce reactivity. For one week, try to replace an automatic response at work with a question presented with true curiosity. 

Remember – Vacation is Not A Recovery Plan

I often hear from clients that they are looking to their vacations for recovery. Vacation can be joyful, but I encourage clients to think of it like hosting Thankgiving, more work than rest. True management of allostatic load is not found on vacation, or with a monthly massage or a scroll through Instagram. Each of these can play a role in reducing stress debt and none are sufficient to reduce the body’s stress debt reliably or sustainably. 

Get Started – Now

Peak performance across a lifetime is not based on pervasive heroic effort – this is a myth. True sustained success takes deliberate, systematic investment of small amounts of time over years. The best time to start was yesterday, the second best time to start is now. 

Pick one, start today. When it sticks, add another. Drift? Yep, you’re a human, start again. That’s how long-term performance is built. You already know how to deliver results, now you need the performance system for making results last.