Foundational Stress Management (How To Manage Your Stress)

The goal of this foundational stress management article is to give you a resource you can use to learn how to manage your stress using good evidence-based information and the latest science.

Stress is a topic that doesn’t get the spotlight that it deserves, and when people do discuss it, the advice that is given is usually quite vague and/or incorrect. So this article is designed to both help you understand what stress is, the impacts of stress, and then what you can actually do to manage your stress levels. We could get caught up in some relatively meaningless biochemical pathway, and you see many discussions of stress falling victim to this, but that is not what we’re going to do here. This article will give you the overview information you need to understand stress, and then also give you the information you need to actually take action to manage your stress. By the end of the article, you will have a very clear understanding of stress, and you will also have a few strategies to better manage your stress.

The article is laid out as follows, and you can jump to whichever section you feel is most important to you by clicking the link in the Table of Contents:

We believe in empowerment through education, so we think it is important to have some understanding of the why behind health topics such as stress. If you understand the why, then the “how” makes a lot more sense. You don’t want to just learn about specific protocols and hope they work for you. No, you want to build a deeper understanding of the topic so that you can modify the protocols to fit your lifestyle and needs. You certainly don’t need to be an expert, but a little bit of knowledge really does go a long way with this stuff. So we will be discussing some of the science behind stress and why the basic stress management practices work, but if you simply want to know what to do with no background information, you can skip all the way down to the Stress Management section.

If you want more free information on nutrition, training, stress management or sleep, you can follow us on Instagram, YouTube or listen to the podcast, where we discuss all the little intricacies of the diet. We also offer coaching if you need help with your own diet. Finally, if you want to learn how to actually coach nutrition and help people manage their stress, then consider our Nutrition Coach Certification course. If you don’t understand something, or you just need clarification, you can always reach out to us on Instagram or via email.

 

 

This article is part of our fundamentals series, where we discuss the key pillars of building “your best self”. Being your best self means you are able to engage with the world how you want to engage with the world and ultimately, accomplish the goals you have. Regardless of what that actually looks like for you, if you can get the pillars set up correctly, you give yourself the best opportunities to accomplish everything you want to in this life. The foundations of the broader society you find yourself in also matter, as do the genetics you were born with or the biology you were born with or acquired (your “biology” could change due to accident or injury, for example, you may have become paralysed, and thus your “biology” has changed), as does your mental and spiritual health, and of course, the health of your local community and support systems. However, much of the foundations are out of our active control, but we can work to set up the pillars as best we can, given the circumstances we find ourselves in. In this article, we discuss stress management, but we do also have an article on sleep and nutrition if you are interested in learning about those pillars, and we will discuss exercise in a future article (you can sign up to the email list to be notified when it is live on-site).

The goal of this article is to provide you with the tools you need to get a really robust stress management system in place. However, to do that, we need to dive a bit deeper into what stress is, the science of stress and to basically build out a better understanding of stress. Then we can really dig into the tips you need to improve your stress management practices. However, you can jump to this section if you just want to get straight into the stress management tactics.

 

What is Stress?

What is stress? We use the term a lot these days, but if you asked most people to actually describe what stress is, you would get some rather vague explanations, focused around a sort of negative type of feeling. That description is actually ok for a general discussion, and you don’t need to know all the ins and outs of stress to be able to get good stress management practices in place. However, we truly believe that you get empowered through education and thus having a basic understanding of what stress actually is, really does allow us to create better stress management strategies for your situation. Without a deeper understanding, you are left just following protocols and systems someone else devised, rather than being able to create the protocols and systems that would actually help with your own specific situation.

At a fundamental level, stress is simply the body’s response to a stressor. It is your nervous system interpreting the stimuli from the world around you, and then mounting a response to that stimulus. It isn’t inherently good or bad, it is simply a response. Stress can be incredibly beneficial, if it is helping you to mount an adequate response to a stressor like a bear suddenly appearing in front of you on a hiking trail. However, it can be incredibly negative if you are sitting at your desk with an uncontrollably high heart rate, just thinking about the various things you have to get done for work etc. So context really does matter, and further to this, there is a huge degree of individual variability with this too. What you deem a negative stress might be something that someone else thoroughly enjoys, and it causes them no negative stress feeling (this is very evident in something like public speaking where some people are terrified of it, while other people find it incredibly enjoyable and not a stress at all).

 

 

So, as you can see, stress, as we describe it in an everyday sense, is actually a bit vague. To detangle this and allow us to actually understand what stress is and how to deal with it, we do actually need to build out a much better understanding of stress. To do this, I think it makes sense to first discuss what the medical and scientific community understand stress to mean, and then bring that understanding back to the real world.

As a scientific term, in a biological context, stress is simply defined as; “stress is the body’s response to a stressor”. Now, as we have discussed earlier, this isn’t actually that helpful in the real world, as it isn’t what the average person is discussing when they discuss stress. As a definition, it does also leave a lot to be desired, as it sounds like a definition someone would give you if they didn’t actually understand the concept (it sounds very like, “stress is the feeling you get when you encounter something that causes stress”, and this would be a very poor definition if you were trying to explain the term to someone who spoke a different language). This definition isn’t very in line with what most people understand stress to be, and as a result, some branches of the scientific community (mainly neuroscientists) have tried to change the definition of stress to something along the lines of “stress should be restricted to conditions where an environmental demand exceeds the natural regulatory capacity of an organism”. This does align better with the everyday understanding of stress, but it does fall short in a number of ways, and it would require the creation of new terminology for a variety of things that we currently discuss related to stress. It also wouldn’t allow us to discuss a variety of things that we discuss related to stress that are relevant for those of us interested in health, nutrition and fitness. So I am going to use the generally accepted definition of stress, but I am going to try to build your understanding of stress to a level where you can actually better utilise this definition and understand “positive” versus “negative” stress.

So with that out of the way, I want to unpack the “stress is the body’s response to a stressor” definition.

Let’s leave the term stress alone for a second, as that is what typically causes a lot of the general confusion when trying to understand stress. Instead, let’s turn our attention to the term stressor. A stressor is simply a stimulus that is applied to the body, and realistically, you could just substitute the word “stimulus” for “stressor”. This stimulus does not even need to be physical, it can also be completely “made up” in your mind. The body is simply responding to the perceived world around it (and perception is not the same for everyone, and this also creates a lot of confusion in this discussion). The stressor is inherently neutral, and the body is mounting a response that it thinks will help it to deal with that perceived stressor. This is why novel things that you haven’t experienced before may appear to be more stressful than things you do every day. This is also why some people feel excessively stressed by certain stimuli than other people, who seem to be more resilient to the same stressors. The stressor isn’t good or bad, the body is just mounting a response that it thinks will help it deal with that stressor. The body has to interpret the stimuli that are coming in from the perceived world, and when it encounters unknown or “higher-intensity” stimuli, it responds with “alarm”. It doesn’t know what this new stimulus is, so it mounts a response that it thinks will adequately allow it to deal with this stimulus. While all of you reading this are unlikely to be extremely startled by a book falling off your desk or another startling event, there was a time when even mildly loud voices were too much of a stimulus for you and overly stressed you out. When you were a baby, even talking too loudly resulted in alarm. This is true of many other stimuli in a baby’s environment (no wonder they cry all the time). But over time, the baby dials down the responsiveness to these stimuli, and their resilience to these stimuli increases and they get to the stage where they are quite resilient to most things they are likely to encounter in the environment they live in. However, if they were to be transported to a faraway land, where they did not build resilience to the stressors present there, well, they would probably have a higher stress response again. But I am getting ahead of myself here, as I just want to illustrate that the stressor itself is relatively neutral, and it is the “stress” side of things that changes.

We have a rough definition of what stress is, but if we are to get to a point where we can create effective systems and strategies for dealing with the stress in our own lives, we have to build a better understanding of stress. So, to actually build a better understanding of stress, we do have to dig into the physiology of stress and discuss the whole process that leads to the stress response we commonly think of. To do this, we do kind of need to discuss things separately, which initially makes it a little harder to follow along, but I will tie it all back together in the end and discussing things this way will allow you to understand it a little bit better.

 

Stress and the Nervous System

The nervous system is actually an important part of the stress response, and understanding its role has a very direct impact on our stress management practices. You don’t need to be an expert on the nervous system to understand stress, but there are some key things you need to understand to really be able to craft effective stress management practices. The nervous system is especially important to understand, as a lot of the things we do for stress management actually work via the nervous system.

Most people just think of the nervous system as the “electrical wiring” of the body and are really only aware of it when something goes wrong with this wiring (i.e. you have some nervous system pain like sciatic nerve pain, or you have some sort of nerve related muscle weakness), the nervous system is actually a vital part of the stress response. The nervous system isn’t just the electrical system that allows you to coordinate movement, it is the system your body relies on to coordinate your response to any stimulus. It is the superhighway that transmits the signal of a stimulus (stressor) to the relevant command centres (your spine and/or your brain), and then transmits the response back.

You have a central nervous system (basically your brain and spine) and a peripheral nervous system, which is further subdivided into the somatic nervous system and the autonomic nervous system. The somatic nervous system is less important for this discussion, as it is basically the nervous system branch that controls voluntary movements (which is still obviously important, as voluntary movement is still important to the stress response overall). What we are really concerned about in this discussion is the autonomic nervous system (ANS). The ANS can be further subdivided into the sympathetic nervous system (SNS), the parasympathetic nervous system (PSNS) and also the enteric nervous system (ENS). The ENS is less important for this discussion right now, but it does play a role in discussions around nutrition and stress.

The whole system is more complex than this, but what I really want to emphasise is the fact that you have these various branches of the nervous system, notably the SNS and PSNS. Now, this is important to emphasise because it helps us understand stress more, and it has a direct impact on our stress management practices. You see, when most people discuss stress, they are really discussing SNS-related actions. The SNS is often referred to as the “fight or flight” system, and this does exactly what it says it does. It is the system responsible for ramping you up so you can either tackle an issue head-on (fight), or run away from it (flight). We must remember that this response is neither inherently good nor bad. It is the system that allows you to mobilise the stored fuel in your body so you can run away from a threat or tackle it, and it is also the system that leaves your palms sweating and your heart rate racing because you have to speak in front of a crowd. Same system, different stimulus, different perception of things. It should be noted, that women don’t always react in the same way that men do to a stimulus, and they often display a “tend and befriend” response, rather than a strictly “fight or flight” response to certain stressors. The “tend and befriend” response refers to the protection of offspring (tend) and the behaviour of seeking out a social group for mutual defence (befriend). This difference in response to stress may not be outwardly different in a noticeable way (i.e. a mother bear being incredibly aggressive to protect her cubs may not appear to be noticeably different to a male bear simply aggressively attacking), but it is important to realise that there are subtle differences and these are important for both our understanding of stress and our stress management practices as there may be differences in how men and women experience and deal with stress.

This whole process is more clearly illustrated if we actually walk you through the whole process of stress, from a nervous system perspective. In response to a stressor, a message is transmitted via the nervous system to the brain (hypothalamus/brain stem) and gets interpreted and relayed to the ANS. For this discussion right now, how it gets the message is less important, and what we really care about is the cascade of events that occurs at the nervous system level and after, once that message is received. A message is received and interpreted in the hypothalamus, which then sends a signal to the SNS, which then relays this signal to the many organs and systems in the body. The SNS innervates many target tissues, but one of the things it targets is the adrenal medulla. Once appropriate signalling is given via the SNS, the adrenal medulla releases adrenaline and noradrenaline, which serve to enhance the nervous system effects by binding to adrenergic receptors around the body. This is what precipitates the “fight or flight” response. As the SNS has multiple targets around the body, this is why you get such a wide variety of effects.

You see dilation of the pupils, increased heart rate and force of contraction, vasoconstriction, changes in blood pressure, bronchodilation (breathing becomes easier, although your actual breathing rate will likely increase when stressed, and most people end up taking short and shallow breaths too), sweating, a lot of metabolic effects that serve to make fuel more readily available and the metabolism less focused on “storage” (glycogenolysis, gluconeogenesis, lipolysis), and then you see digestion changes (you see decreases in gastric motility (so you potentially struggle to poop) and then also relaxation of the bladder (so you urinate more often)), and as I mentioned above and will discuss further below, you get stimulation of the adrenal medulla. These effects make sense given the context of the SNS being a very fast response system that is supposed to help you to deal with a stressor. In nature, that stressor is likely to be a predator chasing you, or you chasing a prey animal, so it makes sense that you would want to get a signal to different parts of the body that make that easier. Your eyes widen, you are more focused and can see better, your heart rate increases, you can breathe better, and you feel amped up and ready to respond very quickly. However, we don’t live in nature these days, and thus there is a mismatch between what this system was developed for and the way we currently live, and that has some implications we will discuss throughout this article.

 

 

Now, before we go on further, we must circle back and remind ourselves that the PSNS is also part of this system. The PSNS is often referred to as the “rest and digest” or the “feed and breed” system, and it also does exactly what you would think it does based on that name. The PSNS is responsible for bringing the heart rate down, relaxation, and it also plays a significant role in digestion. If you have ever had a big meal and then fell asleep straight after it, that is a very good illustration of PSNS activity. However, as you can imagine, being in this relaxed state isn’t appropriate all the time, and this is why we can’t view things in a binary good or bad manner. It also plays a role in hormonal health, mating and procreation. While SNS activity can be thought of as the time for mobilising stored fuel, PSNS activity can be thought of as the time for building for the future. This naturally has implications for health, but for those of us trying to build muscle and improve our performance, spending time with high PSNS activity is vital. The PSNS also plays a pretty big role in mating and procreation, and this should be obvious enough, as most people don’t generally see their sex drive increase when they are highly stress (high SNS activity) and generally do see their sex drive increase when stress is low (high PSNS activity).

The PSNS basically innervates many of the same targets of the SNS, and for this discussion, effectively has the role of turning the dial the other way from the SNS. The pupils constrict, heart rate is reduced, blood pressure reduces, the lungs constrict (bronchoconstriction, as you don’t need to be gasping as much air in as possible when you are relaxing, and you also tend to see long, slow, deep breaths when the PSNS dominates), you get increased activity of the digestive system and you get a contraction of the bladder walls. So the PSNS basically turns the dial down from the actions of the SNS, and this is generally discussed in terms of returning to normal, often called homeostasis (which we will discuss later on). However, that is only the role of the PSNS after the SNS has been activated and it does have effects outside of this.

 

Stress and the HPGA Axis

The stress response isn’t just a nervous system phenomenon, however. There is a hormonal element to stress too, and this does have implications for both our understanding of the effects of stress, what stress looks like and our stress management practices. You see, the nervous system is only one part of the stress response. While you do have to understand the nervous system component, you do also have to realise that there is a hormonal component too. The nervous system can be thought of as the “fast” system, and the hormonal system can be thought of as the “slow” system (the nervous system is basically electrical circuitry, whereas the hormonal system has to travel through the slower bloodstream to get to the target). There is a rather complex interplay of various hormones occurring in response to stress, but for this discussion of the stress response, you just need to understand that there is a hormonal component to stress. Stress affects the hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal-adrenal (HPGA) axis, which can be thought of as the brain-to-hormone system, as it is the system that coordinates a variety of hormonal responses to inputs the brain receives.

 

 

In response to a stressor, the hypothalamus receives and interprets the information, and then transmits it to the SNS to respond (as described in the last section). However, it also communicates with other areas of the brain (namely the pituitary glands), and other areas of the brain also communicate with it (such as the amygdala). The hypothalamus signals (via hormones) to the pituitary to secrete hormones that travel in the blood, which serve to then signal the adrenal glands to secrete what we classically think of as “stress hormones”, such as cortisol. These hormones serve to enhance the effects already being signalled by the SNS, while also serving to mobilise stored fuel (i.e. it mobilises fat and carbohydrate stores). These stress hormones are effectively antagonistic to growth signals, as it doesn’t make sense to build up muscle mass or fat reserves, if you need it right now. I often describe stress signalling as “go time” rather than “grow time” (technically, it should be “grow and/or repair time”, but that isn’t quite as catchy), and this is important to remember for everyone reading this who is trying to build significant amounts of muscle (as high stress is antagonistic to this). Cortisol and the other stress hormones secreted do also have a variety of effects around the body, which we will describe a little more clearly in the “Effects of Stress” section, however, what is important to understand is that cortisol does effectively turn the system off after itself (I often describe this as closing the door after itself). The fact that cortisol down-regulates HPGA signalling, does have implications for our health and our stress management practices.

The process is different if the stimulus encountered wasn’t one that activated the SNS, and rather activated the PSNS. Effectively, you would see signalling that would serve to calm things down, rather than ramp things up. This is both hormone and nervous system mediated, and while the exact mechanics of this aren’t important for this discussion right now, what is important is understanding that certain stimuli elicit an SNS or PSNS response and there are hormonal differences between these two. We will discuss this more later on, but needless to say, this has implications for our health and stress management practices.

Now, we only really touched on part of this system, as we didn’t mention the “gonadal” (testicles or ovaries) side of things. These do form part of the stress response, and they are affected by stress levels. We don’t need to get bogged down in the exact signalling here, as it doesn’t massively enhance your understanding. However, what is important to understand is that the hormones estrogen and testosterone are often thought of as “grow time” signals, and while they can be elevated in response to a transient stressor, they are very often depressed in response to a chronic stress response. However, this pathway is bidirectional and your baseline hormone status does influence your ability to handle a stressor. There are differences in the way men and women respond to stress as a result, but there are also differences in how an individual response to stress at different stages of their life (as hormone levels fluctuate).

 

Understanding Stress

So far, what we have been describing is the classical “basic” stress response, where you encounter a stimulus and then your nervous system responds and activates the SNS, which is further enforced by HPGA secreted hormones, and then it is brought back to baseline by the PSNS. However, this is not the full extent of what stress actually is. It is somewhat reminiscent of what people colloquially discuss as “stress”, but it clearly isn’t the full picture. To build that fuller picture, and thus actually understand our own stress and how to set up effective stress management practices, we have to discuss the type of stress, the intensity of that stress, and then the time course of that stress. Understanding these will help us to really understand stress, beyond just the basic stress response understanding (which is still important, as we need to understand that the nervous and HPGA systems are still heavily involved).

While I did just say that what we have been describing is the classic description of a stressor and a stress response, this is not actually true. What we have been describing is a particular type of stressor, and a particular type of stress response. This is the type of stress that people very often think of, but it is not the full spectrum of stress, and it fails to help us really understand stress in the modern world. What we have been describing is “distress”, and more specifically “hyper-stress” distress. You see, we can categorise stress into four varieties (and then we can add a time component to this), which are eustress, distress, hypo-stress and hyper-stress. Hans Selye (who basically invented all our current thinking about stress) proposed these four varieties of stress, and that they could effectively be mapped on two axes. On the X-axis, we have good stress (what he termed eustress) on the left and bad stress (distress) on the right. On the Y-axis, we have over-stress (hyper-stress) on the top and under-stress (hypo-stress) on the bottom. While this is a very simplified concept, it does help us at least visualise what is going on and can be used as a tool to orientate ourselves with what stress inputs we have going on.

 

 

Hyper-stress is fairly intuitive to understand, as most of you have likely gone through periods of being too stressed, and thus you know what this feels like. Hypo-stress on the other hand sounds like it isn’t a problem, and you may be asking: “how can you be under-stressed?” Well, you can be under-stressed, and this can be more clearly understood when you consider that a stressor is simply a stimulus. You have likely felt under-stimulated before, and while this may have just resulted in some boredom for you, imagine if you had to go through long periods of time where you were actually chronically under-stimulated. You would likely start engaging in behaviours that were more extreme, so you could get some sort of stimulation in your life (humans can regularly be seen destroying their entire life to get away from being under-stimulated, as evidenced by many celebrities). You see, when we discuss the balance between hypo- and hyper-stress, what we ideally want is to be somewhere on the actual X-axis line (the Y coordinate is 0). So hyper-stress and hypo-stress are balanced. We aren’t too stressed out and we aren’t too relaxed, as we do need stress to actually get stuff done and we do need stress to actually get better at and adapt to, well, life. There are obviously going to be periods of time where you are hyper-stressed, and you will have periods of time where you are hypo-stressed, but what we want to do is understand where we are with this stuff, so we can balance that stress over time (i.e. we aren’t always hyper-stressed). We will come back to this discussion of hypo- and hyper-stress a little bit later on, when we discuss the time component and adaptation to stress.

Now, the discussion of eustress and distress isn’t as intuitive as the discussion around hypo- and hyper-stress. Most people find it very intuitive to think of stress as being either too much or too little, and it accords very well with our general colloquial discussions around stress. However, most people don’t tend to think of stress as a good thing, and the discussion of stress focuses mainly on “distress” (“bad stress”). “Eustress” is a little bit harder to wrap your head around, and most people will immediately think of hypo-stress when thinking about this (i.e. they will think about states of hypo-stress, such as relaxing as the opposite of distress). You see, this is why I mentioned perception earlier when discussing stress, as two people may go through the same stress, but experience it totally differently. Eustress is the type of stress that you are exposed to, but you grow from it. This is very easy to understand when we consider resistance training, as the training session is a clear example of eustress. The training itself is a stressor, but by completing it, you gain a benefit and grow from it (assuming the training stimulus wasn’t too excessive). Similarly, as a child, you may have been incredibly excited about a specific event (such as a religious holiday or birthday celebration) and experienced many of the “symptoms” associated with distress (i.e. elevated heart rate, increased blood pressure, sweating etc.), but the stressor was actually a positive experience that you gained something from. Climbing a mountain may be difficult during the climb, but when you reach the top, or in the days afterwards, the stress is often viewed as an incredibly positive stress. So the event can both be perceived as challenging or enjoyable in the moment, but it can still end up being positive after the fact. However, eustress isn’t always actually positive, as you can still have “hyper-eustress”, and too much of a good thing is often a bad thing. For example, the child who is overly excited about an event and can’t sleep, eat or do the basic functions they should be able to do is experiencing too much of a good thing, which if let go on long enough, quickly turns to a negative. Similarly, while exercise can be eustress, too much of it can lead to negative outcomes.

So we still can’t think of stress as being positive or negative, and it really is a messy discussion overall. What can be helpful to think of is simply that the body likes to be at a certain set point and it doesn’t like to deviate from that set point if it can. In biology, we often call this homeostasis, and your body will try to maintain a certain equilibrium, not swinging too far in one direction or the other, instead, it tries to stay around a certain point. The body tries to stay in this Goldilocks zone, and the various stressors you encounter in your life (whether you perceived them as good or bad, too much or too little) are trying to move you away from this Goldilocks zone. Your body is simply mounting a response to deal with the stressor, so you can then return to the Goldilocks zone. This Goldilocks zone way of thinking about stress is actually quite helpful, as it gives us a nice framework to better understand the stress response and what the goal of stress management practices actually are.

 

 

Now, you may have noticed when we were discussing both the nervous system and the hormonal response to stress, both of these things involved a specific area of the brain, the hypothalamus. Well, wouldn’t you know, it is the hypothalamus that is largely responsible for regulating your set point and maintaining homeostasis.

What people generally think of as stress is mainly “distress” and/or “hyper-stress”, and these serve to pull us away from homeostasis. We see high SNS activity, along with the HPGA system-mediated stress hormone secretion, and this serves to pull us away from the Goldilocks zone. This may be needed, so you can deal with an immediate stressor (i.e. you are dealing with a threat), but your body doesn’t like getting too far away from homeostasis, so once the threat has passed or been dealt with, the PSNS is activated and it serves to bring us back to “normal” (our homeostatic set point). At least, this is what is supposed to happen.

You see, it is important to realise at this stage that homeostasis is not a static point, and it does change over time. Your baseline set point will change depending on what you have been exposed to, and this is what allows you to actually adapt to the world around you. If it didn’t adapt over time, you would be left like a baby, where everything you experience is something that is a massive stressor trying to pull you away from homeostasis. You wouldn’t be able to adapt to stressors like training, and you would just be stuck exactly at that homeostatic set point. So the fact that we can adapt to stressors is good, however, it does potentially have a dark side. We will talk about the adaptation process more in a moment, but what is important right now is understanding that this system really isn’t well designed to handle chronic stressors. Spending a long time away from that homeostatic set point really only leads to two outcomes. You either become exhausted and your body forces you to take a break (i.e. you get injured, overtrained, have a nervous breakdown etc.), or you simply set your homeostatic set point further and further away from what is actually “normal”. We will discuss the first option in a moment when we talk about adaptation, but the second option is important to discuss right now, as it is very relevant to the discussion of the time aspect of stress.

 

 

This whole stress response system isn’t exactly well designed to handle chronic stress (at least from a lived experience perspective, although it is quite well designed from a “survival to reproductive age” perspective). Transient stressors can be more easily dealt with, even if they are quite intense. The more intense (or further away from the Goldilocks zone), the longer it may take to get back to baseline. In some very traumatic cases, it may be too intense and get you too far away from that Goldilocks zone and thus lead to longer-term issues, but in general, it is a fairly robust system. It is actually quite elegant in its design:

• Bear jumps out and growls,
• Your nervous system reacts causing you to respond (fight or flight),
• The HPGA system kicks in to support the response (fight or flight),
• You exhibit that classical stress response physiology that maximises your ability to respond,
• You escape,
• Your PSNS kicks in to bring you back to baseline,
• You go on with your life, hopefully having adapted and learned from that experience.

But this isn’t what we ask of the system now. In the modern world, the vast majority of stress in people’s lives is chronic stress. It isn’t just a single stressful event that you need to respond to and recover from, it is a constant bombardment of low to medium level stressors. These low to medium level stressors all serve to add to your overall stress, pulling you away from that homeostatic set point your body wants to be at. Prolonged stress can set then act to pull this homeostatic set point more towards a stressed position. So your homeostatic point is just a higher stress state to begin with, so even when you are at baseline, you are actually still dealing with stress.

 

 

It is like boiling water. Turn the heat up to full blast (transient, high intensity stress) and the water will very quickly heat and if you supply enough heat or let it go on long enough, the water will eventually boil over and we will have a mess to clean up. However, if you have this constant low level of heat (chronic, low-grade stress) boiling the water, you will eventually run out of enough resources to fuel the heating. Alternatively, if you have constantly been heating the water (chronic stress), it takes a much smaller blast of increased heat (transient stress) to have the water reach boiling point and start bubbling over.

So dealing with chronic stress can lead to a state where you are much closer to being overwhelmed by stress, and it can drag your homeostatic set point to having that be your “normal”. However, a lack of stress can drag your homeostatic set point away too. This is potentially why you see some people get very stressed out with very fundamental tasks which shouldn’t be stressful (their set point for stress is much lower, so even mild stress feels quite intense to them, although it could also be that they are already dealing with a lot of background stress and the fundamental task is just the straw that broke the camels back). It should also be noted that returning to “normal”, can also be a stressor in and of itself. Returning the body to homeostasis does still require resources, and while we think of the more PSNS activating stuff as generally enjoyable and potentially quite passive, there is still a physiological cost to the PSNS and of course, there is also potentially a mental cost barrier too. This is one reason many people are reluctant to stop being stressed, as to change actually feels like it is just an additional stressor for them. Finally, it should also be noted that your set point is influenced by your past experiences, and this unfortunately can just mean your set point is in a less beneficial place. This is especially true when we consider early life stress and trauma, and it may just take a lot of work and a lot of time to change that.

So, when discussing stress, we have to consider what type of stress we are talking about (eustress or distress), the magnitude of that stress (hypo-stress or hyper-stress) and the time course (transient or chronic stress). When most people discuss stress, what they really mean is some form of hyper-distress, and I will mainly be discussing things with this in mind going forward, but you now know that there is a lot more to this discussion. This may seem somewhat inconsequential, but it does all improve our understanding of stress, and more importantly for this article, it helps inform our stress management practices.

 

Stress and Adaptation

Now, you have a much better understanding of stress, and the final piece of the puzzle we need to discuss is the adaptation process. As we noted previously, your homeostatic set point is not static, it changes over time. One of the things about stress is that you do actually adapt to it, or at least you have the potential to adapt to it, if it isn’t too intense or if it doesn’t go on for too long. This adaptation process is important to understand as it is the basis for the fitness related stuff we do (i.e. getting stronger, getting fitter, building muscle etc. all require adaptations to occur) and it also is really important for our stress management practices. We don’t want to completely remove all stressors, we want to keep stress at a manageable level and coming from the right places, so we can actually adapt and become more resilient.

While we tend to have this notion when discussing stress that it is bad, however, that couldn’t be further from the truth. Yes, for sure, always being in the distress/hyper-stress position is far from optimal for our long-term health, but that doesn’t mean these things are bad. If you went for a walk in the woods and a grizzly bear jumped out from behind a tree and started chasing you, you would be extremely happy with your ability to get into this hyper-stressed/distressed position, as it would allow you to quickly respond to the threat and it would provide your body the resources needed to escape the threat. You would likely be pretty damn tired after running away and getting that dump of stress hormones and it likely would take you a few days to really get over it. However, it isn’t just in that singular moment that that stress is beneficial, you see, stress triggers adaptations. While an initial stressor can cause you to easily get into that hyper-stress/distress state, if this is your thousand time in that situation, the feelings of stress are likely to be very, very low. After all, a stressor is just an input of information, and the stress response is just your body trying to respond to that information appropriately. If you have done something a thousand times, and you know how to deal with it, it is unlikely that you are going to be extremely stressed out by it. You have adapted to that stressor, and it no longer disrupts your homeostasis significantly.

 

 

While there is some pretty cool physiology underpinning this stuff, we really only need a rudimentary understanding of the adaptation process for our needs here. When you are exposed to a stressor, your body responds to that stressor. If it is too intense, or goes on for too long, you will reach a point of exhaustion. However, if the stressor is at a manageable dose, your body will recover, and be more stress resilient in future. This is very clearly illustrated in the gym with resistance training. You lift a weight that is close to your current capacity, and once you are able to recover, the next time you go to lift that weight, it will be a little bit easier. You have adapted to the stressor, and you have become a little bit more stress-resilient over time. This is also a tool psychologists use to help people overcome issues they are experiencing in their lives, and they call it exposure therapy. For example, if you were afraid of spiders, you would slowly expose yourself to spiders. You wouldn’t just go from fear of spiders straight to holding a tarantula in your hand, and you may need to simply start the exposure process with something as simple as knowing there is a picture of a spider in the room. The process is graded, and it takes time for the adaptation process to take place.

Interestingly, you see the opposite process happening quite often, where people actually make themselves less resilient and less able to deal with stressors in their lives. Society seems to be moving towards shielding people away from stress, and this is a truly unscientific perspective of how to help people get better and deal with stress in the real world. Never being exposed to certain ideas or beliefs can leave people will an incredibly oversized stress response when confronted with those ideas/beliefs in the future. Living a life with no stress at all, generally leaves you far less stress resilient in future. This is very important to understand (hence why I have noted it a few times), as our goal with stress management is not to completely remove stress from our lives. The goal is to better manage our stressors so we can actually become more resilient and a better human over time.

 

 

Right now, the important thing to understand is that stress is required for adaptations to occur, but we just need to be aware of the magnitude of stress we experience and the duration of it too. While the body adapts to stressors, this can only occur if you can actually handle that stressor. If the stressor is too much, or goes on for too long, then you may not be able to handle that stress, and you may not be able to adapt and get more resilient. You have to balance the stress exposure with recovery time, and this is the key to stress management. We aren’t trying to remove all the stress from our life, we are trying to become more resilient. To do this, we have to understand what stressors we are being exposed to, manage them better so that they aren’t as intense and/or they don’t go on for as long, and we also need to ensure that we are actually sufficiently recovering. That is the goal of stress management.

However, it is important to also understand that stress tolerance and resilience is going to be different based on your life experiences and genetics. There are also differences in stress response based on both age and sex. Throughout our life, our capacity for stress changes. This is straightforward enough, as we notice the same ebbs and flows with most other physiological functions, with childhood being different from adulthood, and that being different than when we enter our golden years. However, stress is a slight bit different in that childhood stress (both during childhood and while we are in the womb) can have long-reaching effects on our overall physiology. This is important to understand, as everyone does have very different life experiences, and this can profoundly change our ability to handle stress. Of course, traumatic events can happen at any time throughout your life, and if you didn’t have the stress resilience already built to handle them, it can be a very tough climb to get back to a “normal” stress level. Our sex also impacts the whole stress system. This is actually quite complex, and does become very relevant when discussing certain topics (such as the immune system and stress). We won’t get into it now, but do realise that males and females respond to stress somewhat differently, and very often stress is only discussed from the male perspective (of course, there is still a large degree of difference even within each sex, but we can more broadly notice the general differences). While I am a male, and obviously can never actually feel what it feels like to experience stress as the “typical” female, I will where possible, also try to cover things from a female perspective (both from the physiological perspective and the more psychological perspective).

 

Effects of Stress

While we have covered quite a bit about stress already, what really helps to really understand stress is building out a better understanding of how stress affects the body. As we have discussed, when talking about stress, we are mainly talking about that “hyper-distress” type of stress. However, you must keep in mind that stress looks different to different people, depending on a variety of factors, and we can really only talk in generalities with this stuff, as people do react differently to different levels of stress. We must also remember that different populations (i.e. women vs men) do respond differently to stress, and this can really make all of this stuff difficult to neatly discuss.

I am going to break this section down into discussions on the health effects of stress, the effects of stress on nutrition, the effects of stress on training, and finally the effects of stress on sleep. However, there is a huge degree of overlap between everything that is going on with all of the things we discuss. There is also a large degree of bidirectionally with all of this stuff, where stress affects these different categories, but they also feedback into stress itself. This can be a little bit confusing, but it is something that works to our advantage, as we do actually have the ability to influence our stress by ensuring we do look after our health, nutrition, training, and sleep. Looking after our stress specifically will also further synergise with these and create a really nice positive feedforward loop.

The easiest way to understand how stress interacts with everything health and fitness, is to expand on how stress interacts with the HPGA system, and as a result, the many downstream effects. Understanding the basics of how stress affects the HPGA will allow you to more easily understand why certain issues may be occurring as a result of stress.

Note: I am going to state a variety of hormones in this discussion, and you simply don’t need to remember them all. Just try to understand the broad strokes with this stuff.

 

Stress and The HPGA

As you will recall, the hypothalamus is a part of the HPGA system, which also involves the pituitary, the gonads, and the adrenals. As a result, stress plays a role in the hormones secreted by the various organs in this system.

The pituitary is responsible for growth hormone secretion, along with hormones that are responsible for the facilitating the secretion of the sex hormones (luteinising hormone (LH) and follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH)), it also plays a role in regulating the secretion of metabolism related hormones (thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH), which stimulates thyroid production). The pituitary also secretes prolactin, and adrenocorticotropin hormone (ACTH, which stimulates the adrenals to produce stress hormones).

The gonads refers to the testis or the ovaries, depending on the sex of the individual, and these are responsible for the main sex hormones testosterone and estrogen.

Finally, the adrenals are responsible for the secretion of many of the stress hormones, such as cortisol, aldosterone, adrenaline, and noradrenaline. They also play a role in the secretion of sex hormones such as DHEA (which is a major “male” sex hormone for women, and can also be converted to testosterone or estrogen).

 

 

Now, I realise I have just stated a load of names there, and I haven’t really told you how stress affects things, but this is purely just to establish the fact that the whole system is very interlinked, and you aren’t just creating stress hormones in isolation. In fact, all of the hormones are interacting in complex ways, and there are multiple points of feedback between the hormones along the way.

The best way to more clearly illustrate things is to simply do a walk through of what happens in response to stress. Let’s imagine you get exposed to a stressor. If the stressor is mild, then you may get very small hormonal changes in the short term (although you may get them in the long term especially if the mild stressors are frequent). You will see an increase in the catecholamines (adrenaline and noradrenaline), and perhaps a small bit of cortisol is secreted if the mild stressor is sufficiently stressful for you. So a very mild disturbance in the overall hormonal environment.

However, if the stressor is more intense or goes on for long enough, you get much larger changes. You get an increase in catecholamines with a larger/longer stressor, but a much larger amount of catecholamines are released. Now, this is what is giving you that “energy” to deal with the stressor, but it is also responsible for the stressed feeling (along with cortisol). So it is a double-edged sword. Further to this, these catecholamines are made from the precursor, dopamine. Dopamine is used for a lot of things, namely in reward circuitry in the brain, however, it is also part of the stress response. Your body uses dopamine release as a coping mechanism for stress, as it both makes you happier and it is part of the learning machinery in the brain. This allows you to feel less stressed, but also learn to handle the stressor better in future.

The catecholamines are largely responsible for that stressed feeling, although they are necessary and shouldn’t be viewed negatively. However, they do signal the start of a larger cascade of hormones in response to stress. Vasopressin along with corticotrophin-releasing hormone (CRH) are released from the hypothalamus in response to stress. CRH then stimulates an increase in the secretion of adrenocorticotropin hormone (ACTH) from the anterior pituitary. ACTH then acts on the adrenal cortex to increase the production of cortisol. Cortisol is what people tend to think of when they think of stress hormones, and it certainly could be viewed as a stress hormone. However, we must not fall victim to thinking of it negatively. With transient stress, cortisol is a healthy part of dealing with that stressor. It leads to the mobilisation of fuel to help deal with the stressor, acts as an anti-inflammatory, reduces inflammatory cytokines, and also acts as a negative feedback to CRH and ACTH, leading to a reduction in cortisol. All of this is fantastic for helping you deal with a stressor in the short term, and you can imagine that some of the cortisol effects would be particularly advantageous in the context of our evolutionary past. However, chronically elevated cortisol is much different and has detrimental health effects.

Prolactin is another hormone involved in stress, although most people do not associate it with stress, instead, linking it to pregnancy and breastfeeding (as it is also elevated during those situations too). However, prolactin release is stimulated by the rise in vasopressin I mentioned earlier. The exact reason for this is not fully understood, but it has been hypothesised that it serves as a way to get back to homeostasis. However, it should be noted that prolactin within normal ranges, can lead to an increase in testosterone which may be beneficial for dealing with stress. However, when elevated (especially chronically), prolactin serves to reduce the other sex hormones, testosterone and estrogen. It may also have effects on the immune system too.

Prolactin is one way in which the sex hormones testosterone and estrogen are affected by stress, but there are other mechanisms too. When under acute stress, there is a reduction of gonadotropins and steroid hormones. Under chronic stress, there is usually a quite severe reduction in sex hormones. This is because, sex hormone production is largely regulated by the HPGA axis, which is also heavily involved in the stress response. The hypothalamus is responsible for secreting gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH), and the pituitary is responsible for producing luteinising hormone (LH) and follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH) in response to GnRH. LH and FSH are then involved in stimulating the production of testosterone and estrogen in the gonads (testicles or ovaries). However, when under stress, GnRH is decreased, most likely due to CRH.

So in response to stress, especially chronic stress, the sex hormones decline. This has very important implications, both for health and fitness. Being in good health requires adequate hormone function, especially when we are discussing health topics related to reproduction and fertility. It is also incredibly relevant to fitness-related adaptations, as the sex steroids play particularly important roles (notably testosterone’s effects on muscle and strength building). The effect of stress on sex steroids also gives us a means by which we can gauge stress levels, as we can use things like libido, erection frequency, and menstrual function as proxy markers for stress. It isn’t perfect, but it does provide clues. Further to this, it is important to note that the hormonal system is never easy, and very often it is actually very complex. For example, reductions in testosterone lead to a reduced ability to handle stress. So we have a situation where chronic stress leads to reduced testosterone, which then leads to a reduced ability to handle the stress, further compounding the issue. This is the same in women, where menstrual function irregularities lead to less ability to handle stress and thus further dysfunction.

 

 

There are also some differences in the way men and women respond to stress, and this seems to be largely mediated by the sex hormones (both their transient effects and their long-term sex-differentiating effects). In response to psychological stress, cortisol sensitivity is increased, while in women the opposite effect is seen. Men also secrete more cortisol in response to psychological stress than women, producing more, even in anticipation of stress. However, in response to a toxin-induced cytokine increase (as may occur with infection or illness), the opposite effect is seen (and helps to explain why men “feel” sicker than women in response to illness, more on this in a moment when we discuss the immune system). Women see an increased sensitivity to cortisol, while men display the opposite. Estrogen also seems to blunt the anti-inflammatory effects of cortisol, which may actually be an evolutionary advantage for the developing foetus during pregnancy, but it is also implicated in the increased risk of depression in women. There are many more little differences between the male and female responses to stress, and the various forms of stress, however, we simply can’t cover everything here, and it doesn’t change how we go about helping manage stress overall.

Thyroid hormones are decreased under stress. Stress inhibits thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH), which in turn, reduces T3 and T4 levels. This has very important implications for health, as thyroid hormones are vital to metabolism. It is also important to understand that stress decreases thyroid hormones (which in turn depresses metabolism), because a lot of people use very restrictive diets and high training volumes to induce fat loss, but both of these are quite stressful on the body, and may just serve to make fat loss harder by virtue of depressing metabolism.

Growth hormone levels are elevated in response to acute physical stress, and this may help with fuel mobilisation. Growth hormone has antagonistic effects on insulin, and thus it may serve to help mobilise stored fuel, which can then be used for energy in dealing with the physical stress. However, psychological stress rarely induces a growth hormone increase. In situations of chronic stress, growth hormone levels actually seem to be depressed. This makes you less able to deal with stress, and it also has numerous health implications, as growth hormone is necessary for good health. It also potentially has implications for those involved in fitness-related endeavours, as growth hormone is implicated in muscle building, and reductions in growth hormone are likely not what we would want in the context of muscle building.

Insulin is decreased during stress, and along with the fuel-mobilising effects of cortisol and growth hormone, can lead to elevated blood sugar in response to stress. However, it should also be noted that insulin is somewhat antagonistic to cortisol, and may help to explain why individuals who are stressed often times reach for sugary foods.

 

 

Ultimately, stress has a multitude of effects on the endocrine system, and while acute stress is rarely an issue (due to the effects being transient), chronic stress is almost universally bad for hormonal health. Unfortunately, modern stress patterns seem to be more aligned with chronic stress, rather than transited acute stress. We live in a chronically high-stress environment, and this has major implications for health in general.

Overall, large levels of stress are not beneficial for hormonal health, and this is likely to lead to a variety of negative outcomes, ranging from poorer fertility, poorer metabolic health, poorer response to training, poorer recovery and generally just suboptimal health in general.

 

Stress and The Nervous System

Now, while I have been heavily focusing on the hormones involved in mediating the effects of stress, we have to also remember that the nervous system is also involved in the stress response. The nervous system also innervates, well, the whole body, and while we mostly discuss the nervous system in regards to the more immediate effects of stress (i.e. its “fast” role in the response to a stressor), it does also have specific effects on various systems within the body. This can more easily be illustrated by quickly noting the targets of the SNS and its effects, and then noting how the PSNS tends to also target these systems and provide an opposite effect to the SNS-mediated one.

 

 

So you must bear in mind that it isn’t just the hormonal system that is causing effects in response to stress, and the nervous system “tone” is also mediating these effects by virtue of communicating directly to various organs that we are under stress. This is especially important to understand, because the nervous system tone is actually upstream of the hormonal stuff. So while the hormonal stuff (along with the nervous system) helps explain the effects stress has, the things we do to combat the negative health effects is actually stuff that mostly works on the nervous system side of things. Trying to work on all of the various effects of stress, or trying to target specific hormones is kind of missing the forest for the trees. Fixing the nervous system stuff should be the focus first and foremost, as that is the most upstream thing we can actually influence. Now, that doesn’t mean we ignore the downstream interventions or any focus on hormone “optimisation”, but it does mean that without addressing the nervous system, we will always feel like we are swimming against the current.

 

Stress and Health

Health is obviously a very broad term, and while we all kind of know what “health” broadly means, it is still a very large topic that is very interconnected. So, as a cop-out, I am just going to hit on the major points to be aware of, and rather than diving very deeply into the exact mechanisms for any one issue, I am going to provide an overview of the effects stress has on health. So far in this section, you have built a better picture of the why behind the effects of stress (hormones and the nervous system), and now we can actually look at the specific effects stress has on your health.

While I did already discuss it quite a bit a moment ago, I just want to reiterate that stress negatively affects hormonal health. Notably, the main sex hormones, testosterone and estrogen. This can result in a host of health issues, as good hormonal health is vital for the proper functioning of the body. Of particular note is that this generally manifests itself in fertility and/or libido issues. Many of the things that are often recommended for improving fertility and/or libido are actually directed at managing stress more effectively. However, it should be noted that not all libido or fertility issues are stress related.

Stress negatively affects the immune system. Cortisol has immunosuppressive effects, as cortisol has anti-inflammatory effects and serves to reduce the expression of inflammatory cytokines (which the immune system needs to fight infection) and increases anti-inflammatory cytokines. At least in acute stress, this is what you see. However, in chronic stress, we see reduced immunosuppressive activity. You may think this is a positive, as surely you want your immune system fully functioning, don’t you? Well, you see the issue is you don’t want your immune system constantly on high alert. You want it to get the job done, and then relax. In chronic stress, it is always on high alert, and there isn’t the relaxation we want. Acute stress seems to also enhance the immune response, despite it being somewhat immunosuppressive. However, chronic stress suppresses the immune system, and actually creates low-grade chronic inflammation, which in turn, may make you more susceptible to disease and even cancer.

The immune system is influenced by other hormones too (notably testosterone and estrogen), and as a result, there are differences between men and women with regards to the immune system. These differences may help to explain why women are generally not as impacted by something like the flu, whereas men get “man flu”. This is often played off as the man just being lazy or weak, but it is likely more representative of the differences in the immune system function. However, men tend to have an immune response that is more like the nuclear option, whereas women have an immune system that is more like a large standing army. The nuclear option immune system leaves the man absolutely wiped out in response to illness, whereas the standing army option immune system means women are better able to handle illness, but they are at an increased likelihood to develop many autoimmune conditions (if the standing army isn’t dealing with an outside threat, they start looking at stuff within the body as if it is a threat). Regardless of sex, high levels of stress (especially chronically) make your immune system weaker and thus make you more susceptible to disease.

A weakened immune system due to stress is naturally going to lead you to have poorer health in general. You may pick up more seasonal illnesses, and you may notice you take longer to recover from illnesses than other people (or indeed compared to yourself when you previously weren’t sick). I often think of the immune system as our “health force field”, and when you are under lots of stress, this force field is just weaker and thus a poorer defence against insults to your health. Less stress means a stronger force field, and thus a better defence against insults to your health.

Chronic stress negatively impacts cardiovascular health. It leads to higher blood pressure, it can negatively impact blood lipids, it can increase inflammation related to heart disease, and it also negatively impacts on the functioning of the heart itself, all of which make it more likely that you will experience a stroke and/or heart attack.

High levels of stress negatively affect the digestive system. This is largely due to the direct effects of the SNS on digestive function. Remember, the SNS is called the “fight or flight” system, whereas the PSNS is called the “rest and digest” system, and when the SNS system is dominant, digestive function is generally reduced. This can result in specific medical issues such as ulcers, but it can also result in more “every day” digestive issues such as constipation and/or bloating.

Stress negatively affects metabolic health, leading to worse blood sugar control and blood lipids. Chronic stress also negatively impacts on body composition, both leading to a reduced ability to gain/maintain muscle and a reduced ability to lose body fat, while also predisposing you to add more body fat. This increase body fat accumulation plays a role in reducing your overall metabolic health further, while also increasing inflammation in the body. The decreased ability to build/maintain muscle also increases your risk of death as you age.

Chronic stress also impacts on bone health, and chronic stress can lead to bone loss over time. This may not seem like a big deal, but when you consider that most people lay down their bone mass during their earlier years, and then reduce their exercise throughout their life, if we layer on chronic stress, we have a situation where bone mineral loss is accelerated. This can obviously lead to issues in the shorter term, such as fractures (which is actually quite relevant to athletes under high amounts of stress, from life, their training and/or from nutritional inadequacy), but it also leads to long-term issues such as osteoporosis in later years. As a result, you are more likely to sustain more substantial injuries from a fall in later years, which may lead to an early death.

The brain is also negatively affected by stress. Excess stress can lead to the shrinking of important brain regions, which can lead to reduced resilience to future stressors, reduced executive and cognitive functioning, psychiatric issues and psychological issues. Chronic stress can result in anxiety, depression and many other issues. Mood disturbances in chronically stressed individuals are extremely common, and they are one of the tell-tale signs of excess stress. This is all particularly relevant to individuals who were exposed to chronic stress in their youth, as they may not have developed their brains correctly as a result, and they may be more predisposed to a variety of mental health-related issues later in life.

 

 

There are a whole host of other potential health effects of stress, and we will touch on a few more throughout this article, but you can see that stress negatively affects health in a variety of ways. It should be remembered that these processes generally work both ways, and poorer health can lead to higher levels of stress or a reduced capacity to handle stress, which can lead to further health effects. Improving your health in a broad sense can help with the negative effects of stress on health (as you are better able to handle the stress), and improving your stress levels will generally result in better health all round.

 

Stress Diseases

Now, before we move on, I want to just briefly touch on specific diseases that may result from too much stress and diseases that may result in too much stress.

There are a number of disease states that result from too much stress, and while this is beyond the scope of this article, I think it does make sense to at least be aware that specific disease states can be caused by too much stress. The following are some disease states that can result from too much stress:

• Generalised anxiety disorder (GAD) is a common anxiety disorder characterised by uncontrollable worrying. Some people worry about bad things happening to them or their loved ones, and at other times they may not be able to identify any source of worry.
• Panic disorder is a condition that causes panic attacks. These are best described as moments of extreme fear accompanied by an elevated and “pounding” heart, shortness of breath, a fear of impending doom and often a feeling of the world “closing in”.
• Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a condition that causes flashbacks or anxiety as the result of a traumatic experience. This is often talked about in regard to military personnel, however, it can happen to anyone who undergoes a stressor that is too much for them to adapt to or deal with at that time. This can occur with something that you personally would not consider a traumatic experience, however, we must remember that we all have different capacities for handling stress.
• Social phobia is a condition that causes intense feelings of anxiety in situations that involve interacting with others. This can be from low level all the way to high level, and this can be a significant barrier to people engaging in other health-promoting habits (such as going for a walk or going to the gym).
• Obsessive-compulsive disorder is a condition that causes repetitive thoughts and the compulsion to complete certain ritual actions for fear that something bad will happen if the rituals are not performed.

There are also a number of diseases that can result in too much (or too little stress). Addison’s disease is a frequently cited one. In Addison’s disease, the adrenal glands cease to function, leading to an adrenal hormone deficiency. Cushing’s syndrome is a disease that results in the excessive production of cortisol, and all the ill health effects that go along with excessive exposure to high levels of cortisol. However, I won’t spend too much time discussing these, as they are stuff that a doctor will generally be required to help you deal with, and while stress management practices may help with these, I would prefer you actually seek help from a professional trained to help with these issues specifically, rather than just following the generalised stress management advice in this article!

 

Stress and Nutrition

As this article is part of the foundations series, and naturally, the foundational stuff is the stuff that is, well, foundational to everything else, it makes sense that we expand on how stress affects the other foundational stuff (nutrition, training and sleep). So, let’s start with nutrition. Our nutrition is heavily impacted by stress, both in how we interact with the diet on a psychological level, and how our body responds to the food we eat. However, we should also remember that there is a bi-directional pathway here, and nutrition also effects stress and can be a stressor itself.

The diet can be a stressor, and stress can impact the diet itself, both in terms of quality and quantity. However, it is also important to remember that the nervous system is just responding to the stimuli it is presented with, and perception can alter this. So while I will be speaking in generalities, these should not be taken as a hard and fast rule. For example, fasting may be a negative stressor (inducing distress) for one individual, but for another who is doing some form of fasting for religious and cultural reasons may view that as a way to connect with their god and as such, it is a eustress for them. It is also important to remember that there is no zero exposure group here, as eating food can be a stressor and eating no food can be a stressor, and we all have some degree of stress impacting on our physiology and our nutrition practices in some form or another. However, despite this, we can still learn quite a lot from this discussion by speaking in generalities here.

When stress is higher (SNS activity), we see an increase in catecholamines and glucocorticoids. This “fight or flight” mode is counterbalanced with the “rest and digest” action of the PSNS. This should give you your first indication of the link between nutrition and stress. The high-stress environment is one where the focus is on mobilising energy to deal with the stressor, this inherently means there is a reduced focus on digesting and absorbing nutrients that have just been consumed. When stress is higher, digestion is worse and the processes of actually utilising that consumed food for anabolic purposes are reduced. Why would you spend energy building new structures or repairing old ones, when you are dealing with a stressor that might end your life? This would be akin to the city being besieged by invaders, and rather than picking up weapons to help defend the city, instead, you go about your same daily tasks as if nothing is going on. The body is a survival machine, and as such, if stress is high, resources are going to preferentially go towards dealing with that stressor. As a result, you get worse “results” (health, performance and body composition) from the diet.

It would make intuitive sense that because higher stress leads to a situation where fuel is being mobilised more readily, surely that would make fat loss easier? Well, unfortunately not. For sure, dieting to lose weight is a stressor (more on this in a moment) and we need that mild stress to help with fat loss, but when stress is excessively high (transiently or chronically) there is too much of a catabolic signal and we start to see more muscle loss along with fat loss. In most cases, we are looking to preserve as much muscle mass as possible while dieting, and if stress is high we, unfortunately, see excessive muscle loss. But further to this, stress leads to a situation where you are less likely to stick to the diet you have set up. This is because those same hormones that are used to mobilise energy, also tend to lead to the body feeling like it needs to replete the energy that has just been mobilised. This is especially true of glucose, as the glucocorticoids that allow you to respond to the stress, also lead to the partial depletion of the glucose in the blood, and this can lead to all that goes along with dips in blood sugar. In general, this leads to increased cravings for high carbohydrate, sugary foods. Glucose dysregulation is very often seen in high-stress individuals, both as a result of the stress itself (as it mobilises stored glucose) and because of the dietary patterns of high-stress individuals. Those glucocorticoids also interact with mineralocorticoid receptors and as a result, stress can also cause cravings for salty foods. Combined with this, stress can make you hold more water weight. As a result, high-stress individuals trying to diet start potentially seeing more muscle loss, the scales aren’t moving like they expect them to because of the water weight, and they are having stronger and stronger cravings for salty and high-carb foods. This is not a recipe for a successful fat loss phase, and it clearly isn’t health-promoting.

However, it isn’t just fat loss focused dieters that run into issues when stress is high. Even in a gaining phase (surplus calories), stress can cause issues. It should obviously be apparent that having a reduced ability to build muscle is less than ideal when trying to gain muscle, but unfortunately, high stress can make fat gain easier. This is also a particularly harmful type of fat gain, as it is generally in the form of visceral fat, fat stored around the organs. This type of fat leads to multiple negative health outcomes, and it further exacerbates the issues related to having high stress in the first place, as it puts further stress on the body. High-stress levels can also negatively affect digestion (because you never actually get into that rest and digest state), and as such, this can make getting the food required to effectively gain quality muscle size harder. Hunger can be reduced, and due to stress-causing reduced gastric motility, it can feel like food is just sitting in the digestive tract. Which naturally enough, doesn’t make you feel great, and can lead to reduced adherence and enjoyment of the diet.

 

 

Unfortunately, there is more. As I stated earlier, the actual diet itself can contribute to stress. Dealing with stress requires resources, and if you aren’t providing them from the diet, you will become less resilient to stress over time, as those resources are depleted. This is both in the form of the energy derived from the diet, the actual macronutrient constituents of the diet, but also the micronutrients obtained from the diet. When under stress, your body may have higher demands for certain nutrients, potentially above the normally recommended daily allowances. Eating a lower nutrient-density diet can also cause stress to the body, and if this is then combined with an increased requirement for certain nutrients due to an external stressor, then the body’s capacity to deal with stress will be further diminished. Low nutrient diets can be a cause of stress themselves, but they also lead to reduced resilience to stress from external sources. Eating a high-quality diet is vitally important to actually being able to deal with stress, unfortunately, the general population consumes a low-quality diet, and they are generally under chronic stress. This leads to a vicious cycle of reduced resilience to stress, and a higher likelihood that poorer food choices will be made, exacerbating the issue further.

Low calories diets can be a significant stressor to the body, as the body is forced to mobilise stored energy to make up the deficit of energy. This is what we want to occur when looking for fat loss, however, if the calorie deficit is too severe, goes on excessively long, or is combined with other stressors, the body may not have the capacity to effectively deal with that level of stress. This can also occur in situations where calories are actually at maintenance levels, but a certain macronutrient constituent is low (i.e. low intakes of protein, carbs or fats). While there might technically be enough energy coming in, the body may be being put under stress due to the low availability of a certain macronutrient. This is especially true of low carbohydrate diets, as the low amount of glucose in the blood signals to the body that there is low energy availability, and to not engage in growth and repair.

The psychological stress from dieting must also be factored in, especially if this is in the form of Yo-Yo dieting. The effect of going up and down in weight and calories is probably one of the worst ways you can treat your body with regard to stress and the diet. The rapid swings up and down in weight can cause undue stress on the body, especially if these are rapid and weekly changes in weight. If you starve yourself Monday to Friday and then binge eat on the weekends, there is enormous stress put on the body from multiple fronts. Binge eating is a stressor, both on the gastrointestinal system (as the foods themselves are usually not the highest quality and you have to deal with the rapid influx of food), and on the cardiovascular system (as it has to deal with rapidly fluctuating water balance in the body). Then the actual psychological stress that results from feeling like crap after “falling off the diet”, seeing the weight on the scales rocket up, and having to deal with the negative feelings that often occur after binge eating.

Excess nutrients may also be a source of stress on the body, as the body struggles to deal with these nutrients effectively and in a time-efficient manner. These nutrients may then stay in the bloodstream too long, causing damage there. The body will also likely start storing excess nutrients in the form of body fat, when energy is in excess. Carrying around excess body fat is a stressor in and of itself, both because it means the body has to do more work to carry that weight around, but also because body fat secretes inflammatory signals into the body. The amount of calories you consume does impact on the hormonal system, notably on the levels of cortisol, thyroid hormones, insulin and testosterone you secrete, and as such, this can profoundly impact your ability to deal with stress. but beyond just the magnitude of calories, the timing of calories can also be a stressor too. Practices such as intermittent fasting or time-restricted feeding can be a source of stress on the body. Eating food late at night can also be a stressor on the body, especially if it negatively impacts upon sleep.

Higher calories can contribute to gastrointestinal distress, but so too can eating the wrong types of food. Some foods are more inflammatory than others, both on a generalised level and specifically to the individual. The types of food you eat do matter, as some foods can lead to a decline in your ability to handle stress by virtue of triggering low-grade inflammation. This is obvious enough in the case of issues like celiac disease or something like Crohn’s disease, but even in “healthy” individuals, certain foods may be causing some form of inflammation. This is especially the case with low-quality foods, such as refined and processed foods. Focusing on high-quality food selection, and an overall low inflammation style diet generally leads to better stress resilience.

Components of the diet like caffeine, alcohol or various other dietary compounds can increase stress and/or make you less resilient to stress. Caffeine is one that you will have to pay attention to, as it is a stressor in and of itself (that is why it gives you that jolt of energy), and it potentially reduces sleep quality and quantity (we discuss how caffeine and sleep interact in the sleep article). However, it is also one of the drugs that people reach for most often when they are stressed. However, it is potentially a significant stressor in the diet and it is a crutch that lots of stressed individuals do use to deal with their stressful lives. Alcohol is also one that is used quite frequently as a crutch to deal with stress, with many stressed individuals far exceeding the weekly alcohol targets because they feel they need a glass of wine (or 2 or 3) at night to deal with stress. Unfortunately, alcohol is a stressor itself (it is a toxin the body has to deal with) and that glass of wine each night is likely negatively impacting sleep quality, which makes the individual more stressed and less resilient to stress over time.

Hydration can be a stressor as well, which is often not appreciated. Low hydration levels can induce stress on the body, but so too can excess hydration. While the threshold for excess hydration causing issues is likely higher than would occur in everyday life, it is still apparent in situations like water drinking competitions or sporting events where the individual is sweating a lot. A lot of this has to do with the balance of electrolytes in the body, as drinking excessive amounts of water, without consuming enough electrolytes can cause stress to the body. Similarly, drinking too little water or electrolytes, in general, can cause stress. Anyone who has been dehydrated for any length of time will know just how much overlap there is between feelings of dehydration and stress in general.

However, this relationship between the diet and stress isn’t all negative! You can actually positively influence your stress levels and make yourself more resilient to stress by making good dietary choices. Ensuring that your baseline diet is micronutrient dense, calorie and macronutrient appropriate, and made up of good quality foods that don’t cause you issues, does have a very positive impact on your overall stress levels and your ability to handle stress (learn how to set up your diet here). Unfortunately, when people are stressed, they tend to reach for poorer food choices, which generally serves to make things worse physiologically (although psychologically, there can be some positive benefits seen). A lot of people do find themselves caught in this negative loop of reaching for poorer food choices due to stress, thus making their overall stress levels and stress resilience worse. However, the reverse effect is also true, where making good food choices leads to lower stress levels and better stress resilience, which makes it easier to manage stress and thus make better food choices in the future.

Specific dietary intakes and patterns may also interact with stress levels, notably with regard to carbohydrate intake. Insulin is somewhat antagonistic to cortisol, and you may be able to lower cortisol levels by increasing insulin. This is potentially why some people reach for sugary foods when they are stressed, but we can still potentially use this knowledge to modulate our stress levels, without reaching for the sugary foods. In general, ensuring we are eating enough carbohydrates, and spreading this intake throughout the day will help to keep cortisol in a more manageable level.

Ultimately, stress and the diet are very intertwined. High levels of stress and/or chronically elevated stress can negatively affect the diet, both in terms of how your body reacts to the food you eat and your ability to even stick to the diet in the first place. However, this stuff works both ways, and a poorer diet can negatively impact on your stress levels and your ability to handle stress. So when we discuss stress management, one of the keys is actually just getting really good dietary practices in place. This can be quite difficult when stress is high, but it is a very high-yield stress management practice! Similarly, working on your stress management is also a very high-yield focus when you are trying to get the most from the diet (and when you are trying to actually make it easier to stick to a healthy diet long-term).

 

Stress and Exercise

Just as stress and nutrition are intertwined, stress and exercise are also intertwined. Stress negatively affects exercise in a number of ways. Notably, stress reduces your ability to recover from training, and to actually adapt to the training stressor. We do want to see higher levels of arousal and what appears to be a higher stress state when exercising, and this is the action of the SNS that we want to see. The training is a stressor, and we want the SNS to activate and allow us to deal with that stressor (and get the most out of it). However, we want the PSNS to kick in afterwards and bring us back to baseline and actually recover. If you are always in that SNS dominant state, you are never getting into the PSNS states required to adequately adapt and recover from the training. You need to be relaxed to get into the adaptation and recovery phase after training, and naturally enough, having high levels of stress (distress) does not facilitate this. You don’t actually progress during training, you progress after training when you recover and adapt to the training stimulus. Being overly stressed, either acutely or chronically, interferes with this process. In situations of high stress, you likely can’t recover fast enough to perform the level of training volume required to elicit the adaptations you want, because you have not recovered from the previous training session. But then, even if you were able to perform the required training volume, you would fail to see the expected adaptations as stress would be hindering the actual adaptation process. At best, you may see stagnation, but it is more likely that during periods of high stress, a decline is most often seen.

But the effects aren’t just physiological, they are also psychological. High stress likely reduces motivation to train. So even if you feel you can recover from the training, you are less likely to even want to train. High stress generally drains motivation for other tasks, and of course, high stress is usually brought about by virtue of having things to do, which makes it less likely that you will be able to devote time to training. But assuming you do get to training, high-stress levels will generally result in less motivation and “hype” while training, and thus you are less likely to push yourself in the training session. You are also more likely to have reduced focus and concentration, which may result in an increased risk of injury during training.

So high stress is generally a bad thing for exercise, however, this is not always true. You must remember that stress is altered by perception, and as such, high stress can actually enhance training, at least acutely. There is a reason that people drink a coffee or pre-workout before a training session. These drinks usually contain high quantities of stimulants, such as caffeine. These induce a stress response, which serves to mobilise fuel and create an environment where you are actually better able to perform. This makes sense, because the stress response is what you would initiate when trying to evade a predator or catch prey, and these were predominantly physical tasks throughout our evolutionary history. This is also why a lot of athletes, especially in strength sports, listen to very stimulating music before and during training. It serves to get the stress response going, and thus enhances training. So stress shouldn’t be viewed entirely negatively with regard to training. However, the issue comes about by virtue of what these individuals do outside of the training session. While the acute stressor before and during training can lead to increased performance, it does also lead to an increased recovery debt that must be paid back before adaptation can occur. Unfortunately, most people over-train, over-consume stimulants, under-sleep, under-recover and are excessively stressed outside of training. So the recovery debt is never paid back, and these individuals become reliant on more and more stimulants to even be able to perform at a mediocre level. So while extra stress can be a training enhancer, this must be paired with extra recovery. There is no biological free lunch.

 

 

We have kind of been skirting around it so far, but training itself is a stressor. You are exposed to the stress of training, and given sufficient recovery, you adapt. Without sufficient recovery, you see a reduction in performance. Anyone who has trained hard knows that training can be a stressor. As a very generalised framework, we can divide the training stress into three broad categories. These are nervous system stress, mechanical stress and metabolic stress. The nervous system is required for the act of exercise, and it can be taxed more with certain types of training than others. For example, high-skill exercise requires a high degree of nervous system activity, whereas low-skill exercise does not. The closer you are to failure or your limit with a given exercise, the more taxing to the nervous system the activity seems to be. This is especially true in the realm of weight lifting, where very high-intensity effort (i.e. lifting heavy weights at a high percentage of your 1 rep max) leads to more stress on the nervous system.

Of course, this does also tax your muscles and other tissues, but anyone who has lifted heavy weights will tell you that it feels different than lifting lighter weights, even if you reach failure with both modalities. Mechanical stress is the stress experienced by the actual tissues required for the activity themselves. This would be the stress on the muscles, connective tissue, bones and other structures that are involved in moving. Then finally we have metabolic stress from exercise, and this can be localised or systemic. This is the disturbance to the general metabolic homeostasis of the local tissues involved in the exercise or the body as a whole. This includes general metabolic disturbances such as glucose being used up during exercise, but it also includes the metabolic byproducts of general metabolism, such as having to deal with the excess hydrogen produced during glycolysis.

Then there is also a psychological element to the training too, which contributes to stress. This can be the psychological stress involved in actually performing the exercise, especially when you have a variety of other things that need to be tended to. However, it also includes the psychological stress of assessing your training. If you expect that you can perform certain exercises with certain weights, or you can perform certain feats of cardio within certain parameters, or be able to perform your sport at a certain level, and then you don’t, there is psychological stress involved with that. Many athletes beat themselves up for days when they do not perform up to their own standards. Then there is the psychological stress involved with trying to come up with ways to improve performance. So training can be stressful in a number of ways.

One further thing I want to touch on is the topic of over-training. Over-training is a situation where the adaptations you are hoping for, do not occur due to training more than your body is able to recover from. So despite the high level of effort that is being put in, the results are less than expected because the body has not adapted due to excess stress and insufficient recovery. This is a real phenomenon, but people tend to think of it like an on-off switch, rather than a dimmer switch. You see, most people under-recover, and see results that are below what they could achieve. This is further compounded by the fact that most people also over-stress. However, they still see some progress, so they assume everything is all good. But they don’t realise that they are actually seeing a small percentage of the results they could obtain if they were to actually recover from their training. This is actually why most athletes turn to performance-enhancing drugs, notably anabolic androgenic steroids. It isn’t so much the performance-enhancing aspects of these drugs that they are seeking, it is the recovery-enhancing effects. By taking these drugs they can continue to engage in higher training volumes and still recover. Those of us that do not have the advantage of using these drugs should really be focusing on ensuring recovery and stress levels are managed, so that we are actually able to adapt to the training stimulus. This may actually mean that we need to reduce our training volumes, to a level that we can actually recover from.

However, it is very hard to actually over training, once you give yourself sufficient time to adapt. And therein lies the real issue. Most people are not giving themselves enough time to adapt, and are not focusing on the recovery element enough. They are trying to train like an Olympian, while having a stressful day job, a demanding family life and sleeping 6 hours a night. They also usually aren’t slowly titrating the training volumes up over time, instead, they jump into high training volumes quickly, then fall apart after a few weeks and surmise that it was over-training that caused the issue. It was, but it was really the fact that they did not provide enough recovery time to allow their bodies to adapt to the training. If you look at the training volumes of elite athletes, the volume of work they are doing now, has been built up to over years. Trying to copy what they are doing now likely isn’t going to lead to the same outcomes it does in them, because you simply lack the years of adaptation that they have gone through to be able to handle those training volumes. It should also be noted that it is much easier to over-train by virtue of too much volume of work, than it is to over-train by virtue of too high an intensity of work.

One of the key attributes that distinguishes amateur athletes from elite athletes is the ability to effectively manage their stress inputs. Knowing when to push and when to pull back, and knowing how hard to train on a given day within a larger training program is the hallmark of the elite. Whereas amateur athletes think they can progress faster by simply working harder. Generally, this just leads to quick burnout or injury. For training, we don’t generally tend to maximise for intensity of work, we maximise for the ability to do that work for weeks/months/years. Training adaptations take time, and while you can actually improve a lot in a short space of time, you really need to be thinking over a longer time frame if you want to be successful, and this generally means being able to manage the various training stress and recovery (i.e. know when to push and when to pull back).

Finally, exercise is not just a stressor, it can actually be a stress reliever. It is a bit of a double-edged sword as a stress reliever though, because it may be providing an outlet for stress relief in other areas of your life, but it may ultimately be creating a bigger stress debt if too much exercise is performed. Exercise can be a way for individuals to relieve their stress, as it acts as an outlet for the built-up stress elsewhere in their lives, and it allows them to actually utilise the enhanced fuel mobilisation and other effects of higher stress. It also can make an individual more resilient to stress in future, as it strengthens the ability of the body to deal with stress. However, if an individual is already under a lot of stress, it may just be a further stressor that the body is unable to deal with effectively. A lot of people also use exercise as a means to avoid working on the things they need to work on to improve their stress levels. Despite this, most individuals would still be best served by performing some sort of exercise throughout the week, and this will generally lead to reductions in stress, assuming they do actually factor in recovery.

 

Stress and Sleep

Finally, we get to the other foundational health topic, sleep. Stress and sleep, much like stress, nutrition and exercise, are very intertwined. In fact, I would argue that stress and sleep are the two topics that are most intertwined, and improving your stress management is actually one of the highest-yield habits you can focus on when you want to improve your sleep. You see, for most people, the things that lead to poorer sleep are actually just stress-related issues. Higher stress levels can make it more difficult for you to get to sleep, stay asleep and ultimately have high-quality sleep. It is pretty easy to see how stress affects sleep, as they are almost complete opposites to each other. When you are stressed you are hyped up and your body is trying to have you as stimulated as possible, so you can deal with the stressor. This SNS dominant state is kind of the exact opposite thing that you want when you are trying to sleep. With sleep, we are looking to be relaxed and calm, and that means we want to be more in that PSNS-dominant state. This is very intuitive, and you have likely sat up struggling to get to sleep one night due to being stressed, so you know what I am talking about. However, this interplay is more complex, and as I said, very often the issues people have with sleep, are actually stress-related issues, and many of the things we do to improve sleep, are actually very effective stress management practices.

 

 

Struggling to get to sleep is probably one of the most obvious effects stress has on sleep. Most of you have probably experienced the inability to get to sleep because you are stressed out by something, and the thoughts are just racing around your head. This example is obvious enough, however, it is actually the stress response that makes it difficult for you to wind down and get to sleep after watching screens late at night. Now, part of this is the blue light emitted from screens interfering with melatonin secretion, but a large part of it is simply the fact that many of the things people stay up late watching are designed to be stimulating and illicit some sort of stress response. Of course, there are gradations here, and some things people watch on screens late at night are actually designed to wind you down, however, there are many things that people watch late at night that do actually get you a little bit hyped up (stress response) and thus make it difficult to fall asleep (and get high-quality sleep). For example, people will stay up late watching action movies, thrillers, horror movies, playing video games, checking work emails etc., all of which trigger a little bit of a stress response, making it difficult to get to sleep quickly, and to have high-quality sleep. You may not think of these things as “stress” but very often when you look at the heart rates of people watching these exciting or stimulating things, their heart rates are elevated above what we expect for someone who is relaxed. For some, this can be a significant elevation and for others, it can be mild (you can imagine the person clinging to the edge of their seat watching a movie is getting more of an effect than the person half paying attention). If these very low-level stressors are making it difficult for you to get to sleep quickly, you can imagine that significant life stress is going to make it difficult to get to sleep quickly. In general, stress negatively affects your ability to get to sleep. Avoiding stressful or stimulating things in the 1-2 hours before sleep is likely going to improve your ability to get to sleep.

While it is intuitive enough that avoiding transient stressors in the lead-up to sleep is going to make it easier to get to sleep, what is a little bit less intuitive is that chronic stress can also negatively affect sleep. I think most people would be on board with the idea that checking your work emails in the lead-up to sleep is going to probably negatively affect your ability to sleep, especially if one (or more!) of those emails is particularly stress-inducing. What is less obvious is that checking your emails earlier in the day and dealing with the day-to-day stress associated with those work-related stressors is also potentially affecting your sleep. You see, chronic stress is something we become accustomed to in the modern world, as we always have some sort of deadline that we are working to, we are always online and we are always busy with something. This just becomes the background for us, and we like to believe that it isn’t affecting us negatively. And you may be right. Humans are incredibly resilient and as we discussed earlier, your body does adapt to stress over time. However, what can very often happen is we stack on too many chronic stressors, and while none of them alone is sufficient to boil our stress kettle, they do always leave the water simmering. This background stress can just leave us at a higher baseline level of stress and in this constant SNS-stimulated state. As a result, you may find that even though you don’t have a particular stressor that you can pinpoint as the reason you are struggling to sleep, you still feel the inability to get to sleep due to your stress levels being elevated. You need to get into that PSNS dominant state to really get to sleep easily, but the constant SNS dominant state (even if it is low level) can just make this more difficult.

Similarly, you may get poorer quality sleep when you are experiencing higher levels of stress or you are chronically stressed. You may be able to get to sleep, or you may struggle to get to sleep, but regardless, you may find that the sleep you do get is just lower-quality sleep. You see, to get into those deeper stages of sleep, you can’t have a load of stress hormones circulating keeping you somewhat stimulated. These stress hormones are the “slow” backup force to the “fast” nervous system stress response. They not only take a little bit longer to arrive and provide reinforcements, but they also take a bit longer to disperse once the stressor has been dealt with. As a result, if you have a particularly stress-inducing stressor, or you are chronically stressed, these stress hormones may just be too elevated to allow you to get into the deeper stages of sleep. So a combination of the nervous system and hormonal response to stress can mean that you struggle to get into the deeper phases of sleep, and as a result, get poorer quality sleep if you do manage to get to sleep. You may find that you just wake up tired, despite getting your 7-9 hours of sleep “on paper”.

This can more clearly be seen when you look at heart rate data, as the heart rate is influenced by stress more directly. When under stress, your heart rate will generally be elevated. Most healthy people have a resting heart rate somewhere between 50-70 bpm, and under stressed conditions, it wouldn’t be unusual to see this resting heart rate elevated to 90 bpm or more. During the deeper phases of sleep, we generally see the lowest resting heart rates. If your resting heart rate during sleep is at the same level as your general walking around resting heart rate, it is probably indicative of stress being elevated. If your heart rate during sleep is at 70+, then this is likely indicative of the body being under stress.

Related to this inability to get into the deeper stages of sleep is the very common stress-related experience of waking up multiple times per night. While waking up periodically throughout the night is a normal part of the sleep experience (it is a potentially evolutionary advantage to have people in the group periodically wake up and ensure that there are no threats), when under stress, most people do note that they wake up frequently and struggle to get back asleep. This is related to the fact that you just aren’t getting into those deeper phases of sleep, and you are predominantly in the more shallow stages of sleep. As a result, you are more likely to be awoken and to find it difficult to get back to sleep, because again, your baseline stress is quite high.

There are potentially metabolic reasons for being awoken multiple times per night due to stress. As you will remember from previous discussions, stress does have a variety of metabolic effects, serving to mobilise stored fuel. This is actually something that happens in the background every night, even if your stress levels are low and you are an incredibly healthy individual. Overnight, as your body burns through the various “easy” stores of energy (glucose), it needs to tap into previously stored energy (fat and glycogen). It does this by dripping out some of those stress hormones like cortisol, to help mobilise this fuel. This is a normal physiological response, and something you do every night. In fact, this rise in cortisol is actually responsible for naturally waking you up in the morning! However, as you can imagine, if you are already at a baseline higher level of stress, secreting a bit more cortisol can tip you over the edge and have you wake up prematurely throughout the night. Similarly, if you are undernourished (i.e. calorie or macronutrient deficient), then you may notice your sleep quality reduces quite a lot. This is because the body is just pumping out more of these fuel-mobilising hormones to try and utilise stored fuel to make up the difference. This is something you see all the time in competitive bodybuilders as they get leaner and leaner. The fact that they have to eat in a calorie deficit to get leaner, combined with the fact that they have such low body fat stores just means their sleep is going to be negatively impacted due to the increased output of these fuel-mobilising (stress) hormones. Overweight and obese individuals can also experience something similar, especially if they have poor metabolic health and flexibility. Despite having stored fuel, and potentially higher calorie intakes, due to their poor metabolic flexibility and reduced ability to mobilise and utilise stored fat, once their easy supply of glucose is used up, they struggle to access and use stored fuel. As a result, they have to pump out more stress hormones to try and get a response. This tends to result in the individual waking up, while also potentially feeling quite hungry.

Somewhat related is the fact that very often people who are stressed awaken multiple times per night needing to pee. Now, this is actually two phenomena in one. As we already noted, you do tend to see highly stressed individuals waking up multiple times per night. These people will often need to pee at these wake events, and they just assume that they woke up because they needed to pee. However, this may not be true. They may need to pee, simply because they are awake (or close to awake) and thus they don’t have the urinary inhibition you see with deep sleep. It likely isn’t the need to pee that is waking them up, rather it is the fact that they are waking up that leads them to need to pee. Most people need to pee first thing in the morning when they wake up, and this is normal. So the fact that you have multiple wake-up events throughout the night and thus need to pee at these times is a natural extension of this. The need to pee isn’t (generally) causing the wake-ups, so doing stuff like avoiding drinking water in the lead-up to sleep isn’t necessarily going to help (although it may help some). However, there may also be an increased need to urinate when stress is high. This is both due to the nervous system actions (i.e. the SNS effects on the bladder and other urinary-related organs) and the stress hormones themselves, which have effects on the mineralocorticoid receptors, and thus affect water balance-related stuff. So potentially there is an increased need to pee waking you up while you sleep. However, regardless of the exact ins and outs, working on stress tends to help quite a lot with reducing frequent wakings and needing to pee throughout the night.

But it isn’t just stress that affects sleep, sleep also affects stress. Poor sleep is a stressor in and of itself, and it effectively sets your baseline stress levels higher. As you can imagine, if stress negatively affects your sleep, and then getting poor sleep makes your stress worse, it can be quite difficult to get out of this negative spiral. Improving your sleep generally leads to you being better able to handle stress and to having lower stress levels in general. Now, this just seems particularly unfair, as those who find themselves with too much stress and/or too little sleep get kicked when they are down, whereas those who find themselves with manageable stress and enough sleep seem to just have things even easier. Well, unfortunately, I didn’t make the rules. However, this does offer us the ability to improve things quite quickly, once we get on the upward swing with stress management and better sleep hygiene practices. By working on your stress, you will generally improve your sleep. By working on your sleep, you will generally improve your stress. By working on them together, you will generally see a lot of synergy and get results much more quickly in both areas.

 

The Effects Of Stress Summary

We covered a lot there, but before we move on to looking at what stress looks like in the real world, I just want to do a quick recap. Firstly, we need to remember that stress is a very vague term and what people are generally talking about is “hyper-distress”, and generally, the discussion focuses around when stress levels get very high. However, in the modern world, what people very often experience is actually chronic stress at a lower level, rather than the high intensity stress. Now, don’t get me wrong, people definitely do still experience that high intensity stress, but if we were to survey a random group of people, the vast majority of them will be experiencing some form of chronic stress, while only a small percentage will be experiencing high levels of stress.

Stress has many negative effects on our overall health, and higher levels of stress generally leads to poorer health. The exact effects can be quite different from person to person, but in general, higher levels of stress are correlated with poorer health. Poorer health is also generally a stressor, and being in better health generally results in better stress levels and stress management.

Stress also negatively affects our nutrition, both in terms of how we digest and metabolise the food we eat, and the way we interact with food. Generally, high stress leads to a poorer physiological response to the food we eat, and it makes sticking to a health promoting diet more difficult. However, the diet does also impact on our stress. This can be negative (i.e. drinking alcohol, being deficient in calories, macro- or micro-nutrients, etc.) or it can be positive (i.e. the diet is supportive of good health and doesn’t contribute to stress), and naturally, this is something we can focus on when trying to manage our stress levels.

Stress negatively affects exercise too, meaning you get poorer results, can’t train as much due to poorer recovery and likely don’t even want to train due to poor motivation. However, exercise can be a very helpful stress reliever. Exercise does also tend to make you more resilient to future stress, and thus better able to manage your stress. But exercise can also be done to excess and thus become a significant stressor. Although this is generally only the case for people who are doing quite a lot of exercise, or who already have a significant amount of stress in their life (especially if there is dietary stress in the form of under-eating, and/or sleep quality/quantity is poor).

Stress also negatively affects sleep, and stress is a very significant contributor to most people’s poor sleep. Many of the protocols we tend to recommend for improving sleep are actually stress management practices. Poor sleep is also a significant stressor, leaving you less able to handle the other stressors in your life, and less able to adapt to stress over time. Working on improving your stress management and sleep are incredibly synergistic habits, and serve to really reinforce each other.

Now, you have a good idea about stress and its effects, it is time to discuss what stress actually looks like in the real world and what contributes to stress for most people.

 

What Stress Looks Like

Having coached hundreds of people, it has become increasingly obvious that many people are unaware of what stress looks like. They fail to see the stress in their life, especially if it is chronic stress. They become accustomed to a certain level of stress, and they forget what it even feels like to have a manageable level of stress. Unfortunately, some of this is just the way life is, and they can’t do much to actually remove the stressors in their life. However, very often, there are things that can be done to deal with stress and get it back to a more manageable level. But, this requires you to actually acknowledge that stress is something you need to work on, and to do that, you first have to be able to recognise what stress looks like.

 

Identifying Stressors

Recognising stress is actually quite difficult, especially if it is trying to recognise stress in your own life. So, to build out a better picture of what stress looks like, it is helpful to discuss this from two angles. First, we need to discuss the general stressors that people encounter in their daily life and contribute to their overall stress load. Then we need to discuss the more physical and psychological manifestations of stress. Discussing things from both of these angles will allow you to more clearly identify stressors in your life, and then also assess the impact these stressors have on you. Naturally enough, we simply won’t be able to cover every single last potential stressor or manifestation of stress. However, what we can do is cover the broader categories of stressors, and as a result, we can cover a broad enough swathe of stressors so you can build out a better picture of things.

In psychology, stressors are often categorised under the following broad headings:

1. crises/catastrophes,
2. major life events,
3. daily hassles/micro-stressors,
4. ambient stressors, and
5. organisational stressors.

There is often overlap between these, and they all contribute to your overall stress load to varying degrees. I would hope that you are able to identify the stress related to the first two (i.e. you are stressed because your partner has just died or your job just made everyone aware that layoffs may be on the cards etc.). Ambient stressors are a little bit harder to identify, and they are also things that can be a little bit more difficult to actually deal with. They include things like traffic, noise or air pollution, and a whole host of other things. This is the kind of stress that is just running in the background, generally contributing to your overall stress load.

The stressors that fall under the categories of 3 and 5 are the ones we generally have a lot of control over and can actually do a lot to reduce. Most people can more clearly identify the daily hassles/micro-stressors they experience frequently. Some of them do fly under the radar though, especially if the stressor can be quite enjoyable at other times. For example, social media use can be incredibly negative from a stress perspective, both from the excessive dopamine signalling that occurs (potential addiction forming) and also the negative emotions the use of social media can elicit. A lot of social media users feel good in the moment, or they struggle to put the device away due to the dopamine signalling, and are unaware of how negatively their social media use is actually affecting them and their overall life. This is incredibly common in individuals who are looking for body composition change, and it is not unusual to see individuals following hundreds of accounts that they compare themselves to. This is maladaptive behaviour and can be a source of significant stress. Very often when I get clients to spend a week writing down all of the daily hassles and small stressors they experience, they quickly realise that they do actually have quite a lot of things causing them stress on a daily basis. Many of them can very easily be dealt with and can be an easy way to reduce the overall stress someone is experiencing. Even though none of the individual stressors are all that stressful in isolation, they do add up!

Organisational stress is actually something that most people experience that significantly contributes to their stress levels. Many people just get used to it, and very often people don’t even realise just how much stress they are experiencing as a result of poor organisation. Most people are very poor at organising their lives and this does actually lead to significant stress. Compounding this is the fact that most organisations (work places) are also incredibly poor at organising their company, and this leads to more stress in an individual’s life. Organising your life can actually lead to a very significant reduction in your overall stress levels, although there is potentially an initial increased stress burden as you go about organising your life (e.g. your room being unorganised causes background organisational stress, but cleaning your room requires a significant investment of time and stress). Learning to effectively plan, schedule and organise your life can significantly improve stress.

In our experience, the kinds of stressors that people tend to experience tend to follow into the following categories (in no particular order):

• General life stress: worrying about the mortgage, money, work etc.
• Relationship stress: be it with your partner, family, or friends.
• Stimulants: the use of stimulants isn’t inherently bad, but it is generally an SNS activity, and most people use them excessively.
• Alcohol: lots of people turn to alcohol for stress reduction at the end of the day, but unfortunately this tends to lead to stress on the body and poorer sleep, thus increasing stress overall.
• Training stress: this can be somewhat of a stress relieving activity as you can blow off some steam after work, but it is still something that ultimately adds to your stress as you train hard and have to recover from it. This can be particularly stressful when you train excessively, however, for most people, the fact that they aren’t training is actually the more significant stressor.
• Diet stress: the diet can be a stressor, especially if you eat foods you get some sort of poor reaction from (i.e. you get GI distress from them) or you are eating excessive quantities of food or you are eating too little food.
• A lack of sleep: sleep is generally a good stress reducer, and with a lack of sleep, you reduce an activity that reduces stress and poor sleep is a stressor itself. So you get hit with a double whammy. Poor sleep generally makes every other stressor in your life worse.
• A lack of hobbies: a lot of people enter their teens with lots of hobbies and then by the time they are about 22-25, they no longer have hobbies. Hobbies are fantastic stress reducers, and a lack of hobbies usually means less relaxing activities, and generally these are replaced with more stressful activities.
• Excessive social media use: This is actually quite a big contributor to stress for many people, and it also tends to eat into time you could have spent engaging in activities that could have reduced your stress (like sleep) or improved your life (thus lowering your stress).
• A lack of social connection and meaning in your life: Feeling like you are not part of something bigger than yourself such as a friend group, the community or a religious/spiritual group tends to contribute quite a lot to general stress levels.

There are of course, many more, but in general, they are the kinds of things we see with clients and people trying to improve their health and fitness. Some of these obviously can’t be solved all that easily, while others can rather easily be fixed. But hopefully, you should have a better idea of the kinds of things you need to look out for when trying to identify the stressors in your life. Being able to identify the stressors in your life is vital for actually building better stress management practices, as part of stress management is often working on reducing the stress inducing events in your life, along with building better practices to deal with them.

While these broad categories can help you to get a better idea of the types of stress people experience in their life, it can be difficult to quantify the impact these stressors actually have on your life. Naturally enough, you would expect something that falls into the crisis category to be more stressful than something that falls into the micro-stressor category. It can also be hard to understand how stressors add up and are comparable (i.e. are two major life events equal to one crisis?). There, unfortunately, isn’t a very clear cut way to do this, and it is further compounded by the fact that previous life experiences and familiarity with certain stressors can make them better or worse for specific individuals (e.g. you may be very comfortable dealing with the stress of pregnancy because this is your third pregnancy and multiple family members and friends of yours have also gone through pregnancy, whereas this could be incredibly stressful for the woman who is pregnant for the first time, without friend and family support). The ratings we give to stress also tend to miss out on the duration aspect. They are treated more like transient stressors, rather than stressors that are going on in the background for a long period of time. So it can be difficult to compare a sudden stress of higher magnitude to a stress of lower magnitude but that goes on for a longer period of time.

The Holmes and Rahe stress scale is one that is often used. It is fairly intuitive to use, and while it doesn’t cover everything, it does give you a fairly good idea about how various stressors are actually contributing to your stress levels. You basically add up the units for events that occurred in the last year, and that gives you an idea of your stress levels and risk of ill-health as a result.

Life event	Life change units
Death of a spouse	100
Divorce	73
Marital separation	65
Imprisonment	63
Death of a close family member	63
Personal injury or illness	53
Marriage	50
Dismissal from work	47
Marital reconciliation	45
Retirement	45
Change in health of family member	44
Pregnancy	40
Sexual difficulties	39
Gain a new family member	39
Business readjustment	39
Change in financial state	38
Death of a close friend	37
Change to a different line of work	36
Change in frequency of arguments	35
Major mortgage	32
Foreclosure of mortgage or loan	30
Change in responsibilities at work	29
Child leaving home	29
Trouble with in-laws	29
Outstanding personal achievement	28
Spouse starts or stops work	26
Beginning or end of school	26
Change in living conditions	25
Revision of personal habits	24
Trouble with boss	23
Change in working hours or conditions	20
Change in residence	20
Change in schools	20
Change in recreation	19
Change in church activities	19
Change in social activities	18
Minor mortgage or loan	17
Change in sleeping habits	16
Change in the number of family reunions	15
Change in eating habits	15
Vacation	13
Major Holiday	12
Minor violation of the law	11

• A score of 300+: At risk of illness.
• A score of 150-299: Risk of illness is moderate (reduced by 30% from the above risk).
• A score of <150: Only have a slight risk of illness.

 

Using something like the Holmes and Rahe stress scale can be quite helpful in making you realise that you have likely had quite a lot of things going on in your life that contribute to stress and potentially put you at risk of poorer health outcomes.

However, it does potentially miss certain things, notably more chronic issues. What it also misses are things that contribute to a reduction of your stress. Of course, it simply wasn’t designed to be all-encompassing, so we can’t expect any scale to nice and neatly spit us out a number so we can quantify how stressed we are. However, we do have to still account for the fact that there are things that reduce our overall stress and risk of ill health. Many of these things we will cover in the stress management section, and we did already cover how sleep, nutrition and exercise all factor into stress, but it is important to realise that the above scale (and any stress scale) likely isn’t accounting for all the variables. When I discuss stress with my clients, I will cover the major stressors in their lives and build out a better picture of their overall stress. However, I will also try to build out a better picture of what they are currently doing to destress. The list of things that people do to destress is generally significantly shorter than the list of stressors they give me, and oftentimes a lot of things that are on the “destress” list are actually stressors or potentially maladaptive behaviours that end up increasing stress (i.e. alcohol use).

You can do this yourself. Spend a week writing down all the stressors you experience, and give them a rating of how stressed you perceive they make you. Then spend a week writing down all of the things you do to destress yourself, and give them a rating of how much they reduce your stress. Comparing the two lists you will very likely see that the amount of time and energy you spend de-stressing, pales in comparison to the amount of time and energy you spend stressing. You likely also missed many of the stressors (especially the love level chronic ones), and failed to take account of the background stress you experience from poor sleep, nutrition and exercise patterns. So the stress list is likely much longer. It is no wonder why many people find themselves suffering from stress related issues.

A good proxy for all of this, which I often use when discussing this stuff on consultations or with individuals where we can’t really spend time expanding on things, is to simply ask what hobbies someone has. Generally, you will be hit with a blank stare with this question, as people quickly realise that they don’t actually have any hobbies anymore and instead they really only do things that contribute to stress in their life. While lots of hobbies can be quite stressful, hobbies tend to be activities that lead people to have lowered stress overall.

 

Recognising Stress

While identifying stressors in your life is important, and we will use that information in our stress management practices, it is also very important to be able to recognise the effects of stress. You see, it is very easy to become adapted to the stress in your life and thus find it difficult to even identify stressors. Someone looking in from the outside might be better able to help you identify these things, but doing it yourself can actually be difficult. This is especially the case if you have a variety of small little stressors in your life, especially if they are chronic. It can also be hard to quantify the impact of these stressors on you. While something like the Holmes and Rahe stress scale can be helpful, it fails to take account of your individual resilience to specific stressors. With this in mind, what can be very helpful in helping you identify stress in your life and building a better picture of the impact of that stress, is understanding the effects stress has on your body. I don’t just mean the end outcomes of stress, like we discussed earlier the effects of stress, I mean the signs and symptoms of stress you will see on a daily basis as a result of stress.

There are a variety of signs and symptoms of stress, including physical, emotional, cognitive and behavioural symptoms, and being able to identify them in yourself (and others), is actually a really helpful skill. Being able to identify the signs and symptoms of stress allows you to better understand yourself and to create better stress management practices, based on what exactly you need help with.

 

Physical Signs and Symptoms of Stress

Most people are likely familiar with many of the physical signs and symptoms of stress. Excessive sweating, jitteriness, shaking, franticness, pacing, increased heart rate and breathing etc. You have likely seen someone highly stressed before in real life or in a video, or at least can imagine a caricature of a stressed person. These signs and symptoms are generally quite obvious to someone on the outside looking in, but to the person experiencing them, they can be difficult to spot. They are just the outward expression of the SNS doing its job to help you deal with stressors in your environment, but as we have discussed, this system was designed to help you with transient stress, not chronic stress. These signs and symptoms aren’t always present either, and this can vary quite a lot from person to person, and even within a single individual, depending on the source of the stress. While we obviously can’t cover everything, the following physical symptoms should give you a better picture of the kinds of things you should be looking out for.

 

 

High heart rates are one of the most common signs of stress. This is more obvious in the acute stress state, and we use phrases like “my heart was racing” or “my heart was beating out of my chest” in common culture when discussing stressful events. A high heart rate is quite an obvious sign of stress, and if you track your heart rate throughout the day, it can actually provide you with a good approximation of what things are causing your stress. If something (other than some form of physical exertion or sex related experience) causes your heart rate to elevate, then it is likely something that causes you stress. A high resting heart rate is also a potential sign that you are experiencing stress, especially chronic stress. It can also be a sign that you are not doing the other foundational habits (good nutrition, sleep and exercise patterns), and/or you are not spending enough time doing activities that activate the PSNS. For healthy adults, a resting heart rate should be around 50-70 bpm, with lower figures often seen in very fit individuals. This is generally where we want to see resting heart rate, although having a resting heart rate in the 70-90 bpm range during the day isn’t always indicative of stress and can still be a healthy range. However, if your resting heart rate, especially while asleep, is higher than 70 bpm, then it is likely that you are experiencing a significant amount of stress (or you are very unfit, which is a stressor in an of itself).

Sweating is another symptom of stress, and we have all likely experienced the feeling of sweaty armpits when under stress. This is obviously a sign of stress when you know you are experiencing an acute stressor, but if you do tend to find yourself excessively sweating in general, then this may indicate that you are experiencing higher levels of stress. This is a little bit of a tricky one to interpret, as there are many things that can contribute to sweating (such as environmental temperature, food intake, general metabolism etc.). However, it is something that seems to reduce when stress levels are better managed, and as it is a function of the SNS, it makes sense that having lower SNS activation would reduce sweating.

Excessive urination can be a sign of stress. Stress can cause relaxation of the bladder, and cortisol does have impacts on water balance and urination via mineralocorticoid receptors. So if you frequently need to urinate, or feel you have very urgent needs to urinate, then this can point to stress. This isn’t always a foolproof way of identifying stress, as some people just have smaller bladders, high water intakes, or don’t get an increase in urination due to stress. But much like with sweating, this is something that does tend to improve once better stress management practices are brought in.

Frequent constipation and/or gastrointestinal upset can also be signs of stress. If you have ever gone on a holiday and travelled to a distant country, you may notice that you get constipation. This is actually a stress response, as you don’t usually feel safe in a new environment and travel itself is actually stressful. As a result, you get “backed up”. This also happens in everyday life due to stress. Many people find that their constipation and/or gastrointestinal upset symptoms are reduced when they bring in better stress management practices. However, these aren’t always a sign of stress, and are incredibly multi-factorial.

Frequent headaches can also be a sign of stress for some people, as can muscle tension. The headaches may actually be a form of muscle tension, as many people do find relief from stress headaches from head and scalp massages, and it is very common to see people with incredibly tight trapezius muscles when under a lot of stress. While massage can be helpful in relieving these symptoms, they do just return if proper stress management practices are not done.

While we have been discussing some of the more immediate symptoms of stress, sometimes it can be easier to spot some of the less immediate physical symptoms of stress. Some of these we have touched on previously when discussing the effects of stress on health, nutrition, exercise and sleep, but some we haven’t discussed yet.

Fatigue is often a symptom of stress, and this can be both an effect seen after a particularly stressful event and when someone is under chronic stress. It makes sense that you would feel fatigued after you experience a significant stressor as your body tries to rest and recover from the stressor. It also makes sense that if you are chronically under stress and making demands of your nervous system and physiology more broadly, then you have to pay back that debt at some stage.  Anyone who has gone through a particularly stressful event will know that you do just feel drained for a while afterwards. However, people very frequently fail to connect that same feeling of being drained to the chronic stress they have been experiencing. Feeling fatigued all the time can be a sign that you are (or at least have been) experiencing stress, and doing many of the stress management practices we will discuss in a moment can often lead to lower fatigue levels and more energy in general. Fatigue can be particularly bad if stress is also reducing sleep quality and/or quantity.

As we discussed previously, stress has an effect on body composition and performance. Stress can result in water retention, which can make sticking to a fat loss diet harder as you fail to visually see progress or the scale doesn’t change as quickly as you expected it to. Sticking to healthy diet and training protocols can be more difficult when you are under more stress. Fat loss can be more difficult overall, as can muscle gain. Performance can also suffer, and progress can be rather lacklustre. While it can be difficult to really delineate the exact causes of all of these clusters of symptoms, if you are certain you are doing everything right with your nutrition, training and sleep, then getting better stress management practices in place can really help to get the body progressing as expected.

Beyond looking at the more interpretation-dependent signs and symptoms, we can also measure certain variables to build a better picture of someone’s stress levels. It is quite common these days for people to have access to wearable devices that will measure their heart rates (which will help us see what their resting heart rate is) and stress related markers such as heart rate variability (HRV). HRV is simply the variability between each heartbeat. This can give us a window into stress and nervous system function, as the PSNS is working to increase the time between beats, and the SNS is working to decrease the time between beats. The longer the time between beats, the more time there is for these two branches to battle it out, and thus causing more variability between heartbeats (increased HRV). The shorter the time between beats, the less time available for the SNS and PSNS to battle it out, thus causing less variability between heartbeats (lower HRV). So HRV data can give us a window into overall stress levels. However, it is also affected by your fitness levels, hydration levels, various medications and a host of other things. So while it seems like a more scientific measure of stress, I wouldn’t only use this as a measure of stress. Generally, most average adults fall somewhere in the range of 30-60 for their HRV, although healthier individuals (and fitter individuals) will generally have a score above 60. There is some variability between men and women (women tend to have lower HRV), and age also plays a roll (older people tend to have lower HRV). The exact score also depends on the device that is being used and how their algorithm calculates it (and how it deals with anomalies and artefacts in the data). Most people will see their HRV score improve with better stress management practices.

 

 

There are other markers that could fall under this category, such as cortisol, fasting blood glucose, blood pressure, and inflammatory markers (such as CRP). However, these aren’t as easily accessible to most people, and while they can all be used to build out a better picture of stress, they do require more interpretation.

 

Emotional Signs and Symptoms of Stress

Beyond the physical signs and symptoms of stress, there are emotional symptoms too. These can be a little bit harder to correlate specifically with stress, especially if you have been stressed for a long period of time. Most people have seen someone who is stressed experience feelings of anxiety, irritability and potentially also have some form of mood swings. Emotional volatility is one of those things that we very often caricature when describing stress, as it is very common. I think most people would agree that they aren’t their best selves when they are stressed. This can range from mild emotional disturbances to more severe emotional disturbances.

When stressed, most people will become slightly more irritable, and this makes sense when we consider the stress response partially evolved to help you survive stuff like being attacked. In that context, it makes sense that being more irritable and a bit more aggressive would actually be beneficial. Similarly, if you are going through a period of lower food (nutritional stress), then being more irritable and aggressive may allow you to hunt more successfully. So it makes sense that under stress, there would be an increase in irritability and also aggression. This is very often the first sign that people notice when someone is stressed. You may not notice it yourself, but usually people around you will notice that you are a little bit shorter with them and more irritable in general. This is naturally much easier to see when stress is high, however, you do also see it when you are under chronic stress. With chronic stress, it is a bit harder to pinpoint, as it isn’t as clearly tied to a stressful event. You end up just having a higher baseline level of irritability, rather than just being a bit more irritable in the moment due to high stress.

Mood swings can also be a sign of stress, and this can tie into the irritability side of things (i.e. you swing massively from an irritable outburst to feeling sorry for behaving that way), but it can also be something which can only really be described as emotional volatility. One minute you are happy, the next sad, the next angry, then anxious etc. This can be quite dramatic, but it can also be quite subtle. High levels of stress can result in this rollercoaster of emotions, but so can chronic stress. You will generally be aware that you are experiencing some sort of mood swings, although you may not put two and two together and notice that it is actually stress that is the root of the issue.

Depression can also be a symptom of stress. As depression can be quite debilitating, it can make tackling the stress that is causing the stress quite difficult. In general, people do find their depression gets worse when stress is high, and conversely, gets better when they manage their stress levels.

Anxiety is also very tightly correlated with stress, and most people feel some level of anxiety when their stress levels get too high or they experience chronic stress. Anxiety is basically your nervous system being on hyper-vigilant mode, so this makes sense. Unfortunately, like with depression, anxiety can be quite debilitating, and as a result, it can make tackling your stress challenging. Just like with depression, people notice their anxiety is worse when stress is higher, and they manage their stress levels.

Of course, there are other emotional signs and symptoms to stress, but this can be quite specific to the individual. Some people may notice that they have a much greater change to their emotional state, while some people find that they don’t notice much change at all. This is further complicated by the fact that some people aren’t as introspective, and as a result, may not notice changes in their emotional state, although others may notice it. But the main thing I want you to realise is that stress can result in emotional changes.

 

Cognitive Signs and Symptoms of Stress

Stress can also result in cognitive changes, and these can provide us with clues as to where stress levels are at. While some level of stress does actually help with some cognitive tasks, in general, higher levels of stress results in poorer cognitive capacity. Most people will experience some degree of memory deficits or poorer concentration when stressed. Most people have likely experienced this when they are stressed and studying for an exam at the last minute. They know they should be studying, but they just can’t seem to focus, or the work they do actually get done is just very poor quality, and everything they are trying to learn seems to be going in one ear and out the other. This is a very hard situation to be in, and naturally, if you have higher levels of stress, you reach the point where cognition is affected much more quickly when exposed to additional stress.

Unfortunately, very frequently you see children from lower socio-economic backgrounds falling behind with their education and ending up as adults who just think they are stupid, when in reality, they were just under more stress as a child and that made learning more challenging for them. This unfortunately creates a negative feedback loop where people from lower socio-economic backgrounds get poorer results in school and struggle to get higher paying jobs, and thus their children also end up under-privileged. This also happens to children who experience some sort of significant trauma, and very often this can lead to very poor cognitive performance which can make their future much more challenging.

You do also very frequently see people not living up to their potential in their jobs, due to significant stress with the combination of life stress, work stress and whatever other stressors they have going on. Naturally, if you aren’t able to perform at your full cognitive capacity, you are less likely to advance as far as you could within your chosen career, and this can further contribute to stress due to a poorer financial situation.

People experiencing higher levels of stress tend to make more mistakes and just find tasks harder to actually do, although the higher stress levels can actually make them feel like they are doing a better job. You see this very frequently online where people suggest stressors like fasting or cold plunges make them feel better cognitively, despite them actually performing worse on cognitive tasks. This is something that makes using cognitive performance as a tool for helping you identify stress quite poor, as you personally may actually feel like you do better under stress, when you actually do much worse. You FEEL like you are doing better cognitively due to the various stress hormones making you feel more awake and hyped up, but your actual cognitive performance is generally much worse when stressed. Evolutionarily, this makes sense, as your body basically tricking you into thinking you are doing a great job when under stress is beneficial for encouraging you to continue hunting despite being hungry and repeatedly failing. So cognitive performance tends to be worse when under more stress, but you may unfortunately not be able to perceive this, and your body may be trying to hide it from you.

 

Behavioural Signs and Symptoms of Stress

Behavioural changes are very frequently seen when someone is experiencing higher levels of stress. This is an area that is incredibly broad, as there can be an incredible diversity of behaviours that change as a result of stress. Some of the more frequent behavioural changes are changes in eating patterns (you may be too stressed to eat, or you may be way more hungry due to stress), changes in sleeping habits (you now struggle to get to sleep due to stress, despite never having this issue previously) and changes in the way an individual interacts with the world (you may withdraw socially, or you may start engaging in risky or dangerous behaviours).

As I mentioned, this is a very broad topic, and there are so many potential things that could be covered. However, what we really care about for our purposes is noting that your behaviours can change as a result of stress. Very often these behaviour changes are the symptoms that people notice but struggle to pinpoint the cause of. While seemingly random behaviour changes aren’t always related to stress, very often you do see behaviour changes in stressed individuals. So, if you have been experiencing changes in your behaviour (i.e. changes to your sleeping, eating, the way you interact with the world etc.), then it does make sense to just check in with your overall stress levels and ensure that you are engaging in basic stress management practices.

Behaviour changes are actually usually the first sign that is noticed in children who are under significant stress or who are experiencing (or previously experienced) trauma of some kind. Children go from being the happy, smiley child to having emotional and behavioural outbursts. While this obviously isn’t always associated with stress, it is usually the sign the adults in the child’s life start investigating further. Similarly, it is also the sign that someone’s friends or family generally notice and start investigating further. If you noticed your friend was skipping lunches and socially withdrawing, you would generally enquire further with that person and make sure they are ok. Some behaviour changes may not be as obvious, but very often behaviour changes do accompany stress, so they can be a big clue as to stress. However, this can be somewhat hard to see when the stress is chronic and the behaviours change very slowly over time as a result.

 

Recognising Stress

Recognising stress can actually be quite difficult, but once you know what signs and symptoms to look out for, you can actually become quite good at noticing when you or people around you are under stress. Some of the signs and symptoms are quite obvious, and they form the caricature of a stressed individual we have in our heads, but some of the signs and symptoms are actually quite subtle or aren’t always associated with stress. It is much easier to associate specific signs and symptoms you see in someone when they are dealing with more acute, higher levels of stress, but chronic stress can really muddy the water, especially if the level of chronic stress is actually quite low.

Now, we can finally get stuck into what you have all been waiting for, the actual stress management practices!

 

Stress Management

Finally, we arrive at the topic of stress management. So far, you have learned quite a lot about stress, and hopefully, by now you have a pretty damn good understanding of why stress is something that you should care about and should be looking to manage. Stress management is an area that many people, unfortunately, ignore. However, as stress has such wide-ranging impacts, ignoring stress management is a mistake. It just leads to poorer health in general, and poorer results from any health and fitness endeavours you do undertake. Many people find that working on their stress is the missing piece that has held them back from achieving their goals in the past. Having said that, stress management practices can actually be quite difficult to put into practice, especially because many people only think about stress management when stress levels are already quite high. Trying to stop your house from flooding when the water is already coming in, is obviously a harder thing to do compared to ensuring your house is waterproof before flooding occurs. This is the same with stress management, and preventative measures are almost always better than trying to deal with stress once it is already an issue.

However, we live in the real world, and the “perfect” scenario rarely exists. So, we have to tackle stress management in a practical manner. To do this, I am going to first discuss the goals of stress management (as understanding this does actually really help inform and guide our practices) and then I am going to lay out the stress management practices that seem to work for most people in the real world. The difficulty with discussing the stress management practices is that there are so many stress management practices and they all work better or worse for different people, and are more or less effective depending on when they are put into practice. So, I will be laying these out in a way that makes it easy to discuss, and hopefully understand, but I do want you to keep in mind that there is going to be some trial and error with this stuff. There are some baseline practices which certainly seem to work very well for the vast majority of people, but after that, depending on your specific situation, you may need to play around with the various practices and see what works best for what you have going on.

 

The Goal Of Stress Management

Many people think that the goal of stress management is to eliminate stress, and this really could not be further from the truth. As we have repeatedly noted throughout this article, some degree of stress is actually vital for our continued progress and development. While you may think sitting on a beach sipping on cocktails is the picture of low stress, after doing this for a week or two, most people will become restless and realise that they need some sort of stress in their life to keep them engaged with life. Most people don’t get to test this out, and many people only realise this is true once they retire from work. They enjoy their retirement for a little while, and let some of the accumulated stress of work wash away, but then they get restless and start craving some sort of purpose and things to do. We need some sort of stress in our life, and the goal isn’t to remove stress completely. The goal of stress management is to get stress to a manageable level, and then to keep it at a manageable level. This is important to realise, and I want to emphasise that I did say two very distinct goals there. As a result, you are going to be working on two very distinct skill sets. You are going to be working on skills that help you to get stress back down to a manageable level, and you are going to be working on skills that allow you to actually keep stress at a manageable level.

This is really important to understand, as many people only look at stress management when stress is high. As a result, they only really ever engage in practices that help them get stress back to a more manageable level. There is nothing wrong with this, but it all but ensures that stress is going to get high again in future. If you have a boat that is letting in water, it is clearly very beneficial to develop skills that allow you to get that water out of the boat. However, you still have holes in your boat, and the next time you go out in the water, you are going to have to spend your time and energy on getting that water out of the boat. You really need to develop the skills required to actually repair the boat, so that the boat isn’t filling up with water every time you go out in the water. Developing skills that allow you to reduce stress, allows you to stay afloat, but you also need to develop the skills that allow you to better manage your stress levels longer term, so you don’t get to the point where you need more intensive stress management practices to bring you back to baseline.

The way I often discuss this with clients is with the following analogy. Stress management can be thought of as a balancing act. On one side of the scale, you have all your stressors, and on the other side of the scale, you have all your stress reducers. You can think of this as the SNS side and the PSNS side. What we ideally want is balance. To accomplish this balance, we can either reduce the stuff on the SNS side, or we can add to the PSNS side. Now, much like with any scales, you can’t just keep adding things to either side, as there comes a point where you simply can’t fit any more on it. I bring this point up because while we are trying to achieve balance, we simply can’t just try to add more and more to the PSNS side to achieve that. This isn’t necessarily a physiological thing, it is more of a practical thing. Trying to aggressively chase PSNS activating things generally just comes up against the simple fact of reality that time is not infinite. Trying to fit more and more PSNS stuff into your already stressful life generally just leads to the SNS side of things getting worse. So you do need to address this by both reducing the SNS side of things and increasing the PSNS side of things.

 

 

Now, while I did say there were only two goals to stress management, there is actually kind of a third goal. This is a bit of a background goal that is generally a natural consequence of good stress management, so it generally goes unstated. The third goal is to become more resilient to future stressors. While working on balancing the stress scales is what we are working on, and generally this means reducing the SNS side of things and increasing the PSNS side of things, we have to remember that the body is actually able to adapt to stressors. So the weight of the specific things being added to the SNS side of things is not actually a fixed weight, and it is influenced by our previous experiences and perception of those specific stressors, as well as our overall stress resilience at that time. The best way to work on building resilience is to actually work on stress management overall, as you then allow the process of adaptation to occur. This is the very principle that is used to get stronger in the gym, you manage your overall resistance training in a way that you balance training stress and recovery, and as a result, you get stronger over time. This very same principle is at play when we work on stress management, and as a result of working on stress management, we become more resilient over time. Some people do like to try and focus on this specifically (and this may be a very helpful therapy approach, in the form of exposure therapy), but in general, it is just a natural byproduct of good stress management practices, so I tend to just leave “building stress resilience” as an unstated third goal. Of course, I am stating it here so you do actually have a fuller picture of things.

It is very common for people to treat stress like a feeling, and to focus on stress management tools and strategies that make you “feel” less stressed. There is nothing inherently wrong with this, and very often this is required to actually get some sort of relief from the stress so you can then better deal with the things causing you stress. But the important thing to realise is that you do actually have to work on the things causing you the stress too. Focusing exclusively on reducing feelings of stress is not a long-term solution, and you will have to actually tackle the source of the stressors in your life. This is intuitively obvious, but you would be surprised by how many people get caught up in strategies that seek to reduce the feelings of stress, but then never actually work on the source(s) of the stress. If you have a huge amount of work to do and you feel stressed as a result, it can certainly be very helpful to take some time away from that work and reduce your feelings of stress, but eventually, you are going to have to come back and get all that work done. You can transiently reduce feelings of stress as part of a more comprehensive plan to actually manage your stress, but please don’t get caught up in focusing on solely reducing the feelings of stress without any focus on actually tackling the stressors.

In practice, what we generally end up doing with stress management is initially focusing a lot on reducing the stuff that is contributing to the stress (SNS side), while building up some PSNS side stuff. Once we get things into better balance, then we really focus on building practices that allow you to actually keep things in balance and become more resilient to stress in the future. It is highly likely that you are going to experience periods of your life where things start to tip more towards the SNS side, and that is ok, we just want to establish good habits and systems that allow us to keep these things in a better balance in general and to be more resilient to the stressors we encounter so they don’t weigh down the SNS side as much.

 

 

Now, keep these goals in mind as we go through the next section, as it really is important to understand that we are trying to accomplish two goals here. Certain practices are going to be better suited to reducing the SNS side of things, others are going to address the PSNS side of things, and some are just heavy hitters that work on both sides. This is important to keep in mind, as some strategies are going to be more or less effective for you, depending on whether you need less SNS or more PSNS.

 

Stress Management Practices

There really are a million and one things we could discuss in relation to stress management practices, and very often you see these discussions centre around protocols rather than principles. I believe we have covered enough in this article so far to allow you to understand the principles by which these stress management practices work, and now we really do need to actually get stuck into specific stress management protocols.

I am going to split this section up into a few subsections. This should allow you to really see how all of this stuff could fit together into a more comprehensive, long-term stress management practice. However, I do want to emphasise that there is a lot of crossover between all of the practices, and you shouldn’t see them as completely separate things. To some degree, you can pick and choose which stress management practices you want to engage with, however, some of them are foundational, and ignoring them generally makes dealing with stress more difficult.

I would like to restate at this stage that, in general, it is far more effective to build up good stress management practices BEFORE you really need them. Unfortunately, this just generally isn’t at the front and centre of most people’s minds, and they really only think of stress management once they are already stressed to the extreme. While I will be covering how to deal with being stressed to the extreme, ideally, you would be working on this stuff before you get to that point. There is a reason we think of good stress management as a foundational pillar of health. Just like you would work on your training, nutrition and sleep as good health practices, you would ideally also work on your stress management practices too. If you can set up good systems ahead of time, you will be in a much better position to deal with stressors that pop up, rather than being completely derailed by them when they do hit.

 

Baseline Stress Management

There are some stress management practices that are foundational, and ignoring these ones does tend to make things more difficult. They form the foundation of your stress management approach. Unfortunately, many of these things tend to be the first things that people drop out when stress is higher. They are also the things that don’t pay off immediately, and generally work over a longer time course. They also tend to be the things that make you more resilient to stress longer term. Some of them are easier to do, and others just require a bit more work, and need to be done consistently to see the benefits.

As you can imagine, based on the fact that we spent a lot of time at the start of this article discussing how intertwined stress was with nutrition, exercise and sleep, that we were going to bring them up as foundational baseline health practices. You are always going to be at a disadvantage with your stress management practices if your nutrition is crap, you don’t exercise (or you exercise excessively) and/or you aren’t sleeping well. Sleep is especially important here, as stress and sleep are incredibly intertwined. Very often working on sleep improves stress, and working on stress improves sleep. However, as you have likely experienced before, when stress levels get high, your nutrition choices are worse, you skip out on exercise and your sleep suffers. This unfortunately just makes the stress worse, and you have a harder time dealing with stress and then you have to deal with the stress of getting back into a rhythm with good nutrition, exercise and sleep habits, once you are through the stressful period.

So at a baseline, we want to try and ensure we have rock-solid systems in place for nutrition, exercise and sleep, as getting these right really does help you to better deal with stress in your life. It can be very difficult to do this, and having coached and helped thousands of people, I know this isn’t what you want to hear as the foundational bedrock to your stress management practices. However, if you can follow some basic good habits with these things, you can actually set yourself up to handle stress much more effectively.

I am not going to dive deep into every single thing you can do for nutrition, exercise or sleep, as you can read more about those things in their own articles. However, the following points should certainly be prioritised.

 

Good Nutrition

• Aim to eat a relatively well-balanced diet, where the calories aren’t too high or too low.
• Aim to eat a nutrient-dense diet where possible, so you minimise the risk of any nutrient deficiencies and you supply the nutrients the body needs to deal with stress.
• Aim to drink sufficient water, and don’t rely on coffee for the majority of your hydration.
• Make good food choices where possible, but don’t sweat it if you make some poor choices.
• Avoid alcohol if possible.

 

Good Exercise

• Aim to engage in purposeful resistance training at least twice a week.
• Aim to engage in some cardio-vascularly challenging activities throughout the week, even if it is just walking.
• Some exercise is good, but when stress is high, you may need to dial the intensity and volume of training back a little bit.

 

Good Sleep

• Aim to get at least 7-9 hours of sleep per night.
• Aim to incorporate at least some sort of wind-down time before bed, so you can actually get to sleep efficiently.
• Do NOT engage in stressful activities in the hour or so before bed (this is especially important if you find yourself doing stuff like checking work emails right before you go to bed, as this is just a recipe for poorer sleep quality).

 

Of course, if you can, then really getting these areas properly dialled in and optimised is going to be the best course of action. You can find more information about how to do that in the other foundational articles in this series (you can find the articles at the following links: Nutrition, Sleep, and (soon to be published) Exercise). As I said earlier, working on all of this stuff before you are overly stressed is the ideal, but you can still make some really positive improvements in these areas when dealing with stress and it will tend to help you better manage your stress overall.

 

 

While the common inclination is to abandon exercise, forego good sleep hygiene practices and to reach for poorer food choices, this really should be avoided if you want to manage your stress better. It can be incredibly difficult in practice, but staying relatively on track with these baseline health habits really does make it much easier to deal with stress longer term. Beyond the foundational health habits we have discussed elsewhere, there are many other things we can focus on to ensure we are better able to manage our stress. A lot of these wouldn’t necessarily be associated with stress management, but they do actually contribute to your overall stress management practice. We tend to only think of stress management in terms of what we can do to reduce stress, and that really doesn’t encompass all of the things we should be thinking about when discussing stress management. The following things all contribute to better stress management, although they aren’t always discussed in that way.

 

Meaning and Purpose

People who feel their life has meaning and purpose tend to be less stressed than those who don’t. Religion provided this security for humans in the past, but it doesn’t fulfil this role for many any more. So while I can’t offer much more than a simple statement of fact (that meaning and purpose tend to result in less stress), seeking out meaning and purpose in your own life can be helpful in managing stress.

 

Getting Out In Nature Regularly

Humans generally seem to have lower stress when they get fresh air and actually spend some time out in nature. This doesn’t have to be all the way out in nature, in the middle of nowhere, and even spending some time in manicured gardens and parks can be quite effective as a baseline stress management tool. If you can get out and walk in nature during the week, you will generally find that stress levels are more easily managed. So it certainly makes sense to schedule in some sort of nature time into your week, when we are trying to better manage stress.

 

Socialise

Humans are hypersocial creatures, and rather unsurprisingly, socialising with other humans tends to be good for health. While you may think other humans are the source of all your stress, in general, socialising with friends and family does tend to reduce stress. Of course, there are certain populations where this may not be the case (such as those experiencing social anxiety), but in general, having some sort of socialisation is important for good stress management. This is especially important in the internet age with remote work being very common these days. Many people simply don’t spend time actually socialising with other people, and this can be quite isolating and make good stress management difficult.

 

Engage in Hobbies

This is somewhat a repeat of the above point, as many hobbies involve a socialising component and help to reduce stress that way. However, even more introverted hobbies have the ability to help you manage stress better. This is both through a combination of serving as a distraction from the stressors (and thus allowing you to not fall into the trap of ruminating on the stressors) and usually being more of a PSNS activity. Some hobbies (especially sports) can actually be a significant stressor, and can contribute to more stress, rather than reducing it, but in general, having hobbies is a phenomenal way to help with baseline stress management.

 

Effective Goal Setting

Many times, stress is a part of your life because you have poor goal-setting practices in place. It is very common for people to have all of the goals, and no specific goals at the same time. They try to hedge their bets and never actually commit to any one course of action. This does actually cause a lot of stress as you have a million and one options open to you each day, but you always feel the burden of making a choice and closing off other options. While you would intuitively think that having lots of choice makes life less stressful, this isn’t necessarily the case. Yes, for sure, having options is a good thing, but having all of the options imaginable to humanity pulling at you all the time is a recipe for high levels of stress. This is often called the paradox of choice. It is very clearly illustrated when you go to get ice cream from an ice cream parlour. If they have 3-5 ice cream options, you might take a minute (at most) to make a decision and overall, it was probably a very unstressful event. However, if you go in and they have 50+ options for ice cream, you suddenly are presented with a much more stressful ordeal. If you make a choice, you then miss out on all the other options that you may also like. This is how most people approach their goals. They have multiple options available to them, and instead of committing to a goal, they sit there deliberating over which choice to make. They never fully commit, and as a result, they are left in stress-inducing limbo.

Accepting that you can’t do everything, and that you have to just commit to a goal does actually lead to less stress overall. You don’t have the weight of all the other potential goals weighing down on you anymore. You have committed to a single goal.

However, just because you have chosen a goal doesn’t mean you are now magically free from stress. Not at all. You see, you actually have to be able to accomplish that goal. Choosing a goal that is just not possible for you, or is not possible in the timeframe you want to accomplish it, is just another recipe for stress. People do this all the time with fat loss. They will choose fat loss as a goal (which can be a difficult enough goal at the best of times), and then they make it even harder by placing impossible time constraints on that goal too. Losing 10kg of body fat is a challenging goal in and of itself. Trying to do it in a month is just punishing yourself. These kinds of unrealistic goals are very common, and they generally just lead to excess stress that can be completely avoided by just setting more realistic goals.

So, while it generally isn’t thought of as a stress management practice, effective goal setting is a very important part of stress management. You have to actually sit down and identify your goals very clearly. Your goals need to be realistic, and you have to accept that by working towards certain goals, you are inherently not working towards other goals. So you are likely going to need to spend some time assessing what your priorities actually are.

 

Good Time Management, Prioritisation and Organisation Skills

Further to the last point, oftentimes, people make their lives far more stressful than they need to be, purely because they are not planning and scheduling ahead of time. If you leave everything to the last minute and do not allocate your time effectively, you are always going to feel like you are under stress. Everything is haphazard and you don’t know when things need to be done, when you are going to do them, and overall, things are chaotic.

You don’t have to get psychotic with your planning, but you should have a clear picture of when things need to be done, and when you are going to allocate time to doing them. This isn’t just for the stressors, it is also for the relaxing things. Everyone says they shouldn’t need to schedule in relaxation time, and that it should be spontaneous, and those very same people are the ones who end up never doing anything that is relaxing. If you don’t make room for it in your schedule, you won’t actually get it done. So improving your planning and scheduling is incredibly powerful for reducing stress levels, and it is something that people regularly skip, despite it being so impactful.

Good time management and organisational skills can be hard to develop, but this can be as simple as using the calendar on your smartphone to schedule out your week ahead of time. Then you just need to follow it. You won’t get it perfect the first time, but the more you do it, the better you will get at this.

 

Good Communication Skills

Lots of stress happens as a result of poor communication, and in general, good communication skills help to reduce stress for most people. This can actually be quite hard to develop, especially if you come from a culture where people don’t communicate effectively about their wants and needs. However, if you can develop better communication skills, you will generally see stress reduced and you will have better relationships with those around you, which will also help with stress management.

 

 

 

General Stress Management

The previous section covered lots of things that are going to help with stress management, but may not specifically be associated with stress management. They are good general practices that will lead to better stress management as a consequence, almost like a side effect. However, there are some things we can do more specifically to improve stress management, and more directly influence our stress. While we have discussed it multiple times, it bears stating again. Stress management isn’t just about what you do when you are stressed, it is also what you do all the other times that allow you to better deal with stress when it does occur. So while you do still need to work on generally good baseline practices (the previous section), you can then layer on more generalised stress management practices.

 

Identify Your Stressors

It can be quite difficult to address your stress, if you aren’t aware of where that stress is coming from. Having coached hundreds of people, I can tell you that most people are quite poor at really assessing where the stress in their life is coming from and thus they find it difficult to actually tackle the stress. Now, I certainly don’t want you to be hyper-vigilant looking for stress around every corner, but it does make sense to spend some time trying to identify the stressors in your life. The big ones are likely going to be easier to identify, but it is important to also pay attention to the smaller stressors, as they do all add up. Once you have a good idea of where the stress is coming form in your life, it is actually much easier to come up with specific stress management practices to help you deal with that issue.

The general practice that I get people to do is to write down all the things that stress them out throughout the day, along with a quantification of that stressor (i.e. where does it fall on a 1-10 scale, with 10 being all out stress, and 1 being a micro stressor). I also like people to just generally rate their overall stress level throughout the day, and then at the end of the day, give that day an overall rating. This way you can identify a lot of the sources of stress in your life, and you can more clearly see what times of day you are more stressed, and what days are more stressful for you. This is all very valuable information.

One of the key tasks with any stress management practice is going to be reducing stressors. I can almost guarantee you that right now, there are lots of things on your stress list that can just be removed from your life, with no consequence, and would only serve to make your life better. There are also things on your list that can be sorted out very easily, rather than having them be a frequent daily stressor. Lots of the things that are on your stress list are just meaningless stressors, and while they may not be massive stressors in and of themselves, they do all add up. As we noted in the baseline stress management section, some of the stressors in your life can also be eliminated with better organisational and time management skills, along with good communication skills. While there are no quick fixes for either of these, hopefully by writing down all of your stressors you will see that working on those skills are actually quite important, and will lead to reduced stress in your life (and thus will lead to a better life overall).

 

Change Your Life Situation

Now, some of you will write down your stressors and realise that your life situation is just very stressful. Sometimes, there just isn’t much you can do about this, but sometimes, there is. This is the most unrealistic of suggestions we will give, but if you lead an extremely stressful lifestyle or you are in a situation where you are just exposed to lots of stressors, sometimes you will just need to radically change your life situation. Doing most of the other stress management techniques are just less effective when your life situation is really working against you. That doesn’t mean you don’t try, and most people can drastically improve their stress levels, even when in very stressful situations. However, we can’t promise miracles and we need to be realistic here. If you are struggling with finances, work stress is high, your marriage is falling apart and a loved one is sick, stress is going to be high, even if you do everything else on the list. Sometimes you can change your life situation, such as changing jobs, but sometimes you can’t and sometimes you have to just grind through the stressful times, because you know it will be less stressful on the other side. If you know there is a light at the end of the tunnel to your stress (i.e. this is just a stressful period in work), then it really makes sense to double down on the other stress management techniques so you actually have the resilience to survive the stress.

For a lot of people, finances are a big contributor to their stress, and unfortunately, there is no quick fix to that. The fixes for poor finances generally involve more stress, whether it is working more hours or getting more education, and that is just very difficult to do when stress is already high. Again, I don’t have a quick fix for this, and I always find the content online about this stuff incredibly patronising (as if you didn’t know earning more money would solve your money problems!). But if you can improve your life situation, then that is naturally going to lead to reductions in stress.

 

Life Periodisation

This is somewhat related to the last point, as you may not need to massively change your life situation, rather you just need to organise and schedule your life a little bit better to allow for better stress management. In training, we often cycle through various periods of training, with the goal of developing certain attributes, and we call this periodisation. This very same concept can be applied to your life. Similarly, in training, we can manage our overall fatigue and training stress by utilising a concept called auto-regulation. Auto-regulation is effectively the process by which you push harder or go easier in any given training session or training week, based on the rest of your life stressors and how fatigued you are from training (and life). Again, this same principle can be applied to your life.

You have to realise that you can’t always be go-go-go, and you need some sort of periodic breaks to allow fatigue to reduce. This is the whole reasoning why most religions and cultures have holy days and periodic holidays. There needs to be some downtime if you want to actually be ready to be productive in your life. Now, the unfortunate thing is, most people have very demanding jobs, and they spend a lot of their (supposed) downtime looking after tasks that need to be done for their home life. So they are stressed in work, and then when they are supposed to be resting, they end up doing stressful things. The things may actually be enjoyable, such as going on a trip or attending an event, but these things are generally still contributing to stress and more often than not, you don’t feel “rejuvenated” after them. Usually, this is also further compounded by a reduction in sleep too, so you go into the next week in a worse position, even though on paper, you have had time off work. There is no easy fix for this, but you do just have to acknowledge that if work is excessively stressful, you are going to need to actually organise some sort of downtime into your week. This can be in the form of hobbies, and it certainly can include going on trips or attending events, but you just need to actually spend some time during the week without some sort of stress being added to the system. This doesn’t mean you have to do absolutely nothing, but you should ideally have some time allocated to your week where you genuinely feel like stress has been significantly reduced as a result of that activity. You need to apply some sort of auto-regulatory framework to your week, and realise that if you push hard on one day, you are going to need to pull back another.

 

 

Now, this also applies to the longer time scales too, and just like with periodisation of your training, periodising your life makes a lot of sense. Now, this isn’t always easy, but if you can organise your life in a way that you do actually have a good work-life balance, that would be ideal. You can do this basically two ways. You can either use the sprint or marathon model. With the sprint model, you accept higher stress levels, but you do this for a shorter period of time. Some people feel that they work better when there is a deadline and they don’t mind working that little bit harder and accepting more stress to hit that deadline. After the deadline is hit, they rest for a while, allowing stress to reduce and their systems recover, before getting on to the next task. The marathon model aims to keep stress lower overall, at a more moderate and manageable level, and they just maintain this pace for longer, then having a break, resting and recovering, before getting on to the next task. Unfortunately, what most people try to do is sprint a marathon, and never take a break. This just isn’t sustainable and while some people can run marathons very quickly, nobody is actually sprinting a marathon. You need to establish if you are someone who performs better with the sprint and rest model, or the marathon and rest model, and then try to organise your life accordingly. Unfortunately for most, their work is usually not set up in a way that aligns with good stress management overall, and realistically, they are going to try and get you to sprint a marathon. So there likely will be some friction (and stress) here as a result, and navigating this can be tricky, and you will just have to do your best to better align what works well for you and what your work requires.

There are going to be busier time periods in your work year, and there are going to be busier time periods in your life. When I coach someone, we generally map out their year and all that they have going on. It is incredibly helpful to just write this stuff down and map it all out across the year, as you will see that you do actually have some rather intense periods, and you also have periods where you have a bit more downtime. Once you see this stuff mapped out, you will realise that there are certain periods of time where you are going to have to pull back on certain things, and there are other periods where you can really put the foot down and push forward with other things. For example, I have many clients that have very intense periods of work at certain times of the year (i.e. accountants have very intensive work periods around the end of the fiscal year), and as a result, it doesn’t make sense to be pushing their training extremely hard during these times, as they are just going to be dealing with a much bigger stress load at these times. So dialling back the overall training stress can make sense until the stressful period in work is over, and then we can think about how to start ramping training back up. You don’t have to be redlining absolutely everything at the same time, which is what most people try to do, and instead, you can periodise your year and focus on different things at different times. This really is helpful, even though it seems incredibly straightforward. For example, mapping out your year may help you identify that you have a lot of events on during a certain time period, and as a result, fat loss may be a very challenging goal at that time. It may make more sense to eat at maintenance during that time period, instead of feeling like you are a failure at dieting because you tried to diet during a particularly busy period of the year for you.

Now, one of the things that goes along with this sprint or marathon model is the actual rest period. In the training world, we often follow a period of intensive training with a “deload”, where you reduce the training stress and allow the body to recover and come back stronger. This same principle applies to your life stress, and you need to have some downtime to allow the body to recover and come back stronger. For most people, this takes the form of a holiday (“vacations” for the Americans reading). As you are probably limited in the amount of holiday days you can take from your work, you probably aren’t going to be able to take as much downtime across the year as you would like. Your boss is probably not going to accept you taking an “easy” week after you complete a task. So it is going to be difficult to really organise downtime, and it becomes even more important to actually use your holiday time strategically. Ideally, organising holidays where you can fully decompress and just relax would ideally be timed so as to come after very busy periods of time in work. This isn’t always possible, but that would be an ideal set-up. Further complicating this is the fact that a lot of people don’t just go on holidays to rest and relax, and many people turn their holidays into stressful experiences. I am quite guilty of this myself, as I will go on holidays somewhere and then try to cramp as much adventure as possible into that trip. I will try to visit all the historical and cultural attractions, along with whatever nature is close by. Rarely will you see me just relaxing by the pool on a holiday, even though I do find myself significantly less stressed when I do this. So, if stress management is the goal, we ideally don’t want to turn our holiday downtime into another stressor.

While it would be phenomenal to be able to take a trip to a lake in the mountain forests (or to the beach, if you are that way inclined) frequently throughout the year, but this just isn’t realistic for most people. So you are just going to have to try and organise some sort of downtime throughout your year strategically, in whatever ways you can. This can be something as simple as just reducing your extracurricular tasks for a week, after a stressful period in work. It could be as simple as not organising for work to be done on your house during or immediately after that stressful time period in work. It can also mean forgoing certain events and commitments, so you can actually spend time relaxing. I know this can be incredibly difficult, especially if you have a young family to look after too, but there are usually some things we can do to strategically organise our year to allow for better stress management.

Now, while this may seem counterintuitive, what can also be very helpful for improving stress management, is actually organising what I call “reset days” (or very often “reset weeks”). Most people have a load of tasks that are just on their task list that are contributing to their stress levels, but they never actually get done, because they aren’t “high priority” tasks. All too often we find ourselves stressed out because of an ever expanding task list. While you can practice all the good stress management habits in the world, the reality is very often just that you have a lot of things that need to be done and you are going to be somewhat stressed until you actually tackle them. Setting aside “reset days” (or weeks) where you just tackle all of the little tasks on your task list can really significantly improve your stress. This can look incredibly different for different people, and it can be as simple as setting aside a day or two to clean your house, or it can be setting aside a chunk of time to get yourself booked in for your doctor, dentist, optometrist etc appointments. We all have these tasks that we put on the long finger and while individually, the tasks are usually not that stressful, the combination of the hundred tasks on your task list can really add to your stress levels. It seems counterintuitive that doing more work and specifically doing the tasks that are contributing to your stress would actually lead to a reduction in stress, but this does actually work. Too often stress management discussion focus on things that you can do to reduce your stress, while avoiding the elephant in the room that is, completing the tasks that are contributing to your stress will actually reduce your stress. So, if you find yourself with a lot of little tasks on your list, or even bigger tasks that you know have been weighing on your mind for awhile, organise a reset day and just get them done. You will usually find you are a lot less stressed as a result!

 

Planning and Organising

Building on this last point, and the fact that very often you can only reduce stress by actually clearing out your to do list, is planning and organising. We touched on this as a baseline stress management practice, but it is both a baseline habit you should be engaging in to manage stress more generally, and it is a habit you can utilise to reduce and manage your stress when you need to. Very often a lot of your stress is a combination of the specific tasks you have to get done AND not having a plan for getting them done. They are just things that are just carrying around, constantly taking up some of your cognitive bandwidth and stress capacity. Creating a plan of action, even if it isn’t the absolute “best” plan of action will generally be quite helpful for dealing with stress.

For most people, the process is quite straightforward. You just need to write down all of the tasks you need to complete and then you need to rank them in terms of their priority, and then you can schedule them into your day/week/month. Some people like to tackle the bigger more difficult tasks first, while others like to tackle smaller tasks first and build some momentum. I don’t think it matters too much which way you go about things, the main thing is you just need to start clearing your list of tasks. You may have to spend some time researching how to actually accomplish the tasks on your list, and some of the tasks on your list may just be difficult to complete because you are waiting on other people, but we aren’t looking to be perfect with this stuff. We are just looking to reduce our overall stress burden by actively completing all of our tasks, or at the very least working towards the goal of completing them.

Having a plan of action for this stuff really does seem to reduce stress for many people, and very often just creating a plan is enough to really reduce stress. I am sure you have had the experience of being extra stressed about something because you simply have not even started it, and thus don’t even know how big of a task it is going to be. It is not just the stress of the task you are carrying around, it is the stress of not knowing how much time and effort you are going to have to dedicate to the task too. Once you actually look into the task a little bit deeper and have a better idea of how much time and effort you are going to have to allocate to it, you will usually find that your stress about that task is greatly reduced. While we often fall into the strategy of avoidance when confronted with stressors (and this is natural, as the SNS response is “fight or flight” and this is just part of that “flight” component), in the modern world, you, unfortunately, can’t opt out of many of the things that are causing you stress. While running away from a stressor may have worked for our primitive ancestors, running away from modern stressors is rarely a successful strategy for dealing with the issue and it usually just leads to more stress. Imagine that your strategy to deal with an unexpected bill is to just run away from it. The issue just compounds as a result, and it becomes a much bigger stressor to deal with later on. So while the temptation is to just avoid tasks on your list, and effectively try to run away from them, this is generally just a maladaptive stress management strategy in the modern world. You would be much better served to tackle the tasks head on, create a plan of action to deal with them and then actually have them cleared off your task list and no longer contributing to your stress.

 

Journalling

Somewhat related to planning and scheduling is the act of journalling. Journalling is actually quite powerful as a stress reducer, and yet, people are very resistant to doing it. At its heart, all it is really just writing down your thoughts and feelings, perhaps reflecting on the day, and basically just checking in with yourself to see what is rattling around in your head. You don’t have to get excessive with this, and simply writing down your thoughts on a notepad or even in your notes app on your phone, is incredibly useful. You can do this at any stage throughout the day, although it is particularly useful before bed. This is because you can use it as a “brain dump”, and prevent your thoughts from swirling around in your head and keeping you from sleeping. You would be surprised at how much quicker you get to sleep when you empty your head of all those thoughts. Quite often, we keep thinking these thoughts purely as a way to not forget them. Writing them down removes the potential for forgetting them, and thus reduces the stress. When dealing with sleep issues, especially related to feeling like your thoughts are running wild right when you are supposed to be trying to sleep, journalling can be very effective. It is one of the habits I will often recommend to my clients when they have sleep issues, even though it technically falls under the category of “stress management”. But as we discussed in the sleep article, very often, stress management techniques are actually our best tools for improving sleep.

Now, journalling does take some time to get used to, but it can be quite effective. I always view journalling as a way to reflect on the day, and identify what went well and what didn’t go to plan. Then you can use that information to make the next day better. For some people, their journalling may deal more with their emotional issues, and for others, it may simply be a place to organise their thoughts and their schedule. There is no set format you have to follow, it is your journal. Having said that, there are multiple journal templates you can find online, either as just templates you can copy and follow, or as specific pre-formatted products you can buy and use. Ultimately, the specific way you go about this is probably less important than the fact that you actually did some journaling.

Like a lot of these things, this is a habit that is even better if you build the skill and practice of doing it before you are overly stressed. I know for most people, the last thing they want to do when stress is high is to sit down and spend 5-20 minutes writing down how stressful their day was and how that made them feels, even if they do feel better after it. This is especially true if you have never journaled before, and now there is the added stress of having to try something new. So building the practice of doing this as a more general practice is likely a very good idea, which will then be more helpful when you do find yourself in a more stressful period.

 

Develop a Resilient Mindset

This one is a bit beyond the scope of this article, but it does pertain to your overall stress management strategies. You see, our mindset and the way we view the events in our life is not fixed. It is something that you can change over time. You know how some people seem to just take whatever life throws at them in their stride, while others seem to be stressed out about even minor inconveniences, well this isn’t a fixed characteristic. While there is definitely some genetic components to this, along with previous life history and stress exposures (and thus adaptations), humans have the ability to change their mindset and outlook on life.

Now, I don’t mean to say that you can simply think your way out of being anxious, depressed, extremely stressed etc. That is just wishful thinking, and it simply isn’t reality. However, you can change your mindset around how you view stressors and the things going on in your life, and as a result, become more resilient to stress. As we discussed earlier, part of the stress response is your perception of that stressor. If public speaking is something you have always dreaded, then being asked to give a presentation to a group of people is going to be a very stressful event. However, if you change your mindset on this and view the event as an opportunity to develop your public speaking abilities, and potentially advance your life academically/financially or otherwise, then your interaction with that stressor changes. This isn’t an easy process, and I am simply not going to lie to you and tell you that changing your mindset is a quick, painless and easy task. If it was, then nobody would ever have to deal with stress, as we would simply switch our mindset and view everything as a positive.

Now, it is going to be quite difficult to develop a more resilient mindset if you are simply unaware of your current thinking and thought patterns. So developing a deeper level of introspection is required to be able to then reconstruct them in a manner that is better suited to helping you deal with stress. This is where the practice of mindfulness comes in. Mindfulness is simply the practice of intentionally bringing your attention to the present moment and your experience of that present moment (generally, this manifests as your present moment thoughts and feelings). This is what many people try to accomplish with practices such as meditation (which we will discuss in a moment), and by developing the practice in a more controlled environment (meditation), they can then utilise that practice in their everyday life. Now, the goal of mindfulness is not actually to evaluate and then change your experience, it is simply to develop a greater ability to actually be present in the moment and to actually connect with your thoughts and feelings. Developing this ability allows you to realise that you are not your thoughts or ideas, they are simply things that pop into your head. You can just as easily ignore them as you can act on them, and they do not define you as a person. This is a very valuable skill to develop when it comes to stress management, as developing that ability to be more mindful throughout your day really does make you more aware of how you interact with the world and what you are thinking and feeling in response to the various stressors you are exposed to.

Now, it is beyond the scope of this article, but you can then use this improved ability to connect with your thoughts and feelings to then be more intentional with your actions in response to them. This is where you build that more resilient mindset. Entire branches of philosophy and psychology are concerned with how to go about this, so I simply won’t be able to expand on this adequately. However, stoicism is a branch of philosophy that is particularly helpful here. While modern culture erroneously thinks of stoicism as simply being stone-cold emotionally, with no deviation from neutral, this is not an accurate representation of the core tenet of stoicism and it disregards the fact that stoicism is the foundation of many talk therapies (such as cognitive behavioural therapy, which we will discuss in a moment). The core tenet of stoicism is that you can not control the outside world, you can only control how you react. In the context of stress management, stoicism can be incredibly effective for helping you develop a resilient mindset, as it teaches you to focus on what you can actually control. However, there is obviously more to developing a resilient mindset than simply reading stoic philosophy. I can’t provide you with a framework for this, and I simply want you to realise that your mindset is not fixed, and you can change it to become more resilient in the face of stress.

 

Meditation

Meditation is the name for a variety of different methods, all with the goal of training awareness and attention. This usually involves some form of breath work, and mental techniques to either focus or quieten the mind. You can find a variety of meditation tutorials online, and there are a variety of apps that can help you develop a meditation practice. Many people use meditation as a way to practice mindfulness, and thus develop their mindset, but meditation does also have specific benefits for stress management in and of itself.

Meditation can be thought of as a tool to encourage more PSNS activity, and thus reduce some of your stress load. It is basically an opportunity for you to spend some time in that PSNS state, and allow some of the stress to wash away. Spending some time allowing your body to relax, while focusing on something other than your stress can be incredibly beneficial for helping you reduce stress specifically when you are stressed, but also, if you practice it regularly, it is something that allows you to actually stay ahead of getting too stressed.

The exact specifics of the meditation practice can actually look wildly different, depending on what style of meditation you engage with. Some of them are going to be better at helping you deal with stress, and some of them you just aren’t going to vibe with as much. So you may have to try out a few different meditation practices, before you settle on one that you feel works well for you.

 

 

Breath Work

Breathing techniques are surprisingly beneficial for reducing stress. These are very often done as part of meditation practices, but they can be done independently of meditation. When you are stressed, your breathing tends to get shallower and quicker, and we can “trick” the nervous system into activating the PSNS by practicing deep, slow breathing. It is generally best done through the nose, but even mouth breathing will work. There are a variety of methods for this, but starting with 5-10 deep, slow breaths (3-5 seconds in, and 3-5 seconds out) is incredibly effective. You can do this multiple times per day, as a way to get relaxed before stressful events, to relax during them and to then relax after them.

This is probably one of our most effective tools to help with stress management, as you can use it proactively and retroactively, and you will see benefits. However, most people will still skip past this and not implement some sort of breath work into their stress management practices. It is literally free and easy to do, and yet, when you are stressed, you will make up every excuse under the sun as to why you should not do this. If you take nothing else from this entire article, and you only implement one tool, it should be this one. There are many forms of breath work, and they all potentially work slightly differently, but for stress management, we basically just want to slow the breathing rate down, and allow the body to relax.

 

Moving Meditation

There are forms of meditation that also utilise movement as a way to reduce stress and connect the body with the mind. Yoga is a classic example of this, although Tai Chi is also quite well known. Ultimately, we want to use movement to get into a meditative state, and often, breath work is combined in this practice. There are many videos online and apps that can bring you through guided moving meditations (yoga and Tai Chi are the most accessible, although there are other options). You can use stretching for this purpose if you do want to go it alone, and doing some light stretching or movements while focusing on deep slow breaths can be quite effective for reducing stress.

You could argue that even more “intense” forms of movement such as field sports or martial arts can also be a form of moving meditation. Generally, any movement that you do where you are free-flowing and connecting with the body and not being distracted by the different stressors going on in your life can be beneficial for stress management. However, this is a bit of a grey area, because these more intense activities can actually be quite stressful, and potentially don’t build that longer-term mindfulness. While getting into a flow state certainly has stress management benefits, I am hesitant to just bunch all movements and sports together under this moving meditation category (even though my bias is to actually consider them as a form of moving meditation). The benefits are less consistent with these other forms of moving meditation and I know people will try to justify their excessive exercise habits as “moving meditation”. People will also claim they are getting the same benefits from something like resistance training, despite spending 75% of their workout resting between sets getting stressed out by scrolling on social media, while stimmed out of their minds on caffeine. So, we can’t get too loose with our terminology and categorisation here, and while there is the potential for various movement practices to fall under this category, they would need to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.

 

Reduce/Remove Stimulants and Recreational Substance Use

Now we move to the more unpopular stuff. As this section is concerned with more generalised stress management practices that you can use specifically for stress management, I would be remiss if I did not cover these things. I know I already mentioned this stuff briefly in the previous section on baseline stress management practices, but this section is more concerned with helping you deal with stress more specifically, and thus this stuff becomes more important. While reducing caffeine and alcohol makes sense as a baseline stress management practice, if you are currently dealing with more stress than you would like or you envisage a stressful period of time coming up, then it makes even more sense to reduce/remove certain substances.

Caffeine is a crutch for most people, which unfortunately leads to increased stress in their lives. People don’t work on their sleep habits, and then load up on caffeine to get them through the day. Caffeine itself is a stressor, and as it interferes with sleep and provides a way for people to medicate away the signals from the body that it requires more sleep, it is, unfortunately, something that may have to be removed/reduced for some individuals when we are looking to better manage stress. At the very least, caffeine should be confined to the earlier half of the day, and ideally kept below 200-400mg per day. Many people do actually find this quite difficult to do, and it is very easy to fool yourself into believing that you need the coffee to actually be productive and deal with the stress in your life. But in reality, it just leads to more stress that has to be dealt with, and due to decreasing sleep quality, it leads to poorer recovery from stress, and thus less productivity (and more stress) over time. You end up hammering lots of caffeine to just get to a normal baseline level of functioning, and as caffeine is a central nervous system stimulant, you likely also get a lot of side effects from that caffeine use that overlap with the effects you are experiencing from stress.

 

 

Some people may also be using other stimulants to improve their productivity and work capacity (or just recreationally), and these will also likely contribute to stress and their use will have to be reduced or eliminated. Of course, if these are medically prescribed drugs, then you will need to speak to your doctor about the excessive stress related side effects you are experiencing from their use in combination with your lifestyle. Your doctor can then more specifically adjust your prescription. But for most people who don’t have a prescription for the recreational stimulants they take, if you are experiencing higher levels of stress, it really does make a lot of sense to reduce or eliminate the use of these substances.

Removing (or at least reducing) nicotine use is also a very good idea if you are dealing with stress, as much like caffeine, nicotine is a stimulant. While you might find that smoking a cigarette acutely helps you deal with your stress, and there are certainly stresses involved in quitting nicotine, looking at things in the bigger picture, nicotine use is only contributing to your stress and reducing your capacity to deal with stress.

Removing alcohol is another really important step in stress management practices. Despite popular opinion, alcohol is actually a significant stressor in a lot of people’s lives. It may momentarily provide a sort of “stress relief”, and using that glass of wine (or two) each night to wind down may transiently allow for a reduction of stress, it does generally interfere with productive sleep and chronic alcohol intake like this generally leads to poorer health outcomes and it is putting the body under more stress. You may be able to get away with a small amount of alcohol, but don’t fool yourself into thinking that your alcohol use is actually helping you with your stress. In reality, many people find that once they remove alcohol from their life, their chronic stress and anxiety symptoms all but vanish.

Similar to alcohol, many people turn to cannabis to help with their stress. Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to be a great stress management practice either. While there is research to support the potential use of some compounds within cannabis for stress reduction, on the whole, this does not seem to be a great long term strategy. There are many negative health effects associated with smoking cannabis, especially chronically and at higher dosages. So while there is potential promise here, the juice generally isn’t worth the squeeze on this one. You get a host of potential negative effects, without a very clear and long term benefit.

 

Stress Supplements

It would be great if we could just pop a pill and reduce stress, but unfortunately, despite many companies’ claims, this isn’t possible. There are a variety of supplements that have been put forward as tools to reduce stress, from recreational drugs such as marijuana to adaptogenic herbs such as ginseng, but they all come with downsides or are just very ineffective.

You may see the following recommendations:

• CBD,
• Emodin,
• Phosphatidyl serine,
• Ashwagandha,
• Panax ginseng,
• Ginkgo Biloba and
• L-theanine.

However, while there is some research to support to use of some of these, they should only be considered the cherry on the cake, rather than the cake itself. Popping a supplement may help, but if you do nothing to change the situations that are stressing you, or you don’t build resilience long-term, then you are unlikely to adequately deal with the stress without the use of the supplement. Habits beat supplements every day of the week, and while it can be alluring to consider supplementing to help with stress, it is only something I would look into once every other option has been exhausted. You don’t want to spend your time picking up pennies when you are stepping over hundred-pound notes. Further to this, many of these supplements just aren’t that effective, and may also come along with negative side effects too. So supplementation is not without risk, and due to being so much less effective than general stress management habits, I tend to steer clear of supplementation until a very solid base of good habits is built.

 

Distress Management

Now, while the previous section expanded into some more general stress management practices, that combined with the more foundational practices that also help with stress, we need to round out this discussion with some tactics you can use when stress is already quite high. While the other stuff helps you to deal with stress more broadly, and some of these practices are effective acutely, they are all things that feel like they are just working in the background and not actually helping you immediately with the issue at hand. I hate when you read stress management articles online and they give you the most vague, generalised advice, which I am sure is great for the search rankings, but it really isn’t helpful to the average person. What you want are the generalised skills for sure, but you also want to know what to do more specifically to deal with stress right now. So that is what we will cover in this section, but do realise that to deal with a specific issue for an individual, you do actually need specific and individualised advice. So I will still be speaking in a more generalised way, and you will need to take the general concept of the information and apply it to your life.

 

Auto-Regulation

We touched on this before, as a more general concept (and we will actually expand on this more in the foundational training article), but I think it is incredibly helpful to actually see what this would look like in practice when dealing with a stressful period of time. As most of you reading this are also interested in your general health and fitness, it is important to understand how to manipulate your training, diet and sleep when dealing with higher stress. The basic premise of auto-regulation in this context is that you only have so much capacity for stressors, and when life is stressful, you want to try and reduce the other stressors in your life and effectively create more capacity. As a result, we want to reduce training and nutrition stress, while also trying to really nail good sleep quality and quantity.

So how do we do this? Well, the following guidelines generally apply, although you don’t necessarily need to do all of them:

 

Training

• Reduce the volume of training (i.e. fewer sets).
• Reduce the number of training days (i.e. have more recovery days in between).
• Reduce the training intensity (both in terms of proximity to failure and in the relative percentage of maximum capacity that is used)
• If you are an athlete in season and you simply can’t afford to reduce your training, then your only option here will be to try and increase recovery strategies and modalities (the most effective of which is sleep), such as foam rolling, heat therapies, etc. (these generally aren’t all that effective, especially long term, but may provide some acute reductions in overall stress load).

 

Nutrition

• Eat at maintenance (high and low calories can be stressors).
• Eat a generally high-quality, anti-inflammatory diet.
• Ensure micronutrient and macronutrient intake is adequate.
• Ensure adequate hydration and electrolyte intake.

 

Sleep

• Try to get enough sleep, and put a large emphasis on good sleep hygiene practices.

 

Nothing particularly fancy, but it is important to realise that you can adjust your other foundational habits to allow for improved recovery and to prioritise stress management. Far too often we see people try to stick to their calorie deficit and high training volume, despite their stress being through the roof. It generally just leads to burnout and a poorer overall response to the diet and training.

This concept of auto-regulation also applies to your life as discussed, and if you are dealing with higher levels of stress, then modifying the other commitments and things in your life to accommodate this would be ideal. Of course, this generally isn’t always possible, but for most people, there are things that they can do to create some breathing room. This could be as simple as not spending your time on social media when you are stressed, if you know that social media does actually contribute to your stress. It could mean asking your partner to pick up a few extra chores in the house this week. It could be asking your boss for an extension on a deadline for a low-priority project. You get the idea, you just want to create some capacity to actually allow yourself to deal with the stress.

 

Relaxation Techniques

Beyond just modifying your life to allow for more stress capacity and reducing your overall stress burden, you can also acutely lower your stress. If we imagine stress as a pot of boiling water, when it is boiling over, the best remedy is to remove the pot from the heat. You could certainly get a bigger pot or remember to use a lower heat or boil for a shorter duration next time, but they don’t really solve the problem right now. There are specific strategies we can use in the moment, to help us take our pot of stress off the heat source.

Broadly, while there are a multitude of “relaxation techniques”, they all generally utilise one or more of the following practices to reduce stress acutely:

1. Deep breathing exercises
2. Meditation and mindfulness
3. Progressive muscle relaxation
4. Guided imagery and visualisation

 

Deep breathing, as we discussed before, is probably our most effective tool for modulating stress levels. There are many specific methods for breathing, but they all generally follow the formula or focusing of deep slow, diaphragmatic breathing. You aren’t looking to take these short shallow breaths, instead, you are trying to take deep, full, slow breaths. If you are feeling high levels of stress, then taking 5-10 deep, slow breaths will help you quickly reduce the feelings of stress. Of course, you can benefit from more too! But I know this is something that most people are somewhat resistant to at first, so I am not going to recommend that you spend 5-20 minutes doing deep slow breaths to get a handle on your stress, because I know you simply won’t do that!

Meditation and mindfulness we also already touched on, and while the benefits from this are generally better with a more long term practice, you can use some form of meditation and/or mindfulness to acutely help you reduce stress. Some sort of meditation and deep breathing are probably the tools that are most often recommended for dealing with stress. There is a reason for this, they are very effective.

Progressive muscle relaxation is something that can also be layered onto the previous two. The basic premise is that you mentally scan your body and as you go through the various parts of your body, you then relax these body parts. There are different specific practices for this, from just focusing on relaxing each muscle all the way to more complicated methods which involve alternating flexing and relaxing the muscles. Many people do find benefit in progressive muscle relaxation which also involves flexing the muscles, and while there are different protocols, the basic premise is that you first tense each body part individually during the body scan and then you focus on relaxing those body parts. So you may begin in your feet, focusing on tensing the muscles in the feet, and then focus on relaxing and releasing all the tension in your feet. You would then work your way up your body, doing the same with your calves, quads, hamstrings, glutes and so on all the way through the body. A lot of people find that when they are stressed they tend to tense up certain muscles, and learning to relax these muscles, while also building a better awareness of what it feels like to be tense vs relaxed, can be very helpful. It can help relax the body, but it also makes it easier to notice when you are getting stressed in the future, as you have a better awareness of when your muscles are tensed up, so this can be a very beneficial practice.

Guided imagery and visualisation can also be very effective for dealing with stress. This can be facilitated by a professional, but you can also learn how to do this yourself via online resources. The basic premise is that you learn to focus on a positive mental image or scene, that you can then use to help you better deal with stress. For example, you may really build out the image you have in your head of a beautiful place you visited, where you felt very relaxed. You develop the ability to really feel like you are present in that place and feel very safe, secure and relaxed. Now, you have a little place in your head that you can go to when you need to relax. Of course, it is more complex than that and it isn’t generally as straightforward as simply thinking of a nice image in your head. But this can be surprisingly effective for helping you to deal with stress, and to relax.

There are many other relaxation techniques, but they all generally fall into one or more of these broad categories. I generally recommend that people try out a few different modalities, as different people react differently to different protocols, and while it does take some time to get into the rhythm of a certain method (and thus you have to stick with it a little while before turning your attention elsewhere), you may find that certain modalities just work way better for you. So there is some experimentation to be expected with relaxation techniques.

 

Coping Mechanisms

This isn’t exactly a method to manage distress, but it is something that can help longer term. You likely have a variety of coping mechanisms that you have built up over the years, and you may not even be aware of these. While it is generally not the right time to try and change these coping mechanisms when you are actively dealing with high levels of stress (although sometimes it can be), this is an opportune time to actually practice some mindfulness and introspection and try to identify maladaptive coping mechanisms. Perhaps you turn to food as a coping mechanism, and find yourself relying on hyper-palatable foods to help you deal with stress. Perhaps you turn to alcohol or drugs. Perhaps you socially isolate yourself. Perhaps you lash out at those around you. Perhaps you listen to sad music. Etc. etc.

We all have certain things we do in response to higher stress levels. Very often these coping mechanisms really don’t serve us, and for long-term stress management, we need to be able to identify these things and then work on changing them. Again, trying to change them when you are already stressed to breaking point may not be the right time, but you can try to identify them and then reflect on them later, while trying to come up with better strategies for the future.

 

Post Stress Recovery

So far we have actually covered a lot about how to deal with stress, and some things work in the moment and some things work over a longer time period. However, what often gets forgotten in this whole discussion is what to do after a high-stress period. Yes, there is a discussion of more broadly what to do for stress management and how to better handle things when you are under more stress, but there is rarely a discussion of what to do after stress. This is a vital part of overall stress management, although it is actually quite difficult to pinpoint a precise plan of action for what to do after stress, because stress can be such a varied experience and the exact plan would need to be crafted on a case-by-case basis. However, the way I tend to explain to my clients what we are trying to do with “post-stress management” is to pay back the stress debt that we have accumulated by being stressed. We basically want to bring the body back to that homeostatic point where we have our stress well managed. Things will generally come back to this point over time, without you necessarily doing anything to address the stress debt, but this isn’t always optimal or guaranteed. Dealing with this stress debt without any specific direct plan is like paying back your debt with the minimal monthly repayment. Yes, it gets paid back eventually, but it takes a very long time. It also potentially leaves you on the back foot if you then encounter another stress debt creating event. You just end up digging yourself further and further into stress debt, and it takes much more effort to get back to breaking even, let alone adapting.

So, ideally, we want to pay back that stress debt as quickly as possible, and allow the body to spend more time without excess stress debt holding it back. We have a number of general tools we can do to help with this, but again, you would ideally create a specific plan of action for your unique situation. I should also note that sometimes it can be very difficult to pay back that stress debt, and you may need some professional help for this. This is especially the case with extremely traumatic events that cause a lot of stress debt to be racked up very quickly. With that in mind, the following things can broadly help with paying back that stress debt quickly.

Getting more sleep is probably one of the biggest hitters when it comes to paying back that stress debt. Unfortunately, high stress can make it difficult to get good sleep, but it really does pay off to focus a lot on getting more sleep when stress is higher.

After a stressful event, it can really help to verbalise your thoughts on the stressful event, and to not just leave those thoughts rattling around your brain in a disorganised manner. You can do this with something like journalling or you can do this by talking to someone about the stress (a friend or professional). This is actually surprisingly effective, and if you do discuss the stress with someone, you do get the added benefit of some degree of socialising which can also help to bring you back to baseline.

As I just noted, socialising can be quite helpful for bringing you back to baseline and overcoming the stress. It is rare that withdrawing from society actually helps you to better deal with stress. Going for a walk in nature with your friends while discussing the stressful event and basically debriefing after the event can be quite beneficial on multiple fronts.

Engaging in your hobbies can also really help with this return to homeostasis. Hobbies tend to provide a place for you to decompress and not have the thoughts about the stressor swirling around your head. Unfortunately, when stress is high, we tend to not engage with our hobbies, and from speaking to many people about this through coaching, most people seem to stop doing their hobbies because of a stressful event and then never get back into the swing of the hobby again. So, if you do avoid your hobby/hobbies because stress is high, do try to get back to it/them as soon as you can!

In general, you want to engage in activities that activate the PSNS and I have noted many of these throughout this article. There are going to be certain things that you find particularly effective for rejuvenating the body and activating that PSNS side of things. For some of you, it may be doing more of your hobbies, or maybe meditating, or journalling, or any number of things we have discussed that activate the PSNS. Unfortunately, when you are dealing with chronic stress, it can be quite difficult to get enough PSNS activating activities in your week. So you do have to make a concerted effort to try and set aside some time to actually rest and recover after a stressful period.

 

Professional Stress Management 

There is only so much you can do yourself with stress management. Sometimes you do need professional help to manage your stress. This is something that a lot of people are hesitant to engage with, but seeking professional help for your stress can be really effective for a lot of people. The thing that very often prevents people from engaging with professional help is that they minimise their stress. It is very common to hear people say stuff like “well, my stress isn’t that bad, there are people out there that have been to war or experienced significant traumatic events” or something along those lines. They minimise the magnitude of their own stress by comparing it to the extreme stressors that humans have undergone. However, this is an incorrect thought process. As we discussed earlier in this article, stress is heavily influenced by perception, and you build up resilience to stress over time by being exposed to slightly greater stressors, so just because someone had built resilience to a specific extreme stressor, doesn’t mean that you have that same level of resilience. So, you shouldn’t minimise the magnitude of how that stress feels for you. If you are dealing with a level of stress that you simply can’t get a handle on, you may benefit from professional help. There are a number of ways professionals can help, and we would recommend speaking to your doctor about this to get more specific advice about what would suit you best. There are also a number of stress disorders that you will simply need the help of a medical professional to deal with. While the general stress management techniques we have discussed in this article can certainly help, for certain stress disorders they really won’t be sufficient and you will just need medical help.

In general, there are a few avenues that professionals may explore to help with stress, and again, this is something you should discuss with your doctor to get a more specific plan to suit your needs. However, we can still discuss more broadly the types of professional help that may be of benefit for stress. Generally, some form of therapy and counselling is used by professionals to help with stress, and potentially in combination with this, certain medications may also be used.

 

Therapy and Counselling

Many forms of therapy and/or counselling can actually be incredibly helpful for dealing with stress. Assertiveness training can be helpful if communication issues are a cause of stress. Cognitive behaviour therapy and/or acceptance commitment therapy can help people deal with a variety of stress in their lives. Exposure therapy can also help someone overcome stressors they face in their life. There are a whole host of other modalities that may also be beneficial, and again, this is something that you should consult with a professional about and have a more personalised plan of action created to help with your specific needs.

Many people are resistant to seeking help from a professional for their stress, and many men especially are hesitant. This is partially due to the female stress response being more of a “tend and befriend” response (and thus women are more likely to seek out a more “social” method to help them deal with their stress), and men having a more “fight or flight” response (which tends to make men “run” and social isolate in response to stress, which tends to be very maladaptive and frequently leads to social isolation). It is also partially due to most psychological research being done in women, and thus potentially the methods used by therapists and counsellors may not be as effective for men. Women do tend to get a lot more out of discussing their issues and the feelings around them, while men tend to be more solution-oriented in how they want to deal with their issues. There is also the issue of sociocultural factors where men feel that they are seen as lesser if they aren’t able to handle themselves or the issues they have. However, there are many forms of therapy that seem to be quite effective for both men and women, and nobody should avoid seeking therapy because they think it won’t be helpful. Yes, you may need to shop around to find the right practitioner and the right methods for you, but for many people, with the right help, therapy can be transformative.

Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) is one such method that seems to be particularly effective, especially for dealing with stress-related issues. CBT is basically partner-assisted stoicism, and this makes sense given that CBT was created utilising stoic philosophical concepts. CBT seeks to break the issues you face into smaller more manageable chunks, while looking to modify your thoughts and feelings (the cognitive stuff) and the way you act and behave (the behavioural stuff) in a way that facilitates the resolution of your current issues. As a framework for dealing with stress, CBT can be quite effective, but it is not the only therapy available for dealing with stress and a qualified practitioner will have many tools in their toolbox that may be better suited to your needs.

 

Medication and Medical Interventions

While talk therapies can be quite effective, for certain conditions, further medical interventions may be required. For certain stress conditions, especially for the stress-related diseases, medication and even certain medical interventions may be required to help deal with the issue. This is beyond the scope of this article, and again, it is something that should be discussed with a doctor that can help create a more tailored plan of action.

 

Long-Term Stress Management

Now, before I wrap this article up, I want to just touch on longer-term stress management. One of the difficulties with stress management is that it can be quite wishy-washy in terms of hard metrics you can track. Are you more or less stressed this week compared to last week? What about last year? Did that intervention you tried actually work, or are you just as stressed as you have always been? Having some sort of metrics you can track related to stress can be helpful in managing your stress longer term. However, while tracking metrics is (relatively) easy to do, it doesn’t tell the whole story, and we should not lose the forest for the trees. The metrics discussed here are simply proxy markers, and while they do give some sort of a window into stress, they do not tell the whole story.

 

Tracking Stress

Tracking your stress is actually incredibly hard. You can use a subjective measure (i.e. rate out of 10 how stressed you feel), but that can be deceptive, especially if you have been stressed for a long time. You may genuinely forget what it feels like to feel a 0 out of 10 stress level, because your normal for so long has been 9/10. However, it is still helpful to use the subjective tracking of stress, as we do want to actually impact your lived experience and if you do a load of things to improve your stress and you feel the exact same, well, either it didn’t work, those tools aren’t all that effective for you or you are just incredibly stressed with something we are not addressing. So the subjective does help us dial in the best approach.

In general, I tend to track how stressed you feel certain tasks were (this helps us identify the tasks/situations that you find most stressful), how stressful your day was (i.e. track how stressful your day was at the end of the day) and then how stressed you feel in general (this can help us build a better picture of your overall stress). This can form part of the journalling process, or it can be done as a separate activity altogether.

There are some more objective measures though. We can use resting heart rate (RHR) as a marker for stress because being in an SNS-dominant state usually leads to an elevated heart rate. So if your resting heart rate is elevated chronically, it is likely that you are experiencing stress. There are a number of times we could use for this RHR measurement, such as the lowest heart rate during sleep, the reading within the first 15 minutes of waking up and/or just the average resting rate throughout the day. They all tell us something, but practically speaking, the easiest method is to just get some sort of fitness-tracking wearable (a watch or a ring) and just use the data that gives you. Generally, we want to see at least a sub 60bpm RHR and ideally closer to sub 50bpm RHR if we have gotten stress management dialled in. Of course, if your usual is 35bpm and it goes up to 60bpm, then stress is likely higher, so context does matter. Now, we do also have to factor in overall fitness levels too, as some people may have a significantly higher resting heart rate due to being unfit. However, this is still a stressor on the body, so it is still a factor in overall stress, while also being a marker of fitness.

If you do get some sort of wearable, they often give you a heart rate variability (HRV) score. This is the variability between heartbeats, with a higher variability being a sign of better stress levels (or more accurately, more PSNS activity). So if you do have a wearable that gives an HRV reading, then we can use that as a marker to really dial in our stress management practices. It isn’t perfect, but it does give us something to work with.

It is unrealistic for most, but you can also get blood testing to measure markers that may be related to stress (cortisol, general hormones, inflammatory markers). This would generally require a competent practitioner to actually interpret the data accurately, but I am including it here as I know many people do get regular blood work these days.

Overall, the subjective data is what we usually use the most, but if we also have RHR and HRV data, we can get a little bit deeper with this stuff and track trends over time. Having some sort of subjective scoring system, and then some extra physiologic data like RHR and HRV, or even some blood markers can allow us to really refine our approach over time.

 

Stress Management Review

And now, we finally reach the end of the article. Hopefully, you have enjoyed it so far, and it has given you some ideas about how to better manage your stress. Stress is a very complex process, and unfortunately, people tend to only look at stress management when they are already quite stressed. In an ideal world, you would actually prioritise stress management practices before you are stressed, and ideally, you would build up robust stress management practices before you actually need them. It is much better to have a really good stress management system in place before you actually need it, but obviously, that is very easy to say in hindsight. There are still things you can do to better manage stress when stress levels are high, so even if you haven’t been prioritising stress management, there is still hope!

Overall, there are 4 distinct areas that you can develop stress management practices around, and while there is a lot of overlap between them all, understanding what to focus on depending on where you are with your stress can be very helpful.

 

The four areas are:

 

1. Good baseline stress management practices.

This is the stuff you do that may not generally be thought of as stress management, but does actually contribute to better stress management. A lot of the stuff in this section is just generally good foundational lifestyle habits. These allow you to stay healthier in general, and to have a better capacity to handle stress when it does come about.

2. General stress management practices.

This is the stuff that people generally see as contributing to better stress management. Some of it is actually still quite generalised, and while some of the stuff here can actually help with dealing with stress acutely, a lot of the stuff is better suited to a longer-term practice that generally leads to lower stress and a better capacity to handle stress over time.

3. Distress management.

This is the stuff you do when stress is high and you want to bring it back down. This is the area that most people focus on for stress management, but as I discussed before, while reducing the feelings of stress are an important part of stress management, you do actually have to tackle the source(s) of stress for better long-term stress management.

4. Post-stress recovery.

This is the stuff you do after stress to try to recover to baseline a bit more quickly, and to try to stay ahead of creating too big of a stress debt. Recovery to baseline will happen over time, without excessive focus on it, but due to the nature of the modern world, it is very easy to get caught in a cycle of never actually fully recovering from stress before the next stressor hits.

 

If you can get a good system in place for all of these areas, you will be in a really phenomenal position with your overall stress management. By no means will this be easy, especially if you are currently dealing with a lot of stress, but over time, working on stress management really does pay off!