WHY “STRESS LESS” CAN STICK IT + WHAT YOU CAN ACTUALLY DO INSTEAD TO MANAGE YOUR CORTISOL

“Have you tried reducing your stress?” (😒 cue eyeroll… as if I hadn’t thought of that). 

This is possibly one of the most frustrating things you can say to a woman who is already doing her best to hold everything together.

Yes, thank you… She has considered it. Somewhere between the work deadlines, the family responsibilities, the appointments, the unanswered messages and deciding what everyone is eating tonight.

She cannot simply quit her job and go meditate on a mountain.

She also might not describe herself as particularly stressed. Busy? Absolutely. Tired? Often. But she’s handling it. She’s still showing up, getting things done and keeping the wheels turning.

Which is exactly why we need to have a bigger conversation about what stress can look like.

The stress you’ve stopped noticing

You’ve probably heard about fight or flight; your body’s alarm system, preparing you to respond when something feels threatening or demanding. You get it, you’ve heard about the tiger chasing you, but you don’t feel stressed, so it can’t be you right?!

This is the sneaky stress… The things you might not notice, like how often your attention gets pulled into responding throughout an ordinary day.

An email notification appears while you’re trying to finish something. Your watch vibrates with a text. Instagram lights up. Someone calls or asks you to do something. You need to think about what to have for dinner. There’s traffic on the way home. Another message arrives before you’ve answered the first one… 

Before you know it there’s a total of 35 notifications, that are leaving you mentally paralysed, a to-do list that is somehow longer than when the day started and you still don’t know what you’re cooking for dinner.  

None of those moments needs to be a major crisis to feel demanding. Sometimes there’s a little jolt of urgency, a tightening through your shoulders, or that familiar feeling of what now?

By the end of the day, you’ve spent hours being interrupted, switching tasks and responding to other people’s priorities. You might call that normal. It can still be taking something from you.

Research has found that notifications can disrupt attention even when we don’t engage with them. A separate experiment found that delivering notifications in predictable batches, rather than throughout the day, improved several measures of wellbeing. The way these demands arrive matters too. 

But it’s not just ‘fight-or-flight’ that’s driving your cortisol conversation in your body!

Fight and flight aren’t the whole conversation

Fight might look like irritability, snapping at someone you love, or feeling disproportionately annoyed when one more person needs something.

Flight might look like constant doing. Staying busy, struggling to stop, filling every available gap because sitting still feels uncomfortable.

Then there are two other patterns that tend to be neglected from the conversation, but are none-the-less just as if not more important: freeze and fawn.

Fawn is a term used to describe trying to keep yourself safe through appeasing other people. In everyday life, that might look like agreeing before you’ve checked whether you have the capacity, managing everyone else’s feelings, or saying “no worries!” when there are, in fact, several worries.

Freeze can involve feeling stuck, disconnected or unable to take action. You can know what needs doing and still struggle to begin, think staring at the computer screen for 5 minutes having absolutely no idea where to start! 

These are ways of understanding patterns, rather than four neat personality types. You might recognise different ones at different times.

When you’re functioning, but you feel frozen

There’s a pattern often described as high-functioning freeze that many of the women I work with recognise immediately.

You can deliver the presentation, answer the client and make the appointment (for someone else). The things with consequences get done.

Then you get home and sit on the couch, scrolling, while thinking about the washing you need to put on, the meal you need to make and the friend you still haven’t replied to.

You’re exhausted, but you don’t feel rested. There’s plenty happening in your head, yet starting the simplest thing feels strangely difficult.

From the outside, you’re functioning. Inside, you feel overloaded, flat or a little removed from your own life.

“High-functioning freeze” is descriptive language rather than a formal diagnosis, but it can give you a useful starting point for noticing the gap between what you’re accomplishing and how you’re actually feeling.

Because how many times have you kept going simply because you had to?

The deadline still exists. Someone still needs collecting. The bills still need paying. You’ve become very good at doing what needs to be done, even when there’s very little left in the tank.

So how do we build resilience?

Your stress response has a job. You need to be able to meet a challenge, mobilise energy and respond.

What we want to strengthen is your ability to recover afterwards, alongside having enough resources to meet the next demand. Repeated activation without adequate recovery is part of what makes chronic stress costly to the body.

That means looking at your actual day.

Start with the unnecessary interruptions. Choose which notifications deserve immediate access to you. Could email wait until you open it? Does your wrist need to announce every Instagram interaction? Could you turn off notifications overnight so you don’t wake up to Karen’s comment on your instagram! Keep the important people reachable while giving yourself some uninterrupted time. 

Notice the automatic yes. Before agreeing to something, try: “Let me check what I’ve got on and get back to you.” A little space can help you make a decision you actually have capacity for.

Build a transition between demands. After a difficult call, stand up. Feel your feet on the floor, look around the room and give yourself a moment before opening the next thing. If gentle, slower breathing feels helpful, use it. If you’re feeling flat and disconnected, a short walk or some movement may feel more useful.

Check what you’re asking your body to run on. Have you eaten? Slept? Recovered from training? We’ll be exploring the physiological side of capacity more throughout the month, because nourishment, hormones and recovery belong in this conversation too.

You don’t have to wait until everything falls apart to start paying attention.

This week, notice one moment when you automatically override yourself. The hunger you postpone, the message you feel compelled to answer immediately, the commitment you agree to while quietly wishing you hadn’t.

Then ask: what would support me here?

That’s a much more useful place to begin than telling yourself to stress less.

Yours in Health & Happiness,
Sheree xo