Stress gets demonised — and for good reason. Chronic stress is genuinely damaging. It disrupts sleep, impairs digestion, elevates cortisol, accelerates ageing and undermines almost every health goal you have. I’m not here to argue against that.
But there’s another side to stress that most people miss entirely, and understanding it has changed how I approach both my own health and the programs I build for clients.
Stress Is a Biological Tool, Not Just a Problem
Every time you train hard, you’re stressing your body. You’re breaking down muscle fibres, depleting energy stores and creating inflammatory responses. That’s the stimulus. The recovery and adaptation that follows is what makes you stronger, fitter and more resilient.
Cold showers. Restricted eating windows. Hard conversations. Demanding training sessions. These are all forms of controlled stress — and they all make your body and mind more capable of handling stress in the future.
The problem isn’t stress itself. The problem is stress without recovery, and stress in situations where it doesn’t serve you.
The Saber-Tooth Tiger Problem
The fight-or-flight response evolved for a reason: imminent physical danger. Your heart rate spikes, your muscles prime for action, cortisol floods your system, and you either fight or run. It’s an extraordinary survival mechanism.
The issue is that the human nervous system doesn’t distinguish between a predator and a work deadline. The same biological response fires whether you’re actually in danger or just stressed about an overdue task. And because modern life is full of those triggers — emails, financial pressure, relationship friction, traffic — a lot of us are running a chronic low-level stress response that was designed for acute emergencies.
The goal isn’t to eliminate the stress response. It’s to have enough control over it that you can turn it up when it serves you and bring it down when it doesn’t.
Being the Master of Your Stress Response
Here’s the shift I try to create with clients: instead of being at the mercy of stress, learn to deploy it intentionally. Add controlled stress to your life — training, cold exposure, intermittent fasting, hard physical challenges — and practice recovering from it. Over time, you condition your nervous system to handle stress more gracefully.
When unexpected stress hits — and it will — you’ve already been practicing. You know how to come down from a stress state. You’ve done it hundreds of times in training. That’s not just physical fitness. That’s psychological resilience.
Stress as a Signal
One reframe that’s helped me a lot: stress is information. If something is stressing you, it’s worth asking why. What does this stress reveal about what matters to you, what you’re avoiding, or what needs to change? Stress that you acknowledge and respond to thoughtfully is far less damaging than stress you ignore and accumulate.
It also connects to the importance of having practices — meditation, breath work, movement, sleep — that you return to when stress arises. Not as escape hatches, but as tools for processing and integrating what the stress is telling you.
For practical tools to manage stress in the moment, here are four strategies I use personally. And if you want to understand the recovery side of this more deeply, this post on training recovery covers the physiology.
Related reading: How I Manage Stress (4 Strategies) · The Real Reason You Keep Starting Over · How I Became a Happier Person in Under 5 Minutes a Day
Related reading: The Breathing Technique That Resets Your Nervous System · My Science-Based Sleep Routine · The Real Reason You Keep Starting Over
Related reading: Why You’re Always Tired · The Identity Shift That Makes Everything Else Work
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