I spent two decades trying to build a life with less pressure in it. It made me smaller, and it didn’t make me calmer. Here is what I got wrong.
We treat stress as the problem. Reduce it, manage it, escape it. Every wellbeing programme I’ve ever been shown is built on that assumption.
But stress isn’t the enemy. Stress is your system reporting that the demand has exceeded your current capacity. That is data. It isn’t a verdict on your character.
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The distinction that decides everything
The difference between stress that builds you and stress that breaks you isn’t the size of the stress.
It’s whether your body ever comes back down afterwards.
Pressure with recovery is training. It is how anything gets stronger. Pressure without recovery is attrition, and attrition doesn’t announce itself. It shows up as a shorter fuse, a flatter response to good news, a slow drift into somebody your family recognises less each quarter.
Nobody calls that burnout for about two years. They call it a busy period.
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Why this matters more the higher you go.
At a certain level the pressure stops being seasonal. There is no quiet quarter coming. If you’re waiting for the load to drop before you learn to come back down, you’re waiting for something that isn’t scheduled.
Which means recovery has to stop being a thing you get to afterwards, and start being a thing you can do inside the day. Sixty seconds before the room. One long, slow deep inhale followed by an even longer, slower exhale before the decision. Not because it’s nice, but because a body that never comes down makes worse calls that cost money and relationships — and the calls are the job.
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This week
One question when the pressure arrives. Not how do I get out of this. Ask: who is this asking me to become?
Then check the other half. When did my body last actually come down?
With Love, Pauline
This first appeared in The Conscious Leader, my weekly LinkedIn newsletter. Subscribe on LinkedIn.
