Stress isn’t the enemy – it’s a signal. An invitation to listen.

In my twenties, stress was such a constant presence that it became woven into my every day. I didn’t question it, feeling anxious, distracted, overwhelmed, low in mood, racing thoughts – it was simply the way I operated during a prolonged period of high stress in my life. But over time, I learned that even in moments of deep challenge or loss, our nervous system can be reset. It can be soothed. It can even become a guide, showing us exactly what needs our attention to not just perform better, but to live better too.

When Mo Gawdat and I came together to write our bestselling book, Unstressable, we did so because we both knew – through our own years of experience – that stress needed to be looked at differently.

For me, this wasn’t just professional, it was deeply personal.

Having lost my father in 2019 to stress-related illness. In the years leading up to his passing, I watched him endure enormous strain – losing my eldest sister to cancer, his business collapsing, his health deteriorating, the forced sale of our family home and more. The stress consumed him and I witnessed firsthand how unaddressed stress doesn’t just impact the individual, it ripples through families, through organisations, through communities.

Whether it starts at work or at home, stress travels. If you’re suffering in one space, you carry that energy into the other. Your performance drops. Your relationships strain. And yet, so many people, leaders included, don’t truly understand the stress that’s draining them. They only think they do.

What if your stress isn’t about how much you’re doing – but how you’re responding to what you’re doing?

What if it isn’t the hours you work, but the misalignment with your own authenticity that’s exhausting you?

What if the fatigue weighing you down isn’t physical, but emotional?

Many companies claim to want to tackle stress, which is now the leading cause of work-related absenteeism in the UK. But the reality is, most are addressing it far too late. Applying surface-level solutions to deep-rooted patterns. Offering ‘wellness’ after burnout, rather than preventing burnout in the first place.

Stress cannot be solved by placing a plaster over a wound, it must be understood from the inside out. True change begins with empowering the individual to navigate the stress of their external environment by understanding what’s happening in their internal one in the process. When we can recognise how stress is actually showing up in our own system – we gain the power to shift it, no matter how stressful and pressured things may be in our outside world.

And if our workload isn’t going to change, then the greatest gift you can offer not just yourself, but your people is the skill to understand and regulate their own systems – to be able to work with stress, not against it. To create a culture that values performance under calm, not stressed pressure. Valuing the individual, as much as we do the organisational community.
Empowering both to be able to best support themselves and one another, together.

Whilst also asking leaders to take responsibility for the understanding that if they are stressed, their company is going to be stressed. An Unstressable organisation starts with Unstressable leadership. If the CEO of a company is coming in everyday stressed, that stress ripples down through the rest of the organisation and both performance and morale suffers. Whether they want it to or not.

So how can we begin to truly understand how to regulate the stress in our system and use it to better our performance not hinder it?

Like most things, it begins with awareness…

Imagine if you knew how to bring your system back into a restorative state, no matter what’s happening around you? No matter how much pressure your organisation was being faced with. Being able to remain calm in the chaos.

Most people talk about stress as if it’s one singular state, ‘I’m so stressed’. But what part of you is actually stressed?

As humans, we’re made up of four distinct systems – Mind, Heart, Body, and Soul.

Each one speaks a different language.

Each one responds to stress in a different way.

Each one unique holds different clues about what’s really going on beneath the surface.

Our mind speaks in thoughts – but it rarely tells us the full truth. With the brain’s built-in negativity bias, it’s constantly scanning for threats, both real and so often imagined.

Our heart speaks in feelings and emotions – an intimate language made up of 87 distinct emotional states, according to the latest research – all waiting to guide us. Yet the average human can only notice 3.

Our body speaks through aches, pains, and tension, each sensation a signal to what it needs.

And our soul speaks in the quiet whispers of intuition – the steady stillness of our inner truth and deeper knowing. The gut instinct that differentiates a good leader from a great one.

Each part has its own way of expressing stress and its own way of asking for support.

When we begin to see stress not as one overwhelming wave, but as a specific signal from a specific part of ourselves, everything shifts. We stop suppressing it. We stop trying to power
through it. We can meet it, listen to it and then use it to our advantage.

Because when we ignore stress and allow it to linger – stress doesn’t just disappear, it builds. It turns chronic, building up and up over time and eventually breaking us down.

When we can understand the signs of stress in each part of us, as and when they arise, then we can shift our stress more effectively.

Here’s how stress can show up in each part:

• Mental stress shows up as overthinking, racing thoughts, spiralling through imagined futures or past regrets. You’re everywhere but here in the present moment in front of you.
• Emotional stress shows up as feelings of anxiety, irritability, stress, overwhelm, sadness – or a behaviour that masks it: comfort eating, numbing out with Netflix, drinking, overworking, over-socialising. Trouble sleeping and lacking focus.
• Physical stress shows up as headaches, back pain, gut problems, skin flare-ups, low immunity, fatigue, chronic illness.
• Spiritual stress (or purpose fatigue) shows up as feeling hollow even when life looks ‘successful’. You’ve lost connection with your deeper self, and your intuition is drowned out by doubt. Going against our gut and listening to the fears of our mind.

But here’s the truth: once you recognise which part is stressed – you can change it.

You can:

• Direct the thoughts of the mind
• Soothe the emotions of the heart
• Release the tension in the body
• Reconnect to the voice of your soul

Stress isn’t a one-size-fits-all, it’s nuanced – specific. And once we begin asking not just ‘Am I stressed?’ but ‘Which part of me is stressed?’, we can unlock a new level of resilience.

Being able to bounce back from stress 10 x quicker when it arises and no longer allowing ourselves to get to the brink of burnout.

When it comes to stress, true resilience isn’t about withstanding, it’s about understanding.

It’s learning how to recognise the unique language of each part of us, and how to bring that part gently, skilfully, back to calm whenever needed.

For organisations to become resilient amidst current global and economic challenges, they must start by investing in their people – supporting employees to build resilience in a way that doesn’t lead to burnout, and empowering leaders to be able to stay calm, clear, and grounded in times of stress and uncertainty. Leading in a calm, authentic and more powerful way.

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