Stress Management

It’s easy to focus on alarming numbers about stress. Like this: “40% of employees report crying at work in the past month.” Or this: “burnout is at an all-time high.”

Fear-mongering headlines about burnout are great clickbait, yet they always miss a crucial point, which is going to sound counterintuitive:

Stress itself is not the enemy.

In This Edition:

1. What are Stress and Stress Management?
2. Principles of Stress Management
3. Building Long-Term Resilience
4. When to Seek Professional Help

Stress is your body’s way of keeping you safe. If you never got stressed, you wouldn’t have the hustle to jump out of the way of an oncoming car, or to do your best work before a high-stakes presentation. Stress energizes you, sharpens your focus, and helps you rise to challenges. 

Unfortunately, in some circumstances, stress stops being a useful catalyst and starts eroding your health, relationships, and effectiveness at work. Chronic stress turns into burnout, which is the endpoint of prolonged, unaddressed workplace stress. And that is a crisis.

Stress management is what sits between helpful and harmful stress. It includes the thoughts, behaviors, and habits that bolster you in stressful moments and the practices that build resilience over time. So, let’s understand how stress turns from friend to foe, and what to do when it does.

What Is Stress?

Stress is a physiological and psychological response to real or perceived threats. When your brain detects danger (or what it interprets as danger), it triggers a cascade of reactions: your heart rate increases, hormones like adrenaline flood your system, and your body prepares to respond. It’s the famous fight, flight, freeze, (or fawn) response that’s been keeping us humans alive since our cavemen days.

However, our brain doesn’t distinguish between a genuine physical threat and a looming work deadline, so it triggers the same alarm system.

Now, it’s different for everyone. You might feel energized giving a presentation to a room full of people, but Pat over there? You can literally see his face turning red, his white shirt clinging with sweat. Both of you are experiencing the same physiological reaction; your bodies are preparing to meet a challenge. The stress itself isn’t good or bad. It’s neutral information from your body telling you something needs attention. But whether it turns out to be helpful or harmful depends on two things: the type of stress you’re facing and how you respond to it.

Good Stress vs. Bad Stress

First, there is eustress. This is what you feel when you’re presenting to the board, and everything clicks, and you’re alert, maybe even enjoying yourself. It’s temporary, manageable, and often accompanied by a sense of excitement or purpose that gives you the energy and focus you need to tackle challenges.

Distress, on the other hand, makes your heart race in a bad way and erodes your performance. It happens when you feel overwhelmed and out of control. It’s the stress of impossible deadlines, toxic colleagues, or feeling trapped in situations where you don’t have a voice. This kind of stress becomes chronic when you’re dealing with high demands day after day without adequate resources or recovery time. It’s when stress stops being useful and starts causing damage.

The Job Demands-Resources model explains why stress sometimes shows up as good stress (eustress) and sometimes as bad stress (distress) by asking you to think of your job as having two sides: demands (workload, emotional labor, time pressure) and resources (autonomy, support, skills, recognition). When you have adequate resources to meet demands, stress stays in that productive sweet spot. But when demands consistently outweigh resources, chronic stress and eventually burnout become almost inevitable.

If stress is your trusty sidekick sounding the alarm and keeping you on your toes, stress management is your wise sage, teaching you how to respond effectively to the sound of that alarm, and ideally, helping to reduce how often it rings in the first place.

What Is Stress Management?

Since stress plays different roles at different moments, you don’t want to make yourself stress-proof. It’s more desirable and more practical to keep stress at optimal levels, where it energizes rather than depletes you. This is where managing stress comes in.

Stress management is a set of evidence-based practices that help you identify, control, and reduce everyday stressors before they become overwhelming. It’s preventative work that keeps chronic stress at bay and stops you from reaching burnout, strengthening your ability to navigate stress effectively and bounce back quickly.

My next book is about the real reason your team feels overwhelmed—and it’s not the workload. It’s the thoughtload: the weight of everything they’re trying to pay attention to, plus the emotional baggage they’re carrying. Want updates and sneak peeks in the run-up to the launch?

When something is stressing you out, walk it through a simple four-question test: Can I avoid this? Can I alter it? If not, can I adapt my standards or expectations? And if all else fails, can I accept it and redirect my energy somewhere more productive?

• Avoid when you can. Sometimes the smartest move is not to play. Can you stop checking work email at 10 p.m., take a different route to skip the traffic that spikes your blood pressure, or bow out of the meeting that never produces anything useful? Be deliberate about the stressors you simply do not need in your life.
• Alter what’s in your control. If you can’t avoid the stressor, can you change it? That might mean renegotiating a deadline, acquiring more resources, or redistributing tasks so the work is realistic for a human being. Even small changes that increase your sense of control can lower your stress dramatically.
• Adapt your expectations. When the situation won’t change, the secret is to change how you think about it. That might be reframing a reorganization as a chance to grow, or deciding that “good enough” on a slide deck really is good enough. Loosening perfectionism and updating your story about what is happening can dial stress down.
• Accept what will not move. Some things—your colleague’s quirks, changes to reporting relationships, and macroeconomic uncertainty—are not going anywhere. Fighting them just burns energy you could use elsewhere. Acceptance is not giving up; it is choosing to stop wrestling with what you cannot control so you can invest in what you can.

There is no single “right” strategy. Stress management is about matching your response to the situation, which is exactly what the transactional model of stress and coping describes.

Putting These Principles to Practice

Understanding the different ways you can respond—avoiding, altering, adapting, or accepting—gives you a framework, but using it effectively requires knowing what you are actually dealing with. That means identifying your specific stressors and examining how you currently respond to them.

Identify Your Stressors

The first thing you can do is start paying attention. What makes your neck tense? When do you grit your teeth? What situations make your pulse race? Physical reactions are your body’s way of waving red flags, telling you, “Hey, this situation right here is a problem for us.”

The second thing is to keep a stress diary for a week or two. You don’t need to do anything fancy, just jot down when you notice stress symptoms and what was happening at the time. Look for patterns. Maybe you’ll discover that your stress spikes every time you have a one-on-one with a particular manager, or that back-to-back meetings without breaks leave you depleted.

Your stress fingerprint is unique. Pay particular attention to the difference between situational stressors (the big presentation, the annual review) and chronic ones (the toxic boss who grinds you down, the daily commute that steals two hours of your day). Situational stress comes and goes in temporary spikes that you can prepare for and recover from. Chronic stressors need to be addressed sooner rather than later because they could lead to burnout.

Replace Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms

Once you know your stressors, you can start addressing them by examining how you currently cope. Many of us default to emotion-focused coping, or strategies that temporarily ease discomfort but don’t solve the underlying problem. Stress-eating, endless scrolling, binge-shopping, or having that extra drink might provide short-term relief, but they often make things worse over time.

The alternative is problem-focused coping. This is where you take direct action to address the stressor itself. This requires work, but it pays off in actual stress reduction rather than just temporary masking fixes. Here’s how to start:

1. Notice your pattern. Recognize your go-to coping mechanisms, especially the ones that don’t actually help. Be honest with yourself. There’s no judgment—you’re just gathering information.
2. Identify your need. What is the unhealthy habit providing? If you’re stress-eating, maybe you need comfort or a sense of control. If you’re overworking, maybe you need to feel competent or valuable. Understanding the need helps you find healthier ways to meet it.
3. Plan alternatives. Before stress hits, decide what you’ll do instead. If you stress-eat, maybe you’ll take a walk or call a friend instead. If you doomscroll, maybe you’ll do a quick breathing exercise or take a hot bath. The key is having the alternative ready before you need it, because in the moment of stress, your brain will default to established patterns.
4. Start small. There’s no need to go all in at once—that’s added stress. Pick one unhealthy habit to replace, practice it for a few weeks, and when it’s automatic, you can tackle the next one and keep building from there.

If this article is proving useful to you and you’d like to share these insights with other members of your team or organization, I have a whole talk on how to recognize, prevent and recover from burnout. Use the link below to make an inquiry:

You’ve identified your stressors and examined your coping patterns, but knowing isn’t the same as doing. When stress comes knocking, or distress has already gatecrashed your good mood, you need specific, practical techniques for managing it in real time and building that lasting resilience.

Not everyone responds the same way to the same techniques, so don’t waste energy on what doesn’t work. Experiment, notice what helps, and add those practices into your daily routine.

Strengthen Your Physical Foundation

First off, your body and mind aren’t separate systems. When you’re physically depleted, your stress tolerance drops. When you’re mentally exhausted, your body follows suit. Building resilience means strengthening both.

Sleep is often the first thing to suffer when you’re stressed. You can improve it by avoiding screens for an hour before you hit the pillow, and making sure you go to bed and get up at consistent times, even on weekends. But if your mind is spiraling in the middle of the night, which is a common stress symptom, don’t just lie there. Get up, do something calm like reading, and return to bed when you feel drowsy.

Exercise, even if it’s just 20 minutes a few days a week, is one of the most effective ways to manage stress. It reduces stress hormones like adrenaline while increasing natural mood elevators like endorphins. It helps improve sleep and gives you a constructive outlet for the tension that builds up, so move your body—walk, stretch, do a little dance. And, if you can get outdoors, even better. Green spaces amplify the stress-reduction benefits.

To round out this holy trinity, fuel your body properly. Nutrition affects how well you handle stress. Limit stress amplifiers like caffeine and alcohol, and stay hydrated to avoid stress symptoms like headaches and fatigue. Skipping meals and eating too much sugar create energy crashes that also worsen your stress response, so make sure you eat regularly and with food that provides sustained energy.

Build Your Stress Relief Toolkit

Sometimes stress comes out of nowhere fast, so you want to have a few techniques ready to pull from your sleeve. I’ve talked extensively about these in my video Help! I’m Overwhelmed! and written about it in my blog How to Manage Job Stress, so here are a few that work quickly to calm your nervous system and clear your head.

1. Breathe: breathe in slowly through your nose for a count of four, hold for four, exhale through your mouth for six, hold for two. Repeat four or five times.
2. Reframe the Story: Ask yourself, “Will this matter in four days, four months, or four years?” to give yourself a more helpful perspective.
3. Embrace Tunnel Vision: Close unnecessary browser tabs and documents. Move to a quieter space. Turn off notifications. Do one thing at a time. Direct all your attention to a single task, to starve the frenetic energy that feeds stress.

Experiment with these techniques to find which ones work best for you.

Develop Daily Mental Habits

Quick relief techniques help in a crisis moment, but you still want to build and strengthen your baseline resilience by forming habits that make you less reactive to stress and more capable of handling it.

• Mindfulness reduces stress, anxiety, and burnout symptoms over time, and you don’t need to meditate—unless of course you want to. You can practice mindfulness during everyday activities simply by fully engaging with one thing that you’re doing instead of trying to multitask. Take a walk and observe your surroundings instead of thinking about the items on your to-do list.
• Cognitive reframing changes how you interpret stressful situations. When you catch yourself catastrophizing or assuming the worst, stop and challenge those thoughts. Ask yourself, “Is it true? What evidence do I have? What’s a more balanced perspective?” Often, we’re much harder on ourselves than we are on others.
• Writing about stressful experiences helps you process them rather than ruminate. Keep a simple journal. What happened? What’s bothering you? What did you learn? A journal can help you see patterns, but even a few minutes of writing can help release tension. It also creates distance and clarity, so when you read what you wrote, you might gain perspective or realize that the thing consuming your thoughts actually isn’t that big of a deal.
• Maintaining meaningful connections buffers stress effects. When you’re overwhelmed, you need connection more than ever. Talking with someone you trust often provides new perspectives on your situation. Even going for coffee with an acquaintance helps buffer the effects of stress. Every moment of connection, no matter how small, reminds you that you’re not alone in this.

Sometimes self-management strategies aren’t enough. When stress starts to bleed into every part of your life—your mood, your relationships, your sleep, your health—it’s a sign you shouldn’t keep going it alone. A therapist, counselor, or coach can give you an objective view, help you see patterns you’ve missed, and teach evidence-based tools (like cognitive behavioral techniques) to respond differently to the stressors you can’t change.

If you have access to an Employee Assistance Program (EAP), start there; many include short-term counseling at no cost, and your HR team can point you to what’s available. If you’re looking externally, don’t be discouraged if the first person you see isn’t a fit—feeling safe and understood is non-negotiable, so it’s absolutely okay to try someone else.

Here are some more insights into stress management from the blog:

Use Stress to Your Advantage

Reducing the Spillover Between Home and Work Stress

Addressing the Root Causes of Work Stress

How to Manage Job Stress

Are You Taking Steps to Prevent Burnout?

Good and bad stress

You don’t need fear-mongering headlines to tell you stress is everywhere—you’re feeling it. The pressure’s been rising. Maybe that’s why you’re here. If so, you can still do something about it before it overwhelms you and leads you to the darker side.

Some days, stress will be your ally, and you’ll use these techniques brilliantly. Other days, you’ll forget everything and fall back into old patterns. That’s fine. The difference between managing stress and burning out isn’t perfection. But, when you build awareness, you start noticing when stress crosses the line from helpful to harmful. And now you have what you need to pull it back. And when you can’t, you know it’s time to ask for help.

[1] Surging Stress: Learn Why 40% Of Employees Cried At Work Recently – Bryan Robinson | Forbes

[2] Burnout Hits Six-Year High As Workplace Stress Breaks Gen Z – Allwork.Space

[3] How to manage and reduce stress – Mental Health Foundation

[4] How to prevent and combat employee burnout and create healthier workplaces during crises and beyond – Kelly P. Gabriel, Herman Aguinis | Business Horizons

[5] Transactional model of stress and coping – Rebecca Kivak | EBSCO

[6] Ways to Manage Stress – Lauren Ragland, Kendall K. Morgan | WebMD