Our bodies stress response was built for a different world. We’re biologically designed to escape from sabre-toothed cats: cortisol spikes, adrenaline spikes, we run to safety, and then we settle over a tasty roast mammoth, back in the safety of the cave. The threat ends, the body gets a clear signal that the danger has passed, and the nervous system comes back down.
Modern work rarely provides that ending. Our sabre-toothed cats are the difficult meeting, the unhappy client, the overflowing inbox, the restructure announcement. And it’s not the done thing run away from meetings! So our nervous system activation just stays up. Often all day. Sometimes all week.
Here’s the pattern I notice, in workplaces and in clinical practice: we’re very good at activating our nervous system. We’re much less practised at bringing it back down.
And our nervous system needs a signal that the pressure has passed. In a workday where one demand rolls into the next, that signal may never arrive on its own. The activated state can quietly become the default state, held for years. That tends to show up as the tiredness sleep doesn’t fix, the wound-up feeling that follows you on holiday, the sense of running on adrenaline all the time.
The good news is that we can give our nervous system the signal, and it doesn’t require an app or a wellness retreat. A long, slow exhale is something we naturally do – it’s one of the body’s own signals that we are safe. A big sigh activates the rest-and-digest parasympathetic nervous system, even in the middle of a stressful day. So does a few minutes of genuine pause between demands: the moment in the car before you walk in, the short walk outside, the meeting that ends early enough to breathe before the next one. Small signals, given often, seem to matter more than grand gestures given rarely.
Because burnout doesn’t just come from stress. It comes from stress that doesn’t get settled.
Where in your day does your nervous system actually get its signal to settle?
If the honest answer is nowhere, that may be the most useful place to start.
Human Foundations is a weekly look at the science behind high performance and wellbeing at work, from keynote speaker, psychiatrist, comedian and author Dr Jo Prendergast. Subscribe to get each edition as it lands.
Next week: the wake we leave behind us, and why the people around you feel your stress before you do.
Dr Jo turns this thinking into keynotes for conferences and leadership teams.
