What Your Stress Is Actually Trying to Tell You

Winston Chew 6 min read Stress management

Picture it. It is 11:47 on a Sunday night, and a message from the CEO lands on our phone: “Can we talk tomorrow?” Within seconds the chest tightens, the jaw sets, and the mind begins drafting a defence nobody has asked for. The message carried four words; the body wrote an entire novel.

Stress is the most misread signal in leadership. We treat it as an enemy to defeat, a weakness to hide, or a tax on ambition. Nearly a century of research points somewhere more useful: stress is information. It tells us what we value, what we believe, and where our thinking has outrun the facts. Stress, read well, becomes a counsellor.

What stress is

Hans Selye gave us the first scientific account in 1936. Working with laboratory rats, he observed that cold, injury, exertion and toxins — agents with nothing in common — all produced the same general bodily reaction (Selye, 1936). Stress, in its first definition, was the body’s common answer to any demand.

Bruce McEwen later refined the picture. The hormones that sharpen us under pressure protect us in the short term and wear us down when they never switch off; he called that cumulative cost allostatic load (McEwen, 1998). Stress mobilises; chronic stress corrodes.

Richard Lazarus and Susan Folkman supplied the definition most psychologists still work from. Stress arises when we judge that a situation’s demands tax or exceed our resources and threaten our wellbeing (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984). Notice the verb. Stress rests on a judgement, and every judgement can be examined.

Perception: the story we tell about the data

Perception is the brain’s interpretation of incoming information. Our senses deliver raw input — a tone of voice, a slide full of red numbers, a colleague’s silence — and the mind assigns it meaning almost instantly. We never meet the world raw; we meet our reading of it.

Lazarus and Folkman (1984) described two appraisals that shape that reading. The primary appraisal asks, “Does this matter to me, and is it a threat, a loss, or a challenge?” The secondary appraisal asks, “Do I have what it takes to handle it?” A demand we feel equipped for energises us; a demand we feel powerless against overwhelms us.

This is why two directors can sit in the same boardroom, hear the same quarterly figures, and walk out with opposite heart rates. The data was identical; the appraisals diverged. The stressor lives in the world; the stress lives in the interpretation.

The neuroscience: why the body answers before the mind asks

Joseph LeDoux, a neuroscientist at New York University, spent decades mapping how the brain detects danger. His work identified the amygdala as a hub for learning and expressing threat responses, and traced two routes by which sensory information reaches it (LeDoux, 1996, 2000).

The first route runs directly from the thalamus to the amygdala. LeDoux called it the “low road”: fast, crude, and built for survival. The second route passes through the sensory cortex first. This “high road” is slower and far more accurate. LeDoux’s own illustration is a walker who freezes at a curved shape on the path; the low road triggers the freeze, and a moment later the high road reports that the snake is a stick (LeDoux, 1996). The brain is designed to overreact first and correct later.

LeDoux has since sharpened this account in a way every leader benefits from knowing. In a 2016 paper with psychiatrist Daniel Pine, he separates the defensive circuits that produce the racing heart and the freeze from the cognitive circuits that produce the conscious feeling of fear or anxiety (LeDoux & Pine, 2016). What we experience as “I am stressed” is assembled by the higher brain from bodily signals, memory and context. The amygdala sounds the alarm; the thinking brain writes the caption.

The complication is timing. Yale neuroscientist Amy Arnsten showed that even mild, uncontrollable stress rapidly weakens the prefrontal cortex, the region responsible for reasoning, working memory and self-control (Arnsten, 2009). The faculty we need to correct a false alarm is the first one stress takes offline.

How often have we sent the reply before the high road arrived?

The hope sits inside the finding. If the feeling is partly a caption, the caption can be rewritten.

Triggers and the thinking errors behind them

A trigger is the event that sets the alarm off, and psychologist Albert Ellis argued that the event rarely does the damage alone. In his ABC model, an Activating event passes through our Beliefs about it, and those beliefs produce the emotional and behavioural Consequences (Ellis, 1962). The most distressing beliefs, Ellis observed, tend to be rigid demands: I must succeed; others must treat me fairly; life must be easy. Between the event and the reaction stands a belief.

Aaron Beck, the founder of cognitive therapy, catalogued the systematic errors in thinking that turn ordinary events into triggers (Beck, 1976). Four appear in almost every executive team:

• Arbitrary inference — drawing a conclusion without evidence. “She hasn’t replied; she must dislike my proposal.”
• Overgeneralisation — turning one setback into a rule. “This project slipped; I always drop the ball.”
• Magnification — inflating the stakes, often into catastrophe. “If this pitch fails, my career is finished.”
• Personalisation — claiming responsibility for events outside our control. “The team is demotivated because of me.”

Each error feels like a fact in the moment. The stress that follows is real, yet it answers a story the evidence never told. When stress runs out of proportion to the event, it is pointing at a belief worth a second look.

Self-talk: the narrator in the room

Self-talk is the running commentary we keep with ourselves, and it is where our appraisals become audible. Its grammar matters more than most of us realise.

Ethan Kross and colleagues ran seven studies on how people refer to themselves under social stress. Participants who coached themselves with their own name or with “you” (“Mei Ling, you have prepared for this”) gained psychological distance from the moment. In a public-speaking task, independent raters judged their speeches better, and they ruminated less afterwards than those who used “I” (Kross et al., 2014). A change of pronoun changed the performance.

A second line of evidence shows the power of naming. In a brain-imaging study at UCLA, Matthew Lieberman and colleagues found that putting a feeling into words reduced activity in the amygdala and increased activity in the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (Lieberman et al., 2007). Saying “I notice anxiety” recruits the high road. What we name, we can govern.

Reframing stress changes the body

Reappraisal produces measurable change in the body. Jeremy Jamieson and colleagues at Harvard instructed one group of participants, before a stressful speaking task, to regard their physiological arousal as functional and adaptive. Compared with the control groups, they showed more efficient cardiac output, lower vascular resistance, and less attention captured by negative information (Jamieson et al., 2012). The arousal stayed; its meaning changed, and the body followed.

Alia Crum, Peter Salovey and Shawn Achor carried the finding into the workplace. Employees at a financial institution who watched short videos presenting stress as enhancing reported better mental health and work performance than colleagues shown videos presenting stress as debilitating. In a follow-up study, the stress-is-enhancing mindset was linked to moderate cortisol reactivity and a greater appetite for feedback under pressure (Crum et al., 2013). What we believe about stress shapes what stress does to us.

Reading the message: a five-step practice

Stress carries a message about what matters, what we believe, and what we expect of ourselves. Here is how we read it:

1. Name it. Put the sensation into words: tight chest, anxious, irritated. Labelling recruits the prefrontal cortex and quiets the alarm (Lieberman et al., 2007).
2. Separate the trigger from the belief. Ask, “What happened, and what did I tell myself about it?” (Ellis, 1962).
3. Test the thinking. Check the story for inference, overgeneralisation, magnification or personalisation (Beck, 1976).
4. Change the narrator. Coach yourself by name: “Daniel, what would you advise a colleague here?” (Kross et al., 2014).
5. Reframe the arousal. Treat the racing heart as fuel for the task ahead (Jamieson et al., 2012; Crum et al., 2013).

One caution belongs here. These practices help us meet acute pressure well; rest, boundaries and qualified professional care remain essential. When stress stays switched on for weeks, allostatic load accumulates (McEwen, 1998), and the wise response is to reduce the demand and seek support.

Return to that Sunday-night message. Suppose the CEO wanted to discuss a promotion. The body prepared for a firing; the facts delivered a future. Stress will keep speaking to us. Our work is to hear the message and decline the panic.