From Overload to Agency.

A complete guide to understanding stress, anxiety and resilience in the modern workplace and how this can translate into your home life.

Not all Stress is a Problem.

Stress is part of being human. 

It alerts us to danger, sharpens our senses and mobilises our resources.  In the right amount and for the right reason, stress is not harmful, it’s helpful.  It pushes us to act, adapt and perform under pressure.

However, stress that stays too long, arrives too often, or is left unprocessed can turn from signal to symptom and that’s where the trouble begins.

In workplaces today, chronic stress is mistaken for the norm and fatigue is seen as the price of performance.  

Yet behind the high-functioning surface, many individuals are struggling, not because they are weak, but because their internal systems are overloaded and because the systems they work within offer little space to recover.

To understand what resilience really means, we must start by understanding what stress really does.

How Stress Works: The General Adaptation Syndrome.

In the 1930s, endocrinologist Hans Selye developed a model called the General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS).  It describes how the body reacts to stress in three distinct stages:

1. Alarm: The initial shock response.  Adrenaline spikes, heart rate increases and cortisol begins to rise.  The brain and body shift into fight, flight or freeze.

2. Resistance:  If the stress continues, the body begins to adapt.  Cortisol stays elevated and focus narrows. Function is possible, but it is energetically expensive.

3. Exhaustion: If recovery does not occur, the body can no longer maintain the response and fatigue sets in. Cognitive and emotional control break down and illness or burnout may follow.

This cycle was designed for short bursts of danger, not the relentless, low-grade demands of modern life.

However, many people now live in the resistance stage, indefinitely. They’re coping, until they’re not.

The Hidden Cost of Coping: Allostatic Load.

To survive long-term stress, the body adapts. 

It adjusts hormone levels, redistributes energy, raises inflammation and reprioritises brain function.  These changes are designed to keep you going, but they come at a cost.

This cost is called Allostatic Load, a term coined by neuroscientist Bruce McEwen to describe the cumulative wear and tear on the body caused by chronic stress.

Allostatic Load affects:

• Physiology: High blood pressure, heart disease, hormonal disruption, immune dysfunction, metabolic issues

  
  

• Cognition: Brain fog, memory lapses, reduced concentration, decision fatigue

  
  

• Emotion: Mood swings, irritability, emotional reactivity, reduced resilience

  
  

What begins as biological adaptation becomes systemic overload.  People look like they’re coping, but they’re eroding.

This is where resilience cannot be reduced to “trying harder.”  What’s needed is a different response entirely.

Anxiety Is a Prediction, Not a Weakness.

Stress is what happens to the body. 

Anxiety is what the brain makes of it.

According to neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, the brain is not a passive observer, it’s a prediction machine. 

It uses past experiences to guess what will happen next and prepares the body accordingly.  This means emotions like anxiety are not direct reactions to the world, but interpretations of meaning.

Anxiety arises when the brain predicts danger or uncertainty and interprets it as a threat.  This might be a tight deadline, an ambiguous email, or a fear of letting someone down. 

The problem is not always the situation, but the story the brain tells about it.

Furthermore because the brain primes the body based on this story, we feel anxious even when nothing harmful is happening.

This is why anxiety can become a loop.. the more we feel it, the more the brain predicts it and the more tightly we grip.

The Unified Anxiety Model: How Thought Becomes a Cycle.

There is a simple way to make sense of this loop, it’s called the Unified Anxiety Model. 

It frames anxiety not as a failure of the individual, but as a predictable and interruptible process.

How Thought and Behaviour Loop Together.

Anxiety is not just a reaction,  it’s a cycle made of prediction, discomfort, avoidance and reinforcement.

Step 1: Prediction

The brain detects uncertainty or threat and activates a warning signal (via stress response).  Often based on past experience.

Step 2: Discomfort

Physiological and emotional symptoms follow: racing heart, muscle tension, dread, spiralling thoughts.

Step 3: Interpretation

Cognitive distortions like ANTs or Cortman’s 3 W’s shape the story, “I can’t cope,” “Something bad will happen.”

Step 4: Avoidance

To reduce discomfort, the person changes behaviour: avoids the meeting, checks the email again, withdraws, or over prepares.

Step 5: Reinforcement

Avoidance brings short-term relief and so, the brain learns: “Avoidance works, danger averted.”

So, the same response is triggered earlier and more strongly next time.

Outcome: The Loop

Discomfort is no longer a signal to process, it’s a cue to avoid.  The cycle repeats and escalates, embedding anxiety as a learned system.

How to interrupt the loop.. yes, it’s trainable.

This behavioural loop is where resilience becomes trainable.

Not by removing anxiety, but by interrupting avoidance, tolerating discomfort and retraining the brain’s predictions through exposure, reframe and new action.

It’s also where systems matter. If the environment punishes verbalising of discomfort or makes avoidance invisible, it embeds the loop even further.

At the heart of this model are cognitive patterns known as ANTs,  Automatic Negative Thoughts, a term from Dr Daniel Amen. 

These are reflexive, distorted thoughts like:

• “I’m going to mess this up”

  
  

• “They’ll think I’m incompetent”

  
  

• “If I don’t get this right, everything will fall apart”

  
  

Combined with what Dr Christopher Cortman calls the 3 W’s of Anxiety:  Wishing the past was different, Worrying about the future, Wanting control in the present. 

These patterns trap people in a loop of reactivity and if left unchecked can spiral.  Our survival instincts are being inadvertently misapplied to modern life.

Breaking the loop means learning to see your stories, challenge the distortions and reclaim your agency.

The Four Domains of Resilience: A System for Recovery.

We see resilience as not just one element of your work or life, but a collection of interlocking domains that support or undermine your ability to adapt day to day, week to week.

This view is heavily influenced by the excellent work of Dr Daniel Amen.

These are the four domains and they provide a map to help us navigate the terrain of life.

1. Biological: Nutrition, sleep, movement, rest. Without biological readiness, no amount of mindset training can succeed.

   
   

2. Psychological: Thought patterns, self-talk, reframing and emotion regulation.  This is where tools like ANTs, ABCDE and narrative awareness sit.

   
   

3. Social: Connection, boundaries, healthy communication.  People are a buffer against stress, or a cause of it.

   
   

4. Spiritual:  Meaning, values, belief systems, purpose.  When work aligns with purpose, resilience deepens.

   
   

This framework bridges personal practice and systemic support. 

It allows individuals to rebuild their capacity while recognising that no one can “self-care” their way out of a broken system.

What You Can Do: Application for Individuals and Organisations.

As Individuals: try overlaying this map on your personal life and ask yourself, have you found your best routine?

• Name the signal: Notice when you’ve moved from alarm into resistance or exhaustion.

  
  

• Interrupt the loop: Use tools like ABCDE, journaling or conversation to catch distortions.

  
  

• Protect the body: Prioritise sleep, hydration, movement and downtime.

  
  

• Recover purpose: Reconnect with what matters to you, even in small ways.

  
  

• Ask for help: Shame is an emotional blocker to learning and grows in silence. Connection dissolves fear.

  
  

As Organisations: try overlaying this map over your work life, ask yourself does work build or deplete you/your people? Is individual performance really sustainable in a system that depletes resilience as a default.

• Stop rewarding depletion: High performance should not come at the cost of health, burn out does nothing equate to commitment.

  
  

• Normalise recovery: Make space for breaks, transitions and boundaries.

  
  

• Design for dignity:  Build systems that hold people through pressure, not systems that pressure people to hold everything.

  
  

• Train resilience as a professional skill: Not a personality trait, not a motivational poster.  A lived daily, learnable and transformative capability.

  
  

Final Reflection: From Overload to Agency.

You cannot design a workplace where stress never appears, nor should you try. 

However, you can design one where pressure is expected, recovery is supported and resilience is not treated as an individual virtue but a collective responsibility.

When systems ignore the slow build-up of strain, people are left to carry what the structure won’t hold.

They cope quietly, withdraw subtly and begin to adapt not to the work itself, but to the absence of safety within it. 

That is not sustainable performance, it is silent erosion.

Resilience as a professional skill, requires structure.

It depends on how well your environment allows people to meet difficulty without being consumed by it:  to recover, reconnect and return with strength that isn’t constantly spent.

So, if your organisation is still asking people to “be more resilient,” it may be worth asking a different question:

“What are we doing that makes recovery impossible?”

The most effective systems are not those that eliminate challenge, they are those that expect it, support it and remain stable in the face of it.