There's a point in most years where the calendar starts filling itself in. Work deadlines stack up before the shutdown, invitations arrive faster than you can answer them, and somewhere in the middle of it all you're supposed to be enjoying yourself. If your mind hasn't had a genuinely quiet moment in weeks, you're not imagining it.
Stress isn't the enemy — chronic stress is
On a recent episode of me&my health up I sat down with Heidi Horne, a mindfulness and happiness speaker who has spent 17 years in the wellness space as a yoga teacher, wellness coach and corporate keynote presenter. One of the first things she said reframed the whole conversation for me: stress in small doses isn't a problem. It usually means you care about something and you want to do it well.
The trouble starts when short bursts of pressure stop switching off and become the background hum of your life. Heidi referenced a figure that circulates widely in her field — that somewhere between 75% and 90% of doctor visits have a stress component to them. Whatever the precise number, the direction of travel is hard to argue with. Chronic stress eventually shows up in the body.
So the goal isn't a stress-free life. That was never on offer. The goal is to learn how to stress less: to notice pressure earlier, and to have two or three simple tools you can actually reach for when you do.
Tip one: learn your own stress signature
Heidi's first tip is the one most people skip, because it doesn't feel like doing anything. Before you can manage stress, you have to recognise it — and stress doesn't look the same in any two people.
For some it's fatigue that no amount of sleep touches. For others it's appetite, in either direction: eating constantly or forgetting to eat at all. It might be the million open tabs in your head, the inability to settle on one task, the multitasking that produces plenty of motion and very little progress. Emotionally, it might be a shorter fuse than usual, or a flatness where enthusiasm used to be.
As Heidi put it, we are often so busy being involved that we never stop to check how we actually are. So take an honest inventory. What does stress do to your body, and what does it do to your mood? Once you can name your own early warning signs, you get to intervene at the first stage rather than the third.
Tip two: use the breath you already have
I love this tip because the equipment is free, you're already carrying it, and it works in under a minute. Heidi guides people through nasal breathing — in and out through the nose rather than the mouth — and her go-to starting point is box breathing.
You draw a box with your breath: in for four counts, hold for four, out for four, hold for four. That's one round. Four or five rounds takes well under a minute, and it's the same technique used by people heading into genuinely high-stakes situations, Navy SEALs included.
What makes this so useful isn't that it's clever. It's that it's available. You can do it at a red light, in the two minutes before a meeting, in the car before you walk in the front door at the end of the day. Most of us don't need a longer, more sophisticated stress practice. We need a shorter one we'll actually use.
Tip three: check the filter on your sunglasses
Heidi's third tip is mindset, which she describes as the sum of your thoughts and your words — how you speak to yourself, how you see yourself, and how you see the world around you. Her metaphor is a pair of sunglasses: you're always wearing a filter, and the only real question is whether it's a positive one or a negative one.
Here's the question she poses to her clients, and it's worth sitting with: are you talking to yourself like a best friend, or like your worst enemy? Because the thoughts that run on repeat in most of our heads are negative, unexamined, and frequently just not true. Heidi's example is the person who decided they were "bad at maths" because they failed a test at age seven, and has carried that around ever since.
This matters for stress because your internal commentary either amplifies pressure or buffers it. Catastrophising — the mind running straight to the worst version of events — turns one difficult week into a crisis. Heidi's reminder is that the overwhelming majority of the things we worry about never come to pass.
The reframe that does the heavy lifting: the gain, not the gap
If you only take one thing from this, take this. When Heidi works with people who are overwhelmed, the single most effective shift she makes is moving their attention from the gap to the gain.
The gap is everything still left to do, every box unticked, every standard unmet. It's an infinite list, which is precisely why looking at it is so exhausting. The gain is what you've actually done — the progress made, the things handled, the ground covered. Same week, same facts, completely different nervous system response.
This is also why Heidi builds her whole approach around habits that take a minute or less. Small, genuinely doable steps compound. Grand plans that require a free weekend you don't have simply become one more thing in the gap.
Key takeaways
- Name your early warning signs. Write down how stress shows up in your body and your mood, so you can catch it at stage one instead of stage three.
- Keep one breathing tool in your pocket. Box breathing — in four, hold four, out four, hold four — for four or five rounds. Under a minute, nose breathing, anywhere.
- Audit your self-talk. Ask whether you're speaking to yourself like a best friend or an enemy, and whether the thought is actually true.
- Count the gain, not the gap. End the day by listing what you did, not what's left.
- Put your own oxygen mask on first. Heidi learned this the hard way after breaking her arm — you can't pour from an empty cup, and the guilt that comes with resting isn't a useful signal.
- Start absurdly small. One minute, repeated, beats a perfect plan you never begin.
Where this fits into a holistic approach
As a clinical nutritionist and lifestyle medicine specialist, I see the downstream effects of chronic stress constantly — in digestion, in sleep quality, in energy, in the food choices people make at 3pm when their reserves are gone. You can have an immaculate nutrition plan and still feel terrible if your nervous system never gets to stand down.
That's why at me&my wellness I look at the whole picture rather than one slice of it. Nutrition matters enormously, but so do sleep, movement, mindset and connection — and they're all pulling on the same rope. The strategies above work precisely because they're small enough to survive a busy week, which is the only kind of strategy worth having.
Want to go deeper on this? Book a free 30-minute discovery call with Anthony at meandmywellness.com.au