How to turn your body’s stress response into a performance and health asset
Maya checked her watch twenty minutes before the board presentation. Her fitness tracker showed her heart rate was up. She already knew she was stressed, and seeing it confirmed didn’t exactly help.
She’d been preparing for three weeks and knew her material. She’d done this kind of thing plenty of times before, but there was always that low hum of self-doubt around it, no matter how well prepared she was.
She could never quite understand why these routine presentations got to her so much. And now, with the watch confirming what her body was already telling her, the whole thing felt harder than it had any right to.
The Hidden Cost of Getting Through
For most of her career, Maya had understood stress as a kind of toll. If the work mattered, pressure came with it, and the only way to manage it was to face it and keep going.
She wasn’t someone who crumbled. If anything, she converted pressure into extra effort. Her colleagues saw her as solid and dependable under fire.
What they didn’t see was the mental cost: the sense that she was always wading through mud, using so much effort just to look composed.
Over time, little things started to expose the mental wear and tear. A habit of holding back from jobs she’d once have taken on without much thought. Openly blaming herself when something didn’t go as well as she’d hoped. A sinking feeling that came more often than she liked: that she was just getting by rather than getting on top.
She thought of stress as the enemy she’d learned to live with. The idea of wanting more of it had genuinely never crossed her mind.
Breathe Into It
I have been coaching elite performers for a long time: rugby players, golfers, footballers, cricketers, Muay Thai fighters, executives. Before a big contest, the conversation is always the same. At some point, the person in front of me describes their nerves as the problem to overcome, suppress, or push through.
I always tell them the same thing:
Those nerves are not working against you. The adrenaline is there to make you faster, stronger, sharper. Breathe into it, accept it and feel it coursing through your body. Fighting it is the mistake that holds you back.
I didn’t have a neuroscientist’s explanation for why. I had what I could see: the athletes who accepted the activation performed better, recovered faster, and grew mentally stronger than those who spent their energy resisting it. That was enough for me.
Dr Tommy Wood’s research gave me the explanation I didn’t have then.
In his study, two groups of people faced the same stressful situation. Both groups showed the same cortisol spike. But there was a surprising difference. People who viewed stress as something that helps the body rise to a challenge also released a hormone called DHEA, which drives growth and adaptation.
People who viewed stress as damaging released no DHEA. The situation was identical for both groups, the activation was identical, but the physiological outcomes were entirely different, decided by what each person believed about what was happening to them.
Fascinatingly, Wood’s research also found that people releasing DHEA made better decisions in those high-pressure moments.
What I was asking those athletes to do, without knowing the mechanism, was shift from a cortisol-only response to one that also released DHEA. The belief that the pressure was on their side was the thing that changed the hormonal profile. The performance difference I could see with my own eyes was driven by the biology.
When Maya came to me as a coaching client, I introduced her to Wood’s research and we began working through the first five of The 7 Skills to impress™.
The Ordeal Begins Before You’ve Even Begun
That science gave Maya a new framework for what she’d been experiencing.
Edited Reality is the version of the world your Identity shows you, shaped by the patterns your subconscious has learned over time.
If your Identity has learned to read pressure as threat, that’s what it will show you. Your System 1 brain locks onto the danger signal and starts to narrow your thinking. You become less fluid, less creative, and less able to express your talent in exactly the moments those qualities are most needed.
That’s what the reading on Maya’s watch triggered. It confirmed something she already half believed, and her system moved into Fight, Flight or Freeze before she’d even walked into the room.
Wood’s research asked a different question: what if she’d been misreading the signal?
Give Your Mind a Direction
The first steps for Maya came with Identify Your Outcome.
Under pressure, attention moves towards threat. The mind begins scanning for danger, which means attention fills with the very thing you’re hoping to avoid.
In the 7 Skills framework this is the Stroop Magnet: whatever dominates attention pulls behaviour towards it, the way a motorbike goes where the rider’s eyes go. Look at the kerb and the bike drifts into it.
A clear Outcome gives attention somewhere more useful to focus.
The point is to focus System 1 towards what you’re actually trying to achieve.
“I’m going to make this case clearly and let the conversation develop naturally,”
is a fundamentally different instruction to the mind than,
“I mustn’t mess this up.”
The first keeps rational thinking available. The second loads the imagination with the precise failure you were hoping to prevent.
Maya found this harder than she’d expected. She had a habit of framing things around what she was hoping to avoid, and not just for presentations. It was the same in planning conversations, in her reviews of how meetings had gone, in the way she approached difficult exchanges with colleagues.
The Stroop Magnet had been pulling at her attention in dozens of small ways she’d never been aware of. Seeing it clearly was uncomfortable, and changing it was gradual.
What she noticed, as she got better at it, was a clarity of mind she hadn’t had before. Her mind stopped racing around the meeting she’d imagined going wrong, and started paying attention to the one actually in front of her.
Keep Your Brain Online Under Pressure
If Outcomes got her mind pointing the right way, Manage Your State helped calm the reaction in her body. For Maya, the practical tool was 7-11 Breathing.
When the stress response begins, breathing moves into the chest and becomes shallow and irregular. That rhythm affects the heartbeat, and System 1 reads the unsteady signal as evidence that something is wrong. Rational thought becomes harder to access.
By breathing through the diaphragm, with the out-breath longer than the in-breath, seven seconds in and eleven out, you help the body return to what the framework calls Cardiac Coherence. The heartbeat becomes more regular, the alarm signal drops, and you can think properly again.
For Maya, Wood’s research and the breathing technique were coming at the same problem from two directions. First, you calm the body.
Once the body calms down, the new way of seeing stress starts to make sense. You’re not trying to talk yourself into believing pressure can help you. You can actually feel the difference: calmer, sharper, more present.
She built the habit of 7-11 Breathing in low-stakes moments: on the commute, in the lift, in the minutes before a meeting. Gradually, she found that pressure felt different when she’d accepted it and prepared herself. Less like an emergency to be managed, more like weather she knew how to dress for.
The Stress Filter You Don’t Know You’re Using
Then the big change came through the Elevate Formula.
The Elevate Formula describes the filters through which we make sense of difficulty.
People with a strong, resilient Identity, a High IDQ, tend to see problems as Narrow in scope, Fleeting in duration, and Other in nature, meaning the problem is something that happened rather than something that reflects their worth as a person.
People whose Identity feels less secure under pressure tend to read a setback as Broad, Lasting, and Self: a stumble in a meeting becomes evidence of something wrong in themselves.
Maya could see the pattern clearly in herself, particularly when she was tired. A difficult conversation would begin to feel like a verdict on her credibility rather than a specific, contained event. She’d find herself compensating in advance of failures that hadn’t happened yet.
She couldn’t always catch this in the moment. What she found was that she could notice it earlier, and ask whether the thing was genuinely as broad and lasting as it felt, or whether it was a specific, contained, Fleeting event being run through an old lens.
Over months, that question changed how she recovered from difficulty. Setbacks weren’t as stressful. She became a little more sure of herself, in a way she hadn’t noticed developing until it was simply there.
There was a week, about four months in, when a project she’d championed was shelved. The old reaction would have been Broad and Lasting: evidence of poor judgement, a step back in how others saw her.
What she noticed instead was that it didn’t bother her as much as she’d expected. The project had been the right call with the information available. It hadn’t worked out. She could see, for the first time with any real clarity, that those were two separate things.
The Test
Nine months in, Maya was leading the most important presentation her team had attempted in years. A long-standing client relationship was at a critical point, and she was the linchpin: the person the day depended on, carrying the bulk of the responsibility.
Twenty minutes before the meeting, she found a significant error in the financial projections at the heart of the proposal.
The old pattern came immediately. The error felt Broad, like confirmation of something she’d half expected about herself. One glance at her watch told her she couldn’t pretend she was calm.
She breathed through her diaphragm, long slow out-breath, and thought about how she could rescue the meeting. She’d show them a team that understood the problem deeply. She’d explain honestly that she’d caught something important and wanted to walk them through it. The conversation would be unscripted, professional and authentic.
That became the Outcome. From there, she could lead the meeting.
She was calmer than she expected. The error, acknowledged directly at the start, became the foundation of a more honest conversation than any prepared version would have allowed. She left the room satisfied, and with the rare, exhilarating knowledge that she had been, in every sense, herself, and it had been more than enough.
Performance Today. Resilience for Decades.
What Maya remembered most from that afternoon was not the meeting itself but the twenty minutes before it. The stress had been real, the kind that would’ve beaten her a year earlier.
This time, she’d used the breathing, she’d found the Outcome, and instead of fighting her nerves, she’d welcomed them in and felt them enliven and sharpen her.
That’s what Wood’s research describes at the hormonal level. Cortisol prepares the body to respond. DHEA drives adaptation and growth.
The ratio between them changes depending on what you believe the pressure means.
And this matters far beyond one good performance under pressure.
Wood points out that 45% of dementia cases are potentially preventable through lifestyle changes, and the way the body responds to stress sits near the heart of that.
Chronic stress, the kind that never lets you recover, is linked to higher blood pressure, higher blood sugar, and accelerated cognitive decline. The person who has learned to use stress rather than endure it is doing more than performing well today. They are building a more resilient brain for the decades ahead.
The 7 Skills give that process a practical structure. Identify Your Outcome keeps attention pointed where it can be used. Manage Your State gives the body the signal it needs to stay coherent.
The Elevate Formula gradually reshapes how difficulty gets interpreted, until a setback reads as Narrow, Fleeting, and Other rather than as confirmation of a deeper inadequacy.
The pressure doesn’t go away. What changes is the Edited Reality around it: a stress response that once sent you looking for the exit begins, over time, to feel like an invitation to do your best work.
What Next?
If this has you thinking about your own relationship with stress:
In two minutes, you’ll see how your Identity is shaping your response to pressure.
NB: The 2024 Lancet Commission reported that around 45% of dementia cases may be preventable or delayed by addressing modifiable risk factors across life. Chronic stress is one of the factors worth taking seriously.
