What I Wish I’d Known About Work Stress Before It Nearly Broke Me

I used to eat peanut butter straight from the jar while crying from exhaustion.

With a spoon, mind you. Not a knife. I had standards.

This was dinner. Standing in my kitchen at 9pm, still in my work clothes, too tired to make actual food but too wired to sleep. My body shaking from cortisol. My brain still racing from the day—who I needed to call, what email to send next, which report was due, what I hadn’t finished yet.

It wasn’t worry, exactly. It was more like my brain had been sprinting all day and nobody had told it the race was over. I’d worked through lunch. Powered through the afternoon. Stayed late. And now I still couldn’t switch off.

I’d literally compose emails in my sleep. Wake up at 3am convinced I’d sent something important, then have to check my outbox to make sure I hadn’t.

And my one and only stress management strategy? Exercise at night to “burn off” the anxiety. (Spoiler: exercising at 10pm just floods your body with more stress hormones. I was essentially pouring petrol on a fire and wondering why it kept getting bigger.)

I did this for months. Maybe longer. The weeks blur together when you’re not sleeping properly.

I was stretched thin, running on empty.

And then came the restructure.

My wonderful managers—the ones who’d intuitively understood how I worked, who gave me interesting projects and room to breathe—got moved to other teams. In their place: a woman with a tight ponytail and power suits and a laugh like a bark. BAHAHA. You could hear it from across the office, followed by the click-click-click of her heels as she strode between desks.

The first time we met, she did that lightning-fast look up and down. You know the one. Immediately assessing, immediately categorising. My outfit from Target probably told her everything she needed to know.

After that, everything changed. She took away my projects. Gave me routine tasks instead. I was once asked to edit twelve versions of the same brief in a single week. Twelve. I’d read the same sentence over and over and it wouldn’t sink in. My brain had clocked off. Left the building. Was probably somewhere on a beach, refusing to return my calls.

That’s when the homesick feeling started. This ache for something I couldn’t name—which is strange when you’re in a job you’ve had for nineteen years. I’d sit at my desk and feel like I was in the wrong place, even though I’d been there forever.

One day she shouted at me in front of the whole office. I picked up my bag and walked out. Never went back.

What followed wasn’t pretty. I spent weeks on the couch, unable to do much except watch nature documentaries. Even those made me cry. David Attenborough would narrate a penguin waddling across the ice and I’d be sobbing into a cushion. The penguin is trying so hard, I’d think. We’re all just trying so hard.

(Not my finest era, I’ll admit.)

But honestly? Walking out was probably the best thing that could have happened. Because it forced me to finally pay attention to what my body had been screaming at me for months.

The Stress Cycle Nobody Taught Me About

Emily and Amelia Nagoski, authors of Burnout (2019), explain something that completely changed how I understand stress: there’s a difference between the stressor (the thing causing stress) and the stress itself (what’s happening in your body).

Dealing with the stressor—finishing the deadline, having the difficult conversation, surviving the restructure—doesn’t automatically complete the stress cycle in your body. The cortisol is still there. The tension is still there. Your nervous system is still screaming.

Oh, I thought, when I first read this. Oh.

That’s why I could finish a project and still feel terrible. That’s why weekends didn’t help. That’s why I kept getting sicker and more exhausted even when I was technically “managing” my workload.

I was dealing with stressors. I wasn’t completing the stress cycle.

So what does that actually mean?

When something stressful happens, your body kicks into survival mode. Heart rate up. Muscles tense. Stress hormones flooding your system. This is your body preparing to fight or run—which was very helpful when the threat was a lion, less helpful when it’s a passive-aggressive email from your manager.

Here’s the problem: back when we had lions to worry about, the stress cycle had a natural ending. You’d run, you’d escape, you’d collapse in your cave, and your body would process the stress. Cycle complete.

But modern stressors don’t work like that. You can’t run from a restructure. You can’t fight a deadline. You just… sit there. Absorbing it. The stress response fires up, but it never gets discharged. Your body is stuck mid-cycle, waiting for the “all clear” signal that never comes.

The Nagoskis explain that completing the cycle requires physical movement, connection, or emotional release—something that tells your body the threat is over, you survived, you’re safe now. That might be exercise, or a long hug, or a good cry, or even just shaking it out. Anything that lets your nervous system finish what it started.

I wasn’t doing any of that. I was just… accumulating. Stressor after stressor, stress response after stress response, with no release valve. No wonder my body eventually forced me to stop.

What Actually Helps (That Isn’t Just “Breathe Deeply”)

I’m not a psychologist. I’m someone who reads too many research papers at 3am and then tries to figure out how to apply them to real life without, you know, losing my mind in the process. But here’s what I’ve learned actually works—and none of it requires becoming a morning person or drinking green smoothies that taste like lawn clippings.

The 5-4-3-2-1 Thing

When your brain is spiralling—running through worst-case scenarios, replaying conversations, catastrophising about Tuesday’s meeting—it’s essentially stuck in “not now” mode. The threats feel real but they’re not actually happening. Your body doesn’t know the difference.

This grounding technique pulls you back:

• Notice 5 things you can see (your stapler, a pot plant, the photocopier, a window, that weird stain on the ceiling you keep meaning to investigate)
• 4 things you can feel (the chair supporting you, your feet on the floor, the clothes you’re wearing, the chill radiating from your boss’s heart)
• 3 things you can hear (people talking, someone’s phone ringing, or the guy over the partition, clicking his jaw with every single sandwich bite)
• 2 things you can smell (coffee, hopefully—or the faint BO of a colleague who did lunchtime gym)
• 1 thing you can taste (the Tim Tams you stress-ate at 10am, or possibly just despair)

It sounds too simple to work. I thought so too. But it interrupts the spiral. Gives your brain something concrete to focus on instead of the imaginary disaster playing on repeat.

Ask Your Feelings What They Actually Need

Dr Marc Brackett, author of Permission to Feel (2019), suggests something that initially made me roll my eyes: when you feel stressed, pause and specifically name the emotion. Then ask yourself: What does this emotion need right now?

Not what does this situation need. What does the emotion need.

Sometimes it’s a break. Sometimes it’s a conversation. Sometimes it’s just acknowledgment—Yes, this is hard. It makes sense that I feel this way.

I started doing this during my worst period and discovered something embarrassing: half the time, what I needed was a glass of water and five minutes away from my desk. Not a career change. Not a complete life overhaul. Just basic human maintenance I’d been ignoring for hours.

The Space Between Things

Here’s what I did during my burnout: I finished one task and immediately started another. Back-to-back meetings with no breaks. Emails answered during lunch (lunch being a sad sandwich eaten over my keyboard). No transitions. No pauses. Just an endless stream of doing until I collapsed at the end of the day.

I work for myself now, from home. You’d think that would fix everything. No terrible boss! No office politics! Set your own hours!

But here’s what I discovered: when you work from home, the boundaries blur even more. There’s no commute to signal “work is over.” No colleagues leaving at 5pm to remind you that’s a thing humans do. Just you, your laptop, and the persistent feeling that you should probably be doing more.

Which means you have to build the breaks in yourself. Deliberately. Awkwardly. Even when it feels like you’re slacking off.

The research calls it “micro-recovery.” I call it “remembering you’re a human being, not a productivity robot.”

It looks like: thirty seconds between tasks to take a breath. Actually making lunch instead of grabbing whatever’s closest. Going outside—even just to check the letterbox—instead of realising at 4pm you haven’t left the house. For three days. These tiny pauses prevent stress from compounding throughout the day.

I resisted this for ages. I don’t have time for breaks, I’d think. There’s too much to do.

But here’s the thing: I had time to stare vaguely at the wall for five minutes. I had time to Google “why does my eye keep twitching” then fall down a WebMD rabbit hole. I had time to rearrange my stationery for the third time that month, even though it didn’t need rearranging the second time.

Those breaks were happening whether I scheduled them or not. The only question was whether they’d be recovery or procrastination spirals.

Work With Your Energy, Not Against It

I used to schedule my hardest tasks whenever they landed in my inbox. Important presentation prep at 4pm when my brain was mush. Detailed analytical work right after lunch when I could barely keep my eyes open.

Turns out, this is backwards.

Your brain has natural energy rhythms. For most people, focus peaks mid-morning and dips after lunch. Fighting this is like trying to swim against a current—possible, but exhausting.

Now I protect my mornings for the work that actually requires thinking. Meetings and emails get pushed to the afternoon. Mindless admin tasks happen during the post-lunch slump when I’m basically useless anyway.

It’s not a perfect system. (There is no perfect system. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.) But it means I’m working with my brain instead of constantly battling it.

The Honest Part

I wish I could tell you I figured all this out, started my own business, and now I’m a zen master who never gets stressed and handles every challenge with grace and wisdom.

I can’t tell you that because it would be a lie.

Some weeks I still eat lunch at my desk. Some days I still answer emails at 10pm because the boundary between “office” and “home” is approximately three metres and a door I forget to close. Sometimes I catch myself clenching my jaw so hard my teeth ache, and then I have to drink lukewarm coffee the rest of the day because I’ve made them too sensitive for anything else.

But it happens less. And when it does happen, I notice it faster. And I have tools now—actual, practical tools—instead of just “try harder” and “push through.”

That’s the whole goal, really. Not perfection. Just better.

If you’re in the thick of it right now—the overwhelm, the exhaustion, the crying-over-peanut-butter stage—please know this: it’s not a character flaw. It’s not weakness. It’s your body telling you something needs to change.

And you don’t have to figure it all out at once. Start with one thing. The smallest, easiest thing.

Even that counts.

Want more practical strategies? I’ve put together a free guide with additional techniques for managing workplace stress—quick tools you can use at your desk, strategies for building long-term resilience, and simple ways to protect your energy during busy periods.

References

Brackett, M. (2019). Permission to feel: Unlocking the power of emotions to help our kids, ourselves, and our society thrive. Celadon Books.

Nagoski, E., & Nagoski, A. (2019). Burnout: The secret to unlocking the stress cycle. Ballantine Books.