And yes, I know that sounds slightly unhinged during Stress Awareness Month.
April is Stress Awareness Month and this year we’re flicking the switch. Asking different questions, talking to the experts and deep diving into the research.
Generally we’re told to “reduce stress,” “manage stress,” and ideally become some serene, green-juice-drinking version of ourselves who never raises their voice or checks emails after 6pm.
Cute in theory. Slightly unrealistic in practice.
Because most of us aren’t trying to escape our lives – we actually quite like them. The careers, the families, the ambitions… they just happen to come with a side of stress.
But there’s a part of the conversation that rarely gets mentioned, and it’s actually quite important – particularly once you move into your forties and beyond.
Stress itself isn’t inherently bad. Your body is designed for it. In fact, a healthy nervous system expects it.
So what if the goal isn’t to eliminate stress but to find the right tools and get the right support so you can get better at handling it?
Think about how many of the things we actively choose in life place stress on the body. Exercise is stress. Learning something new is stress. Starting a business, raising children, falling in love, travelling somewhere unfamiliar – all of it activates the nervous system in some way.
Your heart rate lifts, energy mobilises, attention sharpens. The body prepares to deal with whatever is in front of it. That response isn’t a flaw. It’s your system working exactly as it evolved to work. And most of these things? They’re also pure joy.
The nervous system evolved for moments of stress.
Not days, not weeks, not months. Moments.
That means moments of activation, followed by recovery.
Where things become messy is the world we’re living in today.
In the past you ran from the tiger, the adrenaline surged, cortisol did its job, and eventually your body settled back into a quieter state where digestion, repair and hormone regulation could take over again.
Activation. Recovery. Repeat.
And that rhythm is good – it’s how your system maintains balance.
But modern life has quietly removed the second half of that equation.
The tiger no longer appears briefly and disappears. Instead it sits on your shoulder all day in the form of unread emails, financial responsibilities, ageing parents, children who seem to require an endless logistics operation, and a brain that continues thinking long after everyone else has gone to bed.
Then somewhere in the middle of all of this, hormones start shifting.
Many women notice that stress begins to feel different in their forties. Sleep becomes lighter, patience becomes shorter, and the ability to absorb pressure without it spilling over starts to change. The buffering system that once kept everything humming along starts behaving slightly differently.
A lot of women describe the feeling in almost identical terms: wired and exhausted at the same time. Overwhelm that doesn’t leave.
Not lacking resilience. Not “bad at coping.” Simply a nervous system that has been asked to remain switched on for a very long time.
Which brings me to the part of the conversation I think is far more useful than endlessly discussing how harmful stress is.
The real goal isn’t removing stress from your life.
If anything, most of us would be bored senseless if we managed that.
What actually matters is whether your nervous system has the capacity to move between effort and recovery. The healthiest systems are not permanently calm. They’re flexible. They rise to meet the moment when something requires focus or energy, and they know how to settle again once the moment passes.
That flexibility is what resilience really looks like. And a lot of the things that strengthen that resilience look suspiciously like… stress.
Strength training places stress on muscle so it grows stronger.
Breath work nudges the nervous system to become more adaptable.
Exercise temporarily raises cortisol and then teaches the body how to regulate it more efficiently afterwards.
Physiologists call this hormesis – small, controlled challenges that make a biological system more capable over time.
In other words, the body gets stronger by experiencing manageable stress and then recovering from it. Which brings us back to what many women actually need more of in midlife.
Not a perfectly calm existence. That’s rarely realistic when life is full of responsibilities, ambitions, families, work and the occasional slightly chaotic Tuesday (be nice though).
Ahh rhythm. That’s the where the real power sits for us as women.
Once that rhythm is back in place, something else tends to happen.
Life doesn’t necessarily become less demanding. In many cases it becomes bigger. Careers expand, children grow into complicated humans, new ideas emerge, and suddenly you find yourself juggling more than you ever imagined ten years earlier.
The difference is that your nervous system has the capacity to hold it.
Which feels like a far more empowering way to approach Stress Awareness Month than trying to eliminate stress altogether.
A more useful question might be this:
How do we build the kind of nervous system that can support the life we actually want to live?
That conversation is far more interesting (and far more hopeful) than endlessly talking about how fragile we all are.
Lisa x
