That constant, low-grade stress that you’ve probably stopped even questioning isn’t who you are… it’s your nervous system trying to get your attention. This episode is all about why you should finally listen to it, and how to do that. So, Let’s Talk About Mental Health!

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Episode Overview:

Why do you feel stressed all the time, even when nothing’s necessarily ‘wrong’ right now? If you can’t remember the last time you felt properly calm or relaxed, your stress response probably isn’t broken; it’s just never getting the signal to stand down. 

In this episode of the Let’s Talk About Mental Health podcast, I break down what’s actually happening in your nervous system when stress becomes your resting state instead of a passing feeling, as well as why your stress response won’t just switch itself off and why treating it as a workload problem usually only tells you half the story. I dig into the internal sources of stress most of us never name, like the self-criticism, the guilt around rest, and the standards we hold ourselves to, alongside the external causes of stress. You’ll walk away understanding what your stress is actually trying to tell you, and you’ll have practical and sustainable ways to calm your nervous system and address whatever’s driving it to stay on high alert… without just trying to grit your teeth and push through. 

👉 Ready to understand what your chronic stress is really trying to tell you? Then let’s talk!

💡 TL;DR: Chronic stress isn’t a personality trait or a productivity problem… it’s an alarm system that’s stuck in the ‘on’ position, and this episode shows you how to actually start turning the volume down on it. 🙂

New here? Hi! Let’s Talk About Mental Health is your weekly dose of practical mental health advice for real life. I’m Jeremy Godwin (hello! 👋) and I keep things simple, honest, and doable so you can feel more in control of your life and your mental wellbeing. If you’re not already a free subscriber, sign up below to have episodes and transcripts land in your inbox every Sunday:

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Episode Transcript:

Why your stress never switches off

If you’re constantly stressed, then your body is trying to tell you something.

You know that thing where you can’t really remember the last time that you felt properly relaxed? Where ‘stressed’ has stopped being a mood, and just become your resting state?

Feeling stressed all the time is draining, it’s exhausting, and it’s doing you harm.

Now… you’ve probably told yourself, “Things are just busy right now!” or that you’ll be fine once you get through the next week or so.

Except the stress never quite seems to ease off, does it? Because when you’ve gotten so used to being stressed all the time, it’s easy to start mistaking it for normal.

But it’s not, and it needs your attention to make sure that things don’t get worse.

So let’s talk about… feeling constantly stressed.

Hello and welcome! I’m Jeremy Godwin and this is the Let’s Talk About Mental Health podcast, full of practical advice to help you understand and improve your mental health.

So… when you feel constantly stressed, that feeling isn’t random and it’s not some sort of ‘highly strung’ personality trait either. It’s your nervous system doing exactly what it was built to do. But the problem is that your nervous system was built for short bursts of stress, not for running on and on and on with no finish line in sight. So today’s episode is all about understanding what’s actually going on in your body when you’re constantly stressed, and why it won’t just switch itself off… as well as what you can do about the feeling and whatever’s causing it, without just trying to grit your teeth and push through it.

Now… if you came to this episode because you’re feeling stressed at the moment, let me give you one quick thing that you can do immediately to calm yourself before we go any further and then we’re going to get into more detailed advice later on in the episode. So: try breathing in for four counts, holding your breath for four counts, and then breathing out for six counts, deliberately letting that exhale run longer than the inhale. A longer exhale tells your nervous system you’re OK. So, repeat that exercise a few times. It’s not going to magically fix whatever’s causing your stress, but it does take the edge off enough to let you think more clearly.

We’re going to come back and build on that properly later on, but first we need to discuss what’s actually happening in your body to cause that feeling in the first place.

So let’s talk about…

What stress actually is

So the first thing to flag about stress is that it’s not actually the enemy. Stress, in its most basic function, is just your body’s way of getting you ready to handle something that matters; so your heart rate goes up, your muscles get primed for action, your focus sharpens, and it all happens in an instant so that you can either deal with a threat in front of you or get yourself out of its way. That’s it.

That’s all stress was ever meant to be: a short, sharp burst of readiness for something specific followed by a return to normal once the threat has passed. Think about the last time that something genuinely startled you: so you’re driving and someone aggressively cut you off in traffic, or you nearly missed a deadline, or you got a really scary phone call. That jolt that you felt, and then the comedown afterwards where your heart rate slowly settled and your shoulders dropped, all of that was stress working exactly the way that it’s supposed to.

It is not meant to be a permanent or near-permanent state.

But the trouble is that’s not what most of us are experiencing anymore. What you’re probably feeling in terms of stress isn’t really a short burst anymore… it’s more like a background hum that never really switches off.

You wake up with it, maybe even before your alarm goes off, and your mind starts quickly spinning through everything that’s happening in the day ahead. You carry that kind of tight, ‘wound up’ feeling with you throughout the day: in the tightness across your shoulders when you’re just sitting at your desk working, or in the way that you get annoyed with people a bit quicker than you maybe used to, or in the feeling of dread that shows up when you see an email from that person… you know the one, we’ve all got one! You go to bed and that feeling is still sitting there, maybe quietly or maybe not so quietly, and it’s there in your shoulders or your clenched jaw or the pit of your stomach.

And then even when you do finally fall asleep, it’s rarely ever a refreshing and restful sleep. And then it starts all over again the next day. And because all of that stuff has been happening for so long, it stops registering as stress and just starts to feel like who you are, how you are. And when stress becomes chronic like that, it stops feeling like an event and it starts feeling like your personality. You stop saying things like, “Oh, I’m stressed about this,” and start just identifying as a stressed person.

There is a fairly common misconception about stress that we need to be very clear on, right? A lot of people tend to think that it’s a workload problem; something that can be fixed with better time management, or having a lighter week, or ideally taking a holiday. And sure, sometimes it is genuinely about having just far too much on… but that’s usually only ever part of the picture.

Stress doesn’t just come from your never ending to-do list or your overflowing inbox. It also comes from being tough on yourself, from putting pressure on yourself to get everything right, from the way that you talk to yourself when you fall short, as well as your relationship with rest itself and whether or not you actually let yourself rest when you need it or where you feel like you don’t deserve to rest because you have to go, go, go all day and all night long like, you know, most of the productivity influencers tell you to. And stress comes from lots of other things that might have nothing to do with work at all: your relationships, your health, money, even just the state of the world some days… or weeks… or months! You could very easily take two or three weeks off work with nothing to do and still come back feeling extremely stressed, because your job is probably not the only thing feeding your stress.

So before we go any further, it’s worth being completely and utterly honest with yourself about where your stress is really coming from. Because if you only ever look at the external stuff, like your job or your deadlines or the demands that you’re dealing with, then you’re going to find that you miss out on a lot of the stuff that’s actually driving your stress. And the problem there is that you can’t do anything meaningful to address a source of stress that you haven’t even named or acknowledged.

So now let’s talk about…

Why stress affects your mental wellbeing

Alright, so what’s actually going on inside you when you’re stressed? Well, let me explain really briefly, and I promise this will not turn into a biology lecture… just maybe a little tiny bit!

When your brain identifies something as being a threat, now regardless of whether that’s an actual danger or just an inbox full of problems that you have to deal with, when that happens, that’s when your brain can send a distress signal to your adrenal glands which then flood your system with adrenaline and cortisol.

You’ve probably heard of those. Adrenaline is the fast one; it’s what gets your heart pounding, and it’s what makes your senses sharper within moments.

Cortisol, on the other hand, is slower and longer acting. It’s the one that keeps you fueled and alert if the threat hangs around.

Both of them exist to get you through a sudden burst of danger, so that you can either get out of the way or protect yourself or then calm down once the threat has passed.

But your stress response was never built to run for weeks or months at a time. However, that’s exactly what happens for a lot of us. The stress drags on. You know, even if there’s no lion chasing you or any so-called ‘real’ emergency, there’s still lots to stress you out: the relationship that’s always got some tension in it, the bank account that’s turned into more of a ‘spendings’ account than a ‘savings’, the inbox that never empties, or the version of yourself in your head that’s never satisfied or that just likes to criticise you non-stop.

None of those things just resolve themselves nice and neatly the way that a lion chasing after you would, right? It would either run off and the threat’s gone, or it would eat you and then you don’t have to worry about it anymore. The thing about that sort of threat is it means that your brain can then start to calm down, right?

Because it’s very clear and defined that the threat has gone. But for most of the time now the alarm in your mind just stays on instead, right? If you’ve ever found yourself wide awake at 1:00 AM utterly exhausted, but your brain is still going through tomorrow’s to-do list like it’s guarding against something, that’s the alarm with nowhere to go.

And so when your stress levels stay elevated for that long, it doesn’t just make you feel wound up. It actually starts working against you. It affects your sleep, it affects your immune system, it affects your memory and your ability to think clearly; you know, it’s the reason why you’ll walk into a room and just totally forget what you went in for or you might reread the same thing four times and still not take it in. Your body isn’t malfunctioning when that sort of stuff happens. It’s doing exactly what it was designed to do. It’s just that it’s happening because your brain doesn’t switch off that alarm.

Now… stress is not a character flaw, and it is not a sign that you’re weak or you can’t cope. It is simply information. It’s your nervous system tapping you repeatedly, trying to tell you that something needs your attention. The real problem is not that you feel stressed. It’s what happens when you keep ignoring what it’s telling you.

Now, I know that one personally. For years, I treated my own stress as something to just plough through… something to be managed rather than listened to. I didn’t acknowledge it; this is back when I worked in the corporate sector over a decade ago, more than that now, 15 years ago. And I didn’t address what was actually causing all of that stress. I just… I kept on telling myself that I’d deal with it once things settled down. Except things never settled down, did they? Because I never changed anything that was causing the pressure in the first place. And eventually my body and my mind stopped asking politely. I ended up having a full breakdown in late 2011, followed by severe depression and anxiety not only because of stress but mainly because I never gave the ‘stress alarm’ a reason to stop ringing.

Now, I don’t say that to scare you; it’s just the reality of what happens. Because the cold hard fact is that a body that’s been on high alert for months, or years in my case, it doesn’t just quietly reset itself. It doesn’t even happen once you finally notice that something’s going on.

Chronic stress costs you. It costs your health, your relationships, your ability to actually enjoy your own life… and that cost will only compound the longer the stress stays unaddressed.

So if you feel constantly stressed and exhausted and can’t work out what to do about it, then it’s time to stop trying to white-knuckle your way through it or to ignore it… and it’s time instead to start listening to what your stress is trying to tell you. And we’re going to talk about how to do that right after this quick break.

[AD BREAK]

And welcome back! Now let’s get into the ‘how to’ part of today’s episode, and let’s talk about…

How to stop ignoring your stress

Alright then! So let’s get into some practical things that you can do to help you handle your stress more effectively and work on reducing it, starting with…

Work with your nervous system.

So, that breathing exercise from earlier in the episode… you know, with breathing in for four, holding for four, then exhaling for six and repeating that a few times… that is a really, really simple ‘off’ switch, or at least a sort of ‘stand down’ switch that you can use for your nervous system when it’s in a heightened state. And it makes sense logically. So if you really were under a threat and being chased by something like a lion, like I said before, you wouldn’t exactly be able to stop and breathe slowly, would you? If you did, you’d be lunch. And your brain knows that; sometimes it just needs a bit of time to remember or to access that knowledge in amongst all the noise of fear and stress and panic that’s bouncing around in your head like a ping pong ball on acid.

And the thing about that breathing technique from earlier is that it’s actually something that’s worth doing regularly, not just using when things get bad. So do that breathing exercise for two or three minutes a few times a day, especially in the parts of your day that you know tend to either wind you up or stress you out… like, you know, before a tough conversation or before you open your inbox or before bed if your mind tends to race there.

Doing that breathing exercise won’t remove the things that cause you stress. Let’s be very realistic about that. But it will teach your body repeatedly that it is allowed to have moments where it can stand down. And that matters far more than most of us give it credit for. The more you do that, the more your body will get used to it. OK, next…

Name the things causing you stress out loud.

If you went and asked most people what’s stressing them out, they’d probably say “everything” or “just being busy,” right? But that’s not actually particularly useful, because your nervous system can’t respond to ‘everything’ or ‘just being busy’. It needs somewhere specific to land its focus, its attention.

So… sit down and actually write it out: what’s genuinely stressing you at the moment? And please, when you do this, go further than just the obvious answer, right? So if work is the issue, don’t just write ‘work’ but dig deeper. Ask yourself, “OK, why work? What is it about my work?” For example, is it the workload? Or is it the people I work with? Or is it that it’s hard to say no and so you’re carrying things that were never actually yours to carry in the first place. If your stress is about money, for example, then don’t just write ‘money’. Is it the amount that’s coming in? Or the way that you avoid even looking at your finances, so that every bill ends up feeling like a small ambush instead of, you know, something that you saw coming and you expected.

And so when you’re doing this exercise, don’t forget to look inward as well as those external factors, right? A lot of our stress is self-generated if we are really honest with ourselves. It’s the high standards we hold ourselves to, it’s how we talk to ourselves when we fall short of expectations, the guilt we feel the moment we try to rest. So name the things that are stressing you out and name them properly… because you can’t do anything about them if you’ve never actually looked directly at them.

And, you know… if you leave things like that and don’t acknowledge them, that’s when vague and ongoing stress tends to just sit there, humming away constantly in the background building and building but doing that indefinitely. If you want to change it, then you need to look at it. Next…

Stop treating rest as something you earn.

Look… brace yourself because I’m going to be fairly blunt here, which is fairly common for me! If you only ever let yourself rest once everything’s done, you’re never going to actually rest… because your to-do list will never be done. There will always be another task, another email, another thing that needs tidying up. That’s not a productivity problem, that’s a permission problem. Genuine recovery, the kind where your nervous system actually gets the ‘stand down’ signal properly, that stuff, that type of rest, has to happen on your calendar, not in the leftover scraps of time that you’ve got nothing left to fill.

So this week, I want you to pick one block of time for yourself. Look, it doesn’t need to be huge; half an hour is fine to start with. And then I want you to put that block in your schedule, and protect it the same way that you’d protect a critical work meeting or an important event that you just cannot miss. And then when it gets to it, take that time for yourself.

Now, some rules for when you do take that time to rest. No multitasking your way through it, right? No reading a book, watching a TV show, cutting your toenails, and also trying to rest, OK? No feeling guilty through it. And no telling yourself you don’t have time so you’ll just make up for it later on. Just rest. Slowly work on doing that more regularly so that you can then give your body and mind what they need in order to function. You cannot fill from an empty cup. Next…

Stop avoiding whatever you’ve been avoiding.

And so that means it’s time to have the conversation or make the change that you’ve been avoiding… because like I say often in this show: nothing changes if nothing changes. So here’s a constructive challenge I want to throw out there for you. If you’ve named a specific source of stress and it keeps showing up week after week, at some point the honest question is not, “How do I cope with this better?” The real question is: What actually needs to change here?

Maybe it’s having a conversation with your manager about your workload. Maybe it’s finally looking at your finances properly instead of avoiding them. Maybe it’s admitting a relationship needs an honest conversation about something, or that a standard you’re holding yourself to is unreasonable and no one’s actually asking you to be perfect except for you.

A lot of people tend to skip this step, because coping feels safer than changing anything. And yes, a hard conversation feels riskier than just having another sleepless night… even though those sleepless nights are actually costing you a lot more; they’re building and building. But nothing changes if nothing changes, and just trying to power your way through a source of stress that you could actually address with just a bit of discomfort, that’s not resilience… that’s just delaying the cost.

I know. I’ve paid that cost before. And the longer you avoid problems, the more likely it is that they’ll spill over into other areas of your life.

So, stop avoiding what needs to be addressed. Tackle what needs to be tackled, one conversation at a time. You don’t need to blow your whole life up; just stop avoiding things. Besides, once it’s out there, then it’s out there; you don’t have the ‘what if’ hanging over your head anymore, or the fear or anticipation of having to address the thing, right, or have the conversation; you know where you stand, and it’s been addressed… even if it leads to some conflict. Short-term pain for long-term gain. Look, I’m a firm believer with this stuff that at least you know where you stand… and that means that once you’ve addressed it, you can then start focusing on solutions instead of being stuck in the problem. Next…

Build recovery into your week like it’s non-negotiable.

Once you’ve started addressing the actual sources of your stress, protect the gains. This isn’t about blowing up your whole life and starting all over again, but instead it’s about making small changes… because doing that will beat a great, big, dramatic life overhaul almost every time. Build small pockets of genuine downtime into your week on purpose, right? Not just whatever’s left when everything else is done. You have to make your needs a priority.

So that could be as simple as taking a regular walk without your phone. I know… the horror, right?! It could be having a proper lunch break away from your desk. Having one evening a week where you actually switch off. Getting your work email off your personal phone. All of these things. It’s also about consistently practicing self-regulation, like with the breathing exercise from earlier or whatever version of that works for you. And it’s about making it part of your ongoing maintenance instead of being just sort-of ‘in the moment’ damage control… something that you do to work with your nervous system when you’re calm, not just in a crisis.

Because when you consciously look after your mental health on the days that feel fine, that’s exactly what helps you know how to handle the days that don’t feel so fine.

Now… depending on whatever’s causing your stress, I do have some older episodes that might help you. If work is your main pressure point, go and check out Episode 316 about handling work stress. If it’s money, then Episode 310 about money stress has got you covered. And if you’re dealing with relationship stress, whether that’s family or friends or a romantic partner, then Episode 289 is about navigating challenging relationships. I’ll leave them all linked in the episode description, and you can also find them at ltamh.com/episodes along with full transcripts for my whole show.

Conclusion

So here’s what I want you to take away from this episode. Stress isn’t proof that you’re failing at life; it’s your nervous system trying to get your attention.

The question is, what is your stress actually trying to tell you… and what do you need to do about it?

Because when you boil it all down, ignoring stress doesn’t make it go away. It just makes the cost of it more expensive.

Each week I like to finish up by sharing a quote about the topic, and I encourage you to take a few moments to really reflect on it and consider what it means to you. This week’s quote is by the late James Baldwin, and it is:

Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.

James Baldwin

Let me repeat that:

Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.

Alright, that’s it for this week. If you found this helpful, please share it with someone who might need to hear it and leave a rating or review on your favourite platform because it really helps more people discover the show and the advice I share. And come and join me on Patreon to support my work; you’ll find it linked in the episode description below.

Thank you very much for joining me today. Look after yourself and make a conscious effort to share positivity and kindness out into the world… because you get back what you put out. Take care and talk to you next time!

Join me next week when I talk about not putting up with nonsense, and check out my episode on how to improve your mental health next. It’s linked in the description. I release new episodes every Sunday, so follow or subscribe to never miss an episode.

Let’s Talk About Mental Health is an independent program. Discover more at ltamh.com.

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ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Find more content at www.ltamh.com

Let’s Talk About Mental Health.
Making Mental Health Simple.

Let’s Talk About Mental Health. © 2026 Jeremy Godwin.

The information provided in this episode is for general awareness on the topic and does not constitute advice. You should consult a doctor and/or mental health professional if you’re struggling with your mental health and wellbeing. You’ll find additional information on the Resources page of this website.