Why You Feel Stressed and Exhausted All the Time — and What Actually Helps

By: Dr. Sean Pastuch

Let’s talk about stress, because you’ve probably been told it’s a “silent killer” and handed a hundred products to fix it. Here’s a more useful truth.

Stress isn’t good or bad. It’s survival. It’s the thing that gets you up for a glass of water when you’re thirsty, and the thing that makes you scream for help in an emergency. You need it. The question was never “how do I get rid of stress.” It’s how much am I carrying, how constantly, and how little does it take to set me off?

Living near the emergency end

Picture a dial. One end is sleep. The other is a full-blown emergency: no thinking, everything you’ve got, survive right now. Most of us are meant to live somewhere in the middle. But a lot of people keep the dial cranked most of the way toward emergency, all day, over things that aren’t emergencies at all.

That has a cost. When your body thinks it’s surviving, it stops repairing. The resources that should go to recovering (from a hard day, a workout, an injury, ordinary wear and tear) get spent staying on alert instead. That’s why chronically stressed people feel exhausted and tend to collect aches and ailments. You can’t thrive and survive at the same time. And if you’re dealing with pain, this cuts twice: a stressed body is a more sensitive, slower-to-recover body.

Here’s the empowering part: this is more in your control than you’ve been led to believe.

The switch you can flip: your breath

You already have a lever, and it’s free. In an emergency, your body breathes fast and hard through the mouth, and it reads that pattern as “we’re in danger.” Flip it: breathe low, wide, slow, and through your nose, and you send the opposite message: it’s okay to relax. You can literally talk your nervous system down.

The hidden one: CO2 tolerance

Here’s something almost no one is taught. You’ve heard you breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide. True, but your body actually decides when you need to breathe based on your CO2 level, not your oxygen. When CO2 rises, your brain gives you “air hunger” — the urge to take a big breath.

If your tolerance for CO2 is low, you feel that urge constantly. You’re the person always sighing, yawning, or feeling like you can’t quite get a full breath, and that low-grade “I need to breathe” signal keeps you a little stressed, all the time.

The good news: CO2 tolerance is trainable. Build it up, and your body stops nagging you to breathe, settles down, and frees up the energy it was spending on alert. People who improve it report better sleep, more calm, better performance, and an easier time with whatever life throws at them.

Want help turning the dial down, and freeing up what your body needs to actually recover? It's part of what we work on with every person we help.

Are you a coach who wants to help clients this way?

Everything above is what we teach professionals inside AL-P. If this is the work you want to be doing, learn the method and turn pro

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Why Your Pain Keeps Coming Back (It's Not What You Think)

You've Tried Everything for Your Pain and Nothing's Worked — Here's Why

Collaborator: Dr. Lance Einerson

Active Life | Live More. Hurt Less.®