Why your body can’t downshift and how to recover from chronic stress
by Autumn Colon
There’s a moment that happens for many people at the end of the workday. The laptop closes. The last email gets sent. The meetings are over. And yet, your mind and body keep going.
Your shoulders are still tight. Your mind is still making lists. You find yourself checking Slack without thinking. Dinner is happening, conversations are happening, life is happening, but a part of you is still mentally sitting at your desk.
You tell yourself you’ll relax later. But then later comes, and relaxation never quite arrives.
As a therapist, I hear versions of this story all the time. People come into session convinced they have a time management problem, a productivity problem, or a motivation problem. I can’t tell you how many times I hear “I hate my job” when what they’re often experiencing instead is chronic stress.
This kind of stress quietly settles into your body after months or years of carrying too much for too long. You might even find that it becomes so familiar you stop noticing it’s there.
When Stress Stops Being Temporary
Stress isn’t inherently bad.
Our bodies are designed to respond to challenges. A stressful presentation. A difficult conversation. A looming deadline. The nervous system activates, helps us respond, and then ideally settles once the situation passes. The problem is that many of us are no longer living in a world where the stressors don’t leave.
Instead, the demands keep coming. I’ve noticed that many high-achieving people live with an unspoken belief that life will calm down once they get through the next thing.
The next project.
The next quarter.
The next promotion.
The next deadline.
But then the next thing arrives, and eventually, your body stops waiting for relief because it no longer expects it. What started as a temporary response becomes a permanent state.
When Being Busy Becomes Part of Your Identity
One of the reasons chronic stress can be difficult to recognize is because our culture rewards it. The busy person is often seen as the successful person. The exhausted person is often seen as the dedicated one. The person who never stops is often praised for their work ethic.
And for black women, our ability to keep going without complaint is praised as strong, resilient, and the one everyone can depend on.
Over time, busyness can become more than a schedule. It can become part of how we understand ourselves. I’ve sat with professionals who feel guilty when they’re not working. Parents who struggle to rest because someone always needs something. Leaders who feel responsible for holding everything together.
Many of them don’t realize they’re exhausted because they’ve spent years functioning inside exhaustion.
But let me ask you this: When your nervous system spends enough time in survival mode, what happens? For many, peace can start to feel unfamiliar.
What “Go Mode” Actually Feels Like
People often imagine chronic stress as panic, overwhelm, or emotional breakdowns and yes, sometimes it does look like that.
More often, however, it looks surprisingly ordinary.
- It looks like waking up tired and pushing through anyway.
- It looks like checking your inbox before your feet hit the floor.
- It looks like answering emails while eating lunch.
- It looks like lying in bed physically exhausted while your brain refuses to stop solving problems.
- It looks like feeling irritable with the people you love, not because they’ve done anything wrong, but because your system is carrying more than it has capacity for.
- Sometimes it looks like functioning so well that no one around you realizes how much you’re struggling.
Including you.
Your Body Remembers What Your Mind Tries to Push Through
One of the things I explain to clients is that the nervous system doesn’t care whether stress comes from something exciting, meaningful, difficult, or painful. It simply responds to load. And many people are carrying an extraordinary amount of it.
Between work demands, financial pressures, caregiving responsibilities, family obligations, and the constant stream of information we consume every day.
The nervous system keeps track of all of it and over time, our bodies begin adapting to that load.
This is often why people find themselves feeling anxious when nothing is technically wrong. Or exhausted after a vacation they thought would fix everything. Or emotional over something that seems small.
The reaction isn’t coming out of nowhere.Your body has been responding to the accumulation of stress long after your mind learned how to power through it. While you were meeting deadlines, showing up for others, and getting through the day, your nervous system was still doing its job, paying attention, adapting, and trying to protect you.
Sometimes what feels like an overreaction is actually a sign that your system has been carrying more than it has had the chance to process.
What I Tell Clients About Chronic Stress
When people come into therapy feeling stuck in go mode, we rarely start with productivity strategies.
We start by getting curious. What has your body been trying to tell you? What expectations are you carrying that no longer serve you?
What would happen if you stopped treating exhaustion as something to overcome and started treating it as information?
In my work, I’ve found that chronic stress is rarely just about workload. It’s often connected to deeper beliefs about worth, responsibility, success, and what it means to be enough. Many people have spent years believing they have to earn rest.
That slowing down is falling behind.
That taking care of themselves is something they’ll get around to once everything else is done.
But there will always be another task, email, or demand.
What Recovery Actually Looks Like
When people think about recovery, they often imagine something dramatic. Recovery begins when we stop waiting for permission to care for ourselves and start recognizing that our nervous systems need care just as much as our calendars need attention.
Healing our nervous system recovery can happen in small ways.
It happens when you stop treating every moment like it needs to be optimized.
When you eat lunch without multitasking.
When you step outside between meetings and actually notice the air.
When you allow yourself to finish one task before immediately reaching for the next.
When you create moments in your day where nothing is being asked of you.
The goal is to give your body evidence that safety, rest, and recovery still exist.
A Final Thought
If you’ve been feeling exhausted, disconnected, irritable, overwhelmed, or unable to truly relax, I want you to know that your body is not working against you. Chronic stress has a way of convincing us that the answer is to push harder.
But sometimes the bravest thing we can do is acknowledge that we’re tired.
Not failing.
Tired. And tiredness isn’t something to judge.
It’s something we listen to.
These are the conversations I find myself having often, both in therapy and in my own life. In a culture that celebrates constant movement, choosing to slow down can feel countercultural. But our nervous systems were never designed to live in permanent move mode.
Sometimes healing begins with something as simple as permitting yourself to pause.
A Gentle Takeaway
If you’re feeling stuck in go mode, take these affirmations as a reminder:
- Rest is not something I have to earn.
- My worth is not measured by my productivity.
- Slowing down does not mean I am falling behind.
- My body deserves care before it reaches burnout.
- Listening to myself is a form of strength.
The goal isn’t to become someone who never feels stressed. The goal is to become someone who knows how to come home to themselves when stress takes over.
