to make things happen in life, you're going to experience stress, uncertainty, fear and curveballs. health, wellness and performance are largely defined by our ability to navigate these inevitable obstacles and push forward without accumulating the damages of chronic stress.
stress pushes your mind-body in the sympathetic nervous system to respond to a perceived threat. if the stress response is consistently being triggered, the consequence becomes maladaptive as resources are literally diverted away from the processes that define health, wellness and performance. by design, stress changes the mind-body from a proactive to a reactive state. proactive (parasympathetic) processes like digestion, detoxification, cellular and tissue repair, learning, neurogenesis, etc. are given fewer resources in order to prioritize reactive (sympathetic) state. this is fight or flight and it's only designed to run for a short period of time in response to a perceived threat. when stress is chronic, your mind-body doesn't return to a proactive state of resource allocation. more energy is used to fuel fight or flight (or freeze) than immune system, building new brain cells, repairing tissues, absorbing and processing nutrition, learning, etc.