Practical nervous system regulation for people who can't afford to burn out
Burnout doesn't announce itself. It accumulates quietly through months of sustained overload — until one day your nervous system simply refuses to cooperate. Stress Less is a practical guide to nervous system regulation built on polyvagal theory and modern stress science. Not "just breathe" platitudes, but a daily framework for down-regulating your threat response, building stress capacity over time, and creating the kind of recovery that actually compounds. Includes a 6-week protocol, a morning regulation sequence, a pre-meeting nervous system reset, and a guide for identifying your personal stress signature before it becomes burnout.
The stress response evolved to protect you. Cortisol spikes, heart rate elevates, attention narrows — all of this is your body doing its job. The problem isn't that the system activates. The problem is that it never fully de-activates.
Polyvagal theory, developed by neuroscientist Stephen Porges, describes three states the nervous system moves between: ventral vagal (safe, connected, regulated), sympathetic (mobilized, stressed, fight-or-flight), and dorsal vagal (shutdown, collapsed, withdrawn).
Most high-functioning people under chronic stress oscillate between sympathetic activation and dorsal collapse — never spending enough time in ventral vagal to actually recover...