🗞️ The Wellness Briefing – Edition No. 13: “Is Your Stress Momentum or Friction In Disguise?” | September 23, 2025
3 minute read
Quick, high-impact wellness insights for ambitious professionals. Delivered Tuesdays.
Welcome Back to The Wellness Briefing
Many ambitious professionals secretly believe stress fuels performance. It feels like proof of commitment—late nights, rapid responses, relentless pace. But research shows the opposite: stress may give you a short burst of energy, but long-term it erodes focus, decision quality, and health.
The real differentiator isn’t who can grind the longest—it’s who can recover, recalibrate, and sustain momentum without breaking.
Let’s begin.
🧠1 Insight Worth Reading: A McKinsey study found that employees who feel chronically stressed are 3x more likely to disengage and 2.6x more likely to quit within six months. Read the full article on McKinsey.
💡 What That Means for You: Stress might feel like momentum, but it’s usually friction in disguise. The problem isn’t working hard—it’s working in a way that quietly taxes your capacity until you’re running on fumes. Sustainable performance comes from pacing, protecting energy, and building in recovery like any other strategic resource. If you don’t, you risk showing up tired, distracted, and reactive—just when clarity and presence matter most.
✅ Try This: Swap the “to-do” list for a “done” list at day’s end. Remind your brain of progress instead of feeding it an endless backlog.
🎯 Pro Tip from the Guide: Peak performers don’t sprint every mile of a marathon. Neither should you.
⚠️ Be Mindful of Burnout: Chronic stress narrows your perspective. Instead of asking, What matters most? you default to What’s most urgent? This short-term tunnel vision erodes creativity, undermines leadership presence, and leaves a trail of missed opportunities. Over time, it’s not just exhaustion you’ll regret—it’s realizing that you’ve optimized for speed over significance.
The Approval Matrix: A judgmental grid for high-functioning exhaustion.
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See you next Tuesday.
– Michelle