Stress is so ubiquitous in our society that we often don’t give it much thought beyond describing ourselves as being stressed. But having a good understanding of the stress cycle can make a significant difference to how we manage it. In their book, Burnout, Emily and Amelia Nagoski describe the stress cycle as another biological process in our bodies that has a beginning, a middle and an end. They emphasise the fact that dealing with your stress response is a separate process to dealing with the things that cause your stress, the stressors. Stressors are the innumerate number of things that cause us stress every day. The work project, the job interview, our commute to work, being a parent… All of these things have the capacity to activate the threat response in our bodies. Stress, on the other hand, is the physiological response that happens in our bodies when our threat response is activated. This response gets a lot of bad press but it is fundamental to our survival and dev