There’s a Phil Vassar song called Just Another Day in Paradise that paints a picture I think a lot of us can relate to: the bills are piling up, the baby is crying, something in the house is broken, and life just keeps coming at you from every direction.
It’s chaotic. It’s loud. It’s beautiful.
And it’s also… stressful.
You can be incredibly grateful for the life you’re living and still admit that sometimes it’s A LOT. Your body doesn’t necessarily distinguish between “I’m blessed and busy” and “I’m under stress.” Your nervous system is still responding to everything being asked of it.
And that matters when we talk about how stress impacts results. Because your nutrition and workouts are important, but they’re only part of the picture.
Stress can influence your sleep, digestion, appetite, energy, recovery, and even your motivation to do the habits you know make you feel good. National Institutes of Health research suggests chronic stress has been associated with sleep and digestive problems and can affect multiple systems throughout the body.
So if you feel like you’re “doing everything right” but still feel exhausted, constantly hungry, poorly recovered, or just off, it may be worth looking beyond your calories and workouts.
How Stress Impacts Results: Your Body Is Paying Attention
Stress isn’t just something happening in your head. It creates a very real physiological response throughout your body.
When your brain perceives a stressor, it activates systems designed to help you respond. Your heart rate and breathing may increase, your muscles prepare for action, and hormones are released to help make energy available. This is part of the normal “fight-or-flight” response.
And I want to make something really clear here: this response is not bad.
Your body was designed to handle stress. A hard workout is a stressor. Running late to an appointment is a stressor. Giving a presentation, chasing your kids around the house, studying for an exam, getting sick, or navigating a difficult season of life can all place demands on your system.
The goal is not to live a life completely free of stress. That’s unrealistic, and honestly, some stress is an important and normal part of being human.
The problem becomes when the demands being placed on you continually outweigh your opportunities to recover.
Cortisol Is Not the Enemy
We hear the word cortisol thrown around constantly in the wellness space, usually as something we need to lower at all costs.
But cortisol isn’t a “bad hormone.” It plays an important role in helping your body respond to stress, maintain energy availability, and function throughout the day. Cortisol also follows a normal daily rhythm, generally rising around the time you wake and changing throughout the day.
The conversation becomes more complicated when stress is chronic and your stress-response systems are repeatedly activated without enough recovery. Long-term stress has been associated with changes involving sleep, metabolism, immune function, inflammation, and other physiological processes.
That doesn’t mean cortisol is secretly “blocking” your fat loss because you had a stressful Tuesday.
It means your body is a whole system. If stress is consistently affecting your sleep, hunger, energy, digestion, activity, food choices, or ability to recover from training, those things can collectively make your health and fitness goals harder to pursue.
Your Nervous System Needs to Be Able to Shift Gears
You’ve probably heard the phrases “fight or flight” and “rest and digest.” They’re simple ways of describing two sides of your autonomic nervous system.
Your sympathetic nervous system helps prepare you for action. Your parasympathetic nervous system supports processes associated with rest, digestion, restoration, and recovery. Both are necessary—you don’t want to live permanently in either one.
Think about it like driving a car. You need the gas pedal to get where you’re going, but you also need to be able to take your foot off the gas.
The goal isn’t to never activate your sympathetic nervous system. It’s to maintain the ability to move between activation and recovery appropriately.
This is why things that seem almost too simple to matter can actually be valuable: walking outside, slowing your breathing, eating without scrolling your phone, getting enough sleep, sitting quietly for a few minutes, praying, stretching, or spending time with people you love.
Slow diaphragmatic breathing, for example, has shown preliminary evidence for helping reduce stress and may modestly lower cortisol and blood pressure.
Sometimes supporting your health isn’t about doing more. It’s about creating opportunities for your body to come back down.
Modern Life Makes “Turning Off” Really Hard
This is one I’ve become increasingly aware of in my own life.
You can wake up to an alarm on your phone, immediately see notifications, check social media, answer texts, listen to something while getting ready, work all day, manage kids and schedules, squeeze in a workout, answer more messages, scroll while eating dinner, and then take your phone to bed.
Your brain barely gets a quiet minute.
Technology obviously isn’t inherently bad—it allows us to work, learn, communicate, and stay connected in ways that are incredibly helpful. But being constantly connected can also become another source of stimulation and stress.
Research summarized by the American Psychological Association has found associations between frequent device checking and greater reported stress, while reducing notifications has been associated with improvements in attention and well-being.
You don’t need to throw your phone in the trash and move to a cabin in the woods. But you might need to ask yourself: When during my day am I actually allowing my brain to be quiet?
If the answer is never, that’s worth paying attention to.
Stress, Sleep, Hunger, and Your Results Are Connected
One of the biggest ways stress can indirectly influence your results is through sleep.
Stress can make sleep harder, and inadequate sleep can create another source of physiological stress. Research on sleep restriction has found changes in appetite, glucose regulation, sympathetic and parasympathetic activity, and other metabolic processes.
And you probably don’t need a research study to tell you what happens after a terrible night of sleep.
You wake up exhausted. Your workout feels harder. You want the quickest source of energy you can find. Your normal meal prep suddenly feels like a monumental task, and getting 10,000 steps sounds significantly less appealing than sitting on the couch.
That doesn’t mean one bad night ruins your progress. It means that when this becomes your normal, consistently following the habits that support your goals can become much harder.
This is also why we talk so much at LJW about looking beyond perfect macro numbers. In 8 Nutrition Habits that Matter More than Perfect Macros, we talk about sleep, stress management, hydration, balanced meals, and consistency because your health is bigger than whether you perfectly hit three numbers in an app every day.
What About Stress and Gut Health?
Your digestive system is another place where stress can show up.
Long-term stress may contribute to or worsen digestive symptoms, and your nervous system and digestive system are closely connected.
Maybe you notice your stomach feels different during a particularly stressful week. Maybe your appetite disappears when you’re anxious—or you experience the opposite and find yourself reaching for food more often when you’re overwhelmed.
Those experiences aren’t simply a lack of discipline. Another NIH research article also highlights that stress can interact with appetite-regulating pathways and eating behavior, although the response can look different from person to person.
This is also where nutrition still matters tremendously. If stress is leading you to routinely skip meals, eat very little variety, rely heavily on convenience foods, or experience ongoing digestive symptoms that affect what you can tolerate, it becomes harder to consistently give your body the nutrients it needs.
Rather than immediately cutting more foods or adding another complicated wellness protocol, sometimes the first step is simply getting back to the basics.
You Can't Remove All Stress—But You Can Build Resilience
This is probably the biggest thing I want you to take away from this entire post:
You cannot remove all of life's stress, but you can give your body the tools to become more resilient to the inevitable.
I’m a mom, a nurse, a student, a coach, a wife, and a human being with responsibilities that don’t disappear because I decided stress management is important. I don’t have hours every day to meditate in a perfectly quiet room—and I’m guessing you probably don’t either.
What I can do is consistently give my body some of the basic things it needs.
Movement. Nourishing food. Enough protein. Hydration. Sleep. Time outside. Strength training. A walk. A few quiet minutes. Prayer. Putting my phone away sometimes. Taking a few slow breaths instead of immediately moving to the next thing.
None of those things are groundbreaking.
But the basics done consistently rarely are.
Try This Before You Do Anything Else
Instead of finishing this article and creating another giant checklist for yourself, I want you to ask one question:
Where in my life is demand consistently outweighing recovery?
Then choose one thing you can do this week to create a little more support.
Maybe you go to bed 30 minutes earlier instead of scrolling. Maybe you eat lunch away from your computer. Maybe you take a 10-minute walk outside. Maybe you stop skipping breakfast. Maybe you turn off unnecessary notifications. Maybe you take five slow breaths before eating dinner instead of carrying the chaos of your day straight into your meal.
Pick one.
You don't need another 12-step morning routine. You need something realistic enough that you can actually repeat it.
Your Body Doesn't Need You to Push Harder All the Time
There will always be another deadline. Another busy season. Another sick kid, unexpected bill, broken appliance, hard conversation, or week where everything seems to happen at once.
That’s life.
Your goal isn't to create a perfectly controlled environment where nothing stressful ever happens. Your goal is to build habits that support you well enough that when life inevitably gets loud, you have a foundation to come back to.
So yes—keep strength training. Keep walking. Keep prioritizing protein and whole foods. Keep working toward your goals.
But also sleep. Breathe. Go outside. Put the phone down. Ask for help. Give yourself moments where you aren't consuming, producing, answering, fixing, or achieving anything.
Give your body the tools to feel supported from the inside out.
You might be surprised how much better it can respond when you stop asking it to push through everything and start giving it opportunities to recover, too.
