Stress is not the enemy. In biology, it is one of the primary ways the body is prompted to adapt. In health and wellbeing culture, the language around stress is almost always about reduction, management, and relief, as though the goal were to reduce stress from life...

Active and Passive Recovery: Why We Need Both It's easy to expect downtime like a holiday, a quiet weekend or a period of rest to restore us after the cumulative effects of stress and fatigue. In my clinical experience, however, recovery after prolonged stress can...

When Stress Outweighs Recovery Chronic stress can be harder to recognise than acute stress. Your body adapts to sustained demand to help you keep coping, but this also means that a more activated state can gradually begin to feel normal. Over time, your baseline may...

The Case for a Physiology-Informed Approach to Mind, Brain and Performance We often understand stress through thoughts, emotions and behaviour. We ask what someone is thinking, how they are interpreting a situation and what they might do differently. These questions...

Why Muscle Contraction Is More Than Exercise Exercise is good for the brain; it lifts mood, sharpens focus, and improves sleep, but what most people do not know is why. And understanding the why turns out to matter considerably for how you think about physical...

      Over the last few years, “nervous system” has become a mainstream phrase. We talk about regulation, dysregulation, vagus nerve hacks, trauma, and safety cues.Much of that is helpful. But there’s a part of the story that’s often missing: What is...

      NeurOptimal training at home is very easy and the information here aims to help you get up and running as quickly as possible.   Before you start your NeurOptimal Training will need: Headphones (wired rather than bluetooth) A Wi-Fi internet...

      What You’ll Learn About Fatigue and The Nervous System In this post, you’ll discover: What You’ll Learn About Fatigue and the Nervous System Why fatigue is not always a direct measure of how much energy remains. How the brain uses information...

Stress Involves the Body as Well as the Mind Stress, anxiety and fatigue are often discussed primarily through the language of thoughts, emotions and behaviour: something to manage through different thinking, greater effort or better strategies. These are important...