Your brain doesn't care if you're happy...it cares that you're safe.

Let's talk polyvagal theory, a really helpful way of understanding what's going on in your body when you're feeling completely overwhelmed and want to throw your laptop out the window.

So you have the green zone which is social engagement, it's a nice place to be, you feel connected, creative, productive - resting and digesting like a calm functioning human. It would be lovely to stay there all the time, but that's not how humans work.

Our brains are not designed to keep us happy. They're designed to keep us alive!

Our amygdala is essentially an alarm system scanning for threats, and when it spots one it goes "RIGHT, GAME ON, THERE'S A THREAT" and immediately releases adrenaline and cortisol, raises your blood pressure and heart rate, gets you ready to fight or run away. And it hasn't really evolved since humans first walked the earth.

So it responds to someone yelling at you on the bus or a deadline changing or you getting an email saying 'can we chat’ in the same way it would respond to a saber-toothed tiger trying to eat you.

Which is why you get sweaty over an email. Your body genuinely responds as if it's a threat to your life.

And the other thing to be aware of is that other parts of our brain have evolved, which means we can now imagine threats to our life and activate our own amygdala. Yay!!

So you can lie in bed at 3am thinking "oh god what if my daughter gets snatched and then this happens and then that happens" and you're just voluntarily putting yourself into fight or flight for absolutely no reason other than your brain's quite good at catastrophising.

We're designed as human beings to live in a cave and eat berries and go to sleep when the sun goes down (and have no idea what's going down on the other side of the mountain), but instead we live in a world where we have this constant onslaught of information about everything that's happening everywhere, we're connected to everyone all the time, and there's absolutely no bloody wonder that it's hard to deal with and that we don't feel our best.

So when you move into fight or flight (which is that red zone on the polyvagal chart) you're more reactive, less balanced, and less of your best self! You are more likely to see everything with a negative lens because your body's scanning for threats to protect you. And when you're in fight or flight for too long, when you're chronically stressed and constantly being triggered by one thing after another, those stress chemicals stay in your body and cause all sorts of problems. Eczema, psoriasis, headaches, muscle tension, heart issues, stomach issues, tinnitus!

And if you stay in fight or flight for too long without being able to come back down to rest and digest, your body eventually decides it's safer to just shut down entirely, which is when you move into burnout. You feel disconnected, cynical, like you don't care about the things you used to care about anymore. Why even bother, right?

So managing stress day to day has a massive impact on your ability to prevent burnout long term, which is why I think it's so important to understand what's actually happening physiologically so you can spot when you're moving into that red zone and do something about it before it becomes chronic.

Explore more practical tools on how to manage stress and prevent burnout here.

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