As the new year unfolds, I—along with many others—continue to struggle with painful levels of stress and anxiety. Beyond the evidence that political polarization is taking a toll on our collective mental health, waking up each day to alarming news only adds fuel to the fire. As Bob Dylan famously sang, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”

When stress and anxiety reach these levels, our nervous systems are warning us loudly. Bottom line: Chronic stress creates systemic dysregulation that slowly wears us down.

The pioneering stress researcher Hans Selye defined stress as the body’s response to a demand placed upon it. Stress is not the event itself, but our physiological and emotional response to it—an adaptive survival mechanism wired into us.

Selye described three stages of stress, known as the general adaptation syndrome: alarm, adaptation, and exhaustion. While we cannot always eliminate stressors, research shows that it is not stress itself that harms us—it is the inability to shut off the stress response. Chronic activation erodes mood, cognition, immunity, and our capacity for pleasure and connection.

Bottom line: We need tools to turn down the temperature of our stress responses.

Recently, I’ve been caring for our Chihuahua, Jilly, who has advanced heart disease. We are adjusting medications, monitoring her breathing, and watching for signs of decline. Anyone who has loved a pet through illness knows this ache—the anticipatory

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