I remember the initial days of recognising ‘something abnormal’ in the way I was living my life. My first instinct was to dismiss it as my imagination, and then, when the condition persisted, I chalked it up to the S-word that is casually woven into our lives-stress. “Who is not stressed these days?” is the modern-day maxim, making the word reductive and the condition itself more dangerous than it seems. What in the beginning looked like a commonplace response to everyday pressures slowly settled in, taking residence in my nervous system and body, and before I knew it, the condition had crossed the line. From mere stress, it had leapt into a territory that became a long drawn-out health crisis. Prolonged stress, I realised, was not a state that moves on with time. It persists, finds places in our system to lodge, and slowly becomes a health challenge of unthinkable proportions. Stress by itself may not........

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