Stress Management Therapy
When your body no longer bounces back.
Maybe you’ve noticed yourself saying, “Next week should slow down…” on repeat. But next week never seems to come.
If that sounds familiar, your instinct is right. This is the point where prevention matters.
You might also be noticing:
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You’re not sleeping as well.
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You can’t fully relax, even when there’s time.
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Your patience is thinner than you’d like, especially at home.
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You’re still delivering at a high level, but it’s harder to get out of bed in the morning.
Nothing has fallen apart.
But your body isn’t resetting and recharging the way it used to.
This is the ideal time to reach out. You are still capable. Still performing. But you can feel something tightening, and you don’t want to wait until they hit a wall to address it.
Why am I so stressed?
On paper, everything looks fine. You have a good title, an impressive compensation, and a capable team. But it doesn’t feel fine.
The sleep problems, the short fuse, and the weight that won’t budge rarely come from workload alone. They come from sustained chronic stress activation. From covering gaps, managing up, smoothing things over, and carrying the emotional weight of a whole team while still delivering your own work. Day after day. Year after year.
Your nervous system was designed to respond to pressure and then recover. When that recovery phase gets shortened or skipped repeatedly, stress stops resolving and starts accumulating.
Over time, your body adapts by staying “on.”
This isn’t a malfunction. Your body is doing exactly what it was built to do under sustained demand.
The goal of stress management therapy is not to eliminate pressure. It’s to restore your ability to cycle out of it. Improving that flexibility is what prevents chronic stress from turning into full burnout.
You don’t have to continue feeling this way. Visit here to get started.
How stress management therapy works.
We will start by mapping your different nervous system states so we can understand your unique stress profile.
We’ll look at where your system ramps up, what keeps it activated, and what prevents it from settling back down again. We’ll track your patterns in real time. When does your body preemptively anticipate? When does it assume something is about to go wrong, even when nothing is happening?
Most people have very specific activation loops. Certain meetings. Certain personalities. Certain times of day. Certain types of responsibility. Certain seasons of the year. Once we understand your patterns, we can begin building flexibility.
That means helping your system move into activation when something genuinely needs your energy and reminding it to come back down when it does not. Right now, yours is probably staying “on” much longer than it needs to.
We will also sort out which stress is organizational and which is internal, because those require different interventions.
Some of your stress is undoubtedly a direct response to real dysfunction in your workplace. Some of it is older survival patterns your nervous system defaults to automatically. Most people are dealing with both. We will figure out which is which so you are not trying to solve a nervous system problem with a productivity tool, or a structural problem with self-blame.
Our goal is not to eliminate pressure. It is to increase your range.
Because a flexible stress response conserves a lot of energy. You can bring less work home, make fewer reactive decisions, and recharge more easily at the end of the day.
If you are already feeling depleted or shut down, you can read more about my Burnout Recovery approach here.
FAQ
How do I know if I need stress management therapy or something else?
Stress Management Therapy is typically preventative. It is designed for professionals who are still functioning well but noticing that their stress response is not resetting the way it used to. You may be sleeping less deeply, feeling more reactive, or finding it difficult to sit still and relax.
If you are already feeling persistently depleted, detached, or shut down, Burnout Recovery may be more appropriate. You can read more about that approach here: https://www.christinewalkercoaching.com/burnout-recovery/
You do not have to decide on your own. When you schedule a consultation, we can talk about your current stress levels, recovery, and capacity, and choose the best starting point together.
What happens when you ignore chronic stress?
Nothing dramatic, at first. You just keep going. You adapt. You drink more coffee, sleep a little worse, snap at your kids a little more. You tell yourself it’s just a hard season.
But chronic stress is not just mental. It affects the body. Prolonged activation impacts immune function, cardiovascular health, memory, and concentration. Over time, when your nervous system stays activated without adequate recovery, it becomes harder to return to baseline, even when the pressure lets up.
Most of my clients do not come in because they read an article about cortisol. They come in because they got sick for the third time in six months. Or their blood pressure spiked. Or their doctor told them something has to change. Or their partner said, “I’m worried about you,” in a way they could not brush off.
The earlier we interrupt that pattern, the easier it is to restore flexibility and prevent burnout.
How is this different from regular therapy?
Most therapy focuses on your internal experience. Your thoughts, your feelings, your coping patterns. That work is valuable, and we do some of it here.
But if your stress is rooted in a workplace that requires you to overfunction, and you spend session after session learning coping skills without examining why you need to cope this hard, you can end up managing symptoms while your underlying stress response stays activated and untouched.
I work with both sides.
We look at the internal patterns that keep your system “on,” and the organizational dynamics that reinforce those patterns and make them feel necessary.
That means we are not just helping you manage stress. We are identifying what is driving it and restoring your flexibility so you are not trapped living in work mode by default.
What if my job is the problem?
It might be. Most workplaces are dysfunctional to some degree. Some rely on overfunctioning. Others reward hypervigilance. Some create ambiguity or pressure that keeps everyone perpetually on edge.
If your stress is a direct response to real dysfunction, that’s important to acknowledge. We don’t want to convince you that everything is fine or teach you to tolerate intolerable circumstances.
At the same time, even in objectively stressful environments, your nervous system can develop patterns that persist beyond the moment. Over time, activation can become automatic. The body stays “on” even after the threat has passed, and no one makes their best decisions when they’re operating in survival mode.
When you downshift and stop living in a constant stress response, you can step back and assess your work more clearly. Then you can decide whether some strategic boundaries will fix it or whether something bigger needs to change.
How long does stress management therapy take?
It depends on what we’re working with. Some clients start feeling relief within a few sessions once they can see the pattern clearly. Others have stress rooted in years of overfunctioning and workplace dysfunction, and that takes longer to untangle.
Most clients work with me weekly for several months. Some transition to biweekly as things stabilize. We’ll talk about pacing early on so you know what to expect.