In this blog post I am going to talk about something nobody in the business and marketing world seems to want to say out loud, sometimes life makes it almost impossible to function, let alone run a business, and the advice most people give you in those moments is so spectacularly useless it could make you cry. I am going to share what really works, what the science says (the interesting bits, not the lecture), and what I have personally been doing to keep moving when every instinct is telling me to lie on the sofa and stare at the ceiling. Whether you are in Israel living through yet another round of this, or you are somewhere else in the world dealing with your own particular brand of overwhelm, this one is for you.

Let’s just start with the obvious

It is March 2026 and Israel is at war with Iran. Again. Well. Still. Sort of.

We are just over a week into this latest escalation, which comes on top of more than two years of war that most of us were not sure we would get through emotionally, let alone professionally. And here is the thing that is hard to explain to people outside of Israel, it does not feel the same as it did in October 2023.

That first time, there was a specific quality of despair. A where-is-the-floor feeling. A collective national intake of breath that did not really get exhaled for months. It was grief and shock and fury all at once, wrapped in a kind of exhaustion I had never felt before and hope never to feel again.

This time is different. It is not better, exactly. But it is different. There is less shock because we have done this. There is more resilience, which sounds like a good thing until you realise resilience is just the word we use for what happens when people have had no choice but to keep going. There is tiredness. Real, bone-deep, get-me-off-this-ride tiredness. And yet, alongside all of that, there is something almost like defiance. A stubborn, slightly unhinged insistence that we are going to be fine. That this is not the end of the story. That the hummus will still be there on the other side of this and we will absolutely be eating it.

Mixed feelings does not quite cover it. But here we are.

Why I am writing this post and why it is not the post you are expecting

I want to be clear about something upfront. This is not one of those posts.

You know the ones. The ones that show up in your inbox every time there is a collective moment of stress or difficulty, written by someone who has clearly never had a truly terrible week, full of advice like honour your rest and give yourself permission to pause and remember that you are enough.

I am enough. Great. Does that pay my invoices?

I am rebuilding my business from scratch. Publicly, which was either a very brave decision or a deeply unhinged one, and I am no longer sure which. I have spent the last several weeks de-indexing 1,300 pages from my website, watching my email open rate crater to 11% before I dragged it back up, doing the kind of unglamorous technical SEO work that sits on everyone’s to-do list for years, and trying to rebuild an income stream that quietly stopped working while I was not paying enough attention. You can read the full chaotic story of all of that here if you want to feel better about your own situation.

The point is, I do not have the luxury of pausing. Every day I lose to overwhelm is a day of lost income. Every morning I spend staring at the wall instead of working is a morning that does not come back. And I suspect a lot of you reading this, whether you are in Israel or not, are in a similar position. Because the business does not pause when life gets heavy. The clients do not pause. The bills do not pause. The work does not pause. Only we pause, briefly, involuntarily, and then we have to figure out how to unpause ourselves.

That is what this blog post is actually about. Not permission to stop. The tools to keep going.

The stress problem nobody explains properly

Here is something that helped me enormously when I finally understood it.

Stress is not the enemy. Stress is a system. A generic, incredibly powerful biological system that your body uses to mobilise you in the face of any threat, whether that threat is an actual missile or a difficult client email or the sound of your own thoughts at 2am.

The problem is not that the system exists. The problem is that it was designed for short bursts, not a two-year subscription.

When the stress response kicks in, your body does something quite remarkable. Adrenaline floods your system. Your heart rate increases. Blood rushes to your muscles. Your focus narrows to the immediate situation. Your immune system gets a short-term boost, which sounds backwards but makes perfect sense when you think about the fact that historically, stressors included things like infection and injury. Short-term stress is your body saying something needs attention, and here are all the resources to deal with it.

The issue is what happens when that system never switches off. When the stress response becomes the default setting rather than the emergency override. When you are never fully off alert, never fully resting, never completing the stress cycle. That is when it starts eating you alive. Literally. There are brain scans. It is not pretty.

So the goal is not to eliminate stress. The goal is to move through it properly instead of getting stuck in it. And that requires actual tools, not just positive thoughts and a bath bomb.

The thing that works faster than anything else and takes 30 seconds

I am going to tell you about something called the physiological sigh and I promise I am not about to make you do a guided meditation.

When you are stressed, carbon dioxide builds up in your bloodstream and the tiny air sacs in your lungs start to collapse slightly. This contributes to that tight, agitated, cannot-catch-my-breath feeling that makes stressful situations feel even more overwhelming than they are.

The physiological sigh is a double inhale through the nose followed by a long exhale through the mouth. In through the nose, then sneak in a tiny second inhale on top of it, then a long slow exhale. That double inhale reinflates the air sacs. The long exhale dumps the carbon dioxide. And the long exhale specifically activates the parasympathetic nervous system, which is the body’s braking system, through a direct pathway between your breathing and your heart rate.

Do it twice. Maybe three times. Your heart rate will take about 20 to 30 seconds to drop, So do not give up after one breath and declare it does not work. Give it 60 seconds.

I have done this in my car. In my kitchen. Once in a supermarket queue when someone had seventeen items in the ten item queue and the war was happening and I was running on four hours of sleep and I was about three seconds from becoming a person who makes scenes in supermarkets. And more recently, outside when the sirens went off warning that ballistic missiles were incoming, sprinting back to my bomb shelter with my heart going at approximately the speed of a hummingbird on espresso, doing the double inhale exhale while my legs were still moving. It works in all of these situations. It is fast. It requires no equipment and nobody around you needs to know you are doing it. And if it works when you are running from ballistic missiles, it will almost certainly work for whatever you are dealing with today.

The trick that sounds like something from a sports documentary but works everywhere

When we are stressed, our pupils dilate and our vision narrows. This is literal, not metaphorical. The visual field contracts. You get tunnel vision because your brain is focusing all available resources on the immediate threat.

What is less well known is that you can reverse this deliberately, and when you do, it has a measurable calming effect on the part of the brain responsible for the alert state.

The technique is called panoramic vision and it works like this, instead of focusing on a specific point, you deliberately soften your gaze and try to take in as much of your visual field as possible at once. Not moving your eyes around. Not looking for things. Just allowing your peripheral vision to widen, to see the whole room or the whole view rather than the one thing directly in front of you.

It sounds almost insultingly simple. Try it right now. Look up from this screen, soften your focus, let your vision go wide and take in everything in your peripheral field simultaneously.

Notice what happened to your shoulders.

I have started doing this during the sirens, which is a sentence I genuinely never expected to write in a business blog. And it does not make the siren stop or the situation better, but it does something to the panic response that I find genuinely helpful. It is also extremely useful during stressful calls, difficult meetings, or any moment when your brain is doing that thing where it cycles through worst-case scenarios on a loop.

On the subject of loops

The brain under chronic stress loves a loop. It returns to the same thoughts, the same fears, the same unanswerable questions. Will this end. What happens if it does not. What am I going to do about the business. What if I cannot make this work. What if this is the moment everything falls apart.

I have spent a significant portion of the last two years in various versions of this loop and I have come to think of it less as a character flaw and more as a software glitch. The brain is trying to solve something that cannot be solved by thinking about it harder. It keeps returning to the problem because it has not found the answer yet, not realising that some problems do not have answers that thinking can find.

The most useful thing I have found for breaking the loop is not positive thinking. It is not journaling, though I want to be clear that I am a huge fan of both journaling and gratitude practice and have been for years. They are not the same thing as positive thinking and they are not soft. They work. But if you are in the middle of an active spiral and you have five minutes, movement wins. Here is why, journaling and gratitude practice are brilliant for building resilience over time, for rewiring thought patterns, for shifting perspective when you have the headspace to do it. Movement is for right now, when the adrenaline is circulating and your brain is doing laps. It physically metabolises the stress chemicals in a way that writing cannot. So if you have time for both, do both. If you have to choose, move first, journal later.

For those of you outside of Israel, cast your mind back to the beginning of Covid. That period when you could not leave your apartment, when the world shrank to the size of your living room and exercise meant pacing the hallway. That is roughly where we are right now. Except with sirens. So when I say movement, I mean it in the most creative and sometimes slightly unhinged sense of the word. I have been running back and forwards along my street for exercise. Literally. Up and down, up and down, like a very determined goldfish who has discovered the concept of cardio. You do what you can with what you have.

This does not need to be the gym. It does not need to be a proper run. It can be a walk that is fast enough to make you slightly breathless. It can be dancing badly in your kitchen to something embarrassingly upbeat. The point is to give the body something to do with the adrenaline that has nowhere to go. The stress response is designed to make you move. When you do not move, the adrenaline just circulates and the loop continues.

The honest truth about productivity when you are running on empty

Here is what nobody tells you about trying to run a business during sustained stress.

Your cognitive capacity is not the same. This is not a weakness or a failure of willpower. It is neuroscience. Chronic stress reduces the available working memory in the prefrontal cortex, which is the part of the brain responsible for complex thinking, planning, and decision-making. You are literally working with less brain than usual. Expecting the same output from a compromised system is not resilience. It is a recipe for mistakes, frustration, and the particular misery of working very hard and producing very little.

What helps is not pushing harder. What helps is protecting the small window of time when your brain really works.

For most people under stress, that window is in the morning, before the full weight of the day has landed. I have always been a morning person, which is either a personality trait or a character flaw depending on who you ask, but right now it is genuinely saving me. I should say at this point that I am British and I drink neither coffee nor tea, which I understand is basically a deportable offence, so my morning window opens without caffeine and purely on the basis of being a person who wakes up unreasonably ready to function.

Except right now it is harder. The sirens do not respect business hours. There have been a lot of them in the night, which means I am running on broken sleep more often than not and knackered is probably the most accurate word for how I feel by about 3pm. But even so, the morning still works best. That window before I have looked at the news, before I have checked my messages, before anything has happened that might activate the stress response, that is still where the real thinking gets done. I guard it like it is the last quiet table in a busy restaurant and someone is eyeing it from across the room.

Everything that requires actual thinking happens in that window. Everything else, the admin, the emails, the tasks that are basically just processing, gets pushed to later when my brain is running on fumes anyway and the bar for useful work is lower.

If you are trying to rebuild something or build something or keep something going during a difficult period, find your window and protect it like it is the only productive hours you are going to get, because some days it is.

On being kind to yourself without using that phrase

I said at the start that this was not going to be one of those posts about being kind to yourself and I meant it, but I do want to say something about grace that is not the wellness-industrial-complex version of the concept.

There is a difference between giving yourself permission to do nothing and giving yourself permission to do less without punishing yourself for it. The first one costs you days. The second one might save your productivity over the longer term.

I have stopped measuring my days by whether I did everything I intended to do. I now measure them by whether I did one thing that moved something forward. One thing. Some days that thing is an email I had been avoiding. Some days it is this blog post. Some days it is making a decision I had been putting off because making decisions requires energy and I had used all mine before lunch.

One thing. Every day. That is the bar. And on the days when even that feels impossible, I try to remember that two years ago I also thought I could not keep going, and I did, and here I am still going, somewhat bedraggled but fundamentally intact and apparently still writing very long blog posts about stress management.

The social connection bit that is not about Instagram

Chronic stress depletes serotonin over time. Serotonin is the neurotransmitter most associated with feelings of wellbeing, safety, and having enough. And one of the most reliable ways to produce serotonin is genuine social connection, not the scrolling kind, not the performing kind, but the actual kind. A conversation with someone you trust. A meal with someone who makes you laugh. An animal that is delighted to see you for reasons that have nothing to do with your professional performance.
 
This is not soft advice. There is a direct line between social connection, serotonin production, immune function, and the ability to tolerate stress without it becoming the kind of chronic stress that eventually breaks things. The research on this is not ambiguous.
 
In Israel right now, this community connection is one of the things we are genuinely extraordinary at. There is a reason we are still here after everything. It is not just stubbornness, though there is plenty of that. It is the completely irrational but entirely real sense that we are in it together, which makes the in it part more bearable than it has any right to be.
 
If you are outside of Israel and dealing with your own version of sustained difficulty, the equivalent is whatever gives you that same feeling. Not the online version. The real one.

A note on supplements, briefly

 
I am going to mention two things and then stop because this is not a supplement blog and I have no desire to become someone who talks about cortisol at parties.
 
Ashwagandha has solid research behind it for reducing cortisol and anxiety. I use it when I am in particularly high-stress periods, not constantly. It is not a magic pill but it is a real one.
 
L-theanine, which you can also get from green tea, has eight studies showing a notable effect on stress and anxiety. It promotes relaxation without sedation, which means it does not make you foggy, it just takes the edge off. Useful for the 2am thought spirals. Useful for the days when your nervous system is running at a frequency that makes it hard to sit still and do the work.
 
Neither of these is a substitute for the other things I have talked about. They are the rounding error, not the main event.

Where I am with all of this

I want to be honest with you, because that is the whole point of the rebuild-in-public project I have been running these last few months.
 
I am tired. The war is heavy and the rebuilding is hard and some mornings I open my laptop and feel a very specific kind of despair that I suspect many of you recognise. The kind where you know exactly what you need to do and cannot quite make yourself start doing it.
 
But I am also, genuinely, okay. Not in the toxic positivity sense of the word. In the sense that I have done this before and come out the other side, and I know that the tools work, and I know that the one-thing-a-day approach keeps something moving even when everything feels stuck, and I know that this, whatever this is right now, is not permanent.

If you are in the middle of your own version of this and your business feels like it is slipping, or you are overwhelmed and not sure where to start, or you have been staring at the same task for three days and cannot get traction, I would love to talk. That is genuinely what I do, help people get unstuck when everything feels like too much and they cannot see the path through. Drop me a message here and let’s figure it out together.
 
And if you want to follow the rebuild as it happens, the whole messy, expensive, occasionally humiliating series is here. It started with me de-indexing 1,300 pages from my own website, which tells you everything you need to know about where we were and how far we have come.
 
We are going to be fine. All of us. It just might take a while.

 
Every week I share everything I’m doing to rebuild my business, the numbers, the mistakes, the things that are working, and the things that aren’t. Free, every Sunday. Join here.