Imagine being asked to take on more responsibility at work, perhaps to step into a more demanding role or support a lead with some of their responsibilities. You say yes, not really considering the consequences. In that moment, it feels good to be trusted, the challenge seems interesting, it offers you more visibility, and opens new perspectives.
A few weeks later, however, a different question may begin to emerge. Not necessarily because you regret saying yes, or because anything has gone wrong, but because you start wondering:
How will I cope with the new responsibilities on top of my own?
I think this is a more useful question than whether the decision itself was right. Taking on more responsibility is often exactly what helps us grow. A certain amount of pressure can sharpen our focus, mobilise energy, and give us the satisfying experience of stretching beyond what we already know. This kind of "good stress" is called eustress.
The difficulty is that the same extra responsibility can, without much notice, transform from productive pressure into unhealthy stress. From the inside, the two can look very similar for a while.
When the "good stress" becomes too much
One distinction I find helpful is whether we can still hold an internal anchor while facing a difficulty. When the pressure is manageable, we may be challenged and perhaps uncomfortable, but we remain connected to ourselves: we can think relatively clearly, make decisions, ask for help and recover when something does not go according to plan.
When stress begins to exceed our capacity, we experience emotional, behavioral and cognitive changes. We may become more reactive or irritable, find it harder to concentrate or switch off, or feel increasingly driven to keep going despite being tired. Others move in the opposite direction and begin withdrawing, procrastinating or losing interest in activities that would normally restore them.
What makes this boundary particularly difficult to recognise is that we may continue to function very well after we have crossed it. We still attend the meetings, answer the emails, solve problems and meet the deadlines, which can easily be taken as evidence that we are coping.
For high-functioning people especially, however, the question is often not whether they are still capable of performing, but how much effort that performance now requires and whether there is enough recovery between periods of demand to make it sustainable.
Your body may notice before you do
Our bodies often register this shift before we become conscious of it.
Perhaps your jaw is clenched more often, your shoulders are held higher than usual, your breathing becomes shallower during certain meetings, or you notice a knot in your stomach when you open your laptop in the morning. You may be tired at the end of the day but find it difficult to relax, or you might wake up in the night, rumminating about what you have to do next day.
These sensations do not necessarily mean that something is wrong. What they can offer is information about changes in your usual state, particularly when the same signals begin appearing repeatedly.
One way of becoming more aware of this transition is to try something very small: a few times during the day, and particularly before and after tasks that feel demanding, pause briefly and ask what your body is doing.
The purpose of this small check-in is not to make yourself calm or to achieve some ideal state of relaxation. It is to become more accurate at noticing changes in your state, because the earlier you recognise your own signals, the more possibility you have to respond to them.
Sometimes the signal appears in our behaviour
Our behaviour can provide another indication that the margin between what is being asked of us and what we currently have available is becoming smaller.
Perhaps you snap at your partner over something that normally would not bother you, or find yourself coming home and scrolling for an hour without particularly wanting to. You may stop exercising, seeing friends or engaging in hobbies that usually give you pleasure, not because you have consciously decided they no longer matter, but because they suddenly feel like one more thing requiring energy.
Another signal I pay attention to is what happens when something small goes wrong. A slower driver on your way to work, an unexpected email, a change of plan or one additional request at the end of the day may produce a reaction that feels surprisingly large in relation to the event itself.
I sometimes think of this as living without margins. When we have sufficient internal reserve, we can usually absorb a degree of unpredictability; when that reserve has been depleted, even a relatively minor disruption can feel like one demand too many.
Instead of immediately interpreting these reactions as personal shortcomings Why am I so impatient? Why can't I cope with something this small? It can be more useful to treat them as information and ask: How much reserve do I actually have left at the moment?
A simple way to notice your own pattern
Another way of making these shifts more visible is to experiment with a simple scale from 0 to 10, with 0 representing very little internal activation and 10 representing the most intense stress you can imagine.
The point is not to determine the “correct” number, and there is no universal score at which healthy stress suddenly becomes unhealthy. What is more interesting is how it changes over time.
Perhaps you begin a demanding meeting at level 4 on your scale, and finish it at a 7. That increase in itself is not necessarily a problem; our stress response is designed to mobilise us when circumstances require more energy and attention. The question is what happens afterwards.
Does your activation gradually come down again? Does a proper lunch break, a walk, some movement, a conversation with someone you trust or simply a period without demands help you shift gears? Or are you still at a 7 that evening, and do you begin the following morning already at a 6?
Looking at the pattern over several days can tell you more than any individual number. Stress rising is not necessarily the problem; repeatedly having too little opportunity to recover from it deserves our attention.
Noticing earlier gives us more choices
This is ultimately why learning to recognise your own stress tipping point matters.
Recognising that point early leaves considerably more room for choice. It might mean taking on new responsibilities more gradually, clarifying priorities, protecting some margin in the week, or delegating from the old tasks.
It might also mean having a conversation with a manager or lead about expectations before exhaustion makes that conversation much harder to have.
None of these responses means that the original yes was a mistake. They are ways of adjusting the conditions around that yes so that a meaningful challenge has a better chance of remaining sustainable rather than gradually becoming chronic overload.
There is no contradiction between being ambitious and paying attention to what that ambition is asking of you. We can welcome responsibility, enjoy being challenged and want to grow, while at the same time remaining attentive to the signals that tell us when the balance is beginning to change. In fact, sustainable growth requires both.
So the question to ask when we say yes to more is not, “Can I handle this?”, because high performers can often handle a great deal, sometimes for much longer than is good for them. But: “How will I recognise when the cost of handling this is becoming too high?”
Learning your own answer, from your body, your behaviour, your relationships and your ability to recover can help you notice the difference between healthy stress and repeatedly overriding the signals that something needs to change.
And ideally, you learn that difference while you still have enough margin to choose what happens next.
