There are three stages to our response to the stress in our lives 1. Alarm stage – “fight or flight” hormone response primes body to react. 2. Resistance stage – calm on the surface. “Rest and digest” response tries to return most systems to homeostasis however many psychological signs of stress remain - such as increase HR, BP, blood sugar and rapid more shallow breathing. 3. Exhaustion stage – chronic stress that can result in resource depletion leading to both chronic and acute diseases, and even death. Unfortunately, I get a lot of clients who come in only after they have started to move into stage three. They feel exhausted, emotional, unfocused and are concerned about the symptoms they started feeling when they went into stage two, and not the causes of the stress alarm in the first place. An ideal referral for me is a friend you see, who seems to be nervously and on edge all the time, is getting sick all the time or used to socialise a lot but now always finds an excuse not to. I am regularly able to help clients to get back to feeling the good kind of normal, or even achieve their self reported best state ever, in three to four sessions. Brad