What Stress Is Really Trying to Tell You

“Stress is the feeling of demand exceeding supply.”

This idea was first shared with me in a conversation with my friend Jon Goldman. And it is deeply insightful.

Think about it. Say, for example, that you have a major project due to your biggest client in two weeks. Looking at your calendar, you see packed days with no apparent time to complete the work.

The demand (deliver quality work on time) feels like it exceeds your capacity for supply (available hours). And that’s when stress spikes.

Or if you’ve ever faced the “too much month and too little money” problem, then you’ve felt that stress too.

But there’s a nuance that’s really important, which is that it’s not so much about the reality of demand exceeding supply, as it is about your perception.

And that nuance changes everything. It's the gap between the world as it actually is and the story we tell ourselves about it. Between objective reality and subjective interpretation.

For an entrepreneur, that gap is where all your power lives.

Think about it: two founders can face identical circumstances… the same cash flow crunch, the same difficult client, the same market headwinds. But they have completely different experiences. One feels overwhelmed to the point of paralysis. The other sees it as an interesting puzzle to solve. The external reality is the same. The internal interpretation is everything.

When that space collapses – when our perception of being overwhelmed becomes our unquestioned reality – we stop being the author of our story. We become a character reacting to a plot we can no longer influence.

Sovereignty Is a Practice, Not a Trophy

In my last essay, I drew a line between the Author and the Character. The Author creates the plot; the Character is subject to it. This distinction is the difference between building something meaningful and spending years trapped in reactive cycles.

Now, it’s easy to think of sovereignty as a one-time decision you make when you hang your shingle. You create your LLC and declare, “I’m the Author now.”

But it’s more like a marriage or a commitment to a craft…

It's a choice you have to remake every single day. Sometimes every single hour.

Because the truth is, the Character is always there, waiting to take the wheel. When an algorithm change kills your reach. Or difficult clients are unreasonable. When things go wrong, it’s easy to slip back into Character mode.

And stress makes it more difficult to remake that choice every day.

It’s a friction, and it will constantly grind down your sovereignty. It's a gravitational pull back toward the reactive, helpless posture of the Character. A voice that whispers, "See? This is too hard. The market is too crowded. You don't have what the successful people have. Maybe you should just get a job."

This is how bright, mission-driven founders slowly morph into resigned operators.

The pressure mounts, their perception of capacity shrinks, and the daily choice to act as the author of their world feels more and more like a delusion. They begin to live in the lukewarm middle – not quite ready to quit, but never fully committing to the vision either.

And it’s all due to a misunderstanding of what stress is actually trying to say.

The Misdiagnosis That Keeps You Stuck

Here's where most people go catastrophically wrong: they interpret stress as a sign of difficulty.

They think they aren’t enough or that the task is too difficult. And the solution to something being too difficult?

More capability. Push harder. Find another gear. Grind through it. Get up earlier, stay up later, drink more coffee, develop more discipline.

And sometimes that is the answer. Being more capable allows you to accomplish more.

But it doesn’t work when it’s applied to the wrong problem. You can be the strongest person in the world, but if you're pushing on a door that says "pull," all that strength becomes counterproductive. You're not weak…

You're just solving for the wrong variable.

And here’s the thing… Stress rarely signals pure difficulty. It usually signals an imbalance.

An imbalance doesn't call for more force; it calls for realignment. For a shift in approach, not just an increase in effort.

Trying to solve an imbalance by pushing harder is like trying to fix a crooked painting by hammering the nail in deeper. You're applying force, and you might even be applying a lot of force, but you're applying it to the wrong part of the problem.

The painting stays crooked. The wall gets damaged. And you walk away frustrated, convinced that you're not strong enough, when the real issue was direction, not strength.

The Scarcity Loop: How Stress Makes Itself Worse

This misdiagnosis creates what researchers Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir call the "scarcity trap." When your brain perceives scarcity – of time, money, energy, or options – it does something both brilliant and stupid: it tunnels. You lose peripheral vision. You become intensely focused on the immediate perceived threat at the expense of everything else.

It’s brilliant because it’s an evolutionary masterpiece.

When there's a lion charging at you on the savanna, you don't want to be distracted by the beautiful sunset or wondering what's for dinner. You want every ounce of cognitive power focused on one thing: not becoming lunch. Your brain shuts down everything non-essential and channels all resources toward solving the immediate threat. It's fast, it's focused, and it kept our ancestors alive.

The stupid part is that your brain can’t tell the difference between a lion and a cash flow problem. The threats that entrepreneurs face aren’t solved by sprinting away…

They require creativity, strategic thinking, and the ability to see multiple options simultaneously. Exactly the capabilities that tunnel vision shuts down.

So if stress causes you to tunnel, you make decisions that provide immediate relief but create larger deficits down the road.

You take on the nightmare client because you need quick cash, then spend the next two months putting out their fires instead of marketing to attract three better clients. You say yes to every opportunity because you're afraid of missing out, diluting your focus and confusing your message. You sacrifice sleep to meet a deadline, destroying your cognitive capacity and creative problem-solving ability for the next three days.

And the truly insidious part is that the decisions don’t just fail to solve the original problem. They make it worse. They create a self-perpetuating cycle where you have even less time, energy, and options. So they’re actually increasing future demand while limiting your supply.

This is why so many entrepreneurs describe feeling "stuck" despite working harder than ever. They're not lazy. They're not incompetent. They're just operating with a collapsed perspective, trying to solve complex, multi-dimensional problems with a single-dimensional approach: more effort.

The Author’s Superpower

The way out is to embrace the author’s superpower: the ability to see beyond the data. We can see this demonstrated in how the Author and the Character hear the question, “Can you do this?”

For the Character, it’s a forensic question. Do you have the time blocked out? Do you have the money in the bank? Do you have the skills you need? Or the team you need?

When you’re operating as the Character, you hear the question as,

“Do you have the capacity to do this right now, with what you currently have available?”

The Author hears the same question completely differently. The Author hears,

"Given time and resources, is it plausible I could figure out a way to make this work?"

This is a creative question. It's asking about possibility, not inventory. It's asking whether the gap between where you are and where you need to be is bridgeable through learning, adaptation, and resourcefulness.

When you're operating as the Author, you don't just look at what you have…

You consider what you could build, learn, or access.

You’re creating a bridge between current reality and future possibility in your mind before you build it in the world. You're seeing the path before you walk it.

And it’s much easier to do that when you aren’t stress tunneling.

The Blaring Alarm in the Room

Stress feels like a blaring, smoke alarm. It's overwhelming, and our primitive reaction is simple and understandable: "I don't like this feeling. Make it stop."

We often panic, because we know something is wrong. Maybe the house is burning down.

But often, it’s just that the dish you were cooking created too much heat in the kitchen.

So we want to treat stress as more than an alarm.

Instead, it can be like a sophisticated diagnostic tool. It's not just screaming "DANGER!" at random intervals. It's trying to communicate specific information about where the imbalance lies and what kind of imbalance it is.

One pattern of stress might be saying, "You've overcommitted your time." Another might be saying, "You're trying to solve the wrong problem." A third might be saying, "You're operating from a story about yourself that isn't serving you."

But if you never learn to decode the signal, all you hear is noise. All you feel is the urgent need to make it stop.

The work isn't to silence the alarm. It's to learn the language. To develop the capacity to pause when the stress response kicks in and ask:

"What specific imbalance is this pointing to?"

This is harder than it sounds, because stress is designed to short-circuit exactly this kind of reflective thinking. But it's also simpler than most people imagine, because once you know what to look for, the pattern becomes clear.

The Three Levers of Rebalancing

Once you can decode the signal and see it clearly as an imbalance in the equation (rather than a character flaw or an impossible situation) three levers become available to you. You always have access to at least one of them, and often all three:

Lever 1: Increase Supply.

This is the marketer’s solution. It’s the lever of strategic expansion, where you earn more.

You look for growth opportunities, for investments that will pay dividends. It’s expanding capacity and growing resources (like revenue).

But more doesn’t always mean more money. It could mean more time.

You can get help, whether that's hiring a contractor, delegating to a team member, or finally investing in the automation software you've been putting off for six months. You can create systems that handle routine decisions so your brain is free for higher-level thinking.

And critically…

You can rest.

Sleep isn't a luxury in entrepreneurship. It's a core business process that restores your cognitive capacity.

The same goes for exercise. It’s not vanity. It's maintenance on the engine that runs everything else.

So don’t discount the need for space and self-care. That can open up the kind of perspective that only comes when you step back from the immediate demands.

Lever 2: Reduce Demand.

This is the accountant’s solution. It’s the lever of strategic subtraction, where you cut costs.

You look for inefficiencies, for expenses that aren't delivering enough value. It’s about eliminating waste and streamlining operations (like unnecessary commitments).

That can mean saying no to the project that doesn't serve your long-term goals. You can push back the timeline that's burning you out for no good reason. You can simplify the scope of what you've promised a client. You can fire the customer who consumes 80% of your support energy for 5% of your revenue.

Most entrepreneurs resist this lever because it feels like giving up or settling for less. But strategic subtraction isn't about lowering your standards. It's about focusing your limited resources on what matters most.

It's the difference between being busy and being effective.

Lever 3: Shift Perception.

This is the author's master move.

And it's available even when the other two levers aren't. It's where you challenge the equation itself by questioning the story you're telling yourself about what's happening.

There's a principle often attributed to Einstein that captures this perfectly…

"If I had an hour to solve a problem, I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions."

Most people get this backwards. When stress hits, they immediately jump to solutions: working harder, staying later, saying yes to everything. But the quality of your solution is only as good as your understanding of the actual problem.

And shifting perception is that 55 minutes of thinking.

It's stepping back and asking:

What problem am I actually trying to solve here?
What assumptions am I making that might not be true?
What story am I telling myself about this situation?"

The Character feels overwhelmed by a cash flow crunch and immediately thinks: "I need more money, fast." So they take on any client who'll pay, regardless of fit.

The Author feels the same cash flow pressure but asks different questions:

"Why is cash flow tight right now? Is this a timing issue or a pricing issue? Am I attracting the wrong clients or not charging enough for the right ones? What would have to be true for this not to be a recurring problem?"

The Character sees stress as evidence that something is wrong with them or that the situation is impossible. The Author sees stress as information about where the system is out of balance – and systems can be rebalanced.

The Return to Authorship

Sovereignty is hardest to hold when you're under pressure.

The stress response is designed to narrow your options and push you toward fight, flight, or freeze. None of these are particularly useful when what you need is creativity, perspective, and strategic thinking.

But this is precisely when the choice matters most. This is the moment when you can reclaim your authorial stance or surrender it entirely.

It's not pretending stress doesn't exist or powering through with positive thinking. It's not convincing yourself that everything is fine when it's not.

The true path is to develop the capacity to pause when the alarm sounds and ask, with genuine curiosity rather than judgment: "What are you trying to tell me?"

When you can do that, something profound happens. You move from reaction to diagnosis. From helplessness to agency. From Character to Author.

And the choice to be the Author becomes available again. Not once and for all, of course. Just for today.

But when you choose to be the Author today, it becomes easier to make the choice again tomorrow.