Keep The Change
Dave Wood on Stress Control: The Skill That Separates Winners from Losers
27 May 2026
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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You go Google stress and what will it come up with? Mostly negative shit, I imagine. Yeah, and so we grew up with that, you know, stress will kill you. It's like, stress is the stimulus for growth. Anything that you've ever achieved in life that's worthwhile, you think about yourself, it's because you've been willing to push. Stress is not the problem.
The problem is when we have too much stress and not enough recovery. There's never been a time where we've had so much stimulus. think about in a day how much this thing is having to interpret. Multitasking, deadlines, we've got the stress and pressure of what's happening in the economy, we've got physical stress, mental stress, social stress, it's like there's a lot coming at us.
You're a business leader, CEO, entrepreneur, mum, dad, athlete, your ability to control your physical and mental state under pressure is a skill that differentiates often winning from losing.
Chapter 2: How does modern stimulation contribute to stress levels?
The man across from me predicts that the next big theme coming at us will be stress control. Mate, why is that the case?
Just because of how much we're under the pump and you look at how much we're demanding of ourselves physically and mentally. Being able to regulate your physical and mental state under pressure is a skill that has a massive effect on your actions and your outcomes in life.
right across the board, whether it be you're a business leader, CEO, entrepreneur, mum, dad, athlete, your ability to control your physical and mental state under pressure is a skill that differentiates often winning from losing.
And from what you see, are we finding it harder to understand stress and how to control it?
Well, a lot of people have a very fixed mindset around stress because if you think about You go Google stress and what will it come up with? Mostly negative shit, I imagine. And so we grew up with that, you know, stress will kill you. It's like stress is the stimulus for growth.
Anything that you've ever achieved in life that's worthwhile, you think about yourself, it's because you've been willing to push, right? And you've got to push really hard in life to get the outcomes and goals and achieve the things that you want to achieve in life. Stress is not the problem. The problem is when we have too much stress and not enough recovery.
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Chapter 3: What is the difference between stress and recovery?
And that has an accumulative effect. It builds up in our body. It's what we call allostatic load, which is the wear and tear in your body as a result of chronic stress, just constantly being in the red. Don't think of high-level stress. It's just the busyness of your life. That has an accumulative effect. And we start experiencing that as signs and symptoms.
And where people get lost is they're not connecting those signs and symptoms with the cause. And so they're treating the signs and symptoms. But a lot of this stuff is rooted in poor stress control.
So is that the cause, the poor stress control? Or what's happening for people that you're seeing so much stress?
What's happening is you think like we've never been, we're in a really unique time at the moment. There's never been a time where we've had so much stimulus. You know, you think about in a day how much this thing is having to interpret. High resolution imagery, multitasking, deadlines.
um there's a lot right and then we're trying to make we're trying to transition from work into our personal or home lives and we're trying to make that work and we've got the stress and pressure of what's happening in the economy we've got physical stress mental stress social stress it's like there's a lot coming at us and um nowadays i feel like it's easy for the water to start spilling over the top unless you really prioritize your physical and mental health
I kind of explain it like this is the thing that's got to get you through the hard times, right? And where people really get lost is they go through difficult times in life, but they haven't invested physically and mentally and they get lost.
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Chapter 4: How can we learn to control our stress response?
So then they've got no coping ability when the tough time really comes because they've used all of their stress or... Yeah, exactly.
It's like... That whole analogy of the water spilling over the top is we only have so much energy, right? And so if we are constantly in the red all the time, stressed, overworked, overstimulated, our energy gets taxed.
I was thinking about this in prep for this pod where I was flicking through the videos of a certain YouTube channel and the videos with the most views were all things that are very negative and potentially very stressful. And it had me thinking... But if we're already stressed, why do we then go and seek out more shit that's potentially going to make us more stressful?
And then secondly, beyond that, then my mind starts thinking about it more and I'm walking past a lady in the mall and as soon as she got out of the mall, bang, like vape out. And then I'm chat GPTing, is vape stressful for our body? And I can't help but just see stress everywhere now that I started prepping for this pod. Yeah.
Well, stress is addictive and it's addictive because when you're in your busy day and you are getting things done, that feels like control, right? You know, when you're ticking stuff off, it feels like control and the opposite of that is stopping. and shifting into a calm state. That doesn't feel like productivity. It feels like you're taking a step back.
And when we think about the stress hormones, adrenaline and cortisol, they are released when you're in an upregulated state, when you're meeting threat, challenge and demand. Nowadays, again, it's just the busyness of our day, right? We can't be going through it just floating through the day. We need to be focused. We've got things to get done. We need to be in the red. We need to be pushing.
And so that's adrenaline and cortisol. And when you are getting stuff done, you're ticking things off, you get a release of dopamine. And so that combination of adrenaline, cortisol, and dopamine is addictive. And so we start, the brain just recognizes patterns.
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Chapter 5: What breathing techniques can help manage stress?
So if you're just in the red all the time and you are, you know, constant stimulus, what's going to happen when you stop? Your brain wants more of it.
Yeah. So is that what vape's doing for us, for instance? It seems like so many people are doing it now, but we're just creating a pattern loop.
Pattern recognition, yeah. Yeah. You know, holding that thing in your hand, putting it up to your lips. There's a whole process that you go through when you do that, right? Yeah. And it's filling a void. It's filling space in your day. Same with the phone? Same with the phone. The whole thing of being addicted to stress is just ask yourself, when you find a quiet space in the day, what do you do?
Do you sit there, allow your mind to wander off onto ideas and allow yourself to be bored? Or do you search for more stimulus? The phone, multitasking, high-resolution imagery. The other thing about the phone is just flicking through it and multitasking.
um that's actually stealing your ability to focus and so you go into the next bout of work where or you're trying to do something that requires your focus but your focus is fragmented because you're constantly training the opposite of focus which is multitasking it's interesting because i'm picturing myself working from home and i'm doing tasks i'm doing work i'm doing productive stuff
and then i every now and then i think i need to take a break i might lay on the floor but the first thing i do is i'll lay on the floor i feel like i'm relaxing but i'll grab my phone and i might read some economic stuff reply to someone on instagram i'm doing a bit of phone rolling and then eventually i get to this point like fucking do some more work i get back you feel guilty hey
Yeah, but I'm probably not really relaxing because I'm just ā I'm still ā like, I kind of feel relaxed in that state, but, you know, you then can get, like, lost in it, but I'm not just having really a moment of nothing and just thinking.
No, well ā The key skill is being able to shift from whatever physical and mental state you're in into one of calm.
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Chapter 6: How does mindset influence our perception of stress?
And that's how the nervous system loves this oscillation between stress, pushing, getting stuff done, and then shifting back into a calm state. That's actually the two opposing systems in your autonomic nervous system. Red, sympathetic, your stress response, getting stuff done. Blue, parasympathetic, your recovery response. Now, how the system works best is
And how you improve stress control and stress resilience and energy management is having more balance in there. But if you're always in the red and not enough time in the blue, you take that imbalance into everything in life where you need to make decisions, be clear, be productive.
So when that system is out of whack, it impacts everything, including your sleep and including the relationship you have with yourself because being in the red all the time is a reactive state. Emotional regulation, loving and caring comes from the blue part of your nervous system.
And so, yeah, I think the biggest problem that I see, and I work with a lot of clients, is spending too much time in the red, not enough time in the blue, and understanding that, man, there are warning signs there, signs and symptoms, and we tend to ignore them. Irritability, reduced focus, impacted sleep, lower back pain, neck pain. These are gut issues. Yeah, tick, tick, tick. Gut issues.
These are all things that are related to chronic stress.
So what do we need to do to spend some more time in the blue zone? How much time do we need to be spending there?
You're never going to find balance. Everything's in favor of being in the red, right? I'm in the same boat, like I run a business. And if I go away from some of the key foundational things that help me balance
balance balance and strengthen my nervous system shift back into a calm state takes a couple of weeks and my sleep starts getting impacted and so it's actually really simple things and when we look at you know the science and research and biologically how we're designed to function um they are things like connecting with nature getting out in nature social connection um
sleep, you know, prioritizing your sleep, real simple things, eating healthy food, exercising, you know, dimming the lights in the evening. These are all things that have a massive impact over the long term in terms of your stress control. But yeah, then we have more specific and targeted things. The fastest or the most direct
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Chapter 7: What practical strategies can improve stress control?
So with the clients I work with, it's all integrated into the calendar and it's getting them to understand that if you leave it to chance, it will not happen. Your brain will come up with every reason not to do it.
Can you tell us a bit about the business that you now have and the work that you're doing? And then we'll go into how you got there. But just what is the type of work that you're doing in your day to day or year to year with clients these days?
Yeah, the work that I do is around stress control. Stress control is just regulating your physical and mental state under pressure. So what I mean by that, regulating your physical and mental state under pressure. Under pressure, your heart rate's up, your blood pressure's up, your breathing's up, pupils are dilated, blood flow's shunted out from your core to your peripheries. Why?
To get you ready to meet threat, challenge and demand. So stress control is regulating that state because you don't always want to be in a high stress state, right? You want to be able to grab the dimmer switch if you feel like you're too far in the red and dim it back a little bit. That is the essence of performance, being able to control your energy.
So that's the work that I do and remaining calm under pressure, and those things are tightly connected. Having good stress control and remaining calm under pressure are very important skills.
If you take an athlete, for example, you can be the most skilled athlete and have all the attributes that you need to be a winner and a champion, but if you don't have good stress control and you can't regulate your thoughts, thinking, and emotions under pressure, then you're not going to be able to execute. And that's the same with business.
So what are the avenues in which you do that through? Like what are the vehicles? So are we talking workshops or what ways can people come and get access to that?
Yeah, multiple ways. We've just built an online platform on a platform called School. It's a community of like-minded people, people that are motivated to invest in their physical and mental health and mental skill development, stress control, all the things we've talked about.
And there's a bunch of courses on their confidence under pressure, breathing for calm and focus, um, 14 day stress control reset. So this is a new platform that I'm building. I'm really passionate about it. It's something I'm hugely motivated about because there's a big challenge there. And I love a challenge.
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Chapter 8: How can we apply breathing techniques in everyday life?
And then, uh, instead of waking up early, just letting myself wake up when I wake up and then getting into my routine, not saying that that happens all the time, but it's, it's now, you know, 90% of my days rather than 90% were the early you're up, like beat everyone up, Fuck them all. Get it done. You'll do more.
Stay up working later and realize, I don't know if that's actually going to be that sustainable longer term.
Yeah, well, if you just think financially, to be financially successful is not about intensity. It's about consistency. So if you want to be consistent for the next 5, 10, 15 years, you cannot do it without investing in your physical and mental health because that is the vehicle that's got to get you through all of the obstacles that you're going to face, right?
Yeah.
So I think it's very short-sighted if we think that we're going to get out of this life what we want without doing the deep work on ourselves. Because even being financially successful, that doesn't ā it kind of sounds cliche, but it doesn't bring you happiness. Yeah. I remember working with a client. He said the happiest I ever was was when I went from 140K to 180K.
And he said once I got to a million, I just kept scaling. But he said I never got happier. And if I think about my life, the happiest and most content that I have been is when I've had the least amount of things.
When I was traveling around the world with my backpack, the fuck all in there, and traveling on a shoestring and really putting myself out there in the world and challenging myself, that was just ā The most content and happy I've ever been. And so I'm trying to, in my life, it's just like, right, how do we simplify things?
I want to touch on something because you say, you know, hustle culture and that and you completely get it. But I almost wonder, it's like the devil on the other side where sometimes I'll have people talking about burnout and I kind of think, fuck, you haven't even started lighting any of your fuel. What the fuck would you know about that?
burnout and it's like they've gone so hard the other way of uh don't want to work too hard don't want to push myself don't want to go through adversity and i think the adversity that i've been through in my life has always given me the greatest lessons yeah and do we need to you know again like balance those two things but but understand the reality of both sides of that
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