The first things we drop when we’re stressed are often the things we need most
I see this pattern often in my practice: when work gets heavier, the first thing to go is everything that keeps a person balanced. People start skipping the evening walk, we have no time for our friends, the guitar is laying in a corner, gathering dust, conversations with a partner resume to logistics or watching TV because we are too tired to listen and engage.
The instinct makes sense: leave away the "non-essentials," free up time and energy to face the workload. But what actually happens is closer to the opposite. Those non-essentials were the scaffolding keeping you emotionally and physically balanced.
We remove the very things that help us cope with the stress.
Swedish psychiatrist Marie Åsberg described narrowing as the exhaustion funnel. As work expands, life narrows: hobbies, friendships, exercise, rest and pleasure fall away one by one, until what remains is mostly work and basic responsibilities. What's left is a life without margins, where even a late email or a small request from a partner can trigger a reaction far bigger than the moment calls for.
The philosopher Josef Pieper offered another perspective: leisure isn't simply a break that allows us to return to work and perform better. It is part of being human. These experiences have value because they connect us with parts of ourselves that are not defined by performance.
Narrowing life to mostly working has also a biological cost. Clearing your inbox resolves the stressor, but it doesn't eliminate the stress response your body is running. That requires something else: movement, laughter, creative expression, positive social interactions and playfulness.
Skip those, and the stress doesn't disappear; it accumulates, showing up later as fatigue and depletion that no amount of task-completion can help.
And it doesn't stay contained to the office. A nervous system stuck in fight-or-flight comes home too. It wears down "the bubble of love" — the mutual safety a couple builds through small, reciprocal attention and shared affection.
When we have very little energy left, connection can start to feel like another demand that prompts us to withdraw so we conserve energy. Conversations become practical. Patience gets shorter. Small misunderstandings escalate more easily. We notice how slowly, the relationship can become very efficient, but emotionaly disconnected.
This is especially important because connection itself can be one of our rechargers. Pulling away by engaging with media consumtion may save a little energy in the moment, while also removing an important source of support long-term, the human connection.
So what helps?
Not grand gestures, but small, repeated ones and a return to what you like doing outside work, to those people you cherish in your life.
At home: wind down with a recharging activity, and then make time for your loved one. A heartfelt hug, a daily half hour of listening and engaging with your partner without trying to fix anything, doing fun activities together. Have a hobby purely for the pleasure of it, with no goal or expectations attached.
Research on well-being suggests a large share of our time—often close to half when you count sleep, downtime, movement, and connection—needs to go toward restoration just to keep our systems functioning.
This information helps reframing self-care and connection not as the reward for finishing the work, but to what makes it possible to do the work and have a life.
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