By Dan Remon · Evidence checked October 2026
You can carry a lot. You’ve proved that for years. The trouble starts when the load never comes off.
Training is stress. A deadline is stress. Your body is built to handle both, as long as recovery follows. Most leaders I work with are short on recovery, not overloaded with stress.
The load is the job, so it won’t drop much. The recovery is what you can engineer, and you can measure whether it’s happening.
What is stress management for executives?
Stress management for executives is the work of matching recovery to load. The load (decisions, people, travel, deadlines) rarely drops much, so the part you control is recovery: sleep, training, real time off and short breaks inside the working day. Good stress management starts with an audit of where your energy goes, then installs a few recovery habits that hold on a heavy week. A spa weekend twice a year won’t cover a load you carry every day. The recovery has to be daily and weekly, and it has to be measured.
Load versus recovery
In training, the session is the stress. The adaptation comes afterwards, while you recover. Skip the recovery and the same sessions that should make you fitter start wearing you down.
Work runs on the same rule. A hard quarter is fine. A hard quarter on 5 hours of sleep, no training and a phone that never goes down is where it breaks. I saw the sport version up close in 2012, supporting coaches and athletes at the London Olympic Village training facility: plan the load, plan the recovery, watch the signals. Most founders I meet plan the load and leave the recovery to chance.
The early signals are easy to miss because they look like normal life: coffee after lunch to get through the afternoon, a drink to switch off at night, training that gets cancelled first when the week fills up, and sleep that’s long enough on paper but still doesn’t feel like enough. I’ve written about preparing for the job like an athlete prepares for a season in the corporate athlete. This piece is about the recovery side.
Start with an Energy Audit
Before adding anything, find where your energy is going. In the Stealth OS this is W2, the Energy Audit: the protocol that shows where your energy leaks before anything changes. Here’s a one-week version you can run yourself. For 7 days, note:
- Sleep: time in bed, time you actually slept, how you felt on waking.
- Stimulants: coffee after lunch, alcohol to switch off at night.
- Calendar: back-to-back meetings with no gap, decisions stacked late in the day.
- Movement: days with no training and no walking.
- Recovery: any part of the day when you were fully off.
You’ll usually spot a few leaks straight away. We don’t add more to your calendar. We remove what’s leaking.
One week gives you a snapshot. The Stealth Tracker, a 60-second daily check-in on your phone, keeps the signal coming, so after a few weeks you can see which days drain you and what came before them.
Stress management techniques that work
Most stress advice is a long list. I use a short one, because each of these has research behind it and fits a full diary.
Train
Training is stress you choose, and it’s one of the best-studied ways to bring stress down. An umbrella review in the British Journal of Sports Medicine pooled 97 reviews covering 1,039 trials and 128,119 people. Compared with usual care, physical activity had a medium effect on psychological distress and on anxiety symptoms (effect sizes of -0.60 and -0.42), and higher-intensity activity was linked to bigger improvements.1 Most of the reviews it pooled were rated low quality, so treat the exact sizes with care.
What I do with it: 2 sessions a week is the minimum. When time is tight, I’d rather you do a short, hard session than skip it. That’s the minimum effective dose principle: the least training that moves your numbers, protected like a board meeting.
Protect sleep
Sleep is the biggest recovery block in your day, and it’s usually the first thing a heavy week takes. A 2024 meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin pooled 154 experimental studies with 5,717 participants. Every form of sleep loss tested (a night without sleep, shortened sleep, broken sleep) reduced positive mood and increased anxiety symptoms.2 These were controlled experiments, so the sleep loss came first and the change in mood followed.
The usual workaround makes it worse. A drink to switch off works against you: a review of the studies on alcohol and sleep in healthy volunteers found that alcohol disrupts the second half of the night and delays the first REM period at every dose studied.3 What I do with it: a fixed wake time 7 days a week, work and screens off at a set time, and alcohol kept well away from bedtime.
Breathe between meetings
Breathing is the cheapest tool on this list. A 2023 meta-analysis of 12 randomised trials with 785 adults found breathwork was associated with lower self-reported stress than control conditions, a small-to-medium effect (g = -0.35).4 The authors flagged that most of the studies carried a moderate risk of bias and urged caution. I use it as a reset between meetings: 5 minutes to stand, walk and breathe slowly before the next decision.
Switch off after work
The recovery I see skipped most often is mental. You leave the office and keep working in your head, or on your phone. Researchers call the opposite psychological detachment. Sonnentag and Bayer describe it as distancing yourself mentally from job-related thoughts during non-work time.
A 2017 meta-analysis pooled 91 study samples covering 38,124 employees. People who detached more from work in their time off reported less exhaustion (r = -0.36), less fatigue (r = -0.42) and better sleep (r = 0.30). Doing work in non-work time, including on a phone or laptop, went with less detachment.5 These are correlations. They show that switching off and recovering go together, and they can’t prove which drives which.
What I do with it is engineer the off switch, so it doesn’t depend on self-control at 21:00:
- A hard stop. Work and screens end at a set time on weeknights.
- A shutdown note. Before you finish, write down the first task for tomorrow, so your head doesn’t have to hold it overnight.
- The phone out of the bedroom. It charges somewhere else.
- One evening fully off each week. No email, no messages, no quick check.
Build recovery into the day and the week
Recovery has to sit inside the calendar, or the calendar eats it. This is what I install first:
- Gaps between meetings. I work in 30-minute focused blocks with 5 minutes of movement between them. Meetings that end at :25 or :55 give you the gap back.
- A walk after lunch. It breaks the afternoon slump and gets you outside.
- One morning a week without meetings. Your hardest thinking goes there.
- A Friday review. 15 minutes on what drained you, what gave energy back and the one change for next week.
The Friday review is the Friday Debrief from a productivity system that survives a bad week. For the daily practices that sit around it (sleep, focus and training), see peak performance: the daily practices that work.
When stress is more than stress
If you’re not sleeping, you feel flat most days, or you’re pulling away from your work and the people around you, talk to your doctor. That can be burnout or something that needs medical care, and coaching isn’t treatment. A good coach works alongside your doctor.
How to start
- The 1% Scorecard. 8 questions, 2 minutes, free. You get a score out of 100, the system that’s leaking most and the one thing to install first.
- The Quest. The performance membership. Each 28-day cycle installs one change, with a room of founders running the same system. Cancel anytime.
Plan the recovery as carefully as you plan the load.
Related reading: Leadership development programs: what works and how to choose one, Corporate wellness programs: what works for wellbeing and performance and Self-leadership: how leaders run themselves.
FAQ
What are the most effective stress management techniques?
Regular training, protected sleep and switching off after work all have solid research behind them. Breathing practices show a smaller positive effect on stress. Start with a one-week audit of where your energy goes, then install one change at a time.
How do I switch off from work in the evening?
Set a hard stop for work and screens, write down tomorrow’s first task before you finish, and charge your phone outside the bedroom. In a 2017 meta-analysis covering 38,124 employees, people who detached more from work in their time off reported less exhaustion and better sleep.
Does exercise help with stress?
The research says yes. An umbrella review covering 1,039 trials found physical activity had a medium effect on psychological distress compared with usual care, and higher-intensity activity was linked to bigger improvements. 2 sessions a week is the minimum I set.
Is a stress management coach the same as a therapist?
No. Coaching works on the systems around your load and recovery: sleep, training, calendar and habits. If stress has affected your mood, sleep or health for weeks, see your doctor, because that may need medical care.
Sources
- Singh, B., Olds, T., Curtis, R., Dumuid, D., Virgara, R., Watson, A., et al. (2023). Effectiveness of physical activity interventions for improving depression, anxiety and distress: an overview of systematic reviews. British Journal of Sports Medicine, 57(18), 1203-1209. doi.org/
10.1136/ bjsports-2022-106195 - Palmer, C. A., Bower, J. L., Cho, K. W., Clementi, M. A., Lau, S., Oosterhoff, B., & Alfano, C. A. (2024). Sleep loss and emotion: A systematic review and meta-analysis of over 50 years of experimental research. Psychological Bulletin, 150(4), 440-463. doi.org/10.1037/bul0000410
- Ebrahim, I. O., Shapiro, C. M., Williams, A. J., & Fenwick, P. B. (2013). Alcohol and sleep I: effects on normal sleep. Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, 37(4), 539-549. doi.org/10.1111/acer.12006
- Fincham, G. W., Strauss, C., Montero-Marin, J., & Cavanagh, K. (2023). Effect of breathwork on stress and mental health: A meta-analysis of randomised-controlled trials. Scientific Reports, 13(1), 432. doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-27247-y
- Wendsche, J., & Lohmann-Haislah, A. (2017). A meta-analysis on antecedents and outcomes of detachment from work. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 2072. doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.02072
This article is general information, not medical advice.
