Recovery
The brain is active during the day and recovers at night. This is where it rests and regenerates. If we recover optimal each night, we ideally have only the optimal amount of stress left, and each morning will be a fresh start. In a figurative sense, this is the equivalent of having our car serviced and the parts changed and oiled every night so that it is fully optimized and ready for the next morning. But most of us are not even aware that this recovery, this recharging of our batteries and regeneration of our body systems, is happening every night.
Therefore, when we are in balance, we are active with optimal stress during the day, while we recover at night. If stress develops and becomes persistent, we will slowly start to deplete our resources. We simply burn too much gasoline too quickly. The stress system will also start to be active at night, and even if we go to sleep, we will no longer get the rest and recovery we need. Not only are we now using more gasoline, but we are at the same time no longer getting the fuel we need to keep us going. The brain and nervous system are now on full alert around the clock.
In the same way that the car has a button that lights up when the gas tank is almost empty, the brain is so cleverly designed that it sends us a lot of physical and psychological signals that we are running out of resources before it completely stops or "collapses".
This can include difficulty sleeping, headaches or stomach aches, allergy flare-ups, a short temper at work or at home, less sharpness and poorer concentration when it comes to solving work tasks, or it can lead to interpreting other people more negatively. If we ignore the signals the brain sends us at this point, we risk that it will develop into persistent and severe stress. Then the brain and body will begin to "hide" these symptoms/signals from us, so to speak. This happens because it is a primitive mechanism with the sole purpose of ensuring our survival, and if we, for example, were feeling pain or hunger while fleeing from a lion, it would not be appropriate for survival.
This means that we can be very severely stressed without being able to feel it, and we can miss the danger signals.
