It’s 9:00 am on a Monday, your coffee has barely kicked in, and your inbox is already lighting up like a Christmas tree. You have 25 hours of meetings in your calendar this week, a pile of gifs and emojis in your IMs, and a blog post due on Friday that you’ve left to the last minute (not that I would ever do such a thing). You’re on daycare pickup, you need to grab sour cream for tacos tonight, and you have 3 friend events this weekend to try to jam in between kids’ gymnastics and soccer and errands and everything else.

Sound familiar? You’re not alone! I personally love a fast-paced environment and a busy life because it keeps me motivated and performing at my top level. But it can definitely be a bit stressful sometimes, especially when it all hits at once. What I’ve learned through my research and experience with stress is that it’s normal, and it’s ok to talk about it. Stress itself isn’t inherently bad – it’s when we don’t deal with it that it causes problems. 

You may be wondering what a stress management article is doing on a media and marketing blog, so here’s the connection. Marketing Week’s 2025 Career & Salary Survey of more than 3,500 marketers found that 58% of those surveyed have felt overwhelmed, 56.1% undervalued, and 50.8% are emotionally exhausted. More than half! I’ve read other studies and articles that cite up to 83% of marketers have reported burnout at some point in their career. Those are pretty wild numbers, so I think it’s safe to say that we marketers are susceptible to stress due to the fast-paced nature and performance-based orientation of our jobs. 

If you suffer from stress and/or have felt burnout at any point in your career, stay tuned because that’s what we’re here to talk about. I’m going to share some things I’ve learned about stress, but more importantly, a few strategies and practices that I have personally adopted to rise above it all.

Standing on Shoulders

Disclaimer! I’m not a psychologist, a doctor, or some kind of zen master. I’m just a busy dude with a busy life that has a keen interest in maximizing happiness every single day. So, I am definitely standing on the shoulders of professionals in this space in sharing their wisdom, and I hope these insights and strategies will help you as much as they have helped me.

The Biology

To understand how to deal with stress, we first must understand what it is and how it works. Essentially your body enters a ‘fight or flight’ mode when experiencing stress, and releases chemicals like cortisol and DHEA.

• While it has a bad rep (and for good reason), cortisol gives you extra energy in critical situations while also slowing down unnecessary internal processes (like digestion, reproduction, etc.). This internal process exists so that you can respond to potential danger with your full available strength.
• Conversely, DHEA allows you to recover, increases brain function (so you can learn from what happened), and helps activate healing and immunity responses in the body. This chemical is released when your body feels the ‘danger’ or stressor has passed, and is meant to counterbalance cortisol and help you heal.

In ‘normal’ situations, your body will self-normalize and return your chemicals to balance; however, when under constant stress, your flight or flight stays on, and the recovery step doesn’t happen in the same way.

Did you know your body reacts to the stress of paying any overdue bill or meeting a deadline the same way it reacts to the stress of running from a lion?! (Talbott 2007). I was shocked when I learned this! We don’t often have to run from lions these days, but it’s wild to think that our stress response hasn’t changed from when we did. Modern stressors, like making the deadline or answering an urgent email, are far more numerous, but aren’t usually life or death situations (despite our bodies treating them that way). So, it’s not enough to let the body try to deal with it naturally, because we get bombarded with stressors at a faster pace than our stress response was built for. Instead, we must take deliberate action to catch and release stress, and allow ourselves to recover from it.

Flip the Script: Stress is Useful

Can stress make us stronger? Something I love from Kelly McGonical’s “The Upside of Stress” (2016), is the idea that ‘stress can be useful’. She suggests that how you respond to stress determines how you experience life, and that most people actually need to have stress in order to achieve. So, it’s not about eliminating stress, it’s about responding to it, and there are two ways to think about stress (I vibe with the latter):

• Stress kills
• Stress makes you stronger

If we can reframe stress and position overcoming stress as an achievement, we can bend it to our will. The key point here is ‘overcoming stress’, as constant stress without release can lead to serious health problems according to “The Cortisol Connection” (Talbott 2007).

Remember, stress itself is not bad for you. It’s when we don’t deal with it that it becomes a problem.

Strategies for Releasing Stress

“Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right”. – Henry Ford…

Optimism and belief are key components in stress management; it’s mind over matter. If we cannot eliminate stress, we must train the mind and the body to be more resilient through deliberate practice and effort.

Be Mindful

Increasing Awareness and Mindfulness changed my life significantly and helped me take a huge leap forward. People often ask me how I manage to keep it together when I have 6 hours of meetings in a day, tasks to complete, teammates/clients who need support etc..  Mindfulness is my number 1 answer by far. Once you get good at it, you will get good at staying present. Once you get good at staying present, your anxiety will go down because, by definition, anxiety is nervousness or apprehension about the future. If you can reduce your anxiety, you can begin to manage your stress more effectively and release yourself from the cycle. This is so important to understand because it will trickle down into everything else I will talk about here. I try to leverage mindfulness when waking, working, and walking, and I even use it to calm the butterflies before a big presentation or music gig. But there’s one really important practice that I maintain to keep my mindfulness moving…

Just Breathe

Daily meditation is the vehicle in which I learned about mindfulness, and is an incredibly important part of my day. Daily practice is like preventative maintenance – it keeps me grounded and calm, and my awareness high. I also use it in SOS moments to catch my breath and bring me back to centre when needed. I draw on the teachings of mindfulness as I take on day to day activities, and the breathwork I developed through meditation is a go-to tool in my stress management toolbox. But I didn’t buy into this idea immediately… 

I used to think meditation was for hippies, despite several reputable sources, scientific studies, and scholarly articles that have proven the physical and psychological benefits. But when I finally got into it in 2018, I noticed profound changes in myself within less than a year. 2018 was a really hard year for me despite so much good stuff going for me both personally and professionally. Then, one fateful day I sat through a presentation with my good pal Renu at Google HQ in NYC that was all about productivity and flow state, but with a side section on stress and using tools like meditation to overcome it. 

Later that evening, I got the opportunity to speak with Alex Langshur (the gentleman who gave the presentation earlier that day), and he said we don’t have to start at the top in order to build up to something big. He then suggested that consistency to form the habit was more important than the actual time spent, and to “guard that time jealously”. So, I started small – 1 minute a day, and then 2, and then 3 and so on, and today, roughly 6-7 years after starting, I am doing 15 minutes a day. I think something that  holds people back on meditation is it feels super weird when you start doing it, and you don’t get that instant gratification as it takes time to rewire your brain and your body. That said, within a year of starting this practice, I was promoted at work, I learned to produce electronic music and started getting gigs, and I was able to let go of some serious baggage that had been holding me back my whole life. 
I cannot overstate how powerful this practice is, but it definitely takes time and commitment to start feeling it. I used Headspace right from the start to help break into meditation in a guided way, and still use it today because I love the teachers and the content. I used to think that I didn’t have time for meditation, but now I know that this is time that is extremely well spent and I make it a priority in my life. There’s a famous zen proverb in meditation that goes a little something like…

“You should sit in meditation for 20 minutes a day, unless you’re too busy, then you should sit for an hour”

I Want to Pump, You Up!

Exercise is another critical tool in releasing stress and bringing the body back into balance. Similar to meditation, there is a tonne of research on this topic and its direct link to reducing stress. Similar to meditation, you don’t have to start at the top of the mountain, you just need to take a single step to get started. Start small and put in consistent effort, and you will for sure see the benefits.

• Daily walks are a great place to start (and also a good chance to practice mindfulness when walking). Take a break, go outside, and try to really be present and aware of your surroundings while you do it. It’s ok to stop and smell the flowers. 
• Activity based fitness – it is WAY easier to commit to regular exercise if you enjoy the activity. I have never been big on the gym personally, but love doing things like snowboarding, longboarding, paddling and golf, so those are my go to activities. 
• Yoga – is a banger when it comes to stress release and feels so good after sitting in a chair all day! Breathwork and mindfulness are intrinsically connected to Yoga, so you can get that dual benefit of mind and body here as well.
• Weight training – Making your body physically stronger will help with your immunity and physical resiliency, and is a great way of releasing stress as you can ‘take it out on your body’ after a hard day and get some gains while you do it. I know I just said I don’t like the gym, and I don’t, but I still do weight training a couple of times a week at home with a set of dumbbells and a yoga mat to get the health benefits and release stress.

Design Your Life and Your Ecosystem

This is a nod to a lesson learned from Atomic Habits by James Clear (2018), which by the way, is one of my favourite books of all time. The premise of this book is that making small changes and setting positive habits will lead to profound results, and I am all in on this idea. There’s a section in this book about designing your environment to allow you to more easily set positive habits and negate negative ones – and I think this applies directly to the endeavour of managing stress. 

Recalling McGonical’s notion that ‘to stress is to live’, we know we can’t eliminate it completely, but what if we could design our environment to reduce the stressors (or at least to slow down the bombardment of them) in our day to day? Here are a couple of ideas to get you started:

• Focus time and flow state – When you really need to get something done, it’s ok to really dial in and focus on it to help you get to your flow state. Set yourself up with an hour block, put on your headphones, turn off your notifications, close your email, and get it done. Checking off a task that was stressing you out is our modern equivalent to escaping from the lion. 
• Eat the Frog! – There’s a popular philosophy in productivity called ‘eat the frog’, which originated in a quote from Mark Twain…
  
  “If it’s your job to eat a frog, it’s best to do it first thing in the morning. And If it’s your job to eat two frogs, it’s best to eat the biggest one first”.
  
  The takeaway here is to tackle your most challenging tasks (aka your most stressful tasks) first and to move through them one at a time. This is a powerful notion in stress management because it helps you feel fulfilled because you are checking those tasks off and this will engage your recovery chemicals (escaping the lion), but also stops those tasks from taking up mental real estate and can help you kick you out of the anxiety loop. Procrastination is the devil when it comes to stress because it allows things to fester and feel more daunting than they actually are. Get it done, eat the frog!
• Limit Social Media – This one has been important for me, personally. Setting timers, pausing the apps during the day, and turning off push notifications have all improved my mental health and have reduced my tendency to doom scroll and/or to get sucked in when I have other things I need to do. Give it a go and see what you think!  
• Prioritize Your Happiness – What fills your cup? Make sure to make time for it and fill that puppy up.
  
   “The key is not to prioritize what’s on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities”.  (Covey, the 7 habits of highly effective people, 2004)
  
  It’s so easy for us to say we’re too busy to meditate, or too tired to make a good meal or to hang out with friends. Too this, too that, and so on. The truth is you absolutely need those things to feel good and to release stress, so we need to take action. Your happiness and well-being can only be as good as the time you put into it – so make it a priority, book a time to do your thing, and make it a habit.
• Go to bed! Not getting enough sleep has a significant impact on stress levels. According to the sleep doctor, people who have slept better also experience fewer negative emotions and can recover faster from a stressful event. I used to discount this one personally, but this has become especially important and noticeable as I have gotten older.

Don’t suffer in silence! It’s time to take action, take control, and design your environment to help you manage stress. But even if you are doing all the right things, life can still be a bit much sometimes. Thankfully, there are support systems available for you.

It’s ok to not be ok

You are not alone, you are worthy, and it is ok to ask for help. Nobody is all good all the time, and that’s totally normal. So, don’t be afraid to leverage some of the great resources that are out there to support you. I would like to do a shout out to NABS here as it was established specifically to help people in our industry. In their words – “NABS was established in 1983 with the belief that no member of the Canadian media, marketing or advertising community should ever be left behind, financially or otherwise. NABS is a safe haven when you need some support, and we have a whole team ready to help.” If you’re really feeling it, and none of the things are helping, I would highly encourage you to reach out to NABS.

You Can Do It!

Life rarely waits for a ‘good time’ to present you with a challenge, nor does it wait before presenting you with another.  We need to be proactive in managing stress, releasing it, and designing our environments to effectively deal with stress so we can be more resilient and increase our happiness every day. This won’t happen by accident. It takes time and focused effort to get there, but you are worth it, and you can do it. All you have to do is believe and start taking action.

Citations:

Clear, J. (2018). Atomic Habits: An easy & proven way to build good habits & break bad ones. 

Talbott, S., & Kraemer, W. J. (2007). The Cortisol Connection: why stress makes you fat and ruins your

health – and what you can do about it.

McGonical, K. (2016) The Upside of Stress: Why Stress Is Good for You, and How to Get Good at It.

AI tools were used for research and images in this blog.