Your nervous system runs a budget.

What you’ll hear

Nobody collapses from a single email. They collapse from the four hundredth small thing in a month with no recovery between. Marcus unpacks allostatic load — the body’s running tab of adaptation costs — and why it predicts breakdowns better than any single stressful event.

The episode tours the early-warning dashboard: sleep latency, resting tension, shortened temper, the Sunday-evening dread. Each signal gets a plain-English translation and a threshold worth respecting.

It ends with the cheapest interventions in the literature — daylight, exhale-length breathing, a walked meeting, a written ledger — ranked by effort, so the busiest listener can afford at least one.