You Were Taught to Push Through: That’s Exactly Why You’re Still Suffering
The difference between stress and suffering and why high performers almost always get this backwards.
By Katie Nickel | The Nickel Collective | March 31st, 2026
Related episode: Performance Under Pressure, Episode 13
The Thing Nobody Told You About Stress
Have you ever noticed that the most high-performing leaders you know are also the most exhausted ones?
Not the ones who are struggling. Not the ones who are visibly falling apart. The ones who are doing the most, delivering the most, carrying the most, and somehow simultaneously running on the least.
There is a reason for that. And it is not what most stress management content will tell you.
The problem is not that high performers experience more stress. The problem is that high performers are exceptionally good at overriding the stress signal, at performing the appearance of fine while the nervous system runs a full alert underneath. And that override has a cost. A cumulative, physiological, very real cost that does not care how good your performance is.
Today we are talking about the difference between stress and suffering. Because they are not the same thing. And understanding the difference is the first step to actually changing your relationship to pressure.
“Stress is inevitable. Suffering is the accumulated cost of never letting the signal complete.”
Stress Is a Signal.
Suffering Is What Happens When the Signal Never Resolves.
Stress, the actual physiological event, is neutral. Your nervous system is alerting you: something that matters is happening, resources are required, pay attention. That signal is not the enemy. That signal is information.
Suffering is what happens when the signal doesn't resolve. When the stress response activates and never gets the all-clear. When your nervous system keeps sending the alert because the stressor is still there, and there is a new one, and the original one got bigger, and the system keeps running the protocol because nobody told it the emergency was over.
High performers don't suffer more because they are weaker. They suffer more because they are better at overriding the signal. You were taught, explicitly or implicitly, that stress is something to manage. To push through. To not let affect your performance. And you became extraordinarily good at that.
The problem is that overriding the signal does not turn off the signal. It just makes it louder over time. And eventually the volume gets high enough that no amount of performance can cover it.
What I Learned in a Fitness Class
Here is something I have not shared publicly before.
My background in fitness started before I could remember choosing it. Age two or three, watching my mom and aunts do aerobics tapes in the living room. Carrying my mom's weights and mat into the elementary school for her park and rec class. Tae Bo with Billy Blanks and P90X with my dad. Cheer and gymnastics. Group fitness was not a career I selected, it was just what I had always been.
When I started teaching for a paycheck, I was genuinely good at it. I could nail complicated choreography, build a playlist that worked for a sixty-year-old and a twenty-five-year-old at the same time, and connect with every person in the room.
But the thing I was best at was performing.
“I could walk into a room completely falling apart - mentally, physically, emotionally - and the moment I crossed that threshold, every single person got Actress Katie. Full energy. Full presence. Zero indication that anything was going on underneath.”
That was not a skill I developed. That was a pattern I perfected. And I performed it so consistently, for so long, that I lost the ability to tell where the performance ended and where I actually was.
And then pregnancy, three times over, made it impossible to override. Preterm labor. Nosebleeds every time I tried to work out. My body made it very clear that the performance was done. And for the first time, I had no choice but to let the signal complete, to be vulnerable, ask for help, and be honest about what was actually happening.
That was the first time I understood the difference between managing stress and actually moving through it. And it took my body forcing the issue for me to learn it.
Three Shifts That Change the Pattern
In 2012, psychologist Kelly McGonigal presented findings from a study that followed thirty thousand adults for eight years. Participants were asked how much stress they had experienced and whether they believed stress was harmful to their health.
The finding was striking: high levels of stress were associated with a 43 percent increased risk of dying, but only in people who believed stress was harmful. People who experienced equally high stress but did not view it as harmful had among the lowest mortality risk of anyone in the study.
The stress was not killing people. The belief that stress was killing them was.
This is not an invitation to think positive thoughts and push harder. It is pointing to something more specific: your relationship to the stress signal, the story you tell about what it means, shapes your physiological response more than the stress itself does.
For most high performers, that story sounds like: stress means I'm failing. Stress means I can't handle this. Stress is something to hide. Push through it. Don't let it show.
That story is not just unhelpful. The research suggests it is actively harmful.
Three Shifts That Change the Pattern
Shift One: From Override to Acknowledge
Instead of moving immediately to manage the stress, name it. Out loud if possible, internally if not. Research on emotional labeling by Matthew Lieberman at UCLA shows that naming an emotional state measurably reduces the intensity of the physiological response. Your nervous system gets the signal that the alert was received and it can begin to quiet.
You are not wallowing. You are not complaining. You are giving your system the one thing it needs to move forward: acknowledgment.
Shift Two: From Harmful to Functional
The stress response exists because something that matters to you is at stake. Your body is preparing you to meet it. That is what stress was designed to do. The reframe is not that stress is good, it is that this activation means you care, and your system is responding accordingly.
You are not broken. You are activated. Those are different things.
Shift Three: From Accumulation to Completion
Every stress response cycle has a beginning, a middle, and an end. High performers interrupt the cycle before it completes, they override the signal before the nervous system gets to send the all-clear. Completing the cycle does not require resolving the stressor. It requires a physical outlet: movement, emotional expression, connection, creative output.
You cannot think your way out of a stress response. Your body needs to do something with it. The walk after work actually works, not because you cleared your head, but because you completed the cycle.
This Week's Pressure Audit
Three questions to sit with before next week:
When you feel stressed at work, what is your first move? Not what you think it should be, what it actually is.
When was the last time you let a stress response complete, felt it, moved through it, without managing it into performance first?
What is the story you have been telling yourself about what stress means? That it means you're failing? That it's a sign something is wrong with you?
That story is where the suffering lives. Not in the stress itself.
Ready to Go Deeper?
This post is the companion to Episode 13 of Performance Under Pressure. The full episode goes deeper into the three executive action steps.
Take the free Pressure Index assessment -- coming soon.
About Katie Nickel
Katie Nickel is the founder of The Nickel Collective and host of Performance Under Pressure. She holds a master's degree in mental health counseling and spent over a decade in national fitness industry leadership before founding The Nickel Collective.