A few years ago I started noticing something in my NLP coaching practice.
People came to me describing very different experiences — but they all used the same word for it. Stress. One person had been to three specialists about a back problem that appeared on no scan. Another couldn't switch his mind off at night no matter what he tried. A third was snapping at her husband over things that would not have touched her two years earlier. A fourth was performing at work at the same level as always — but the enthusiasm that used to come with it had quietly disappeared.
Same word. Completely different experience. Completely different underlying mechanism.
Stress is not one thing
The research on chronic stress — and there is a substantial body of it — makes clear that sustained pressure does not express itself the same way in everyone. It finds the path of least resistance. In some people that is the body. In others it is cognition, or emotional regulation, or the slow erosion of the energy reserves that make life feel worth living.
I identified five distinct patterns in the people I work with, each with a recognisable profile and a different primary driver:
The Body Carrier carries pressure physically. Back tension, headaches, a digestive system that never fully settles. The body has become the container for what the mind has not fully processed. This is well-documented — van der Kolk's work on somatic stress responses, Sarno's research on tension myositis — but rarely what a GP looks for.
The Overclocker cannot switch the cognitive processor off. Sharp during the day, still running at 2am. The prefrontal cortex stays in activation mode long after the work is done. High performers often develop this pattern without noticing — until the gap between what they produce and what they feel begins to widen.
The Silent Reactor is composed in a crisis but has a shorter fuse for the small things. The comment that should not have landed the way it did. The reaction that was larger than the trigger warranted. Emotional reactivity increases as regulatory capacity decreases. This is not a character flaw — it is a buffer running low.
The High-Functioning Exhausted is still delivering. From the outside, nothing is wrong. From the inside, the vitality that used to come with the work has quietly drained away. Weekends no longer restore what the week takes. This is the pattern that tends to go unaddressed the longest — because there is no crisis to point to.
The Full Load is all of the above simultaneously. When pressure is systemic, it registers across every channel. Physically. Cognitively. Emotionally. In the endurance. This is the pattern that research on allostatic load describes: a baseline that has become chronically too high.
None of them described it as stress.
That is the point. As a retired pharmacist and NLP coach, I have spent a long time sitting at the intersection of physiology and behaviour. What strikes me consistently is not how many people are stressed — it is how many do not recognise it. They have been told, in one form or another, that nothing is wrong. The tests were fine. The scans were clear. They were managing.
And they were. That was precisely the problem.
Why this matters
Generic stress advice — breathe more, sleep more, do yoga — is not useless. But it is untargeted. A Body Carrier and an Overclocker need fundamentally different interventions. Giving them the same advice is like prescribing the same medication for five different conditions because they share a symptom.
The protocol for each pattern addresses the actual mechanism driving it. Not the symptom.
The assessment
I built a short assessment — 10 questions, about 5 minutes — that identifies which of these five patterns fits your experience. It is based on validated stress research frameworks and designed specifically for people who do not yet recognise what they are carrying.
It is free. No subscription, no upsell at the end. You complete the assessment, confirm your email, and receive your pattern summary and a protocol specific to what you are dealing with.
If you have been told nothing is wrong, but something clearly is — or if you recognise yourself in any of the descriptions above — take the assessment.
Richard de Laat is a retired Pharmacist, NLP coach, Hypnosis Trainer, and TimeLine Therapy Trainer based in Riehen, Switzerland.
