Renew Your Life – Start By Reflecting On Your Stress 

Part 1: Stress Reflection Process

Hyrox Pro Men 55-59 Hong Kong July 2025

It’s not another article about Hyrox. It’s an article on the process of personal reflection on stress and how to renew your life so that your healthspan and lifespan merge (upwards and to the right). This article is really for those of you who are thinking about what your life will look like in your sixties and want to improve what you see.

I started this stress reflection process the day after completing a Hyrox Pro, as I did not want to burn myself out physically and mentally from chasing high-intensity sports anymore.

The process has taken me five months to complete, and I am ready to start preparing action plans. By sharing my reflections and process, I can save you a lot of time. This article covers my personal stress reflection and several aspects of stress, including race stress, accumulated stress, everyday life stressors and how they affect longevity, healthspan and lifespan, musculoskeletal stress, cognitive stress, and inspiration to “be better than yourself. The article concludes with six questions to reflect upon to start your process of renewal.

One of the things that I like to do is to write, and another is to share and help people get better. One of my overarching goals (shared in part II) is to “share what I seek to embody with others, as such future blogs will cover physical, mental, social and spiritual meaning in life. 

Topics will include:

• Inbody body composition analysis
• bodyweight endurance
• cardiovascular fitness
• Max strength tests
• foot care for barefoot running
• eye and vision training
• Somatic movement
• Somatic experiencing for trauma healing
• sport psychology and mental skills
• stress regulation
• well-being interventions, methods, techniques and philosophies. 

The smiles on the podium above belie the effort it took to complete the Hyyrox race. The stunned expression on my face in the photo below illustrates my truth about effort, and the moment I realised that there is more to life than chasing high-intensity sports competitions.

Race stress and more

The stress of that race was the straw that broke my camel’s back. 

In sport psychology, there is a theory called the “inverted tick” theory (Cox, 2011) that illustrates that state anxiety increases in proportion to how close the event is due to start. Anxiety rises in proportion to the effort put into preparation, the degree of care about the event, and the number of unknowns and uncertainties (lack of controllables). Once the event starts, anxiety drops significantly. 

(By the way, strategies to counter this are: one, to turn the anxiety into excitement; two, turn the stress into a challenge; and to focus on what you can control.) 

This acute stress is present in all sports events, music performances, sales pitches, job interviews, dates, exams and public speaking – I am just using Hyrox as it is a topical and pertinent-to-me vehicle to illustrate this.

Inverted Tick Theory 

Ontop of the physical exertion, the Hyrox environment is highly stimulating and has been described as a the modern nightclub: the venue is packed with very fit people wearing very little clothing to show off their very tight bodies, there are vendors booths, pedestrian crossings, with a DJ and music so loud that during the wallballs I could not hear myself think, nor my support crew cheers.

   Wallball Station

Benji, Lorna, Darren, Tracy

Accumulated Stress

The acute stress of the Hyrox experience was the tipping point to realise that my nervous system was fried; I had been accumulating stress, compartmentalising, and disassociating from stress over many years – I had learnt to block stress with cognitive sport psychology interventions like self-talk, visualisation and male machoism values of New Zealand, and the false prophet of mental toughness. 

When we encounter a threat/stress situation, our reptilian brain reacts with three options:

1. fight or attack it
2. flee from it 
3. Freeze or shut down in response to an extreme threat.

There are effectively two more response options that our neo-cortical brain can activate and override the reptilian brain with:

4. Calm and optimal (through experience and resilience)
5. Ignore

Clearly, number four is the best option, and it is the goal of sports psychology and stress regulation training. The problem with not using the energy (or decompressing from) the fight/flight, freeze/ignore events is that it gets stored in your body and accumulates – think” ignore and store”. If one repeatedly ignores stress, then it becomes chronic, and that is when stress starts to manifest into chronic disease and eventually a crisis.

Ross Eathorne 2025: Stress layered upon stress without discharge manifests in disease or worse.

The Stress Accumulation chart illustrates how the adverse effects of stress lead to a decline in health over time. 

• The vertical axis represents stress.
• The horizontal axis represents health decline. 
• The short horizontal lines are individual stress events. 
• We each have an accumulated amount of stress that we can easily handle (green lines); 
• As the stress layers and intensities increase, we require proportional recovery/decompression strategies to bounce back to health (homeostasis) (orange lines). 
• When stress layers or intensity exceed our resilience threshold, we enter a state of chronic stress and chronic disease (red lines). Chronic disease (as evidenced by medication, multiple sick days) reversal (discharge) requires a physical, mental, social and meaningful lifestyle transformation. 

There are many seemingly legitimate reasons to compromise one’s health and continue to ignore or accept these stressors (money, family provision, work inexpediency, etc.). There are serious health consequences of continuing to forget stress, and that will be a crisis that requires hospitalisation, work cessation, a family member caring for you, and a good chunk of money spent on medical bills (that could be spent on preventive well-being care somewhere near the resilient threshold had it been crossed, or well before).

I had denied/dismissed my chronic stressors and their impact on my body/mind/spirit, and now is the time to see them, accept them and do something about them before they manifest in something preventable. (FYI, I have had chronic fatigue from sport burnout and chronic injuries that I have ignored, but have not reached a hospitalisation or medication crisis point.)

I list my stressors below: as you read them, make a mental note of which ones push you past your resilience threshold.

• Injury: hamstring and calf musculoskeletal injuries, training for said Hyrox.
• Not enjoying 15 weeks of training and competing in a Hyrox Pro race (meaning).
• Workplace discord
  • Frustration at not being able to inspire Gen-Z university students in a sport psychology paper, on which I was lecturing (occupation, meaning, relevance)
  • Keeping relevant on Instagram and A. I world
• Parenthood, human or animal
  • Empty nest. My children (17, 19, 21) have left home and are studying abroad.
• Separation
• Divorce
• Self-employment
• Finances
• Career progression and satisfaction
  • 30 years and counting in the same career, and wondering where else this path could lead (occupation)
  • Wanting something more of myself and how I helped people (personal growth/meaning)
• Where, how, and when to retire in the next decade or so.
• Trauma denied (more on this in future Somatic Experiencing blogs)

I knew, leading up to the Hyrox, and certainly after that, these stressors were draining my energy and that I needed to transform my life to reduce the risk of getting a chronic disease such as stroke, coronary heart disease, and other such afflictions that seem to creep up on people my age. Hyrox was the catalyst and not chronic disease.

I decided to take some time out to reflect and resolve to do something about it. I decided to share my renewal journey over the next 12 months to help me embody what I am seeking, and to inspire others to do something similar.

Healthspan and lifespan

Dr Peter Attia, a longevity expert, says (Attia, 2017) that longevity is a function of healthspan and lifespan. Lifespan is the number of years you live, and healthspan is how you live. 

Attia expands on the lifespan and healthspan definition below:

Lifespan as:

• By how long one can delay the onset of Coronary heart disease, stroke, cancer, and neurodegenerative disease; 

Healthspan as 

• brain – cognition, executive function,
• body – muscle mass, functional pain-free range of active movement 
• spirit – robustness of social support network and sense of purpose

It is certain that as we age, our brain, body and spirit decline. We can, however, shift the longevity curve up and to the right by addressing our stressors and renewing our approach to our body, brain and spiritual/social lives. The reflection activities in this blog are a starting point for arresting the decline. 

When I collapsed after crossing the Hyrox finish line, I knew that I had to take a good look at how I had been approaching life to have my healthspan equal my lifespan; I needed to be compassionate toward my physical, mental, social, and spiritual self. To repair and reprogram my go-go-go, my always-looking-for-more challenges nature (or programming) has shaped my approach to life, especially as I approach my sixties.

Body – Chronic Muscle tension leads to Musculoskeletal Stress

The repetitive events of Hyrox and other sports (surfskiing was my previous challenge) cause a “pattern overload” of chronic muscle tightness that while making some areas very strong for the sport, they equally make others weak for when you move outside those movements (as in doing another sport) and create injuries (I pulled a hamstring training for the 100m walking lunges early on in Hyrox training).

Cognition – Achievement orientation

Competitive sport emphasises outcome. Outcome (ego) orientation leads to burnout, comparing yourself to others, toxic motivational cultures, fleeting happiness, and lasting bitterness. 

An alternative is task orientation, which focuses on long-term personal growth, self-comparison, and the intrinsic reward of mastering a task. The process of mastering a task is being better than you were yesterday.

If you strongly identify with the Alpha type or are a competitive athlete, it will be very challenging to drop the winning at all costs attitude overnight – that is, until the cost of physical and mental health, social relationships and meaning in life catch up with you.

Of course, in reality a complimentary dose of both ego and task orientation will lead to optimal motivation and sporting excellence: use past competition results and outcomes to motivate you (train as if you are second) and in competition, focus on what is in your control and enjoying the experience of challenging the execution of your skills under the pressure of opponents and spectators. 

It is easy for me to make comparisons to sports, but that is just a medium to convey my thoughts and models. This blog applies to all aspects of life and to different people’s lives, and to you if you want a healthspan to match your lifespan.

My Inspiration

“Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don’t bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.” William Faulkner.

Faulkner’s “being better than yourself” quote epitomises the approach I intend to take in my life going forward; it came across my path coincidentally during this period of self-reflection and at the conclusion of a 10-month experiential design course for coaches that I was attending. The course is called “Honor the Animal” (Forencich, 2025) and was held on the https://www.thetrueathleteproject.org/ platform. 

The quote spoke to me because it summarises key aspects of eudaimonia, excellence, and achievement goal theory, which are key to positive motivational climate, long-term well-being, and to empowering excellence under pressure (Papaioannou, 2017). (Eudaimonia and clutch performance were the subject of my Master’s dissertation and are something I believe strongly in.)

The Process

My self-reflection journey started in late July after I decided that, at age 56, my nervous system had had enough of being excited about training for and competing in high-intensity sporting competitions. I also wanted to start shaping a life that would enable me to flourish and live a long life as I entered my sixties.

The key part of a reflection is taking the time to reflect. Allow yourself to realise what your distractions or excuses are, put them aside and give yourself stillness to discover what really matters. For me, the crucial question is “what do I enjoy doing?” 

Pause on that question for a moment.

I did pause. In fact, I got stuck on that for an uncomfortable while. A lot of what I did was for career growth, because I was told to, not necessarily because I enjoyed it.

My Six-Question Stress Reflection Process

(I invite you to do this activity)

Reflect on your life over the last 365 days or longer and ask yourself:

1. What are your reasons for wanting to reflect or change?
2. Any influences that may help you decide what you like to do or not like to do?
3. Self-work: what do I want to concentrate my personal growth on?
4. What do I need to let go of: what aspects do not serve me any longer?
5. What wisdom do I need? What is the most significant change to facilitate growth?
6. What is my vision? What will I grow into if I attend to a,b, and c?

Take your time to work through this process. It took me nearly five months to organise and distil mine down into some workable guidelines. In Renew Part II, I share these guidelines and influences behind them.

References

Attia, P. (2017, January 22). How you move defines how you live. Peter Attia. Retrieved December 17, 2025, from https://peterattiamd.com/move-defines-live/

Cox, R. H. (2011). Sport Psychology: Concepts and Applications. McGraw-Hill Education.

Forencich, F. (2025). Honor the animal. https://humananimal.earth/honor-the-animal

Papaioannou, A. G. (2017). Teaching a holistic, harmonious and internal motivational concept of excellence to promote Olympic ideals, health and well-being for all. Journal of Teaching in Physical Education, (36(3)), 353-358. https://doi.org/10.1123/jtpe.2017-0064