Why some of us absorb stress more than others
There is a nervous system explanation for what is happening here, and understanding it changed the way I practiced yoga and the way I moved through my workdays. Highly empathic people have more active mirror neuron systems, which means your brain is literally simulating the emotional states of the people around you. When your colleague is dysregulated, your nervous system picks that up and starts to mirror it. This is not a flaw. It is the same neurological hardware that makes you a good listener, a perceptive collaborator, and someone people trust. But without the right tools, it costs you.
The physiological result is a chronically elevated stress response. Cortisol stays higher than it should. Your heart rate variability (HRV) drops, which is a measure of how flexibly your nervous system can shift between states. You become more reactive and less resilient, not because you're weak, but because your system is working overtime and nobody taught you how to reset it.
"Resilience is not the absence of stress. It is the speed at which you return to baseline. Yoga is one of the most evidence-supported tools we have for training that speed."
What yoga actually does to your stress response
I have a PhD in Molecular Cell Biology from UC Berkeley. I spent years studying how cells respond to stress at the molecular level. When I discovered yoga, what surprised me most was how much the science aligned. Yoga, and particularly breathwork, directly stimulates the vagus nerve, which is the primary pathway of your parasympathetic nervous system. This is the system responsible for the rest and digest state, the one that gets suppressed when you're in chronic fight-or-flight.
Regular yoga practice measurably increases vagal tone, which means your body gets better and faster at returning to calm after a stressor. It also lowers baseline cortisol levels over time and has been shown to improve HRV. In practical terms: you still feel the difficult meeting, but your system recovers from it faster and you carry less of it home.
Three practices for before, during, and after work
Set your nervous system before the day sets it for you
Spend five minutes in child's pose with a slow 4-count inhale and 6-count exhale. The extended exhale activates the vagus nerve directly. Follow with three rounds of cat-cow to wake up your spine. This is not about fitness. It is about establishing a baseline state before external inputs begin arriving.
The physiological sigh reset
Take a full inhale through the nose, then sniff in a second time at the top to fully inflate the lungs, then a long slow exhale through the mouth. Repeat three times. This double-inhale technique, studied at Stanford, is the fastest known way to reduce acute physiological arousal. Use it after a difficult conversation, before a presentation, or any time you feel yourself absorbing the room's energy.
The decompression sequence
Legs up the wall for five minutes, then a slow supine twist on each side, finishing in savasana with deliberate body scan. This sequence signals to your nervous system that the workday is complete. It is a physiological transition ritual, not just stretching. Done consistently, it trains your body to release the day rather than carry it into your evening and sleep.
What to do when the stress is coming from a person, not a project
Difficult colleagues and workplace dynamics are a different kind of stressor than a deadline. Deadlines end. Some people do not. If you are navigating an environment where the stress source is interpersonal, whether that is a dismissive manager, a competitive teammate, or something that has crossed into bullying, the yoga practices above are still useful, but they are not the whole answer.
What yoga can offer in that situation is something I think of as a grounded presence. A consistent practice, over time, shifts how you occupy your body. You become harder to knock off center. Not because you stop feeling things, but because you have a deeper sense of where your center actually is. This is subtle but it is real. It changes the way you walk into rooms, hold conversations, and respond to provocation.
It also gives you a non-verbal skill for energy management. Learning to notice when you are bracing, holding your breath, or clenching your jaw in someone's presence gives you the option to consciously soften those responses, which breaks the feedback loop of absorbed stress.
A note on perimenopause and workplace stress
If you are in your late 30s, 40s, or early 50s and the stress feels harder to manage than it used to, that is not just in your head. Hormonal fluctuations during perimenopause directly affect cortisol regulation and nervous system sensitivity. You may find that the same situations that were manageable before now feel overwhelming. I wrote a separate post on yoga specifically for perimenopause that goes deeper into this.
Where to start if you have never had a consistent practice
Do not try to overhaul everything at once. Pick one of the three practices above, the one that feels most accessible, and do it every day for two weeks. That is it. Consistency over duration is the entire game when it comes to nervous system regulation. A five-minute daily practice will outperform a ninety-minute session once a week every time, because you are training a reflex, not just moving your body.
If you want support getting started, my online classes are designed exactly for this. Drop-in sessions, no membership required, and you can practice from wherever you are. The link is below.
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