How to Train Your Brain to Stay Calm

April is Stress Awareness Month, and if you’re like us, you might be feeling a little weary of the narrative that stress is the enemy. In this powerful and perspective-shifting piece, Neuro-Performance Scientist Kristy Goodwin invites us to rethink everything we’ve been told about stress – and shows us how to train our brains to respond in ways that support our energy, focus and wellbeing. 

For many women, especially in midlife, the conversation around stress has become overwhelmingly negative.

We’re often told that stress is something to avoid. To reduce. To eliminate. Articles tell us that stress is toxic and to be avoided at all costs.

But what if that narrative is incomplete? What if the goal isn’t to remove stress, but to instead respond to it differently?

Stress Isn’t the Problem

Your Human Operating System, your hOS, which is how we’re biologically designed to function and flourish, was built to deal with stress. How smart. 

It was designed for short bursts of stress followed by recovery. It was also designed to complete stress cycles. However, in our digitally-demanding, always-on world that we find ourselves in today, we’re in a constantly elevated stress state – oscillating between emails, Teams notifications, a flurry of WhatsApp messages and back-to-back virtual meetings. 

We very rarely experience short pulses of stress and rarely do we close out the stress cycle. Personally, I can’t recall the last time I experienced a sustained period of “inbox zero”. Can you? 

Despite this constant digital deluge and our increased stress, recent research suggests the right kind of stress can sharpen your thinking, enhance your focus and improve your performance. Yes, stress can actually catalyse, not constrain our performance and wellbeing.

We see this in high-stakes environments, like surgeons, who often perform better under pressure. This is sometimes referred to as the “clutch effect.” A short stressful incident in the first five minutes of surgery can improve outcomes for the patient.

So the issue isn’t stress itself. It’s how we interpret and respond to it.

Research from Stanford psychologist Alia Crum shows that our mindset about stress shapes its impact on us, both psychologically and physiologically. 

If we believe stress is harmful, it adversely impacts us physically and psychologically. However, if we see it as helpful, by helping us to mount the right resources so we can respond, it can actually enhance performance and resilience.

Your Calm Code

Being a “Calm Queen” isn’t about eliminating pressure. It’s not about avoiding stress. It’s about building the capacity to stay steady within it and also developing our tolerance to stress. 

And that’s something we can train. I call it “building your stress adaptability”. This is how we activate our calm code.

Here are five simple, science-backed ways to help you learn to dance with stress:

1. Breathe like your brain depends on it (because it does)

When our eyes converge on our screens, our breathing becomes shallow and we often stop sighing, a subtle shift that increases stress. We literally hold our breath, sometimes in a condition called “email apnoea”, where we go into our inboxes, hold our breath, dump cortisol and our pupils dilate.

Instead, try this:

• Take 2–3 physiological sighs (double inhale, slow exhale)
• Lift your gaze away from your screen. Our hOS was designed for us to dilate our gaze, not spend hours a day staring at screens.

This quickly downregulates your nervous system and allows you to embrace your calm.

2. Give your brain a visual reset

Your occipital lobe (your visual processing centre) is constantly active when you’re looking at screens. It’s estimated that our brains process 11 million bits of sensory data per second and 10 million of those come through our eyes, so it’s not surprising that being on our screens for long periods of time can make us feel stressed and depleted.

• Closing your eyes for 30–60 seconds gives this region of your brain a much needed reset.

It’s a simple way to reduce cognitive load and restore mental clarity and calm.

3. Don’t go it alone. Connect.

Women are biologically wired to “tend and befriend.” Connection activates what’s known as social buffering, where supportive interactions help regulate our nervous system. At a neurochemical level, connection releases oxytocin, often called the “social bonding hormone”. In women, oxytocin works alongside oestrogen, amplifying its calming effects and helping to counteract cortisol, the body’s primary stress hormone.

The result? A catch-up with a friend is a powerful biological buffer against stress, anxiety and even inflammation. So those voice notes, kitchen-table conversations and “just checking in” texts? They’re not just emotional support. They’re neurological stress regulation. They're one of your calm codes.

Connection is not a luxury. It’s how your brain returns to calm.

4. Train your brain to handle stress

A part of your brain called the anterior mid-cingulate cortex helps build stress tolerance. It’s the willpower centre of your brain.

And like a muscle, it grows when you challenge it. So this is why we must choose challenge over comfort. 

We can do this by:

• Cold or heat exposure. And the good news is you don’t have to do ice baths – cold water at 15-16 degrees Celsius is sufficient for female physiology. 
• Learn something new  – try a new yoga class, learn a language or pick up pole dancing.
• Vigorous physical exercise. If this makes you roll your eyes find a fun way to raise your heart rate - dance the morning away if you must. 

The goal isn’t to avoid stress. It’s to become better at handling it. It’s to learn to dance with it, so stress helps you to expand, but not explode, stretch, but not shatter you. Building your stress tolerance helps you to activate your calm code on demand.

5. Protect your sleep (without perfectionism)

Midlife is often characterised by disrupted sleep due to a host of factors, including shifting hormones, demands on midlife and elevated daytime stress.

However,  small changes can make a big difference. New research suggests that:

• Curate what you consume before bed – Avoid news and social media late at night, they can disrupt REM sleep, which is critical for emotional processing and learning. Listen to an audiobook, podcast or relaxation app instead.
• Do a simple “brain sneeze” – Write a short to-do list before bed. Research shows listing 10 To Do tasks for the following days can help you fall asleep up to 15 minutes faster by reducing mental load and quieting unfinished thoughts.

Small shifts, significant impact on sleep quality. These habits help reduce mental load and improve sleep quality. We all know from experience that we’re far more likely to retain our calm, even under pressure, when we’re well slept.

You don’t need to eliminate stress to feel calm. You need to build your capacity to move through it differently. Because calm isn’t something you find when life slows down. It’s something you create , even when it doesn’t. 

Welcome to your Calm Queen era.

Dr Kristy Goodwin is a Neuro-Performance Scientist, an international keynote speaker and an executive coach who works with ambitious and accomplished teams and leaders to optimise performance in a digitally-demanding world. Drawing on neuroscience, she translates the science of sustainable peak-performance into practical strategies that help high-performers enhance focus, energy and resilience without burning out. Her work challenges outdated productivity norms and helps high-performers stop paying a “success tax” by learning how to work in alignment with their Human Operating System, hOS, so they can perform at their best and still have the capacity to enjoy the life they’re building.