Why stress is not the problem
Building the framework for stress balance with Thermalist®
Over the past years, one thing has become increasingly clear to me.
People don’t struggle with stress because they are exposed to too much of it. They struggle because their system doesn’t resolve it.
This is an important distinction, and one that is often overlooked.
We tend to think of stress as something external — something that happens to us, something we accumulate, something we need to reduce. But from a physiological perspective, stress is not inherently negative. It is a signal. A deviation from the body’s current state, which initiates a response.
In a well-regulated system, that response resolves. The body returns, or adjusts, to baseline.
But when that resolution does not happen properly, something else begins to occur.
Over time, the system remains slightly activated. Not in a way that is always obvious, but in a way that gradually shapes how we feel, how we recover, and how we respond to new demands. It becomes a kind of background activation — subtle, but persistent.
This is where the problem sits.
Not in the exposure itself, but in the lack of resolution.
What I find particularly interesting is that when this begins to change, the shift is rarely dramatic. It does not feel like a breakthrough. It is much quieter than that.
People often describe it as a sense of stability. They recover a bit faster. They feel less reactive. There is less internal noise. The system becomes more regulated, but without a clear moment where everything suddenly changes.
And this is also why it can be difficult to recognise what is actually happening.
We are used to looking for intensity, for strong signals, for clear before-and-after moments. But physiological change does not always present itself that way. It often emerges gradually, through repetition, through exposure, and through the system learning to respond differently over time.
What has stayed with me most, however, is not just the data — it is the people.
Last year, after a talk, a man came up to me and said that he had learned more about health in that one hour than he had in the past ten years. That stayed with me, because it shouldn’t be that difficult.
Understanding your body should not feel fragmented. Understanding stress should not feel like something that only a few people have access to. And yet, for many, it still is. The information is scattered, the experiences are disconnected, and the results are often short-lived.
This has been a large part of what has driven my work.
Not just studying stress in controlled settings, but trying to understand how to translate that knowledge into something that actually works in practice — something that creates change over time, not just in a single moment.
This is also the foundation of what I am building with Thermalist®.
A way of taking these physiological principles and applying them in real-world settings — not as isolated experiences, but as structured processes designed to support adaptation over time.
If I have been quieter than usual recently, this is also part of the reason.
Much of my time has been spent working behind the scenes. Testing, refining, and trying to simplify something that is often made unnecessarily complex.
Because in the end, I do not believe that health should be that difficult.
For those of you working in spas, clinics, or performance spaces who are interested in how this can be applied in practice, science backed you can learn more about our first program the Thermalist® Method here:
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Dr. Susanna Søberg
Founder and CEO at Søberg Institute & Thermalist®
