Not all stress hurts recovery — there's a 'good' kind and a 'bad' kind

Stress from a hard workout and stress from a work deadline act differently

Physiology distinguishes between eustress — stress the body perceives as a manageable challenge and responds to with adaptive strengthening — and distress, stress perceived as a threat that exceeds your coping resources, which drains the body without any upside. A hard but planned workout is a textbook example of eustress: the body takes on a controlled load, followed by recovery and supercompensation.

Chronic psychological stress — from constant work pressure or financial anxiety, say — usually falls under distress and creates a hormonal backdrop (persistently elevated cortisol) that actively interferes with recovery from physical training, even if the workout itself was well planned. The problem is that from the hormonal system's perspective, both types of stress partly draw on the same resources — the body doesn't always 'separate' their sources when tallying total load.

Practical takeaway: during periods of high psychological stress outside the gym, it's reasonable to temporarily scale back training volume or intensity — not by dropping activity entirely (light movement itself lowers distress), but with a gentler training load until the source of chronic stress is under control.