A conversation with Dr. Amit Sood — physician, resilience researcher, former Professor of Medicine at Mayo Clinic, founder of the Global Center for Resiliency and Wellbeing, and member of WONE’s Scientific Advisory Board

How a wise leader interprets stress, and acts in the face of it

Stress is detectable. It is readable. But what do we do once we've read it?

Dr. Amit Sood has spent decades studying resilience at the bedside and in the boardroom. A physician-scientist and former professor of medicine at the Mayo Clinic, he founded the Global Center for Resiliency and Wellbeing and has worked with patients facing life-threatening illness as well as leaders navigating sustained pressure.

Across these very different environments, he has observed the same pattern: stress itself is rarely the deciding factor. What matters is how people respond to it.

Where biology helps us detect stress and behavioural science helps us interpret it, Dr. Sood’s work focuses on the deeper human capability required to act on it well.

Stress Intelligence begins with noticing stress, but it matures in how we choose to respond to it.

What is stress? The rock in the pond

Central to Dr. Sood's framework is a distinction that sounds simple but carries real weight: stressors and stress are not the same thing.

"Stressors are the real problem. Stress is a natural response." A stressor is anything that disrupts your equilibrium. And that includes disruptions you choose. "Any time your equilibrium is disrupted, even by desired change, that's a stressor." 

A new job, a new baby, a relocation you were excited about. The disruption is real whether or not it's welcome.

It's like throwing a rock into a pond. 

The rock is the stressor. The waves that follow are the stress response, the body doing exactly what it was designed to do.

Stress is information about the relationship between the demands we face and the capacity we have to meet them. The question stress intelligence asks is not why is there a wave? but how do I choose to respond to it? 

"Stress intelligence helps you decide: is this likely to overwhelm me, or help me grow?"

That question, asked with genuine curiosity rather than anxiety, is the beginning of a wiser relationship with pressure.

The bridge between stress and resilience

Most of us think about stress and resilience as opposites. Stress is the problem. Resilience is the solution. If you're resilient enough, stress won't take you down.

But Dr. Sood believes something important is missing from that model.

“Toxic stress and resilience sit at the polar extremes,” he explains.

“When you’re overwhelmed and cannot think clearly, that is excessive, unmitigated stress. And resilience is your flexible, flowing capacity to respond. But you need something that connects the two, a bridge, if you will. That bridge is Stress Intelligence.”

What makes it a bridge is that it operates in the space between perceiving a challenge and responding to it. The moment most of us speed through on autopilot.

That decision, often made in seconds, determines whether stress becomes fuel, strain, or growth. Most of us move through that moment automatically, but Stress Intelligence slows it down just enough to see the situation clearly. 

It restores a small but powerful form of agency: the ability to pause, interpret the moment, and choose how to respond.

Looking through a stressor means you're already inside its logic, reacting from within it. Looking at it means you have enough separation to see it clearly.

The distance allows better questions to emerge:

• Does this deserve my full energy?

• Is this my fight?

• What response would serve best here?

• Will this help me grow, or overwhelm me?

“Often that thinking is passive,” Dr Sood says. “We react to situations. We don’t respond to them.”  The stressor determines the outcome, not the person.

"But we are not passive pawns. We decide how to respond. That intentionality is what's missing, and that's stress intelligence."

Stress Intelligence is what makes us authors of our response, rather than just recipients of it.

Good, bad, and ugly: not all stress is the same

Before we can respond intelligently to stress, we need to stop treating stress as a single thing.

Dr. Sood thinks about stress in three flavors – good, bad, and ugly – and he is deliberate about the distinction.

Good stress is any change you've desired or chosen: a new baby, a promotion, a new relationship, a challenge you've signed up for. It costs you energy and demands adaptation. But it is the texture of a full life. 

"Keep your good stress. Otherwise life will be boring."

Bad stress is when that same change tips into overwhelm. The promotion becomes fourteen-hour days, seven days a week. The relationship that once energized you becomes a source of chronic tension.

It is often the same stressor as the good kind, just past a threshold the individual can sustain.

Ugly stress is qualitatively different again. A child sick in the ICU. A workplace with toxic politics and no psychological safety. Situations that are not just demanding but genuinely damaging. Ugly stress asks something different of you entirely.

"Just calling stress 'stress' doesn't tell me much," Dr. Sood says. 

There is a complexity behind what each person is perceiving, shaped by their history, their other stressors, the people around them. 

The practical goal, in his framing, is to understand and honour those nuances. To keep your good stress, convert bad stress into good whenever you can, and be genuinely prepared, not just braced, for the ugly.

We are travelling a foggy road

Here is something stress intelligence asks us to accept, and it is harder than it sounds.

We do not know what is coming. Not ten miles ahead, not ten minutes ahead. And most of the strategies we use under stress – controlling, predicting, over-preparing –  are attempts to resolve that uncertainty before it arrives. They rarely work. And the effort of sustaining them is itself a source of chronic pressure.

Dr. Sood offers a different frame.

 "Life is like driving on a very foggy road. You cannot see ten miles ahead, but you can see the next hundred feet. And the beauty is: when you drive those hundred feet, you can see the next hundred feet. That's how you can drive ten miles, or hundred miles."

The capacity to act faithfully within uncertainty – not because certainty has arrived, but because you trust it will keep unfolding – is one of the deepest expressions of stress intelligence. 

Not control. Not certainty. Faith in the next hundred feet.

For leaders especially, this reframe matters. The pressure to have all the answers, to project certainty, to control outcomes, are themselves sources of chronic stress. A wiser foundation is clarity about what's within reach, and equanimity about what isn't.

What resilience really is

Many high performers build their identity around endurance.

Grit. Pushing through. Showing a brave face. These are admired and often rewarded. But they are not, Dr. Sood believes, the same as resilience.

“Think of a tree with stiff branches in a thunderstorm,” Dr. Sood says. “Branches that cannot bend will break.” What often passes for resilience is actually rigidity masquerading as strength. 

Grit, at its extreme, is the performance of composure while something quietly fractures beneath it. "Grit can look brave on the outside while you're melting on the inside" Dr. Sood says. 

We all know what this looks like. In others, if not always in ourselves. The person who insists they're fine, right up until they aren't. “Emotions that are repressed don’t disappear,” Dr. Sood says. “They actually revolt at unpredictable times.” 

True resilience is something more fluid. It doesn't insist on fighting. It doesn't perform toughness. It is, as Dr Sood. puts it, "flexible and flowing". Able to engage when engagement serves, and withdraw when it doesn't.  

Real resilience requires the flexibility that allows us to grow through difficulty, not just past it. "You don't want to be experiencing the same challenge again and have to go through the same response again.” 

“When you grow through difficulty,” Dr. Sood explains, “you vaccinate yourself against similar challenges. You become quicker, savvier, more effective at putting out small fires before they become forest fires.”

Endurance asks: How long can I hold on? Resilience asks: What am I becoming through this?

And flexibility is something that can be built regardless of age or history. "Flexibility is absolutely something you can learn and develop, our brains preserve neuroplasticity into old age." 

The capacity to adapt is not something we are born with in fixed supply. It is available as long as we are willing to engage with it.

The key, Dr. Sood adds, is knowing where to be flexible and where not to be. "Be flexible about preferences, but strong in principles." 

This combination, a steady core, and genuine openness everywhere else, is what resilience actually looks like in practice.

What a stress-intelligent leader actually does

Dr. Sood has sat with senior leaders who told him they had ten minutes, and ended up staying for ninety. So we asked: if you truly had only ten minutes, what would you tell them?

He offered three things. Not tactics. Orientations. Three ways of entering the fog with more wisdom than you left it.

Before every meeting, remember why you are grateful to this person.

Not as a performance. As a genuine, private act of attention. "That will change the energy with which you meet that person," Dr. Sood says. "They will perceive your different energy. And that will lead to a more affiliative meeting, rather than transactional or adversarial." The meeting hasn't changed. The person hasn't changed. But you have, in the ten seconds it takes to remember something true. 

Ask: will this matter in five years?

We overreact because we judge ourselves quarter to quarter. Sometimes week to week. Urgency becomes the primary lens, and importance gets crowded out. "If it won't matter in five years, it's not a good use of your time today." Dr. Sood keeps a photograph of Earth taken from the edge of the solar system on his phone, half a pixel in a massive solar system, as a reminder to keep a zoomed out  perspective that is always available, if we reach for it.

"I am enough. I have enough."

This one is easy to misread as passivity. It is not. "All the money, the pleasure, the joy I ever needed, I already have it. My job now is to be a force for good." A leader who operates from sufficiency rather than scarcity leads differently. Decides differently. Relates differently. This is empowered engagement, and it dissolves the ambient anxiety that drives so much of the overwork cycle.

Designing for humans, not just for output

Stress Intelligence is not only a personal practice. It changes the questions leaders ask about the people around them.

Dr. Sood grounds this in two conditions without which no policy or tool takes root: respect and trust.

"Respect for me is unconditional. There are two kinds: respect related to performance, and respecting another person as a human being. I would say 90% of respect is respecting the other person as a human being." Organizations that begin from that premise create the conditions where honest signals about stress can actually surface, where people feel safe enough to say when they're at capacity, rather than performing wellness they don't feel.

Trust is the second condition. And specifically, trust means believing people when they report their own experience. "When a person is feeling that their stress curve is maxed, you just believe them. And you give them grace. You try to customize work. You allow people to craft their job so that they are operating at their maximum."

And beneath both of these sits a more fundamental reframe. We have spent decades asking whether people are resilient as though it were a single, universal capacity that some people have and some people lack. Instead, Dr. Sood invites us to "Ask not if someone is resilient. Ask how they are resilient."

Every person has a particular way of meeting difficulty, a particular strength that carries them through. The job of a leader, a manager, a colleague, a parent, is to find it, and then align people's work with it accordingly.

"I've seen this many times. People who were not doing well with one kind of work, and it was clear that was not their thing. But they were phenomenal at something else. You reassign them, and they absolutely blossom."

This is what stress-intelligent leadership looks like at scale. Not managing stress out of the system. But asking better questions, and designing conditions that let people meet challenges in the way that is most authentically theirs.

Stress Intelligence in practice: Dr. Sood's personal playbook

My "I need a pause" signal When I stop enjoying, when I start just repeating myself, and when I stop being creative. Sometimes when my eyes get tired. That is when I know my brain is also tired. I need to rest.

Most reliable reset Zoom out. I look at myself from a much bigger perspective and I recognize how precious yet inconsequential I am. I look at that pale blue Earth picture — it's on my phone as one of my top pictures — and recognize that the entire planet Earth is about half a pixel in this massive solar system. So: zoom out.

One habit I protect when life gets intense Two, actually. I continue smiling with my eyes, and I continue sending silent good wishes to others. That keeps me centered.

Advice to my younger self about stress Pursue purpose. Do not run away from fear. Instead of running away from fear, chase purpose. Instead of removing negativity, enhance positivity. Negativity will fall by the wayside on its own.

A small practice that makes a disproportionate difference Prayer for others.

One word I wish people used less about stress "It's killing me."

Dr. Amit Sood is a physician-scientist and founder of the Global Center for Resiliency and Wellbeing.

This is the third piece in WONE's Scientific Advisory Board series on Stress Intelligence. Read Part 1 with Dr. Lydia Roos on the biology of sustainable performance, and Part 2 with Professor Ashley Whillans on how stress reshapes decisions.