By Michael J. Critelli | MakeUsWell Newsletter,
Over many decades, particularly when I led Pitney Bowes, I was puzzled about different health profiles among employees and other people in the community who had very similar diets. Some of the least healthy people had what appeared to be healthy eating habits. Did that mean that what we were told by public health authorities about nutrition was wrong? Were they secretly eating unhealthy foods?
In recent years, I learned that research supported the hypothesis that chronic stress was more important to overall health, even for those who adhered to good eating habits and engaged in vigorous physical activity.
Most conversations about stress reduction focus on individual coping: mindfulness, resilience, better habits. But emerging research suggests that the most damaging stressors are not emotional, they are structural. Two factors dominate:
- The frequency and perceived importance of emergencies
- Whether people have adequate time and resources to do what is expected of them
These are not abstract workplace design problems. They directly influence how the body processes food. When emergencies proliferate and capacity is mismatched to demands, stress physiology overwhelms nutrition physiology. Even excellent diets stop working as intended.
The Biology of “Everything Is Urgent”
An emergency is not defined by the clock or the calendar. It is defined by how the brain interprets threat and consequence. When individuals believe that failure to respond immediately will produce harm social, professional, or financial, the nervous system activates survival pathways.
This matters because the body cannot efficiently process nutrients while in threat mode.
Repeated emergencies:
- Elevate cortisol and adrenaline
- Reduce insulin sensitivity
- Suppress digestive efficiency
- Shift fuel usage away from repair and toward short-term survival
Under these conditions, food that would normally support energy and metabolic health is more likely to be:
- Stored inefficiently
- Converted into inflammatory byproducts
- Only partially metabolized
In effect, chronic urgency lowers the return on every nutritional investment.
Reducing the number and perceived significance of emergencies is therefore not a productivity improvement; it is a metabolic intervention.
Why Constant Urgency Breaks Nutrition
When emergencies are frequent, the body adapts by staying partially activated all day. This state was evolutionarily useful for short bursts of danger, but it is destructive when sustained.
In chronically urgent environments:
- Meals are eaten quickly or distractedly
- Blood sugar responses become more volatile
- Appetite signalling becomes unreliable
- Cravings skew toward fast energy rather than efficient fuel
People often misinterpret these effects as “poor discipline” or “bad food choices.” In reality, the stress environment is overriding normal nutritional signalling.
Reducing emergencies restores a calmer baseline in which nutrition can once again do what it is designed to do: support steady energy, cognitive clarity, and cellular repair.
Historically, work and family were the main sources of constant emergency. Today, both mainstream and social media outlets amplify and, in too many instances, create constant urgency messaging where no objective emergency actually exists. They believe that doing so increases engagement, which it does, but when the so-called emergency is found not to require as urgent a response, they simply move on to create or amplify the next one.
Capacity Mismatch: When Good Nutrition Is Biologically Neutralized
The second root cause of stress is capacity mismatch—being assigned tasks without sufficient time, tools, authority, or clarity to complete them. This form of stress is particularly corrosive because it creates persistent helplessness, one of the strongest activators of stress physiology.
From a nutritional perspective, this matters enormously.
When individuals lack capacity:
- Stress hormones remain elevated even during rest
- Sleep quality declines, impairing glucose regulation
- The body prioritizes energy conservation over optimization
In this state, nutrition becomes maintenance at best, and sometimes irrelevant.
People may improve their diets, increase protein intake, reduce sugar, or eliminate ultra-processed foods—and see little benefit. The underlying issue is not the food. It is that the body is stuck compensating for structural overload.
Time Is a Metabolic Resource
Time is rarely discussed as a nutritional variable, yet it functions like one.
Adequate time allows for:
- Calm eating, which improves digestion
- Predictable routines, which stabilize metabolic rhythms
- Recovery between cognitive demands, which lowers baseline stress hormones
Time scarcity does the opposite. It compresses meals, fragments attention, and keeps the nervous system activated throughout the day.
When individuals are rushed:
- Even healthy meals produce poorer metabolic responses
- Hunger cues become distorted
- Energy crashes become more frequent
This is why time pressure often leads people to believe nutrition “isn’t working for them,” when in fact time deprivation is sabotaging nutrient processing.
The Compounding Effect
Emergencies and capacity mismatch reinforce each other. Too many emergencies reduce available time. Insufficient capacity turns routine tasks into emergencies. The body experiences both as threats.
The result is a chronic stress loop in which:
- Nutrition becomes less effective
- Energy declines
- Cognitive performance suffers
- Stress increases further
Breaking this loop does not require perfect diets. It requires fewer emergencies and better-aligned expectations.
The Core Insight
The most under appreciated truth in modern nutrition is this:
Food quality sets the ceiling for health. Stress, particularly chronic stress, determines how much of that ceiling you can reach.
Reducing the number and significance of emergencies, and ensuring that people have the time and resources to do what is asked of them, is not just humane or efficient. It is foundational to metabolic health.
In a system that respects capacity and minimizes artificial urgency, good nutrition finally has the conditions it needs to work as intended.