3 Stress Regulation Tools That Helped Me Work Better Under Pressure

Working in sales taught me something I probably should have figured out a lot earlier. Stress regulation isn't about finding one perfect tool. It's about knowing which layer of stress you're actually dealing with.

Sometimes you need something simple and immediate, like one conscious breath before you pick up the phone. Sometimes you need help interrupting the mental loop that keeps running long after you've logged off. And sometimes, when your system is carrying something deeper, you need support that goes beyond anything you can do on your own.

Before I got into sales, I already had a solid background in breathwork and functional breathing. I'd worked as a skydiving instructor for about 10 years, taught breathwork, and spent a lot of time learning about stress, performance, breathing mechanics and nervous system regulation. So, honestly, I figured I'd handle a sales job pretty comfortably.

I'd worked in high-pressure environments before. I'd taught people how to regulate themselves. I had a breathwork business ticking along that gave me a fairly low-stress lifestyle. Then I stepped into a performance-based sales role and worked something out fast.

Sales stress is different.

And while this story comes from sales, the same patterns show up in leadership, customer service, business ownership, healthcare, hospitality and any role where people are expected to perform while under pressure.

It's not like jumping out of planes. It isn't one big hit of intensity. It's constant volume, constant task switching, constant customer needs, new software, targets, follow-ups, pressure and emotional management, all at once.

And I came in during the busiest month in the company's history. I was learning new systems, Salesforce from scratch included, while trying to manage clients, take on new leads, get my head around the product and keep up with the volume everyone expected. The training at the time probably wasn't enough for that kind of workload. To the company's credit, they later tightened up and standardised the whole process. But at the start, it was a lot.

On top of that, I was in a stressful relationship. One of those things on its own, I could probably have managed. Together, they were more than I could carry where I was at.

Here's what I learned from that stretch.

Breathwork was the foundation, but not the whole answer

Breathwork was the first tool I reached for, because it was the one I knew best. And I still reckon it's the foundation of almost any stress management program.

Not because it magically fixes everything. It doesn't. But your breath is one of the most accessible ways you have to shift your state. It affects your stress response, your focus, your voice, your recovery and your ability to stay steady when the pressure's on.

Once you understand functional breathing, the relationship between oxygen and carbon dioxide, and ideas like the Bohr effect, you start to see that breathing isn't just about getting more air in. It's about using the breath well. A lot of people under pressure are over-breathing, mouth breathing, holding their breath, sighing, rushing their words or tensing up without even noticing.

In a performance role, that matters. Your breath changes your tone. Your tone changes how people experience you. And in sales, people can feel whether you're rushed, needy, tense, present or grounded.

At first I mostly used breathwork after work. I'd get home and use a breath pacer app (there are plenty around). You set the length of the inhale and the exhale, and it gives you a tone to follow, say a four-second inhale and a six-second exhale. If you've got a higher carbon dioxide tolerance you might manage a longer inhale and exhale, but longer isn't automatically better. If the cadence makes you uncomfortable, tense or hungry for air, it probably isn't helping. You're looking for a rhythm that feels calm, sustainable and relaxing.

That after-work practice helped. It beat doing nothing. But I noticed my mind would still race for a while once I got home. Breathwork was supporting me, it just wasn't solving everything.

Later, once I knew the job better and had more capacity during the day, I started using breath in a much smaller, more practical way. Before a call, or before I picked up the phone, I'd take one slow inhale through the nose. Then one slower, relaxed exhale through the nose. As I breathed out, I'd bring a slight smile to my face. Then I'd answer, or dial out.

That tiny reset made a huge difference. I was less rushed, more present, less attached to the sale, less needy in my tone. And when you don't come across as needy, people feel it. They feel it in your voice, your pace, your posture and the way you listen.

Around that time I also started connecting better with my co-workers. When you're stressed and overcooked, it's harder to connect with anyone. You're more in your own head, less available. You might not mean to push people away, but your system just isn't giving off ease. Breathwork helped me create a bit more space.

My simple rule is this: breathe slow, smooth and silent. If you can do that, you're already heading in the right direction.

Hypnosis helped interrupt the stress loop

The second tool was hypnotherapy. This one came in when I realised I wasn't just stressed. I was stressed about being stressed.

And because I work in nervous system regulation, there was some shame wrapped up in that. Part of me kept thinking, "I should know how to handle this." Which is not a helpful thought. It just stacks another layer of pressure on top.

After the relationship ended, I could feel my nervous system was still agitated. Breathwork was helping, but I wanted something that could interrupt the mental loop. I came across a hypnosis for stress course by Paul McKenna on Mindvalley (some people will know him as a TV hypnotherapist). I signed up and worked through it over about two weeks.

The main practice was a recorded hypnosis audio, around 30 minutes long. I listened to it twice a day, once when I woke up and once before bed. It helped. It didn't fix the root cause and it wasn't the biggest driver of change, but it was useful.

The biggest win was sleep. The recording gave my mind something else to follow. For that half hour I wasn't rehearsing the same problems, replaying conversations, thinking about work or worrying about how stressed I was. It snapped me off the thought train. It also lifted my emotional state a bit and gave me more capacity for the mental load of sales.

I'll be honest, multitasking has never been one of my strengths. But anyone who's worked in sales knows you've got to juggle a lot at once. You might be listening to a client, updating notes, checking availability, managing follow-ups, watching your pipeline, thinking about objections and trying to stay calm and helpful, all in the same breath. The hypnosis seemed to help me handle that with a bit more ease.

I also think the breathwork made the hypnosis work better. Because I already had a breathing foundation, it was easier to drop into a calmer, more parasympathetic state, which probably made my mind more receptive to the recording.

Would I recommend hypnosis? Yes, but carefully. Find a good practitioner or a high-quality program. Some people respond really well to it, some don't. It comes down to the person, the practitioner and how seriously you engage with it. I know people who've had private sessions and seen great results, and people who haven't.

For me, I'd give it about three out of five. Helpful, but not the whole answer. It's useful when you're stuck in a stress loop, especially when your mind keeps replaying the same thoughts on repeat. But it's no replacement for changing an unhealthy workload, a bad relationship, poor training or an environment that's genuinely unsustainable. Hypnosis didn't fix the root cause of my stress. It just gave my mind somewhere else to go when it was stuck rehearsing the same problems.

Neuro Emotional Technique (N.E.T) helped lower the baseline charge

The third tool was Neuro Emotional Technique, usually shortened to NET. This was the one that surprised me most.

A friend recommended it. She was passionate about it, and told me a lot of her fairly sceptical, non-woo-woo friends had tried it and seen real benefits that lasted months.

By then I was doing better. Breathwork had helped. Hypnosis had helped. But then a former colleague from my skydiving days took his own life. After the funeral I woke up in the middle of the night and could feel a huge amount of stress sitting in my body. I knew I hadn't processed it properly. I had what I'd call a bit of an emotional release, but my nervous system was already so wound up that I was struggling to come down from it.

I needed help quickly. The NET practitioner in Byron Bay wasn't available, so I found one on the Gold Coast.

I noticed the difference almost straight away. Even walking out of the office afterwards, I felt different. My Garmin showed a clear drop in stress shortly after the session. My sleep score improved that night. And after work, I could suddenly down-regulate much faster.

This is the one I find hardest to explain. I don't fully understand how it works. But the effect was strong enough that I took it seriously.

The session involved muscle testing, questions, emotional threads and tracing stress responses back to earlier ages. The practitioner would ask a series of questions, then use muscle testing to narrow down when something might have first started. She might ask whether it began between ages one and five, five and ten, or ten and fifteen. If the response tested within a certain range, she'd narrow it further. Then she'd ask something like, "When you were that age, do you remember anything particularly stressful or painful?" You say the first thing that comes to mind.

There was also light touch on certain points on the body. In my case she did a few very gentle chiropractic adjustments too. No cracking, nothing forceful, just gentle work because she thought my body was out of alignment. After years of skydiving, I wasn't going to argue with that.

What changed afterwards? Quite a lot. My sleep improved. The emotional charge dropped. Work stress felt easier to handle. Body tension eased. The racing thoughts settled. And I recovered better at the end of the day.

One of the most interesting parts was how she helped me relate differently to frustrating sales calls. In sales, especially with a bonus structure, it's easy to get resistant towards people who seem to be wasting your time. Some people ring up and basically just want a chat. They're not serious about buying, but they soak up time and energy that could be going towards real opportunities. My instinct was to get them off the phone quickly.

She suggested the opposite. Stop resisting them. Take a breath. Actually listen. Let them say what they need to say. She reckoned that once I stopped resisting those calls, I'd probably notice I stopped getting as many of them.

I tried it. And to my surprise, she was right. Whether that was energetic, behavioural, tonal, or simply because I'd stopped meeting those situations with internal resistance, something shifted. I seemed to get fewer of those calls, and when they did happen, they bothered me less. That alone made my day easier.

I ended up doing two sessions with the practitioner on the Gold Coast. About six months later I saw the Byron Bay practitioner I'd originally been pointed to. They worked differently, but both were excellent. The first session was more urgent, I was at a tipping point. The later one was different again. My system was more stable by then, so we could go into deeper layers rather than just hauling me out of emergency mode.

For me, NET was five out of five, with one important caveat: practitioner quality matters.

I reckon NET suits people who feel like they should be coping, but their body is still reacting as though something's wrong. You might understand the stress mentally. You might have the tools. You might be doing all the right things. But your body still feels charged.

The way I picture it is a pressure-sensitive alarm. When your system is overloaded, the alarm goes off too easily. Small things create a big response. You can regulate a little, but only down to a point. NET felt like it lowered that threshold. It took some of the charge out from under the surface, so my nervous system stopped kicking off so readily. And that made a clear difference to both my health and my performance.

What sales taught me about stress regulation

Sales was one of the clearest environments I've ever been in for watching stress regulation play out in real time.

When you're regulated, you listen better, speak better, handle rejection better, and recover faster after a hard conversation. You're less needy, less reactive, easier to work with, and you make better decisions.

When you're dysregulated, the whole thing gets harder. You rush. You grip. You overthink. You take things personally. You carry one bad call straight into the next one. You finish the day exhausted but still wired.

The biggest lesson for me was that different tools work at different layers. Breathwork helped me regulate in the moment. Hypnosis helped interrupt the mental loop. NET helped lower the deeper baseline charge.

I still believe breathwork is the foundation. If you don't have any awareness of your breath, your state and how to bring yourself back to centre, everything else is harder. But breathwork on its own isn't always the whole answer. Sometimes you need a mental reset. Sometimes you need emotional support. Sometimes you need to change the environment, or get better training, better workload design, better boundaries, better recovery.

Stress regulation isn't about pretending pressure doesn't affect you. It's about having practical tools, enough self-awareness to know when those tools are working, and enough honesty to get support when they're not.

Practical takeaways for stress regulation tools

If you work in sales, leadership, customer service, business ownership, or any performance-based role, here's what I'd take from all this.

Start with the breath. Before a call, a meeting, a presentation or a difficult conversation, take one slow inhale through the nose and one slower, softer exhale through the nose. Let your face soften. Let your voice slow down. Then begin. Don't wait until you've got 20 minutes and the perfect setting. One conscious breath beats waiting for the perfect practice.

If your mind keeps looping, use something structured. That might be hypnosis, meditation, guided relaxation, journaling, or anything else that gives your mind somewhere else to go.

If you feel like you understand the stress in your head but your body is still carrying the charge, think about getting support from a skilled practitioner.

And don't confuse regulation with tolerating something that's genuinely unhealthy. The goal isn't to get so regulated that you can survive a bad environment forever. It's to understand your system well enough to know what it actually needs.

Final thoughts

The best stress regulation tools are the ones you'll actually use. For me, working under pressure taught me that breathwork, hypnosis and NET all had a place. Breathwork gave me the foundation. Hypnosis helped me interrupt the mental noise. NET helped reduce the deeper emotional charge that was keeping my system switched on.

None of them were magic. But together they helped me sleep better, work better, connect better and recover better. And in a performance-based role, that matters. Because your state doesn't stay hidden. People feel it. Your team feels it. Your clients feel it. And over time, your body feels it too.

Base State helps businesses organise practical corporate wellbeing workshops and team experiences, by matching them with trusted facilitators across Australia and New Zealand. If your team is working under pressure and you want them walking away with tools they'll actually use, Base State can help you find the right facilitator for your people, your event and the outcome you're actually after.

If this sounds like something your team could use, get in touch through the enquiry form or email info@basestate.au.

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