About the Episode
Stress is often treated like something to eliminate, but what if understanding it differently could help you move through life with more clarity, strength, and intention?
In this episode of Whole by Design, Dr. Julie Lopez is joined by clinician and clinical director Amanda Good to explore the stress equation, a practical framework for understanding why stress affects people differently and how lasting balance is created.
Together, they break down how demands, coping capacity, internal beliefs, and support systems interact to shape your experience of stress. Amanda explains why managing stress is not just about coping in the moment, but about identifying where imbalance lives and knowing how to shift it.
This conversation also explores how difficult experiences can become catalysts for growth, offering insight into resilience, deeper self-awareness, stronger relationships, and renewed meaning after hard seasons of life.
Episode Guest
Amanda Good is a psychotherapist, speaker, and Clinical Director of The Sibley Group, a psychotherapy practice in Washington, DC. For over 15 years, she has helped clients understand and heal the roots of anxiety, trauma, chronic stress, and burnout. Amanda is passionate about helping people reconnect with their strengths and create meaningful change in their lives. Her debut book, The Stress Equation, is currently in development.
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Episode Transcript:
Dr. Julie Lopez: My name is Dr. Julie Lopez, and I’m your host for Whole by Design. On this month’s episode, we will be diving into the stress equation and how this empowering body of work can actually help you deal with life’s challenges and be empowered to manage your stress in the most efficient way.
Stay until the end, where we’re going to actually go into the five benefits. Yes, I said “benefits” of going through something super stressful and what you can actually benefit from on the other side. Today, I’d like to welcome Amanda Good, who is an incredibly talented clinician. She is the clinical director of the Sibley Group.
She does a lot of training for peers and others on regulation. And she has a full manuscript of a book called The Stress Equation, which we all hope is going to be coming out really soon. Thank you so much for joining us, Amanda.
Amanda Good: Thank you, Julie.
Dr. Julie Lopez: How did you like that little pressure there?
Amanda Good: No, I love it. I would be very excited for that book to come out soon. So that’s awesome.
How the Pandemic Changed the Way Many People Experience Stress
Dr. Julie Lopez: Well, I want to just dive right in. I want to hear about what you’ve been working on and specifically have other people hear about how the stress equation works, what it is, and how people can use it in their day-to-day lives.
Amanda Good: Sure. So I’m really excited to talk about the stress equation. This idea came up for me during the pandemic because I was getting so many referrals with people who were just very overwhelmed and experiencing stress more intensely and going through a lot of kind of collective trauma at that point.
And so I started thinking more deeply about how stress impacts us differently and how we all process it. We are also thinking about how I conceptualize my cases with clients and how I help people understand what stress is doing in their bodies and what’s working or not working. And I got to a point where I was like, if I could actually break this down into a conceptual model that anybody can use, so not just in therapy, but a formula for understanding stress and realizing that it can be beneficial for us to have some amount of stress, but that it’s when it gets really imbalanced that it becomes a problem for us.
So being able to understand your stress, understand balance or imbalance, and then know where to target to be able to change that and start healing from chronic patterns of stress, that I was able to flesh out this equation for people to be able to figure out themselves, and then be able to use it as maintenance, not just therapy.
Dr. Julie Lopez: I love that. And you know, this whole podcast is about empowering listeners.
It’s about making things more accessible to the everyday person who’s walking around living this human experience.
Why Stress Can Feel Bigger Than the Situation Causing It
Dr. Julie Lopez: And what a time that was COVID, so much loss, so many things that got shut down. And I love how it inspired you to make what you were studying and really diving in to on a clinical level, more accessible for people to feel empowered in their lives, especially as it relates to stress.
Amanda Good: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And I’m a trauma therapist.
I’m EMDR certified, and I do a lot of trauma work, but I also found that talking about trauma wasn’t exactly what most people are thinking of in the things that are challenging us day to day, even if that’s how we might kind of scientifically understand it in what’s held in our bodies.
When we go through stress, that’s either acute stress or stress that’s chronic over a long period of time. That trauma is not what people are at first thinking of. They’re really thinking of their stressors. So the equation describes it that way.
Dr. Julie Lopez: I love that because I do think, as a former trauma therapist myself, you say the word trauma and people think of war or fire or violence in a significant way.
Yeah, of course it is. But I think you’re talking about the human system and its response to things that are less than ideal, of which we have a ton of them, right? They’re on a continuum. And we know that stress has been coined the silent killer because it wreaks such havoc on our physical body.
Amanda Good: Yeah, right.
Dr. Julie Lopez: Oura rings are all the rage. Everyone’s watching the way their body’s responding to the everyday stressors that people experience, from the big to the small,
Why Coping Skills May Stop Working Under Chronic Stress
Amanda Good: Right. Yeah.
And, really, it’s the chronic stressors that a lot of clients come to me that have a lot of skills for managing much of the stress in their life, but they’re doing so much managing, and it’s coming at a cost. They’re not really healing, whatever the underlying cause is.
And if you’re constantly, you know, exercising or doing yoga or doing all the coping skills to be able to manage these, you know, feelings that keep coming up routinely, then you’re going to eventually burn yourself out.
You know, if that imbalance persists over time, then you burn out. So we want skills to balance, not just for the moment, but really like from the bottom up to like fully heal from whatever is causing that stress.
Dr. Julie Lopez: I love that.
And you’re saying a bunch of things that are really interesting.
What Happens When Life Demands Exceed Your Capacity to Cope
Dr. Julie Lopez: So I think that the empowerment piece around this stress equation would lead us right to this place of saying, what is the stress equation?
And I actually even heard you saying something about coping tools. You distinguish your equation from just coping tools, because there’s actually, I think a lot of different levers that can be part of your equation.
So tell me about that.
Amanda Good: So the equation looks at someone’s level of stress, which again, it’s a continuum, and it’s not a negative thing. You know, we can be at a high level of stress, and that can be kind of driving us to a good goal.
So it’s not necessarily like good or bad. It’s just understanding what level of stress we’re at, but that the formula for showing us our stress level is it’s the relationship between the demands on us and our capacity for meeting those demands.
How Chronic Stress Affects the Body Over Time
Dr. Julie Lopez: Okay. So hold on just a second. So, like following along, so demands are high, coping is low. Maybe that becomes a crisis point.
What do we see when that happens? Demands high, coping low.
Amanda Good: Right. So if we’re not able to meet all those demands, and that’s an imbalance, and we’re functioning at an imbalance for a while, well, there are two things.
One is that it can just cause overwhelm, or the other is that it’s if you think of it like allostatic load, you know, if you hold up a, like something like your cup of water. Okay. That’s not a significant demand, but over time, it starts getting heavier and heavier and heavier on you.
And it starts to cause strain. And so that imbalance over time can cause strain or, or more of those like physical symptoms, like you were talking about where stress starts to really impact us in our bodies. So we can, we can feel that more like acute, like emotional overwhelm, or just starting to have all these side effects of stress over time. If we’re at a constant imbalance of these demands on us and what our capacity is to meet them.
Can Stress Affect Memory, Digestion, and Physical Health?
Dr. Julie Lopez: So how about some examples of things physically that you might experience if the demand is high and the capacity is low and you used the cup, I was going to pull up this candle, which is amazing by the way. It smells so good.
But holding the candle, you know, I hold it for a while at some point, if I’m holding this imbalance for a while, I’m going to give out like my system’s going to give out. So I was thinking kind of the parallels emotionally. Right.
What does that mean?
Amanda Good: Yeah.
And that’s a good example.
Dr. Julie Lopez: You become comatose, become severely depressed.
You have a panic attack. Like what’s the break look like physically?
Amanda Good: Yeah.
Dr. Julie Lopez: A heart attack, a stroke, like a, it can be a lot of different things.
Amanda Good: And I think part of that is because we hold our emotions in different places in our bodies. So I have, I would say a majority of my clients, as far as physical symptoms go, will either come to me with chronic headaches or like upper GI. So it’s like chest upward physical symptoms where they are holding a lot of tension in the upper part of their body.
And so chronic headaches or migraine, difficulty focusing, difficulty with memory, you know, a lot of that can be an impact of stress and not necessarily a diagnosis of its own, or nausea, chest tightness, you know, that quick breathing that comes with more anxiety, or I see more lower GI issues.
I have so many clients who have IBS because when we’re in a chronic…
Dr. Julie Lopez: Tell us what IBS is, irritable bowel syndrome.
Amanda Good: Yes.
Dr. Julie Lopez: Keep everyone on the yes.
Amanda Good: Yeah. Well, and a lot of people listening might, you know, really resonate with that because it’s so common, and having chronic, you know, constipation or bowel issues is actually not how our bodies should be working.
But because of inflammation that can come from being chronically in a stressed state, you know, at that point, your body is just working to keep up with your demands. It’s not working to just do your regular healthy functioning. So things get thrown off, but yeah, over time, it can contribute to other, more serious things too, like heart issues and all kinds of health problems.
Emotionally, stress that piles up over time can lead to different anxiety disorders or mood disorders, and anxiety as it becomes more acute over time can also turn into like panic, phobias, or OCD.
Because again, you’re just trying to come up with ways to compensate for the demands, just feeling more and more crushing, rather than figuring out how to balance it out.
What Hidden Factors Can Make Stress Harder to Manage
Dr. Julie Lopez: Yes. So tell me about that, right?
I think one of the things I love about this is that you talk about different ways to change the equation. It’s not a one-size-fits-all. Every person is unique, every situation is unique, and every scenario is unique. And that, rather than being prescriptive, like do this thing, you’re like, let me teach you this model so you can decide or figure out what’s happening, and then do these things for yourself.
So tell me a little bit more about that.
Amanda Good: So in thinking about the capacity part of the equation, like how you’re able to manage all of these demands, that really depends on a lot of things because each of us has different strengths and different resources. But also, if you think about what your goals are, the way that you want to handle your demands or the amount of demands you’re okay with is going to be very different.
And I sort of think about it like if I worked with an athletic trainer, so I was doing workouts with a trainer, they wanted to know what my work, my like exercise goal was before we started trying to build muscle or build endurance. You know, was I going for speed? Was I trying to run a marathon? Was I, you know, trying to like get really buff, or was I just trying to lose weight? You know, the different goals are going to mean very different skill building and attention to different parts of, you know, an exercise routine, and very different exercises or practices that would go into it.
And so, depending on what somebody is looking to work on or looking to heal or what is of value to them, building capacity could look different.
How Skills, Beliefs, and Support Systems Shape Stress Capacity
Amanda Good: So I break capacity down. So your ability to deal with stress in your life can come from having good skills for meeting the demands on you, and skills can be like your, or if you have a job that has a lot of varying demands, task-related demands, then your organizational skills are super important, and that’s going to reduce your overwhelm. But most of what I’m talking about is coping skills is, you know, what we can learn in therapy as far as mindfulness skills and deep breathing and emotion regulation.
And this is what people first think of for managing stress. But then there’s also our internal beliefs. And that is something that, you know, you know, working with implicit memory can really shape our experience of stress and our approach and how we’re even using our skills or not using them.
That mindset, if you want to think of it that way, just influences everything. So sometimes we pinpoint, okay, that’s where we really need to do our work.
And then the third area is support. And that can be relationships. It can also be other resources or accommodations that we need to put in place to, to manage our demands better.
Dr. Julie Lopez: Okay, cool.
So there’s these different ways that you can increase your resiliency, which is the bottom part of the equation.
Amanda Good: Yeah.
Dr. Julie Lopez: How about what are the ways to reduce demands? And that can be really hard in our culture or in our ambitious, industrious world that we live in.
Amanda Good: Totally. I think, especially practicing in the DC area with a lot of my clients, the idea of taking certain demands off of our plate or, you know, kind of shifting our expectations of how much we should be doing. That’s a tough sell.
So sometimes it’s just about recognizing how to focus ourselves and kind of pick where our energy goes so that it feels like our values are really dictating where we’re spending the bulk of our time. And we’re choosing the demands for ourselves. That’s actually going to make those demands feel a lot different right off the bat.
Dr. Julie Lopez: When they’re innately inspired, when they’re authentic.
Amanda Good: Right. This is in service of things that are within my values, my goals.
There’s an outcome that I’m really connected with. And so it feels less of a demand just right there. So that’s a way we reduce some of our demands.
But the other piece of it is recognizing what’s in there that doesn’t need to be. Um, so some of that is I work with a lot of moms on figuring out what, like, what kind of roles at home or tasks they have at home that they can take off their plate, either having a partner do it, having the kids start doing more, or recognizing that there’s a lot of internal pressure that we put on ourselves as moms that maybe those things don’t all have to happen. And we can pick and choose a bit.
Um, and then there’s the less conscious stuff, the, the, I feel like a good popular term for it would be emotional baggage, the stuff that we’re carrying around, and it does weigh on us. And it makes everything a little bit harder and heavier. And you know, it makes your arm give out faster holding the candle, because you’re always kind of holding on to it.
Dr. Julie Lopez: So even if you’re not consciously aware of it, right?
Amanda Good: Yeah, yeah, all that stuff that we haven’t worked through. And, um, and we don’t always have to, like, it might not actually be relevant to, to bring out old stuff and work through it. But sometimes it is if it keeps being the reason why we’re stuck.
Why Delegating, Delaying, and Deleting Can Reduce Stress
Dr. Julie Lopez: Well, you said you work with a lot of moms, I work with a lot of business owners and entrepreneurs. And believe it or not, reducing demands can often be about delegating or control, like being willing to let go of something in the service of personal well-being and also opportunities for other people.
But it’s not always so easy. So tell us what the unconscious factors are.
Amanda Good: I actually have a portion of my book where I talk about writing down what all your daily tasks are. So like a list of all the things that you do in the day and taking a look at it and putting color coding, you got three choices. If there’s anything that you can code in there to delay, delete or delegate.
Dr. Julie Lopez: My God, I love that. Delay, delete or delegate.
Amanda Good: Because sometimes we’ll look at that list and be like, I don’t need to be doing this. Why am I? Why am I doing this task that I really don’t even care if that happens or not? Or I could give this to my assistant.
Or this is important to me, but it’s not urgent; it can wait until next week. And then that’s one less thing today for me to be worried about.
Dr. Julie Lopez: I love that. So that’s a great way to change the top of the equation. I hope you get that book out there. Because I’m so excited to read it.
And I actually think a lot of people need to be reading it, especially right now. History continues to have challenges to it. And our communities have challenges, and people have, you know, life’s not perfect, and crappy stuff happens all the time.
And having tools that you can use in the midst of it feels really important right now more than ever, probably.
Amanda Good: Yeah, yeah, having tools that you can use and also feeling like you know what tools to go to. I feel like that’s what’s tough, especially now that we have such a wealth of information on the internet.
So people can look up all kinds of therapy skills and really learn a lot online now or just on TikTok, right? But knowing, kind of for you, what is the best thing to use at what time and why, I think that’s so important.
How Early Life Messages Can Influence Adult Stress
Dr. Julie Lopez: For sure. It sounds amazing. So just a question for you. I know that writing a book is a ton of work. It was a ton of work for me.
And my personal book was driven by a very personal experience, which is that, you know, I was given away as a baby and lived for the first few months in an orphanage. Then that early experience really informed a lot of the way my nervous system was built and how I was coping with life, unconscious to me.
And like me, other people in my demographic, adopted people, people who go through foster care, or frankly, any person who’s been abandoned in their life by parents who aren’t around in whatever ways, even if they’re there physically, can have all kinds of factors that are impacting them, and they don’t know it.
So it was personal. It was a personal driver that got me to the finish line of publishing my book about implicit memory, this unconscious way that our body holds data, that of course, the main message is that we can move and change; we have all these tools in the present day, where we can access the unknown to move it and change symptoms.
So I’m just wondering in your book, which I know is mostly done, you’re just tweaking it for too long, in my opinion.
You know, what on a personal level kind of drove your investment in the stress equation?
Amanda Good: A couple of different things. I think earlier on, when I was writing it, I sort of came to a realization about certain messages that I had grown up with, just like you did. And for me, a lot of that was having ADHD and being in the private schools in DC and just feeling like my worth was so tied to my achievement and this go, go, go kind of drive that I had all the time.
And over time, just recognizing the toll of all of that stress that I was putting on myself and how it was affecting my mental health, how it was affecting my body, how it was affecting my relationships, just that kind of level of stress that I kind of added to things that were already maybe a bit harder for me going through school.
So the more that I kind of understood that about myself, the more I was interested in writing about stress.
How Serious Illness Can Clarify What Matters Most
Amanda Good: Then what actually was the kind of getting me to the finish line of writing the book was going through the experience of having cancer and my treatment experience with cancer, which generally you would think of as a trauma.
And I guess, objectively speaking would be a trauma in my life. But because of all of the work that I’ve done in figuring out how to balance, how I, how I meet all of my demands, you know, how I balance my own equation, I was really, really clear-minded about how I wanted to navigate this really difficult period of my life. So there were, there were demands that were going to be on my plate, where I was like, I’m going to be extremely tired.
I’m going to be going through surgeries. Like these, these are things on that top half of the equation that are going to be stressful and hard and are not negotiable. I can’t delete, delay, or delegate any of that.
But it made it really clear for me, if I’m going to increase my capacity to manage all of that, then I have to look at where I’m spending my energy and what’s most important, and just be very, very deliberate about how I spend my time and my energy and how I take care of myself. And so I, I remember very distinctly right after I got diagnosed, just being like, how do I want to go through this? It wasn’t, it wasn’t panic. It was just like a game plan of like, who do I want to be going through this challenge? And the biggest thing for me was actually my sports.
I was like, if I have everybody do everything else that I need, then I can just focus my energy on being well, then I can do this. I’ve got the childcare. I got the babysitters and a meal train. I have never asked for so much help on so many things. But it meant that I didn’t have to worry about anything.
Dr. Julie Lopez: So good. And it’s so inspiring, Amanda.
Amanda Good: Thanks. Yeah, no. And I really, I mean, I’m very lucky. But I got through that like, you know, with relative ease, all things considered, and really feeling very empowered. Like, wow, I’m so strong that I can get through all of that. I do feel like I experienced this growth from going through that experience of my cancer treatment and kind of staying ahead of the stress of it.
And, I feel kind of, in a weird way, I feel grateful for a lot of what I got out of that. I finished my book while I was off from work. I was like, well, I have some time on my hands.
And I’m feeling really inspired by what I’ve experienced. And so that was when I actually finished writing.
Dr. Julie Lopez: Amazing and inspiring. And yes, I am so glad you’re on the other side, but it sounds like your struggle really helped birth this great piece of work that I think is going to help so many people.
Five Positive Changes That Can Happen After Stress
Dr. Julie Lopez: So you’re not going to believe it, but we’re at that time. And it’s almost like a perfect lead in to hear about the five categories of benefit that you and anyone can actually get from healing stressful things or healing their stress equation.
Amanda Good: And this is sort of my favorite part in the therapy process too, is once people feel like that click when things start to feel more balanced, or they really feel like they understand how to be managing and maintaining things on their own. And, I certainly felt it there.
There was a theory from the nineties, I didn’t come up with this myself, but some research that went into post-traumatic growth.
But I think that this is broader than just what people experience after trauma. It’s really the benefits that we get from having gone through something stressful and then seeing that we could do it. So if we get through it and we feel like we handled it well, then there are all these benefits.
And, so it’s not just that you’ve built up more resilience or grit. It’s also that a lot of people will experience a greater appreciation of life. So that was one of the categories is just feeling this renewed sense of gratitude and appreciation of things around you.
And I certainly feel that like going to a doctor’s office and sitting there waiting an hour, and just being like, this receptionist is so sweet. She keeps checking in on, but like really just genuinely seeing good in things.
And then, when I talked about before, the second aspect, that personal strength, like really feeling like you found this strength in yourself when you had to dig deep.
And if so, that’s why I say stress isn’t all bad. Like having some level of stress does get us to dig deep and uncover that strength.
New possibilities in life. So maybe a piece of that as my book, but I think also if you’re thinking about working with leaders, you know, recognizing kind of what we can set our sights on once you realize what you could get through, you know, internally or personally.
Closer relationships, so the connections that you build with people, because you’re more connected with yourself once you’ve healed your stress.
And the last one being spiritual change, which I also resonate a lot with, just even if that’s not necessarily a connection to a higher power, just feeling a deeper sense of meaning in your own life or purpose in your own life.
Dr. Julie Lopez: I love that. Oh my gosh, I love that. All five of them.
They’re really beautiful and magical. And of course, no one wishes these hard, stressful things on anyone themselves or their loved ones, but knowing that getting through hard things like that and coming out on the other side can lead to these five important areas of growth, I think is really beautiful.
Amanda Good: Yeah.
Dr. Julie Lopez: Oh, go ahead.
Amanda Good: No, I was going to say, it’s just, it’s very encouraging. Yeah.
Thinking about having a breakthrough instead of thinking about what it feels like getting there.
Dr. Julie Lopez: 100%. So I want to thank you for joining me on this episode of Whole by Design.
I hope it left you feeling inspired to toss out labels, embrace new perspectives, and take one step closer to the joy and clarity that is waiting for you as you balance out your stress equation. As always, visit www.vivapartnership.com to access our free and low-cost resources that will empower you and your loved ones on health and wellbeing. Let’s spread the message, subscribe, review, or share this episode with someone who could benefit from a stigma-dropping approach to mental fitness today.
