Stress has a number. Most people have never seen theirs.

What’s different after this protocol

You know your stress level as a number, not a feeling. You’ve seen it drop.

Your nervous system shows measurable improvement on HRV. The daily practices that got you there take 10 minutes, and you know which ones are doing the work because your team tested and adjusted as you went.

If something clinical showed up on your depression or anxiety screen, you were referred to the right provider promptly. Not six months later, when you finally brought it up at a physical.

What this protocol delivers

• Your perceived stress score at intake and at the end, so you can see what changed
• An HRV trend showing your autonomic nervous system responded to the work
• A 10-minute daily resilience protocol you’ll keep: cyclic sighing, Three Good Things, and a stress cycle completion method that fits your life
• Your character strengths profile and specific ways to use those strengths under pressure
• Depression, anxiety, and loneliness scores at baseline and exit
• If needed, a referral to a mental health professional with full documentation of your assessment results
• A clear picture of how your stress connects to your glucose variability, sleep quality, and hormones

”Manage your stress” is not a plan

Your doctor tells you to manage your stress. That’s the whole intervention. No measurement. No follow-up. No protocol.

Stress is physiological. It shows up in your heart rate variability, your cortisol rhythm, your glucose patterns, your sleep. It’s in your blood. And it affects every other health domain you care about: cardiovascular risk, metabolic function, hormone levels, immune response.

The problem is that nobody treats stress as a measurable, improvable metric. They treat it as a vague concept you’re supposed to handle on your own.

More than a third of Americans report chronic stress that affects their daily functioning. The medical system’s response is a pamphlet about deep breathing.

We don’t hand you an app and wish you luck

Your team runs the screening battery, establishes your HRV baseline, starts you on the two practices with the strongest evidence, and adjusts from there. Full rescore at the end. 10 minutes a day, tracked.

This isn’t meditation. It’s a protocol with data behind it.

The centerpiece practice is cyclic sighing: a specific breathing pattern (two short inhales through the nose, one long exhale through the mouth) done for 5 minutes daily. A randomized controlled trial at Stanford (Balban et al., 2023) found it reduced anxiety and improved positive affect more than mindfulness meditation. That’s not a blog post claim. That’s published data.

The second daily practice, Three Good Things, has its own evidence base. You write down three good things from your day and explain why each happened. The causal attribution piece is what separates it from generic gratitude journaling.

Everything else we add is matched to your assessment results and personality profile. A runner who scores high on loneliness gets a different set of practices than someone whose stress cycle completes best through structured social connection.