Ashley ChandlerFounder + CEO, The Teenage Guide · Founder and CEO, The Teenage Guide | Parent and Teen Coach

Stress isn’t just about what’s happening around us — it’s about what our nervous system believes is

9 Oct 2026 · 1 min

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1:01

In this coaching segment, the speaker emphasizes that families need a clear toolkit to truly understand stress, which is often misunderstood. She introduces a framework of seven distinct categories of stress that drive our nervous system’s responses. Stress is described not as inherently good or bad, but as a trigger that creates an imbalance, prompting the body to perceive threat and activate fight, flight, freeze, or fawn reactions. The speaker stresses that emotions are not problems to be fixed but valuable information reflecting underlying beliefs and perceptions. By working with her, families can pinpoint the specific triggers affecting each member—parents, teens, and others—allowing them to interpret emotional signals more accurately and improve communication.

Chapters

So every family needs the toolkit to understand what stress actually is. It's oftentimes not what you think it is. This is part of the work that you do with me when you work with me. And there are 7 different categories of stress that are running the show. 7. And stress is not necessarily good or bad. It's a trigger that prompts us to be out of balance in our own nervous system to perceive threat, danger, and gets us into fight, flight, freeze, fawn. So there's 7 different categories. And when you work with me, I walk you through this where you understand on an intimate level what's triggering you and what your teen's triggers are, or what the other people in your house, what their triggers are, because emotions are not a problem to fix. They're just simply information, right? That communication is an expression of what we're believing or what we're perceiving. So by the time it's come out as an emotion, there's already stuff beneath the surface that we are believing or that we're perceiving.