This audiobook is narrated by a digital voice.

In the bustling heart of Auckland, Maria sits at her desk at 9 PM, her third cup of coffee growing cold beside a stack of reports that seem to multiply rather than diminish. Her shoulders ache from hunching over her laptop, her jaw is clenched from grinding her teeth, and her mind races with tomorrow's deadlines even as exhaustion weighs down her eyelids. This scene, played out in offices, homes, and cafes across New Zealand and around the world, has become so commonplace that we've begun to accept chronic stress as an inevitable part of modern life.

But what if it doesn't have to be this way? What if the very stress we've normalized is actually poisoning our well-being, relationships, and potential for happiness? The concept of a "stress detox" isn't about eliminating all pressure from our lives—some stress is natural and even beneficial. Instead, it's about identifying and purging the unnecessary, toxic stress that accumulates in our daily routines like sediment in a river, slowly but steadily clouding the waters of our existence.

The human stress response, designed by evolution to help our ancestors survive immediate physical threats, has become chronically activated in our modern environment. When our cave-dwelling predecessors encountered a predator, their bodies flooded with stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline, providing the energy and focus needed to fight or flee. Once the danger passed, these hormone levels returned to normal, and the body recovered. Today, however, we live in a state of perpetual low-grade emergency, with our stress response triggered by everything from traffic jams to social media notifications, from work emails to financial worries.