Dan Crowley explains the importance of stress management in honor of National Stress Day
Published 5:00 am Saturday, November 1, 2025
Nov. 1 is National Stress Day, and local life coach Dan Crowley understands the importance of understanding the effects stress can have on a person’s life.
To him, receiving life coaching is a way to start growing as a person and work through the things that may be blocking you from being the person you want to be.
“It’s about learning the process of how you became the person you are,” Crowley said. “How the person you are keeps you from being the person you could be. And how to unblock those blocks and build a new regime of behavior to increase your self-image, self-worth, and self-esteem positively instead of negatively.”
Those aspects of who we are, according to Crowley, make up our identity as we evaluate our thoughts, actions and feelings. This process begins when we are young, and stress can have a major impact on it.
“The base root of stress is fear,” Crowley said. “Fear, in my opinion, is an emotion that’s based on past unresolved losses projected into the future, felt in the now.”
However, Crowley does not feel that the quicker fixes of spending time outside and taking deep breaths are enough to alleviate the consequences of stress.
“Long-term recovery means that you have to actually work to establish a new pattern,” Crowley said. “And because we’re taught that immediate gratification is better than delayed gratification, we don’t delay gratification. So I’ll go out and smell the flowers and get some relief and then I’ll go back in and start stressing again.”
For Crowley, getting out of that cycle requires thinking about stress differently and focusing more on the long-term goal of experiencing less stress, rather than looking only for how to not feel stress in specific moments and process the emotions that normally lead to stress differently.
Crowley said this focus on the future is what life coaching is about, and he offers a $15 discount to Jefferson County residents off of his regular fee of $65.
