Almost everyone who has read anything at all about stress knows the three stages. Alarm, resistance, exhaustion — Hans Selye’s General Adaptation Syndrome, worked out in the middle of the last century and repeated ever since in textbooks and wellness newsletters. When I began running hair mineral tests in 2010 under ARNP Julie Walker here in Kennewick, that was the map I was handed, and it is a good map.
It is also, in the version I work from every day, short by two stages. Dr. David Watts of Trace Elements extended Selye’s three to five, and the two he inserted — recovery and adaption — sit right in the middle of the sequence. One of them is where a great many people are quietly living without knowing it. The other is the stage worth aiming at, and it is the one nobody ever talks about.
The Three Stages, and What Selye Left Unfinished
Selye’s contribution was noticing that the body answers very different stressors — cold, injury, financial pressure, a microbe, a deadline — with the same underlying sequence. Alarm is the mobilization: the body throws resources at the threat. Resistance is holding the line, running that response day after day. Exhaustion is what happens when the reserves funding all of it run out.
He was also clear that stress itself is neither bad nor good. Some is required. Without load, bones demineralize and muscles atrophy, and by his own account a life with no stress in it would not be much of a life. That framing gets lost in most modern retellings, where stress becomes a substance to be eliminated rather than a cycle to be completed.
What Selye did not do was say what to eat. George Watson supplied part of that in 1972 with the idea of an oxidation rate — how quickly a given body burns its fuel — and Dr. Paul Eck supplied the rest by finding a person’s stage could be read from the ratios between minerals in hair. Selye to Watson to Eck is the whole intellectual chain of the work I do.
The Two Stages Dr. Watts Added
Watts came at the same territory from a different lab and a different set of ratios, working from an enormous library of tissue mineral profiles. His objection to the three-stage model was simple and, once you hear it, obvious: three stages do not describe ordinary life. Most stress does not end in exhaustion. You have a brutal week, you sleep, you eat properly for a few days, and you come back. Nothing collapsed. The cycle finished.
So he inserted recovery after resistance, and adaption as the branch that goes the other way — the case where the body neither recovers nor exhausts, but settles into the adapted state and stays there indefinitely. He treated that holding pattern as a state worth naming in its own right, separate from both recovery and exhaustion. Five stages, then: alarm, resistance, recovery, adaption, exhaustion.
Recovery has a signature you can see on a chart. In the Trace Elements reference it shows as the sodium-to-potassium ratio traveling back toward its ideal after having been pushed well off it. I will not walk the ranges here, because that belongs in a different kind of article — the stage-by-stage version is laid out in the hair-test breakdown on Wellness Shopping Online.
Why Recovery Is the Stage Nobody Talks About
Alarm is dramatic. It has a heartbeat and a story. Exhaustion is dramatic too, in the other direction, and it is the one people write books about. Recovery is a Tuesday on which nothing in particular happens — nothing to photograph, nothing to post — which is roughly why an entire wellness culture has discussed stress for decades without making recovery the point.
The clinical version is more interesting. The aim is not to suppress the stress response; the aim is to let it finish. Watts’ own guidance on a pattern sitting in the alarm stage is that the person needs support for the resistance phase to develop, and after that for recovery to arrive. You are not stopping the sequence. You are helping it get all the way through.
As a former nuclear power quality engineer, I find that framing comfortable. A relief valve lifting is not a failure — that is the valve doing exactly what it exists to do. A relief valve that lifts and will not reseat is a failure. The event is not the problem. The failure to return to the resting state is.
Adaption Feels Like a Personality
Adaptation, in this literature, has a precise meaning: it is how the body alters itself — minerals, temperature, blood sugar, even attitudes — in order to keep going under the circumstances it has been given. Nothing about that is broken. It is the body being resourceful with what is left.
The difficulty is that an adaption is silent, and never announces that it was meant to be temporary. Cold hands become “I just run cold.” Needing to eat every two hours becomes “I have a fast metabolism.” The three o’clock coffee stops being a fix and becomes a preference. None of those arrive as complaints, because by the time someone sits down with a chart, the adaptations have long since been absorbed into their sense of who they are.
I watched the institutional version of this for twenty years in quality work. A temporary compensating measure left in place long enough stops being called a workaround and starts being called the design. Nobody decides that; it quietly happens on a long enough timeline. Bodies do the same, which is why the stated aim of a nutritional balancing program is to remove the need for the adaptation, so the body can put it down by itself.
Why One Test Cannot Tell You Where You Are
Adaptations stack, which is the practical reason a single hair test is a starting point rather than a verdict. A person carries layers of compensations laid down over years, and successive tests reveal different layers as the ones above come off. Things nowhere to be seen on a first chart routinely surface on a third — not because they arrived, but because the body finally had energy enough to move them.
There is also an honest physical limit on how fast you can look. Each reading represents an average rate of accumulation over roughly two to three months of hair growth, so retesting sooner mostly re-measures the window you already measured. So the sensible rhythm is a few months between tests rather than weeks. The literature’s own metaphor is a mid-course correction on a long voyage: the program is steered, not prescribed once and abandoned.
What I am reading on a retest is direction, not position — and the direction of improvement runs backward up the stages, toward an earlier and higher-energy one rather than straight to balanced. That is also why the picture on a chart can look less tidy partway along than it did at the start. A hair tissue mineral analysis is a screening tool for nutritional and toxic element status. It does not diagnose anything, it is not predictive, and it is far more useful as a series than as a snapshot.
Aiming at the Middle
Aiming at recovery is not the same as aiming at a stress-free life, which does not exist and would not be good for you if it did. It means aiming at a body that can go up and then come back down — mount a real alarm response when something demands one, hold resistance as long as it takes, and then genuinely land.
The literature calls that capacity flexible oxidation: the ability to shift from a slower rate to a faster one as circumstances require, and back again. Notice it is not one of the types. It is the freedom to move between them. The comparison that sticks with me is the household animal — a healthy dog runs hard, fights hard, and is equally content to sleep the afternoon away on the floor. People are reliably good at the first half of that and poor at the second.
So when I look at the five stages of stress now, I do not see a ranking with exhaustion at the bottom. I see a loop that either closes or does not. Most of us are somewhere in adaption, running quiet compensations we stopped noticing, with recovery sitting right there in the middle as the stage we skipped. If you want somewhere to start, the guides I use with clients are on the free resources page, and how I came to this work is on my about page.
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This article is for educational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment.
