Accumulated stress grows your "attack surface." Resilience practices smooth it back to defensible boundaries.
Each unprocessed stressor adds a "bump" to your coastline—like the Koch snowflake, perimeter grows while area stays bounded. At 5 iterations, your boundary is 3.16x more complex. That's 768 edges where anxiety can attack—up from just 3.
Resilience practices—meditation, exercise, sleep—act as "smoothing operations." Level 2 resilience reduced 5 stress iterations to just 4. Your perimeter dropped 0%, leaving fewer edges to defend.
The Math of Burnout: A Koch snowflake's perimeter grows by 4/3 each iteration (approaching infinity), while its area stays finite. Your mental "bandwidth" (area) is fixed—but stress complexity can grow without bound. Fractal dimension 0.83 means your boundary is becoming space-filling. Resilience reverses iterations before they compound.
Increase stressors to see the coastline become jagged and complex. Increase resilience practices to watch the smoothing operation collapse complexity back to defensible boundaries.