I feel like ‘pushing yourself’ is a bit… loosely defined (it’s Blades in the Dark jargon), and means a player can easily avoid the ‘death spiral’ by simply never pushing and never resisting.

In the new text the extra dice derives from the fiction directly, and comes with unavoidable consequence.

Which is closer to my initial intent anyway.

Though I think I’ll reword ‘in control’ to ‘has the upper hand’ as control and stress seem sort of mutually exclusive.