Thinking About Stress
If someone tells you that they are stressed, do you automatically assume that is a bad thing? Why?
You may have felt pressure from an upcoming exam or job interview. Maybe you’ve felt stressed by money, relationships, or an unmanageable workload. But do you know what stress is and what causes it?
Simply, stress is how your body reacts to changes that demand a response. Those changes are called stressors, which are anything that may trigger stress. This could be a specific event or situation.
By itself, a stressor has no meaning. It is neither good nor bad. It just is.
You give a stressor meaning by how you perceive and respond to it. The default thought is usually that stress is a negative experience. But if you reframe your perception of the stressor from negative to positive you can change its meaning and how you experience the stress.
For simplicity, let’s bucket stress into two types: distress (bad stress) and eustress (good stress).
Distress – persistent and destructive stress. It can lead to anxiety and worry.
Eustress – beneficial stress. It is often accompanied by feelings of energy and enthusiasm.
If you always assume that stress is negative and something to be avoided, you may miss out on the benefits it can provide.
How you think about stress can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. As William Shakespeare said:
“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
Think about how it feels leading up to a job interview. This can be a stressful situation. You may be stressing about being judged by the interviewer. You may be thinking, “What if they don’t like me? What if I start sweating uncontrollably? What will I do if I don’t get this job? Maybe I’ll end up living under a bridge.”
You may think of job interviews as worrying, anxiety-inducing, stress-fests; but what if you changed your internal narrative? What if you looked at the interview as an opportunity to advance your career or take on an exciting new challenge in a field you’ve always wanted to be in?
As a stressor, a job interview doesn’t have any meaning until you give it meaning. You are free to choose how you perceive the situation and how you respond. How you think about stress matters.
Use Stress to Your Advantage
It may feel tempting to wish for a life without stress. Wouldn’t life be easier if you could just get rid of all your stress?
Before you go too far imagining what your stress-free utopia will look like, consider the role stress plays in your life and the ramifications of eliminating it entirely.
Stress is a driving force behind adaptation and is an essential component of growth. When life throws challenges your way, stress forces you to adapt and become more resilient.
Challenge is a part of life so consider what way of thinking will be more useful for you throughout your life: hoping that you don’t run into any difficult situations or preparing yourself for when those situations arise.
In The Obstacle Is the Way, author Ryan Holiday said:
“You’ll have far better luck toughening yourself up than you ever will trying to take the teeth out of a word that is – at best – indifferent to your existence.”
By leaning into stress and embracing it you’ll grow stronger and become more resilient. Previously difficult situations will be easier for you to handle and you’ll become capable of managing challenging situations that would have been overwhelming before.
How Stress Leads to Growth
When stress arises you feel challenged. The challenge forces your body to react and leads to adaptation. Adaptation is how you grow.
From a biological perspective, this concept is called hormesis.
Hormesis is a phenomenon where moderate stressors produce beneficial effects and high-dose stressors cause harmful effects. Hormesis is your body’s way of adapting and preparing itself so it can better handle future stressors.
Weightlifting is a good example of hormesis in action. When you lift heavy weights, the weights stress your body, causing micro-tears in your muscle. After you are done, your body reacts and adapts to the stressor so it can better handle it in the future. Your body likes to be in homeostasis, so when you are challenged by a stressor, it helps you adapt and grow.
The key to benefitting from eustress and hormesis is to apply the Goldilocks Principle. You need just the right amount of stress to grow. With too little stress, you won’t grow. Too much stress becomes overwhelming and potentially harmful.
To grow from stress you need just manageable challenges. Just manageable challenges are situations where there is a gap between what you are currently capable of and what you could be capable of if you stretched yourself. The key to growth is to push yourself outside your comfort zone and to stretch your abilities, while not overwhelming them.
Paraphrasing the Swiss physician Paracelsus:
“Poison is in everything, and no thing is without poison. The dosage makes it either a poison or a remedy.”
As you continue to grow through eustress and hormesis, you become stronger and your resiliency improves. The upper limit of your stress resiliency shifts out.
The specific situations a beginner finds challenging will be different than what an expert does. The process of growth doesn’t change, just the level of challenge. Both the beginner and the expert must seek out their own individual just manageable challenges.
To continue to grow and make progress you have to continue to push yourself beyond your current limits.
Look for how you can use stress to your advantage. Within stress, you’ll find adversity and challenge, but you’ll also find the key to growth.
“Don’t wish it were easier; wish you were better.” – Jim Rohn