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Does Stress Hurt You or Help You?
How we think about stress determines how we respond to stress.
The Mind, Explored.
December 10, 2023
Imagine yourself in the following scenarios:
When you’re working hard to meet a tight deadline, do you feel disadvantaged by the time pressure? Or, locked in and efficient?
When you’re called upon to perform and feel your heart racing, do you worry that your performance will suffer? Or, do you feel your body energising you to boost your performance?
When faced with a task that pushes your limits, do you stop in fear of failure? Or do you push through to expand the boundaries of what you’re capable of?
Insight:
Stress is powerful. Depending on your mindset, it can enhance you or debilitate you.
But first - what is stress?
Just like mental health, stress is usually defined by its negative consequences, such as feeling overwhelmed in a situation that we feel we cannot manage.
Here’s a better definition:
Stress is your response to adversity in your efforts towards achieving a goal.
Stress is derived from the Latin word strictus meaning ‘tight’, reflecting the force acting upon an object. Any form of adversity exerts a force upon us that leads to some tightening. We must expand in response - that’s how we grow (through adversity).
The ‘in your efforts towards achieving a goal’ part is important because we only stress about things that we care about. Things that we are attached to. Things that we are motivated to protect, develop, or achieve.
A healthy dose of stress:
With too little stress, we are never pushed enough to fulfil our potential. With too much stress, our abilities are overwhelmed and our mind, body, and spirit can be damaged. The sweet spot is the zone of discomfort, where we are able to safely expand our abilities in response to the tightening we feel by stress.
Whether stress is helpful or hurtful is determined by how positively or negatively we respond to it.
What determines our response to stress?
For stress that lands within our discomfort zone, our mindset shapes:
whether we expect something good or bad will happen to us
how motivated we feel to work through it
how we respond
Think of mindsets as different pairs of glasses. Each pair gives you a different view of the world. Stress mindsets fall into one of two categories: stress-is-debilitating and stress-is-enhancing.
Having a stress-is-debilitating mindset is like wearing glasses through which you view stress as harmful to your performance and health. This mindset makes you want to avoid stress.
Having a stress-is-enhancing mindset is like changing the lenses so that you can view stress as a healthy challenge for learning, growth, and heightened performance.
Instead of trying to avoid or eliminate stress, people with a stress-is-enhancing mindset are able to harness the benefits of sharper focus, faster thinking, and greater energy in pursuit of their goal.
People with a stress-is-enhancing mindset make stress a catalyst for achieving their goal.
Stress is inevitable. But when we avoid stress, we also avoid the opportunities it gives us to grow. Instead, put on the glasses that reframe your view of stress as enhancing, and utilise its powers to help you, not hurt you.
Research has shown that changing your stress mindset even changes the way your body physiologically responds to stress by:
Reducing the length of time cortisol is released (the hormone associated with stress)
Increasing stroke volume (the amount of blood that your heart pumps with each beat)
Improving blood flow to the brain and periphery (to think more clearly and move more freely).
To perfectly summarise the power of responding to stress positively, Andy Grove once said:
“Bad companies are destroyed by crisis.
Good companies survive them.
Great companies are improved by them.”
How can a company possibly be improved by a crisis? Because, to great companies, stress is not debilitating - stress is enhancing. The same is true about great people.
Tool:
As long as you care about anything, you’re going to experience stress. Here’s how to make it work for you rather than against you:
Acknowledge the stress - describe how it’s making you think, feel, and act. This will bring it to full awareness.
Welcome the stress - because driving it is something you care about. Ask yourself ‘What is it that I care about here?’ This won’t make the stress go away, but it will make it more tolerable as you reconnect with what makes it meaningful.
Utilise the stress - let it energise you rather than drain you in pursuit of your goal. In adversity, find an opportunity to improve your skills, knowledge, and character.
Prompt:
When you next feel stressed, ask yourself:
1. How is this affecting me?
2. What is it that I care about here?
3. Am I responding in a way that is helping me or hurting me?
4. Find a way to benefit from the stress (e.g. an argument with your partner gives you an opportunity to learn more about your partner’s wants and needs).
Changing your stress mindset changes the way stress affects you - let it be for the better.
Resources on Stress-is-Enhancing Mindset:
Written by Dr Manu Sidhu 🩺
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