Harnessing Stress and Pressure
See also: What’s Stressing You Out? QuizThere is a tendency to think that being under pressure or feeling anxious is always bad. There is much talk of an epidemic of mental health problems, including anxiety. We also spend a lot of time trying to reduce stress, especially at work. However, a small amount of stress or anxiety from time to time is not just normal, but can actually be beneficial to performance.
This page discusses how you might build a healthier relationship with feeling slightly stressed or anxious. It does not suggest that prolonged stress, or crippling anxiety, should be embraced. However, it makes clear that feeling uncomfortable sometimes is a normal part of life. Indeed, going through stressful situations can even help us to develop and grow.
Is Feeling Stressed or Anxious Always Bad?
Stress is defined as a reaction to excessive pressure or demands (and you can read more about this in our page on What is Stress?).
The implication behind this definition is that stress is universally bad. Being under stress causes your body to release hormones that have an inflammatory effect on your body. There is no question that prolonged stress, over a long period, has adverse effects on both your mental and physical health. It is associated with serious heart problems, high blood pressure, and stroke, and can also lead to depression. None of these are positive.
Similarly, our page on Anxiety explains that some people can become anxious about things that are not really threats. If this starts to affect their ability to function, this is clearly not good.
However, we all get both anxious and slightly stressed from time to time, and this is perfectly normal.
Being asked to do more than we really have capacity to do, or to step outside our comfort zone, is difficult. Feeling worried about it is perfectly reasonable. Indeed, it can even boost your performance because the adrenaline that is released can help you to think or act faster, and operate at a higher level.
It is therefore important to recognise that simply feeling stressed or anxious is NOT a sign of having a mental health problem. This may be an issue with language (see box).
Assessing the size of the problem
Consistently, surveys in the US and the UK estimate that around a fifth of the population feels anxious most or all of the time.
This sounds like a serious problem.
However, mental health conditions are notoriously hard to diagnose accurately. They rely on self-reporting, with no objective tests available.
It seems more likely that what most of us mean when we say we are anxious is that we feel a bit worried about something. We might be worried about work, or our families, or perhaps the state of the world. It also seems quite likely that we feel like this much of the time. After all, most of us have a lot going on in our lives.
However, this is not really what doctors mean when they talk about anxiety.
It is therefore possible that there aren’t really that many people experiencing anxiety as a mental health problem. However, if people think they’re anxious, and that this is a problem, then might that turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy?
Developing a Relationship with Stress and Anxiety
In 2007, psychologist Susan Jeffers published a best-selling book called Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway. This book argues that everyone feels fear about various different things. We might be afraid of change, or about doing something, or being judged by other people. Jeffers suggested, however, that the biggest fear of all—and what underpinned all other fears—was that we would be found lacking: that we would not be able to ‘handle it’.
The problem is that if we do not act, we are letting the fear take over—and that builds a vicious cycle.
Instead, Jeffers argued that we needed to manage our own internal dialogue, and act.
She suggested that taking risks in our lives would help to build resilience, and therefore enable us to recover from setbacks. This would then build our ability to take more risks and try things, and overcome the fear.
More recently, in The Anxious Achiever: Turn Your Biggest Fears into Your Leadership Superpower, Morra Aarons-Mele argued that you need to have a relationship with anxiety and fear. She suggested that you should see anxiety as your brain telling you that something needed to change.
This doesn’t mean that you should automatically avoid whatever was causing you to feel anxious. Instead, you might adjust your expectations, renegotiate your deadline, or change your internal dialogue. Aaron-Meles also noted that it is easy to fall into ‘thinking traps’ around assumptions—and that they are very likely to be untrue (there is more about this idea insofar as it relates to other people in our page on The Ladder of Inference).
By interrogating your anxiety, and crucially, applying reality to the situation, you can ‘break out’ of these thinking traps and move on more rationally.
In other words, you can use your anxiety to help you identify what is really worrying you—and address that.
What’s interesting about the ideas of both Jeffers and Aarons-Mele is that they share a sense that you need to find a way to manage anxiety. You have to develop a relationship with it. It is a good way to gain insights into your thinking and emotions—and then to move on from those in a positive way.
One way in which you can start to understand your fears in more detail is ‘fear-setting’ (see box).
Tim Ferriss’ Fear-Setting Technique
American entrepreneur and investor Tim Ferriss suggests a way to interrogate and understand your fears that he calls fear-setting. He likens it to goal-setting. The process is:
- Start by writing down the action you fear or are nervous about, starting ‘What if I...?’
- Define all the things that could go wrong if you take that action.
- For each one, write down how you could prevent it from happening.
- Then, for each one, write down what you could do to minimise or repair the damage if this happens.
- Next, on a second page, write down all the benefits of taking the action.
- Finally, on a third page, write down the costs of NOT taking the action. Look at what your life will be like in six months, a year and three years if you don’t do it.
This technique works because we tend to overlook or ignore the costs of inaction. We also minimise the possible positive outcomes and dwell too heavily on the potential negatives. By writing down your fears in this way, you can look at them more rationally, and consciously consider each of these aspects.
Stress, Anxiety and Performance
Feeling stressed or anxious causes various physiological changes. Your body releases hormones such as adrenaline, the ‘fight or flight’ hormone, which prepares your body and brain for action.
You may not be going to fight a tiger, but your blood is moving to your big muscles ready for action, and your brain is primed for quick thinking.
This means that feeling a bit stressed can actually sharpen your performance.
Possibly even more importantly, your view of stress can affect your performance.
Studies have found that people who believe that stress can help performance tend to do better than those who believe that stress is always a problem. This has been found to apply to elite athletes and to students taking exams. There seems no reason to suspect that it wouldn’t apply to other groups.
There is more about this idea, and the power of the mind, in our page The Importance of Mindset.
Post-Traumatic Growth
There is a saying that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, but is this really true? It turns out that the answer, at least in terms of stress and trauma, is yes.
Research shows that stress and trauma can have positive effects.
Stressful and traumatic experiences are difficult and challenging, and none of us exactly enjoys going through them.
However, they are actually good for many of us in some ways. It turns out that around 70% of people emerge from traumatic events having grown and developed. They may, for example, have learned new coping strategies, such as sharing negative emotions, or appreciate that they can cope with more than they thought. This phenomenon is known as post-traumatic growth.
Indeed, some researchers suggest that we need to experience challenges and difficulties for just this reason. We cannot always prevent ‘bad stuff’ from happening, and we need to be able to cope with it when the worst happens.
A Final Thought
There is no question that prolonged stress has serious health consequences, and should always be addressed (and if you are affected, you should seek help).
However, feeling a bit anxious or stressed on an occasional basis can be useful. It can help you to identify problem areas, and address them. It may even improve your performance, especially if you believe that it is going to do so. The big lesson is to embrace feeling a bit anxious or stressed, and harness it for your own purposes.