Use Stress to Your Advantage

So far, in this month-long series on stress, we’ve been talking mainly about the negative effects of stress: diluted attention, increased emotionality, and physical and mental health issues associated with burnout. But today, we’re talking about the upside of stress and the secrets to using stress to your advantage.

Distress Versus Eustress

Not all stress is created equal. Actually, that’s probably not true; good and bad stress come from the same basic, primal, preconscious interpretation of threat in your environment, but one leads to an unpleasant, ineffective behavioral response, and the other leads to a positive and constructive one. The unpleasant version is called distress; the useful one is eustress.

The American Psychological Association defines eustress as:

“The positive stress response, involving optimal levels of stimulation: a type of stress that results from challenging but attainable and enjoyable or worthwhile tasks (e.g., participating in an athletic event, giving a speech). It has a beneficial effect by generating a sense of fulfillment or achievement and facilitating growth, development, mastery, and high levels of performance.”

That’s the kind of stress you’re looking for as a power source for performance. So, how do you turn distress into eustress? How do you get the upside of stress?

How to Use Stress to Your Benefit

There are several ways to use stress to help you in the moment and after.

Use Stress to Energize You

One of the most fundamental purposes of stress is to get you moving to keep you safe. The physiological mechanisms of stress divert blood flow to your muscles and increase your heart rate. Perfect! This is the little jolt you need to get started on something you would otherwise put off. If you’re going to capture that chemical catalyst, you need to:

Notice when your stress response kicks in: pounding heart, flushed face, sweaty palms.Resolve right away to do something to channel that stress into action. Don’t wait; the chemicals coursing through your veins will slowly dissipate, and you’ll have to muster energy through less natural approaches.Take one step that will lead you forward: draw up a plan, reach out to someone, build, write, design, or draft a first pass at something that will address the threat and reduce the stress.

Being energized is great. Now, you need to worry about an unhelpful reaction to a threat, which is to run madly off in all directions. Instead…

Use Stress to Focus You

Another part of the physiological reaction is stress is focus, literally. In stress, your peripheral vision declines while your visual system locks in on the threat—tunnel vision. Again, you don’t need to fight the natural reaction; you can go with it. To benefit from the narrowing of attention in stress, you might:

Close down open windows and tabs until you only have the one you need.Move to a location with fewer distractions and less clutter to free up mental bandwidth.Set a timer for how long you want to stay focused and use do not disturb mode until the end of that period.

Using the energy and focus of your stress response to get through the immediate threat is great. But what caused the stress in the first place? What made you susceptible to having a strong response? To better understand your vulnerability to stress, you need to:

Use Stress to Reflect

It’s good that stressful and emotionally salient experiences are also more memorable. That’s useful because it means we can learn from them afterward. After going through a stressful event, reflect on what made it stressful so you can:

Identify what was happening in the situation that your body interpreted as threatening.Consider whether your interpretations in the moment were accurate or whether you drew conclusions that were out of line with what was happening.Think back on previous stressful episodes to identify patterns that help you understand yourself and your needs more deeply.

Self-awareness is so powerful in helping you manage your stress response, but self-awareness doesn’t do much good unless you:

Use Stress to Motivate Change

Stress that knocks out your rationality and causes an outsized emotional reaction is aversive. Your brain naturally wants to avoid aversive experiences, so you can use that energy to motivate you to make changes so that distress is less likely in the future. Make changes that will shift you toward eustress.

Change how you plan for situations so you’re better prepared for what’s coming at you.Communicate with the manager and colleagues about what you need to work efficiently and effectively.Prepare a series of “if/then” coping strategies you will use the next time a stressful situation arises. “If someone criticizes my work, then I will ask for what a better version would look like.” “If I feel I can’t meet a due date, then I will ask which parts need to be finished first.”

As you shape your environment and your thinking, you can use stress to your advantage by reducing the impact of situations that might have once been highly stressful. Over time, that will allow you to:

Use Stress to Increase Resilience

Just as vaccinations teach our bodies how to be immune to infections, moderately stressful episodes teach our bodies how to be resilient. Today’s stressful scenario becomes tomorrow’s no big deal as you learn how to deal with it. Use stress to boost your resilience.

Gradually increase your exposure to stress.Use periods of rest and reflection to recharge after a stressful situation. Not only does your body need to reset for the physiological changes, but your brain also needs time to consolidate what you have learned.Focus on how you benefited from the stressful situation rather than dwelling on how uncomfortable it was. Cognitive reframing is a great skill to learn that will increase your willingness and ability to confront stressful situations in the future.Conclusion

Stress is a physiological reaction where your brain tells your body that it’s under threat and needs to respond accordingly. There are many ways you can use this response to cope with a stressful situation. After the fact, there’s much to learn from stress that will set you up to be more successful in the future. Here’s to a little stress to keep us moving, growing, and learning. Here’s to using stress to your advantage.

Additional Resources

Bolster your stress reserves

What does your stress look like?

Help! I’m Overwhelmed!

 

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