Stress: Do You Really Need It? This Will Help You Decide!

Stress!! This is one word which I have had difficulty understanding over the years. I keep telling my friends, family and colleagues that I do not get stressed and obviously they think I’m just trying to put on a strong face. The truth is that, I have never understood or felt stress as people describe it.  I googled the definition of stress and here are some of the descriptions I came across.

The symptoms often used to describe stress are psychological and include

In addition to psychological symptoms, experts have also indicated stress to show up physically and in behaviours. For example people losing appetite, increased blood pressure, frequent headaches, hyper tension, muscle aches, etc. have all been listed as symptoms of stress. Behavioural shifts like taking up or increased smoking, alcohol consumption, emotional eating, etc. are also indications that a person may be going through some stress.

I will admit that I have felt all of the above at one point or the other, but they have never stayed with me long enough or got to a point that it caused me any harm. So this probably means that I have experienced stress in my life but have never been stressed.  In other words there is probably some kind of a threshold (different for each one of us) which decides when you move from experiencing stress to becoming stressed. This brings me to an interesting question. Is stress really bad?

Stress is Not Always Bad… That’s what Science Says.

Robert Yerkes and John Dodson formulated a relationship between arousal (stress) and performance in 1908. They called is the Yerkes-Dodson Law. The law dictates that performance increases with physiological or mental arousal, but only up to a point. When levels of arousal become too high, performance decreases. In other words, while stress can initially help your personal performance, sustained stress at too high a level can decrease your performance.  As you try to compensate for your decreasing performance, this creates more stress, further decreasing your performance.

The anxiety you experience before an exam is one example of how the Yerkes-Dodson Law operates. An optimal level of stress can help you focus on the test and remember the information that you studied; too much test anxiety can impair your ability to concentrate and make it more difficult to remember the correct answers. Athletic performance offers another great example of the Yerkes-Dodson Law. When a player is poised to make an important move, like making a basket during a basketball game, an ideal level of arousal can sharpen his performance and enable him to make the shot. When a player gets too stressed out, he might instead “choke” and miss the shot.

The problem with this law is that it seems to imply that a little stress is good for us and it drives us, keeps us motivated and helps improve performance.  My concern with this is that while this may be true to some extent, it has been misunderstood. Stress causes a surge of hormones in your body. When your body detects stress, a small region in the base of the brain called the hypothalamus reacts by stimulating the body to produce hormones that include adrenaline and cortisol. Adrenaline increases your heart rate, raises your blood pressure and provides extra energy. Cortisol, known as the stress hormone, also temporarily increases energy by triggering the release of glucose into the bloodstream, to help the person fight or run away. The body’s response to stress usually regulates itself. As your hormone levels fall, your heart and blood pressure will return to normal.

The fact that some amount of stress helps improve awareness, attention, productivity or performance does not imply that stress is a motivator or that it is good. While it may help in the short term and in situations of extreme stress (e.g. faced with a danger), this is not a permanent solution and in the long run is detrimental especially in managing stress experienced on a daily basis.

Stress is Different for Different people

Stress is difficult to define because it is so different for each of us. A good example is afforded by observing passengers on a steep roller coaster ride. Some are hunched down in the back seats, eyes shut, jaws clenched and holding on with an iron grip on the retaining bar. They can’t wait for the ride to end so they can get back to normalcy. On the other hand, sitting in the front are the wide-eyed thrill seekers, yelling and relishing each steep plunge who race to get on the very next ride. And in between you may find a few with an air of nonchalance that borders on boredom. So, was the roller coaster ride stressful?

The roller coaster analogy is useful in explaining why the same stimulant can differ so much for each of us. What distinguished the passengers in the back from those up front was the sense of control they had over the event. While neither group had any more or less control their perceptions and expectations were quite different. Many times we create our own stress because of faulty perceptions you can learn to correct.  Our perceptions are formed in our mind which controls the thoughts, feelings and consequently our behavior when exposed to a stimulant.

So what is the solution to effectively dealing with stress? Obviously there are all kinds of solutions you can google to find out how you can manage stress. There are solutions ranging from medication, stress management courses, taking a vacation, exercise and many others. Many of them are very effective as well. The problem I see with most of these approaches is that they are treating the symptom rather than the underlying problem.  As a result they have only a temporary effect and help us in avoiding or running away from the challenges rather than trying to solve it.

What is Stress?

Before we come to solutions, we need to understand what stress is. Stress can be understood through a simple mathematical equation

Stress = Pressure/Resilience

This is a simple equation which indicates that stress is directly proportional to pressure and inversely proportional to resilience. In other words as pressure increases, stress increases and as resilience increases stress reduces. Modern life has made sure that our pressures are increasing every day. Whether it’s your personal life, professional life or social life, we experience a constant increase in pressure. Pressure to do well in exams, to be more productive at work, manage time, manage relationships, etc. However our resilience has not increased as fast as it should to ensure that the stress is not going up.  There are 2 ways you can look at reducing stress

1. Decrease the pressure

This is not an easy thing to do unless you choose to give up the material world and decide to live the life of an ascetic. However, as long as you are living in the material world, you are bound to be subject to pressures.  For example you are always going to have the pressure of deadlines to meet, targets to meet, budgets to meet, costs to cut, perform in your exams, become more productive at work (do more with less), family pressure, social pressures,  and many more demands on your time, energy and resources.

2. Increase the resilience

The other option is to increase your resilience. What does increasing your resilience mean? Does it mean doing more exercise, getting enough sleep, taking adequate rest, going on a vacation to relax and maintaining a healthy diet? All of this is important and helps your body build resilience. However there is one element which we all tend to ignore which is the root cause of stress. That element is our thoughts which are the underlying cause of all stress.  Stress is caused as a result of our perceptions we have formed based on our past experiences, beliefs or fears.  Thoughts create your destiny. So to effectively manage stress our focus needs to move away from the pressures to increasing our inner resilience.

What can I Do?

Stress at the very basic level is a form of “pain” or “discomfort” or “disturbance”. It is an indication that there is something which needs to change. Pain is like a messenger that comes to tell us there is something I need to learn. Every time we feel stress, we need to be aware that we are receiving a signal that it is time to change.  One of the biggest challenges in this change process is your belief system.  I have heard many people say that they can’t help getting angry as it’s in their nature or that they have a tendency to worry about things and it’s something which is core to their nature. The problem with this thought process is that we are unconsciously giving our minds the permission to get angry, worry or create the negative emotions which cause stress.  We need to understand that anger, worry, anxiety, etc. are not natural. They are only a matter of habit which has been formed consciously or unconsciously by repeatedly responding to situations the same way. The important thing to understand is that while the belief system can appear to be difficult to change, it is far from invincible.

Below are my Top 5 tips on how to lead a stress free life.

1. Change your belief about stress

The first step in dealing with stress is to believe that you can have a stress free life. In other words you do not have to accept that stress is required in life to make you productive, or competent. Believe that there is a way to lead a stress free life. One thing which people say is that if you are not aroused, you lack energy; you are not charged enough and don’t have the ambition or drive to do anything. This is far from the truth. Once you have learnt how to lead a stress free life, you will be able to perform at much higher levels and achieve much more. This is a very deep rooted belief which will need to be changed. Changing beliefs takes time. Don’t be disheartened if you don’t see changes immediately. As you work on your beliefs, your attitude towards stress will also change.

2. Shift your focus

The key to dealing with stress is to change the focus from the problem to our response to the problem. The circumstances or situations are never in our control. What is in our control is the choice of our response to the problem. Change your focus from trying to reduce the pressures in your life and move your attention to increasing your resilience. The practical implementation of this advice is to change your question from “Why” to “Now what”. In other words instead of dwelling into why someone is behaving in a particular way or why the situation is not favorable, ask yourself the question “Now what can I do about it?”

3. Meditate

Meditation is the strongest and most powerful antidote for stress. The whole purpose of meditation is to spend time quietly with you and get a good understanding about yourself. Once you get to know your true nature better and build a relationship with yourself, stress will have no place in your life.

4. Pause , Breathe, Think

During the day take a minute at regular intervals to just pause and breathe deeply. Once you have done this think through how the day is progressing for you. What are the things which are disturbing you? Become aware of things which you think are causing your stress. The point here is to be able to just slowdown in the mad rush and be able to introspect and become aware of your thoughts, feelings and emotions.  If there is something that is bothering you ask yourself 2 questions

1. So what? (Keep asking this to find out what the worst that can happen; and then when you are at the end, ask yourself if whatever the consequence is going to be more important than your health.

2. Now What? (Focus on what you can do about it rather than the problem itself)

5. Work on self-development

I can’t stress the importance of working on you. This is essential to building your resilience. Self-help and development is a very broad topic and the point here is to develop your resilience at 4 levels

• Spiritual
• Mental
• Emotional
• Physical

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I find it unfortunate that stress has taken on so much importance that it is now become almost like a status symbol.  It’s amazing how a conversation between two people revolves around trying to prove to each other, who has got more problems and consequently is more stressed in life.  It’s almost as if each one takes pride in being stressed.  I happened to bump into an old colleague at work and he passed a remark. He said “Vipin, are you ok? You look very calm”. Now to me this was a very surprising question. I would expect people to ask “Are you ok? You look stressed?” Stress does not have any place in our lives. Choose to have a stress free life and you have taken the first step. And as they say.