Mind Gym (32 page)

Certainly there are plenty of things that can elevate your stress every day: your commute, the pile of emails waiting in your inbox, the lunchtime rush to get to the gym before everyone else does, and your horrible boss. Let’s not overlook some of the biggest stressors in life: finances and relationships. Still, there’s something intriguing about stress—many of us thrive on it. We want to be challenged. We want to feel the pressure. We want to improve. And, believe it or not, stress can be good for you.

Of course, there are times when stress can be bad for your health, but stress is also, in different forms, essential for your happiness, success, and fulfillment. If you eliminate all stress, you actually become less able to deal with it. And without it, you can’t enjoy the thrills, pressures, and challenges that make life and work worthwhile and meaningful. No stress, in other words, can equal no joy.

The chapters in this part of the book explore both stress and relaxation. “Make Stress Work for You” describes how stress can be both positive and negative, and the chapter offers tools to help you work out which type you are feeling and how to make it work to your advantage. The more you know about your stress, the better equipped you are to deal with it.

“Combat Stress” focuses on getting down to business. Basically, you’ll learn how to avoid letting stress get in the way of your productivity. The chapter includes surefire strategies to deal with the negative kinds of stress that paralyze you. This is the go-to chapter when you’re experiencing bad stress and want practical advice about coping with it.

Finally, “Switch Your Mind Off” offers two very practical techniques for instant relief from negative stress that can be used anywhere, at any time. It may sound silly that you need to teach yourself to relax. However, after using the techniques in this chapter, you’ll quickly understand how powerful true relaxation can be—and you’ll wish you’d read this chapter years ago.

We feel it. You feel it. Everyone feels stress. The questions are: Do you understand the stress you feel and how to manage it? Do you understand how to leverage it to your advantage? Do you know how to truly relax?

Take a deep breath, because you’re about to find out.

A
lice grew up in New York City. Now, at the age of twenty-eight, she is finally getting her driver’s license—a requirement for her exciting new job as a family counselor in Atlanta. Today she’s taking her final driving lesson before the test. She arrives early to chat with her instructor. After fifteen lessons, Alice is feeling pretty confident. She gets in the car and starts to drive. Two minutes later, while talking about what she was watching on TV last night, Alice fails to spot a van pulling out of a driveway and she has to jam on the breaks. Then she starts to concentrate. Without even thinking, she checks her rearview mirror, gently releases the brake, uses her blinker with plenty of warning, steers smoothly around a corner, and, altogether, drives like a professional.

Parking proves to be a little trickier. Even though she’s done it perfectly on the last three occasions, she almost hits the curb. Nevertheless, she recovers. The rest of her final lesson is a little jerky, but she finishes without another incident. She thinks she’s made it to the end. She feels okay. But when she pulls in to a final stop, she forgets to shift out of drive before she tries to take the key out of the ignition. Obviously she can’t remove the key. Nervous now and not knowing what to do, she takes her foot off the brake. The car begins to roll forward. She screams in frustration, and her instructor has to calm her down and help.

If we wanted to plot Alice’s driving lesson on a chart, it would look something like this:

A hundred years ago two psychologists, Robert Yerkes and John Dodson, created a similar-looking graph to show how our level of “arousal”—our physiological and psychological level of alertness—affects what and how much we achieve.
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In the same way that the quality of Alice’s driving increased once she stopped chatting and started concentrating, Yerkes and Dodson suggested that as our arousal goes up, so does our performance. (Okay, chuckle at that last sentence. It’s fair to assume that double entendres went unnoticed when Yerkes and Dodson were writing at the beginning of the twentieth century.) The effect arousal has on performance is clear in Alice’s example: Her attitude changed from confident to concerned when she failed to spot the van, and then from concerned to stressed when she struggled to park the car. High levels of arousal (again, it’s okay to chuckle) led to a decline in her performance. In fact, excessive arousal, such as Alice being unable to get the key out of the ignition, leads to no performance at all.

Yerkes and Dodson’s model of how arousal impacts performance was developed further by psychologist Hans Selye. Selye correlated levels of arousal to distinctive stages of stress: The section of the chart where performance is improved by increased arousal are what he named the “calm” and “eustress” stages. Selye defined “eustress” as euphoric stress, or positive stress.
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An example of the eustress stage would be the increased adrenaline rush you feel while playing basketball and sinking three-pointers like a pro. Selye called the section of the graph where arousal starts damaging your performance the “distress” and “extreme distress” stages (see the following figure). An example of the distress stage is when the time on the scoreboard is running down. Everyone is counting on you to make the final shot, the fans of the opposing team are booing you, and as a result, you find it hard to focus.

By identifying these four distinct stages of stress, Selye showed that stress can be both good and bad. There’s an optimum point where the right amount of arousal results in increased performance. If you have much more arousal than that, it will have a negative effect on you. But if you stay below the optimum point in your arousal graph, gradually
increasing
your arousal levels until you’ve reached your optimum point will produce a positive result.

Somewhere along the way, however, Selye’s impressive findings got lost. As the pace of all our working lives increased to frenetic, his subtle distinctions between the four stages of stress were left behind. In fact, the term “stress” has become a single catchall term to encompass both eustress and distress; “distress” now refers to what Selye called “extreme distress.”
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By losing this distinction, we’ve also lost the ability to distinguish between positive stress and negative stress; instead, we are left with the false assumption that all stress is bad. And if we can’t diagnose the stress correctly, then we are highly likely to prescribe the wrong solution.

WHAT DO YOU DO UNDER PRESSURE?
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A study published in
Frontiers in Psychology
proved that pressure does increase performance.
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Participants of the study were put under pressure to succeed at a physical task of throwing a ball at a target and meeting an accuracy goal. Randomly, some participants were told that their personality assessments indicated they were the type of person who would do well under pressure, and a control group was told unrelated/nonspecific personality assessment feedback. In the control group, only 27 percent of the participants met the accuracy goal, compared with nearly 90 percent of the participants in the group that was told they’d perform well under pressure.

Sally is an actress auditioning for a role in a musical. If she gets the part, it would be her big break and she could finally quit her job as a waitress. Given that the stakes are high, she’s been rehearsing hard and is bouncing off the walls with adrenaline. At this point, her arousal level is high—and so is her performance:

This is where our modern one-size-fits-all definition of stress comes into play. If you asked Sally if she was stressed, she’d probably reply “Yes.” She assumes, like most of us do, that stress is a bad thing. Her response to any stress is to relax, in hopes that by reducing stress she’ll improve her performance. So, she decides to go shopping to calm her nerves.

Sally’s mistaken analysis of the situation (that she is stressed) leads her to pursue the wrong action (relaxing), which creates the opposite effect to what she intends (decreasing her stress and lowering her arousal, curve A), marginalizing her performance instead of honing and perfecting it. In fact, Sally was coping well with the adrenaline of rehearsing, and by continuing to focus she could have greatly improved her performance. In other words, by
adding
stress Sally could have improved her performance (curve B).

Although Sally assumes that all stress is bad, she is still considered “laid-back” compared to many other people who don’t handle stress well. In a similar situation to Sally’s, these people might avoid any and all stress until their resilience to stress is negligible—they can no longer deal with any. At that point, waiting tables during the quiet periods could be too stressful.

There are, however, two pieces of good news. First, if you can identify where you are on the stress curve, you can take the right steps to improve your performance. Second, just as you can mentally redraw your stress curve downward (that is, relax), you can also redraw it upward and become more resilient.

As we mentioned earlier, the key to coping with stress is to identify where you are on the stress curve. In order to do so, it is useful to consider the curve as having four distinct zones. Think of these four zones as four different rooms in a club, and each has its own ambience and atmosphere (see the following figure). By looking at each zone in detail, you can make a decision as to where you are and where you want to be at any particular moment.