Rethinking Your Relationship With Stress

Managing stress and anxiety is a leadership skill. And when leaders are super-stressed out, I remind them that they chose this job! Thriving through uncertainty isn’t about eliminating stress or anxiety. It’s about building a better relationship with them. If you’ve followed me for a while you know that I try to help people build a better relationship with their anxiety. Your anxiety is trying to tell you something!

Well, stress is your body’s way of trying to help you meet a challenge. The research on stress is robust and convincing.

So many of us are told to fight stress. To breathe it away, calm it down, or pretend it isn’t there. But stress and anxiety are the natural productions of our nervous systems—and they aren’t bad.

They are our body’s built-in threat detection systems, finely tuned to help us survive danger. Humans often experience uncertainty as a threat response, so in times of high uncertainty, such as layoffs, reorgs, market shifts, or personal upheaval, our nervous systems fire off alerts. Our hearts race. We tighten up. We worry. That’s your brain and body trying to help. We can use grounding tools and cognitive reframing to manage stress responses in the face of uncertainty we cannot control. We can’t solve large intractable problems, but we can help manage our responses to them.

We also feel stress when we’re doing amazing, hard things. This is good stress. And this is the stress we can welcome: literally. My son’s basketball coach taught him to say, “I love stress” when approaching the free throw line in a crucial game. I’ve heard from musicians that they welcome nerves approaching a concert, because it means they want the audience to enjoy the show. When we welcome stress during situations we care about, we get stronger.

Here’s the good news. Research from experts like Dr. Jeremy Jamieson and Alia Crum shows that if we reframe our physiological response to stress not as a danger signal but as a natural response of our body preparing us for action, we mitigate the negative physiological effects of stress and use the stress productively. If we believe we have the resources to meet a challenge, our body mobilizes energy productively. We become alert, focused, even excited. That’s why we can fight or flee; the modern equivalent might be the added physical and cognitive energy to achieve something great.

In other words, “My threat arousal is a tool to aid performance. My body is helping me.”

Stress usually doesn’t feel good. And we’ve been told for years that stress is B.A.D. It might even kill us. We adopt the “stress is debilitating” mindset. But people who have a stress is debilitating mindset do one of two things: “We freak out, or we check out. And it makes sense because we’re told stress is bad,” says mindset expert Dr. Alia Crum of Stanford. But if we have a “stress is enhancing mindset,” the motivation to face stress changes. And so we can ask: “How do I use this stress to create better outcomes?” It doesn’t feel good but it makes the stress useful and productive, and less scary.

When we adopt a “stress-is-enhancing” mindset, we move from panic to purpose. Try these reframes:

• “I’m feeling stressed because this matters to me.”

• “It’s normal to feel anxious. I can still act with courage.”

• “I may not know the future, but here is what I can do right now.”

(Check out the Stanford ReThink Stress one hour program online. It’s wonderful: Stanford Mind Body Lab and Rethinking Stress)

Let’s be clear: there is stress we can’t control, there is productive stress, and there is stupid stress.

A lot of the stress we feel at work is stupid. Stupid stress is the unnecessary churn that results from unclear expectations, constant urgency, shrinking resources, and poor communication. Stupid stress is a full schedule of Zoom meetings all day with no transition or break times in between. Or it’s your boss texting you late at night when there’s no urgent matter. Stupid stress is when we operate without consideration for clarity, space, or our human needs.

A client was stressed because of a really stupid request: even though her team was down three people because of layoffs, she and her colleagues had to re-write their job descriptions to educate the new department head, and effectively make the case for their job. My client didn’t know why she was re-writing her job description, but she new it was a request from her new boss. That’s stupid stress, and creates a threat response for no good reason. A simple explanation and an acknowledgment would have gone a long way to reduce the stupid stress.

Too many demands and not enough support is not resilience-building. It leads to burnout.

As leaders, we can reduce stupid stress by offering what people actually need:

• Clarity: Define what “good” looks like. Set expectations around communication and performance. Reduce ambiguity wherever possible.

• Space: Build in time for recovery. Encourage breaks, pauses, and time to think, especially before big meetings or decisions.

• Joy: Remind people of what they love. Reflect on what gives them energy and help them do more of that. Joy is as physiologically powerful as stress.

We cannot cure stress. We cannot control anxiety. But we can choose how we respond.

Learning to evaluate the stress you’re feeling is a powerful first step. Stress I can’t control, good stress, or stupid stress.

What has you stressed today? Let’s talk about it in the comments.

With Feeling,
Morra