Don’t Stress Over Stress: Changing Your Attitude To Achieve Success

So, how can we view stress as helpful when the opposite view is ingrained in us? Science helps us. Our bodies produce helpful responses to stress. All that’s required of us to flip stress from harmful to helpful is telling ourselves it’s helping us. Then, we can embrace what our body is going through, and negative stressors physically turn positive.

Feeling stressed and anxious can cause the blood vessels around our hearts to constrict. Unfortunately, this can increase a person’s risk of heart attack or stroke. However, people experiencing stress from excitement, joy, and courage don’t have that happen. Why not?

It turns out that oxytocin is why. It’s anti-inflammatory. More of it is released when you have a different perception of the stress (perceived pleasure instead of misery). Oxytocin protects the heart by keeping blood vessels nice and wide. It also helps the heart regenerate cells for faster recovery and a stronger heart muscle.

How cool is it that stress, which constricts blood vessels around the heart, also produces the right chemical to protect the heart?! Our body has a built-in lifesaver. And all we need to do is remember the good that comes from being stressed.

It’s as easy as flipping a switch. Perceiving stress as bad produces adverse reactions. However, identifying our stress responses as helpful (our body primes us to act quickly and efficiently) releases more helpful chemicals.

Can you relate to this? There you are, doing something you’ve done countless times. You could do it in your sleep. In fact, rest sounds perfect because your brain is about to die of boredom.

Or how about this? You have to do something so new and challenging that you don’t know where to start. Your mind begins to wander. You’ll procrastinate and scroll social media instead because it’s much easier and more rewarding.

There’s a law for these two polar opposite responses to stress. It’s called the Yerkes-Dodson law, named after the two scientists who created it, though it isn't a scientific law at all.

While running experiments on rats, they noticed the amount of stressors they put on rats affected their performance. Rats with too little or too much stress took the longest time to learn a task. But rats with a medium amount of stress learned the quickest.

How can we use information from the Yerkes-Dodson discovery in everyday life?

Knowing that too little or too much stress leads to poor performance is a great start. We don’t have to be scared of stress. We can continue to set the bar higher and higher until we find a sweet spot.

Stress keeps us motivated, and that helps us set and reach goals. We’ll be the most successful we can be if we have the optimal amount of stress to keep us motivated but not overwhelmed.

We can’t tell you what kind of stress is optimal or how many hours a day you should work or rest. Your experiences, sensitivity to stressors, emotions, fears, beliefs, confidence, outlook, and the type and difficulty of the tasks affect your optimal stress level.

Short-term, moderate stress is beneficial as long as you make time to rest and recover. Chronic, unmanaged stress is harmful.

We can’t always change our situation. Sometimes, there’s a challenging task that we simply must get through. Our perception of stress can make all the difference, though.