Coping With Stress by Convincing Yourself It’s Good
Stress is one of those things we all have to deal with. But what if you could use stress to your advantage?
Brad Stulberg, co-author of Peak Performance: Improve Your Game, Avoid Burnout, and Thrive with the New Science of Success (This is Completeness), recently told Business Insider about how we can all use stressful situations to our advantage.
His recommendation?
Instead of looking at stress as negative when you need to tell your body to calm down because you’re too stressed, look at it as positive: “I’m excited. This body of mine is getting ready to give it all. It enhances my perception. “
Stuhlberg argues that, at its core, stress is just a stimulus. The incentive could be a coaching session or a performance review with your boss.
The feelings we experience when we are stressed became negative only when we called them that.
“So in a poignant sense, rethinking stress as something positive can be very helpful,” Stuberg says. “In the long term, researchers are coming to a very similar conclusion that people who see difficult times as challenges, not threats, and code stress as something that is incentive that will help them eventually grow because they will overcome it, they generally perform better. And they not only perform better, but they also have better health and even live longer. “
The best way to deal with stress is to convince yourself it’s okay.