Start Optimizing Your Stress
Usually when you think about stress, you think about how to deal with or avoid it, or you read about all the bad things it does to your body. But what if you reformulate that mindset and start using regulative measures to make stress work for you?
Rethinking Stress as Beneficial
In 2021, researchers published a call for ” stress optimization ” in the American Psychological Association’s Journal of Emotion. They proposed combining theory and other research on stress thinking and stress reassessment as an intervention to help people stop believing that stress is “bad” for them.
The World Health Organization defines stress as “a state of anxiety or mental tension” caused by a difficult situation and “a natural human response that prompts us to deal with problems and threats in our lives.” Facing difficult situations and solving problems is not a bad thing in and of itself; in fact, they can be good things.
Dr. Michael Leiter, author of Challenging Burnout: Managing People’s Relationships with Their Jobs , tells Lifehacker that the positive aspects of stress are “just managed pressure.” High-pressure situations can inspire greatness, or at least peak performance, up to a point, while intense demands can focus the mind and sustain that performance. The trick is to determine if stress can motivate you and in what way.
How to optimize stress
The researchers suggest changing your rating system to be more flexible in deciding whether stress is just “good” or “bad” for you. The goal is to reformulate what you consider a “bad” stressor into a “good” one, since the good ones can be motivating.
Louise Sanders, stress consultant at The Stress Experts , says that in her practice she advises clients to work on emotional regulation and stress assessment, which she calls “perceptual change.” Stress, she says, can be like an anchor that pulls you down and prevents you from moving forward, but with a change in perception, it can become a springboard that actually pushes you forward to growth. She compares this reframing to a physical challenge. With practice and consistency, you will be able to lift heavier and heavier weights. The same goes for your emotional regulation. With practice and consistency, you can increase the amount of stress you can handle and then focus your emotional energy on what needs the most attention without letting it weigh you down.
It also fits with Leiter’s insight: “Working on the positive side of stress…requires understanding your way of working and structuring your time and energy to maintain physical and mental well-being. Stress arises as a result of a two-stage assessment: first, people determine that the situation contains a potential threat, and then they determine whether they are able to cope with this threat. Facing potential threats becomes more effective when you have a firm, reality-based confidence in your ability to deal with these threats.”
Just be sure to give yourself a break between studying, preparing, or otherwise maximizing the value of your stress as a stimulus.
Try Some Stress Management Tools
Even though there are benefits to rethinking your idea of stress and finding the good in it, stressful events are still stressful. We are committed to finding ways to deal with this while you work on optimizing, including trying out CBT techniques on your own or using tools. Try something like this:
- A meditation light that glows in different colors to guide your inhale, pause and exhale.
- An essential oil roller (with an excellent rating!) to use when you want to calm down on the go.
- A good old-fashioned lavender tea , loved for its soothing properties.
- A massage gun for when you really need to take care of yourself.