Stress – Your Catalyst for Success summary

If you’re feeling chronically stressed, tired, and burnt out, then many common self-care strategies – think doing deep breathing exercises, or eschewing screen time before bed – won’t help you long-term. Arin N. Reeves, author of "In Charge: The Energy Management Guide for Badass Women Who Are Tired of Being Tired," likens the experience of chronic stress to  being in a leaky canoe on a lake and attempting to scoop out water with a bucket. In other words, these band-aid self-care strategies start in the middle, assuming you'll continue your current, unsustainable, path while managing the symptoms, not the source, of your stress. 

When your canoe is sinking, don’t waste time bailing water. Fix the leaks. 

To understand the impact of stress on your performance, you need to understand the Yerkes-Dodson Law. And the best way to understand the Yerkes-Dodson Law is to visualize an inverted bell curve. The curve charts the relationship between mental and physiological arousal and performance. When we are either insufficiently or excessively aroused – in other words, when we are either bored stiff or highly anxious, our performance flatlines. The curve peaks when we hit the sweet spot between boredom and anxiety – in other words, finding the right level of mental and physiological arousal enables optimal achievement.

Why is it so difficult to reach that “just right” state of arousal? Well, the brain’s prefrontal cortex, which is our mental hub for advanced thinking, is remarkably sensitive. To function optimally, the cortex requires precise neurochemical equilibrium—neither excessive nor lacking. No wonder  Amy Arnsten of Yale University terms the prefrontal cortex "the Goldilocks of the brain".

Have you ever felt inexplicably drained? Microstress might be the culprit. Microstresses are quiet, recurring moments of tension that stealthily accumulate, sapping our energy without us even noticing. Unlike standout stressors, microstress lurks within daily life. Think: unspoken tensions in work meetings, shifting expectations from your boss, fleeting family concerns.

These minuscule stressors evade our awareness but leave lasting impacts. For example, when you start your morning with a brief disagreement with your partner, you might find your focus and mood subtly affected throughout your workday. Conventional stressors – divorce, illness, financial worries – produce heightened levels of adrenaline in the body, which trigger our inbuilt fight-or-flight response. This, in turn, creates a strong physical reaction: racing heartbeat, sweat, uneven breathing. It’s easy to identify when we’re affected by conventional stressors. Microstress, on the other hand, can slip by unremarked, slowly accumulating over time.

Stress management techniques often focus on avoiding, or eliminating, worry. Here’s one that does the opposite. It’s called worry scheduling, and it involves setting aside a specific period in your day exclusively for worrying. The logic behind this counter-intuitive idea is pretty simple:  when you condense your worry into this dedicated time, you can leave the rest of your day free for more positive experiences.

This technique curbs excessive worrying, by putting a hard boundary around the time you spend with your negative thoughts. What’s more elevates effectiveness. Instead of indulging an endless loop of fretting in an unstructured way, with worry scheduling you tackle worries systematically. Evaluate each concern: Can you influence it? If yes, devise a plan and act. If not, practice acceptance.

When we’re feeling stressed, we often look for ways to lower the tension – hello, long baths and Netflix marathons! But for a quick fix, try heightening your senses, instead. Research shows periodic diversion through intense sensory inputs, like chewing on a hot pepper, or tricky mental exercises, like saying the alphabet backwards, actually offer respite from acute stress. 

Spending time in nature is soothing. But when you have 90 seconds between meetings and need to de-stress fast, seek out images containing fractals – those naturally-occuring, intricately repetitive shapes seen in snowflakes and nautilus shells. These have a calming influence on the human mind. Humans are wired to prefer moderately complex, non-smooth lines, like those seen in fractals – or in certain works of abstract art, like Jackson Pollock's famous splatter paintings.

If conventional stress management techniques just aren’t working for you, using more targeted strategies might prove helpful. Instead of managing the symptoms of stress through self-care, assess your energy levels to determine the root cause of your stress. Find your equilibrium along the Yerkes-Dodson curve and adjust your levels of stress and stimulation to reach peak performance. Adopt the mindset of a Ten Percenter, one of the elite group of people that can sniff out and shut down microstress. Embrace your anxieties for 30 minutes a day with worry scheduling. And, in a pinch, quick hacks like heightening your sensory input or engaging opposite action, can provide an effective reset.

If you’re interested in learning more about the topics we’ve discussed in this Blinkist article, we’ve got some recommendations for you. 

First, we’ve got The Power of Full Engagement by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz. This Blink goes into detail on how to nurture the energy sources that are the basis of good stress management.