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Zusammenfassung von Stress – Your Catalyst for Success

Name: Stress – Your Catalyst for Success
Rating: 4.5 (18 reviews)
Author: The Blinkist Team

The Blinkist Team

Learn a few techniques to manage your stress and energy

4.5 (18 Bewertungen)

13 Min.

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Stress – Your Catalyst for Success is a book that explores the positive effects of stress and how it can help us reach our full potential. It offers practical tips and strategies to harness the power of stress and turn it into a tool for growth and success.

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Problem and Promise

How long has it been since you updated your toolkit for stress management? There’s more to it than mindfulness, spending time outdoors, and eating and sleeping well. Don’t get us wrong, those time-tested techniques can be effective at reducing stress. But maybe you’re feeling ready to freshen up your approach to stress management and learn targeted techniques for dealing with different varieties of stress. If so, this article will introduce you to a range of helpful new concepts, like Energy Management, Worry Scheduling, and the Ten-Percenters.

TL;DR
Here's the TL;DR version of this Blinkist article

Stress is complex. Yet, reading the literature on stress management, you might come away with the belief that all forms of stress can be easily treated through simple meditation, exercise, and deep breathing.

The truth is, if you want to master stress management, you need to learn more about how stress operates. And you need a well-honed repertoire of strategies for combating it.

Fine-tune your understanding of stress through learning to identify microstress, and understanding where you fall on the spectrum proposed by the Yerkes-Dodson Law.

Then, acquire some targeted strategies for troubleshooting stress – like Energy Management and Worry Scheduling.

Think Energy Management, not Stress Management

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.

Turn the Yerkes-Dodson Law to your advantage

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".

Don’t sleep on Microstress

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.

Why schedule worrying?

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.

For quick relief, try science-based hacks

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.

Conclusion

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.

Recommendations

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.

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Worum geht es in Stress – Your Catalyst for Success?

Understand the nuances of managing stress beyond meditation and exercise. Equip yourself with effective strategies, such as Energy Management and Worry Scheduling, for tailored stress management.

Wer Stress – Your Catalyst for Success lesen sollte

Those who feel overwhelmed
Anyone who feels a persistante undercurrent of stress
People who want to find the sweet spot between boredom and anxiety

Über den Autor

This multi-sourced Article was created by the Content Team at Blinkist based on the main ideas from Bored or overloaded? This is the amount of stress you need to get things done by Dina Smith on fastcompany; Combating the ‘Microstress’ That Causes Burnout by Rob Cross and Karen Dillon on the WSJ; Worry Time: The Benefits of Scheduling Time to Stress by Sanjana Gupta on verywellmind; These stress-relief strategies could be doing more harm than good by Stephanie Vozza on fastcompany ; Need a quick stress-reliever? Try one of these surprising science-based strategies by Jelena Kecmanovic on WP.

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