Name: How to Master Stress
Author: The Blinkist Team

Problem and Promise

In modern life, stressors are all around us. And stress is inescapable. But its negative effects on your health and wellbeing are avoidable. If we can switch gears and learn to see our stress as a potentially positive force, we can actually alleviate its negative impact on our bodies and minds.

Here’s the problem: as anyone who’s juggling deadlines, personal commitments, financial pressure, and the need to, you know, eat and sleep every so often can tell you, stress doesn’t usually feel positive. But trust us – tweaking your mindset with the help of research-based strategies is enough to change your relationship with stress for good.

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

TL;DR

Stress can cause serious harm to your physical and mental wellbeing. So, you should try and avoid it…right? Not according to the experts. Stress is an unavoidable part of life. But it turns out that it is possible to skip its negative side effects, or at least seriously lessen their impact. In fact, it's not stress itself but our perception of stress that produces the worst outcomes for our wellbeing. If we can start to see stress as a neutral or even positive influence in our lives, we can start to avoid its negative effects.

Thanks to simple techniques like stress inoculation and resilience training, you really can learn to see your stress as a valuable asset.

If you’re interested in getting into the details, let’s start with making friends with stress.

Make Friends with Your Stress

A study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison had surprising results, revealing that while having substantial stress wasn't inherently linked to premature death, believing that stress negatively affected your health increased the risk of early death by 43 percent. Altering how you perceive stress, it seems, can positively impact the way stress impacts your health.

A Harvard study found similar results: study subjects who were provided with information about the positive aspects of stress performed better under stressful conditions compared to those who were advised to ignore stress or received no guidance. This suggests that viewing stress as a mechanism that empowers you during tough situations can actually transform stress into a positive.

Try Stress Inoculation

What would you do if you saw a house on fire? You’d probably panic, while trying to dial 911 with shaking fingers. What does a firefighter do when they see a house on fire? They coolly assess the situation, then move swiftly into the house, prioritizing tasks in order of urgency. See, as part of their grueling physical training, a firefighter runs into burning buildings again and again – they’re inoculated against that specific form of stress, in the same way that exposure to a virus inoculates you against future infections.

To become more adept at handling stress, try "stress inoculation", an approach based on the idea that practicing exposure to manageable stressors can prepare you for major stress events.

Manage Stress Holistically

Making clever changes to the way you think, eat, exercise, and socialize can help you manage stress better. Here are the most impactful tips from the source article.

Exercise alfresco. Regular exercise helps reduce stress. But taking your exercise routine outdoors further enhances its benefits for stress management. Studies have shown that individuals exposed to green environments during exercise tend to find it easier and experience improved moods compared to those in gray or red environments. This suggests that natural surroundings, like green spaces, contribute to a more positive exercise experience.

Conclusion

Stress can be severely detrimental to your physical and mental wellbeing. Stress is also unavoidable. What’s the solution? Reframe your thinking to embrace the positive side of stress; think of it as an asset that has the potential to sharpen your focus and enhance your performance. Inoculating yourself against stress and building your resilience will help you forge a better relationship with stress.

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 stress code by Richard Sutton. This is a good recommendation if you are looking for a few more tips on how to manage stress and what happens when you don’t.

Key ideas in How to Master Stress