One of my favorite clients recently worried about the stress on his team as they began to dive into some really cool and creative initiatives they were all excited about. How in the world were they going to get them done on top of an already full workload? I said it sounded like eustress. “What stress?" he asked. Eustress. The good kind.
First coined by Hans Selye in 1974, he distinguished bad stress, or distress that can cause all kinds of health problems from the good kind that we need to get energized and get stuff done. The prefix “eu” means good in Greek, so… good stress.
Some of the most memorable and proud times in our lives can come from a pedal-to-the-metal crunch to get a big project done, start a business, nail that dissertation, or complete a triathlon. We work at it and think about it constantly. We wake up at night. Worry. Have butterflies. Our heart pounds. Yet, this kind of stress gives us the boost we need. It feels exciting and manageable. Well, exciting is probably true at the time. Manageable is the rear view reflection.
The eye of the beholder
I did some googling to find a backgrounder to send to my client. This piece included some research I hadn’t seen before:
“While we know that stress is associated with health problems, plenty of people with high-stress lives are thriving. How is that possible? In 2012, researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison published a seminal study looking at how 28,000 people perceived stress in their lives. People in the study answered these two questions:
During the past 12 months, would you say that you experienced:
A lot of stress
A moderate amount of stress
Relatively little stress
Almost no stress at all
How much effect has stress had on your health?
A lot
Some
Hardly any
None
The researchers looked at death rates in the study group over nine years. The results are startling. The study found that having a lot of stress in your life was not linked with premature death. But having a lot of stress in your life and believing it was taking a toll on your health increased risk of premature death by 43 percent.”
Hmmm.
When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change
As I was writing this, I was about to begin teaching entrepreneurship to incarcerated students at a local women's correctional facility through Portland State University’s Higher Education in Prison program. I hadn’t taught the course before, and I’d never been in an environment such as theirs: the students have no internet or email privileges. In-class slide deck presentations or videos can’t be used. Not even post-it notes or poster paper are allowed. Only books, notebooks, paper assignments, a blue pen, and limited access to type and print.
It had taken quite a few months to figure out how to deliver a (hopefully) robust learning experience, and the experiment was about to begin. I was nervous: 70% excited and 30% terrified it wouldn't work.
And wouldn't you know, just as the class was about to start, I found the perfect place in which to settle in Portland, layering a move on top of it. I still had my regular work and exercise demands to build the muscle and skill to power this contraption that allows me to walk. I felt overwhelmed. Fitful sleep and wide awake heart-pounding, mind-racing hours — your basic dark-o-clock dreads — were leaving me groggy and foggy.
When I discovered the research above, I realized that this was GOOD stress. Eustress. It’s exciting. Every one of these things I WANT to and GET to do.
So, I did a little self-talk: You WANT to do these things. You’re excited. You’ll pull it off, you always do. The universe doesn’t give you more than you can handle. By golly, it made a difference, and not a small one. Especially in getting me back to sleep at night.
A few little hacks were particularly helpful:
Words matter. Replace need to and have to with want to and get to. It’s a great reframe.
Keep a daily do list with every little thing on it. When we need to remember something and haven’t written it down, it takes up precious space in our brain, as we’re worried we won’t remember it.
Trust the process. There is a calming effect to not imagining all that could go wrong, and just staying on course.
And, I was reminded to keep doing those healthy things: connect to family and friends (furry ones too!), eat good, play, exercise, garden, meditate. None of these things take that much time, yet they’re easy to cast aside when we are in crunch mode.
So, go out there and get stressed out for good!
Sunday Morning: 179