Stress and health pt. 2: Stress alchemy

How can you turn a stressful situation into an experience that improves your confidence, strength, discipline, and overall well-being?

Do you believe that exposing yourself to stressful situations can actually improve your ability to manage them? When you’re under stress, is there a skill being developed? Do you believe that stress can actually make you better?

There’s overwhelming evidence that suggests people that learn how to manage and harness stress to their advantage are healthier, happier, and generally more effective in life.¹

If you’re prone to letting stress overwhelm you and even shut you down, this is for you.

As mentioned last week, stress isn’t necessarily good or bad, and it can be harnessed to improve performance and health. We have both a physiological and psychological response to stressors. What we do with that energy is everything.

This time around, I want simplified breakdown of what I’ve learned over the last 15 years about stress, how I’ve shifted my mindset around stress.

From the time I was a kid until I was about 26 years old, I held the belief that stress, and challenge were not good things. I routinely looked for ways to minimize what I perceived to be difficult or stressful situations in life and thought that the best way through life was to take the easy path.

I’m also extremely curious, kind of a high achiever, enjoy competition, and love experiencing new things… quite the conundrum, indeed.

Having barreled my way through life by learning how to cope with stress in many unhealthy ways, I began to explore my mentality around stress a bit more closely to hopefully improve my ability not only to cope with stress in a healthier way, but to learn how to turn stress into a tool for growth.

Here’s where Stress Alchemy comes in…

I’ve CHOSE to see stress and challenge as a tool for growth, not something to be feared. What really pushed me over the edge was the book Mindset by Carol Dweck. Her work basically demonstrates the value of seeing ourselves as malleable and that we can leverage challenge to our benefit.

Here are my 3 key takeaways on improving your relationship and perception of stress:

1. Learn to develop a “stress is helpful” mentality.

2. View yourself as someone that can learn and grow from stress in life.

3. Understand that stress is universal and not a signal that you’re screwing up life.

If you’ve got a negative relationship with stress, it’s difficult to see a world in which stress is actually helpful or even performance enhancing.

So, how can you start the journey (and it’s definitely a journey…) to embracing and even leveraging stress as a tool for growth?

Here’s a great and quick read on the process: Make stress good for you! | HPRC (hprc-online.org)

1. Embracing stress is more important than reducing stress, Stanford psychologist says | Stanford Report

Keep Going,

Geoff