Savage Mindset: Manage Your Stress So It Doesn't Control You

Welcome to my newsletter. Every month, I’m going to be sharing highlights of leadership lessons, new tech, and things that have inspired me recently.

A question I often get asked is: How do you manage stress?

Our world is stressful. Our jobs are stressful. And our personal lives can be really stressful.?

As stress adds up, it can make everything much harder. Something simple like figuring out what to eat for dinner can get a lot harder. But something really hard like restructuring a team can feel impossibly hard.?

But there are things we can do that can substantially increase our ability to manage stress and to mitigate its impact.

What follows is what I currently do to manage the stress of running a 190-person company, with a global customer base, in a competitive space while raising a family and working hard to maintain lots of friendships.?

Make It Easier to Get Into the Moment

Seven years ago, while on vacation, my impulses got the best of me while I was lying in bed.

I picked up my phone and checked my email. The email had bad news.?

In a single moment, I had destroyed any chance of restful sleep. I tossed and turned and could not stop thinking about this bad news. What should I do? What should I change? Do I need an answer now?

The stress of the news was building alongside the stress of not being able to go to sleep. What if I can’t get to sleep? What if my restless night ruins my vacation?

There we were — me and the bad news, awake on vacation in the middle of the night. I felt the stress taking control.?

Suddenly, the idea of meditation popped into my head.

A few weeks earlier, a friend had been talking about the benefits of mindfulness for managing stress. I was skeptical it would help. How could sitting in silence help me quiet my racing thoughts? It was already silent!

But I was awake anyway, so why not try it?

I downloaded an app and did a 10-minute introductory meditation.?

My mind continued to race. Ideas about bad news at work kept flooding back in.?

I was supposed to count my breaths in and out up to ten.

One, two, three… but if we just changed direction…

One, two, three, four… but we could also just stop this project…

Until suddenly after a few minutes, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.

Silence.

It took me a minute to realize what had happened. The thoughts had come and gone, and I was able to slowly count my breaths.?

My mind had stopped racing.

I had a realization. The problem existed before I read the email, and it would exist after I went back to sleep. There was nothing I could immediately do other than rest.?

I managed to sleep and woke up with a clearer mind, feeling grounded and confident we could handle the issue from the email. It just would take the right effort from the right people, like all problems.

This moment was the beginning of my meditation practice. I committed to meditating daily and made it 500 continuous days.

Though I don’t meditate every day now, I’m able to use it as a tool to ground myself. I find myself meditating and focusing on being present when the stress builds. And 95% of the time, I can fall right into noticing my breath and letting the stress pass by.?

It might be counterintuitive when you have a million and one things to manage, but you ultimately can do more when you take the time to slow your mind and allow yourself to be present.

Give Yourself Time to Think

In the early days of a start-up, it seems like you are building from nothing, but you actually have a very valuable asset that can go away as you grow: unstructured time to think.

Do you give yourself unstructured time to think?

Odds are, you probably don’t. It can be hard to see open-ended thinking as work because so much of it doesn’t result in concrete changes and progress.

A lot of that time also doesn’t look like work.

I’ll never forget when Brendan Schwartz and I first started Wistia . One day, we taped a point-and-shoot camera onto a golf club, and I spun it around in front of myself. We were goofing around and playing with different ways to shoot videos. It was only later I realized that we had accidentally discovered the selfie stick years before you could take a selfie with your phone.?

We never commercialized our golf club selfie stick, but we didn’t have to. We were constantly playing with new products, with new ways of doing things. We were going to meetups and connecting with people from all different sorts of industries.

Eventually, we started to see opportunities to take what we were working on at the time (a filmmaking competition website) and realized that there were applications in learning and development, medical devices, circuses, and more.?

We had a lot of our breakthroughs in unstructured time, but we didn’t understand how valuable that time was or how much easier it is to have at the beginning of a journey than when you are scaling.

As a company grows, the problems to solve don’t get easier; they get harder. There’s more on the line, more stakeholders, and more complexity. And yet, we give ourselves less time for unexpected connections, creativity, and breakthroughs.?

Important and influential ideas come from open-ended thinking. But if we’re too busy, we never get the unstructured time that was all we had at the beginning.

Problems are stressful when we have to live with them. And if we don’t have time for breakthroughs, that’s when they pile up.

Giving yourself time to think makes it easier to solve problems as they come up. It makes it easier to find breakthrough answers. And it allows for stress to live continuously at a lower level.

Workout and Laugh

To get to the bottom of stress we have to recognize that stress is emotional and physical.?

We can build up our tolerance to managing physical stress, which will translate into our ability to manage emotional stress. Josh Waitzkin wrote a great book called The Art Of Learning that goes deep into the links between physical and emotional stress in professional chess players.

Working out can be an escape, it can bring more mental clarity, and it can increase our ability to literally handle more physical stress. And this ability to manage physical stress will translate directly into our ability to manage emotional stress.

When you’re operating a company (or doing any busy job) it is so easy to justify or believe that the 30-60 minutes you need to work out would be better spent being more productive working on something else. The issue is that this isn’t true.

We know that working out makes us happier. We know that when we have momentum, it’s easier to accomplish hard things. And we know that if we can manage our stress levels, we can make decisions more rapidly and with less emotion.

We all have different types of workouts that best match our bodies, time, equipment, and goals.?

This is how I have made working out a daily habit:

• I came to terms with the fact that physical stress is directly tied to emotional stress.?
• I’ve removed as much friction as possible to ensure my daily workouts get done by building a home gym over time. Removing the excuse of commuting to and from a gym, especially in bad weather, made a huge impact. I started with a package of resistance bands and built up more equipment over time as my habit became cemented.
• I got a coach via an app called Future . With the mental load of deciding what to do each day gone, my workouts aligned to my goals, and an accountability partner, the planning around working out isn’t an added thing to do. My coach gets to see the results of my workouts through an integration with my Apple Watch, and they are constantly updating and changing my programming to align with where I am making progress and where I am not.
• I listen to podcasts. I accidentally anchored my workouts to listening to comedy podcasts. Now I look forward to my daily sweat and expect that I will be laughing for part of the time. Building more positive associations has made it a very easy habit to keep.

Closing

We can’t remove the stress from our worlds. But we can build tools that help us handle more stress. That gives us the time to more quickly manage the problems that create stress and allows us to center ourselves in solving the problems we are living with in the moment.

This post came directly from questions I got from all of you. Please let me know if there are other questions I can answer or things you want me to cover.