Stress Wisely: How Eustress Can Transform Your Work Life

Stress, just is. There is no escaping it. Stress is the natural wear and tear of the human response system. From the cradle to the grave, stress is ultimately winding down the clock on living. But it is not all bad. There is, for the majority of us, a lot of good which results from stressing wisely, especially at work.

How do we stress wisely?

The stress management literature has over a hundred thousand references, preoccupied with how to avoid or minimise stress – actually distress – by coping. Given a situational encounter that is primarily perceived as harm, loss, or threat, relative to our resources to cope, one potentially feels some degree of distress. So coping is a regulatory process that ameliorates distress and wellbeing.

Coping happens regardless. At the psychological level, through our dissonance we seek to explain away the disorder, suffering, pain, hurt, harm, loss, and threats that potentially upset our equilibriums and homeostasis. We physically move and flush excess cortisol, stressing other parts of the system better designed to use this hormone. We draw on social support systems to unpack, understand and make sense of those things that don’t kill us, but instead make us. We run away from death traps because our amygdalae hijack our emotional responses and turn on flight mechanisms to keep us alive. We stand and fight when we are ostensibly adequately resourced to beat the odds of a potentially fatalistic outcome. We are built to cope because distress is a fact of life.

But hands up who would like to look back on life and say, “I’ve coped”? Yay… I minimised and tolerated distress. I lived a life that potentially didn’t kill me before my time.

Unfortunately, some folks may have very traumatic lives where the preoccupation on harm, loss and threat is everyday reality. For the rest of us, distress is potentially a relatively innocuous variable in our stress response. Personally, I think boredom is most likely the greatest distress for many people – the frustration of not utilising one’s potential. But for those who do push the boat out, we must sleep, eat well, exercise, love, pay the bills, move, stretch, cry and ask for help to minimise the harm and inflammation – life demands it.

Notwithstanding, we are experiencing a lot of eustress – good stress.

Exploring regulates our eustress. Our human response systems are always on the lookout for potential resources that proffer gain and benefit. We approach and move towards pleasurable and enjoyable situations, as well as opportunities which possibly provide some resource acquisition which we can add to our armamentarium. We are made to do this, to work, and better our lives.

Eustress, by definition, is effective goal striving. All behavior is goal-directed. Breathing is a case in point. If you hold your breath, you will soon realise that breathing becomes a priority conscious goal pursuit. Over the course of our lives we continue to add complexity to the goals that we pursue.

There is no better place to utilise such complexity than at work.

Here we can encourage people to explore how to effectively goal strive. Again, we are made to do it. Performance management systems all around the globe, however, create distress responses because they threaten people’s need for security, status, and social connection. Essentially they require people to cope. What if we turned this on its head and began to stress wisely?

Here’s what it would look like. Someone would have a conversation with you about what you hope to achieve relative to the organisational objectives, resources and constraints applicable to you. You would explore and consider the opportunity and think through what success could envisage. There might be some brainstorming to the development and learning that could result from doing well. Of course, someone would be available for support to help cope with potential obstacles that may thwart the goal pursuit. You may even consider how to push the boat out and aim high. These goals would be clear, maybe written down, so that they could be used as a gauge of success and talked about in moments of savouring – the gold medal moments when goals are reached. We would do this often and make our goal pursuits purposeful and transparent so others can support and celebrate with us. We could even do this as a team.

But we don’t stress wisely. We create meaningless, routine, processed and mundane systems that do not draw on the human potential nor foster eustress. This is not to say the world isn’t changing. Indeed, it’s slowly happening – we are cottoning on to how to optimise human functioning and explore how we can continuously improve. Some organiszations are looking forward, rather than looking back.

A forward-looking, approach-oriented method like exploring, is a positive regulatory process for managing the demands of work and living. Exploring will return greater dividends for the shareholder and nurture our individual need to realise our potential. Coping will make sure it is sustainable. So stress wisely by exploring opportunities to advance and add value, whilst appropriately coping with the everyday fatigue and strain of winding down the clock. Oh – and have fun.