Nobody likes stress.
Everybody has it.
Some people have a lot, some have a little. Most people have it occasionally, while others have it all the time.
Stress can come from a lot of different sources:
- Your environment – living in a crowded city, being stuck in traffic, battling bad weather
- Your relationships – uncooperative kids, toxic family members, co-workers without boundaries
- Your perceptions – unreasonable demands, eternal to-do lists, people-pleasing, financial problems
- Your body – health concerns, aging, injuries, lack of sleep
In today’s world, one of the biggest ones is simply having too much to do – and not enough time to do it. It’s a common denominator among people who attend time management classes. By the time they decide to attend, it’s probably because their stress has gotten out of hand.
Sometimes it’s because of the sheer amount of work we have to do. Other times, it’s pressure from other people. It happens when we have a big project due, we’ve procrastinated on a major deadline, or traffic makes us late for a job interview.
No one is immune. We check one task off our list, and three more slide it to take its place. Or we repair one damaged relationship, and another one goes off the rails.
That’s why we see so many online blog posts, articles and courses promising to help us get rid of stress. With a few simple steps, we can find the freedom we seek. We’ll still get everything done, but be relaxed in the process.
Wouldn’t it be great if we could find a way to eliminate all of our stress?
Probably not.
We might feel better for a while, but we wouldn’t accomplish anything, either.
When Stress Becomes Valuable
Stress is like the strings on a guitar. They have to have a certain amount of tension to produce the right sound. If there’s no stress and the string is hanging limp, it won’t produce any sound. If it’s too tight, it breaks.
The key is to find the exact amount of stress to make each string play in tune.
Many professional athletes and concert artists recognize the value of stress. As one NBA start said, “It’s OK to have butterflies in your stomach; you just have to teach them to fly in formation.”
That’s why you hear about stress management seminars, but you never hear about stress elimination seminars. Stress itself isn’t the problem; it’s what we do about it.
It’s like setting a spark to gasoline so it explodes. If it happens in your car’s engine, it’s a good thing. If it happens in your living room, it’s a bad thing.
The Key to Dealing with Stress
So, what should we do when we have stress? Research has shown that there are two primary strategies for handling stress:
Change the situation. This is called a “direct action” strategy. We observe and analyze what’s really happening (facts, not feelings). Then we determine if we can do something to stop whatever it is.
- We get a flat tire; we change it.
- Someone is upset at us; we approach them to talk through the issue.
- We don’t have enough money to last until payday; we don’t go to McDonalds.
Sometimes that’s possible, but sometimes it’s not. If we can’t change the situation, there’s only on other logical choice:
Change our attitude. This is called a “palliative” strategy. If we can’t change the situation, we can choose how we respond to it. We learn to accept it and adapt.
Viktor Frankl was an Austrian neurologist imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II. He experienced the worst possible conditions as a slave laborer, watching many other prisoners and his own family tortured and killed. He made a discovery through his observations that he wrote about in his classic book, Man’s Search for Meaning:
“Everything can be taken away from a man or woman but one last thing: the last of human freedoms to change one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.”
Most of us won’t go through that type of experience, but the principle still applies to our everyday lives. If we can’t change a situation, we can change our choices and our attitude.
I can’t change the traffic in Southern California. I could try, but it will only lead to frustration and more stress. Instead, my only real option is to accept the traffic and choose a different way of handling it:
- I could leave earlier to beat traffic.
- I could move closer to my work.
- I could change jobs.
- I could use commute time to listen to audiobooks or podcasts.
It sounds easy, but it takes practice and conscious choices. But it’s worth the effort, because we’ll be free from the tyranny of the stressful.
Without wind, a sailboat is stuck in the water. We need wind to sail, and we need stress to perform to capacity. It’s a matter of what we do with that stress when it comes.
Speaker Jim Rohn said, “We can’t control the wind, but we can learn how to set the sail.”