In their book Never Finished, Martijn Aslander and Erwin Witteveen draw a picture of a world that is never finished and over which we have less and less control. Let that unfortunately also be one of the main reasons why we experience stress. The lack of control over a given situation.
Therefore, in a world where the number of residents has increased almost fourfold in the past 100 years and where technological advances can no longer be kept up with, stress increases correspondingly.
Everywhere you read about the negative consequences of that stress. But is that justified?
Stress can indeed be quite crippling. We have all heard of the flight or fight response that is activated in our brain when we experience a lot of stress. Our brain prepares us for action. Where once the stressful situation was often actually life-threatening, today it has been replaced by an upcoming presentation, deadlines and workload.
The stress your body and head build up in the process is there precisely to help you be sharper and react faster. Basically, you start functioning better. You become more creative and thus come up with smarter solutions.
Too much stress, too often or continuously is absolutely not good for you. But if you learn to handle stress well, learn to appreciate stress for what it is, and take the rest to recover after a stressful situation (we don't work too hard, we just "recharge" too little), you will only get stronger from it.
A well-known study on the effects of stress from Stanford University followed 30,000 adults for 8 years for this purpose. Participants were asked 2 questions.
The first was: How much stress do you experience; 1) Little, 2) Moderately, 3) A lot?
Then the death registers were monitored to check how many participants died.
The results were shocking. Participants who indicated that they experienced a lot of stress were found to have a 43 percent higher chance of dying. But, that was only true if they had also answered the second question positively: Do you think stress has a negative impact on you?
Participants who did not think that stress had a negative impact on them were less likely to die even with high stress levels than those with low stress and a negative stress perception. So your stress perception says a lot about whether stress cripples you or helps you take action or come up with creative ideas.
As a training agency, we are constantly looking for new programs and techniques to help people cope with stress. If you would like to learn how to turn your own stress levels into resilience, you can do so with the following 3 simple steps:
- Become aware that stress is actually helpful to you.
- Find stressful situations to practice with this, to see your stress experience positively.
- Share this insight with others. Not only do you then teach another person how to handle stress better, but you also immediately produce oxytocin. That hormone, in turn, makes your brain better able to handle stressful situations.
