28: We All Need A Little More Stress
[00:00:00] Sometimes you all need a little bit more stress. I find that once in a while, interesting lessons come from random places and sources and we just need to take a a moment and stop and listen. This week on Monday afternoon, I was ready to rush out the door of the office after a long day of back-to-back appointments.
Of course I just had one more appointment to get to before making the a hour long drive to, to meet my family for dinner later that evening. However, I couldn't find my keys. I looked at my office, I looked at the conference room. I looked at the kitchen, the bathroom back to my office. I literally even opened the refrigerator thinking somehow I must have put them in there.
Absentmindedly. Now I don't often lose my keys. So this was a bit out of character. Well, fast forward. And I found them. I had left them in the ignition of my unlocked car on a busy street in downtown Portland, parked in front of my office, by the way, which I had fallen asleep out the evening before, after walking through working through the night, I'm on a project.
Fortunately, the story continues because there in lies the valuable lesson that was in store for me. And I'm sharing with you today leaving the keys in the ignition caused. The battery to completely drain which, which led me to being unable to start the vehicle or get to my appointment for that matter.
So I went back into the office where a team member was kind enough to pause what he was working on. Come out, help me jump my car. I called my next appointment and moved into the following day and hit pause on the rest of the day at the moment. But while jumping the car the team member asked if I'd ever come across the word you stress.
Now I admitted I had not. So we had a brief conversation about the etymology of the word and he shared his perspective on it. About 15 minutes later, the car was running. I decided to take a drive out to the vineyard to do a little work before I headed home. Now, while working on the vines, I couldn't stop thinking about this new word that I had been taught you stress.
And that began a research project that I spent an embarrassing number of hours on this week. And I'm going to share some of those thoughts with you today. Now, lesson number one, we can learn valuable lessons from everyone around us. If we just stop and listen. That research led me to some incredible studies done by Hans , who is a Hungarian Canadian.
Endocrinologist in the early 19 hundreds. Now he is most widely known for his work at John Hopkins university and also the university of Montreal. But interestingly, this man was nominated 17 times for a Nobel prize yet died in 1982 at the age of 75, having never taken home the prize. Now, after my research in my book, he won now that leads me to lesson number two.
We all need a little bit more stress in our lives. The catch there is that we need the right kind of stress and the right way to handle it. We oftentimes associate stress with this negative connotation and that's because for decades, humans have connected the word stress with the negative psychological effects that has on us.
Therein lies the issue of why we run away from it or attempt to prevent it. But by definition, stress is simply a physical, mental, or emotional factor that causes bodily or mental tension. And it can be defined also as, importance attached to a thing you see, we can experience stress from both internal and external forces.
External forces could be environmental. It could be a psychological or even social situ situations. We're probably experiencing external stress right, right now. And I'm happy that we are okay in his book, the stress of life Han Selia defined stress as the non-specific response of the body to any demand for change.
Simplified. It's the response of your body to any demand for change. It's only through stress that we will actually achieve change. And that was his life's work. Now all of us have something we'd like to change. Perhaps it's our environment, perhaps it's our habits. Maybe it's our schedule, our business results, our financial situation, the depth of our current relationship.
Perhaps even a personality trait we have that we've accepted from birth. I often tell each of my business partners that we never would have partnered. If there wasn't something that both of us were looking to change. There isn't a point to a partnership without the collective desire and commitment for change.
Selia is the father of the concept that stress. Is the response [00:05:00] to the stress sore. He developed a theory of stress that he called the general adaptation syndrome or gas. He went on to publish some 33 books and over 1600 scientific articles around the topic during his lifetime. Thus the countless hours of research that I wound up spending on the topic.
But part of that response is automatic and chemical, right? Part of that adaptive ness is automatic without too long. Yeah, but I have a science lesson. Celly identified our internal stress processing mechanism called the hypothalamus pituitary adrenal system. He was a scientist after all, but this internal system.
Monitors at what level our body actually reacts to the stress sore over time, we can learn to monitor this even better. Control this, the hype with almost acts as a tunnel or bridge between our brain and endocrine system, which sends a message to produce a hormone in our pituitary gland. And it releases it into our bloodstream.
Our body in turn produces cook corticoids another hormone and disperses them to parts of our body that needs them. We then use this hormone to fight the stressor. Put simply stress can immediately turn your body into a chemical plant. Now these chemicals push the internal fight or flight button.
They allow us to either stand and deal with the stressor or react and run from the stressor. Our body produces that cortisol and neuro epinephrin immediately. And here is where our control comes in. Most medical journals will define stress as adaptive response to an external situation that results in physical, psychological, and behavioral deviation.
The key here is adoptive. See, we forget that responses are adaptive. It need not be automatic. And it leads to controlled changes in our physical actions, our emotional reactions and our behavior on our path to behavioral change, eustress will become our competitive advantage. Remember Selia defined stresses as the response to the stressor.
We at times may not be able to control the stressor, right? The situation the external. Sometimes we can't control the internal, but we can however, always control our response, which is the stress. And we get to choose whether or not we respond with distress or you stress left unchecked. We may naturally develop the habit of allowing stressors to lead to distress.
Distress is extreme anxiety, distress is sorrow or pain. Over any extended period that will lead to fatigue, it will lead to exhaustion. It will lead to burnout. We can gauge if we're headed towards distress. If we're beginning to experience fear, feelings of irritability, frustration, poor concentration, sound familiar.
We can choose to respond with a different kind of stress. And that's our new word for this week. You stress the Greek EDU or you literally means good. So you stress is a form of stress. Having a beneficial effect on your health. It has a beneficial effect on your motivation and effect on your performance.
An effect on your wellbeing, all beneficial effects. Wow. We all could use a little bit more. You stress this positive response to all internal and external stressors leads to energy. It leads to motivation, increased confidence and our coping abilities. It leads to increased focus and increased performance.
Now, in contrast, when our response trends towards distress, we have increased anxiety, unpleasant feelings, decreased focus, often physical and mental problems. So here's the couch stress. Is necessary in our life. We actively need to welcome it, accept it, even seek it because stress leads to change. We all need a little bit more stress without stress.
We will actually experience boredom, which leads to confusion and apathy as detrimental to our emotional and mental health as distress. In Chinese, the word stress is the combination of two characters, meaning danger and opportunity. Now opportunity is never easy. And in fact, it lives just on the other side of danger.
That danger will force us to choose which stress we will respond with distress or eustress. So let's remember that this week, this month for this year, we all need stress in our lives. Those stressors give us the opportunity to choose a higher level of motivation, [00:10:00] focus, confidence, and energy. It is the only thing that will predict meaningful change, and we've all committed to and need change.
