Tame your stressors (3 min)
This article is part of Dare Be's Leadership Handbook, a guide to help people lead with impact and heart.
Like many, I have suffered from stress and panic attacks for years. In an attempt to treat them, I’ve tried and tested just about any method that you could think of.
Thanks to that experimentation, I’ve gotten better. While I certainly do not experience constant bliss, my stress levels have reduced dramatically, and I no longer suffer from panic attacks — touch wood!
I’d hazard a guess that many other people suffer from the same levels of stress and panic that I used to. Stress is a leading cause of disease, and it limits our creativity, empathy, and rational thinking. Simply put, it’s not good for you.
So I’m going to go over where stress comes from and how to identify your stressors, so that you can start the long journey towards a more peaceful mind.
Warning: Always Consult a Professional
Stress can be dangerous. While the stress management techniques I’ll go over below have been helpful to me and others, they are for general guidance only.
You should always take the advice of qualified medical professionals if you have concerns over stress-related illnesses, or if stress is causing significant or persistent problems in your life.
Stress = Stressors x Stressability
Let’s start with this definition attributed to psychologist Richard Lazarus: “[Stress is] a condition or feeling experienced when a person perceives that demands exceed the personal and social resources the individual is able to mobilise."
In other words, we experience stress when we believe that we don't have the time, resources, or knowledge to handle an unavoidable situation.
This “out-of-control” experience is the result of two factors:
The Stressor: an external factor coming from the environment
Stressability: our internal capacity to deal with stressors
This means that you can deal with stress by addressing the stressor (to the extent that is possible) and by reducing your stressability.
It should be noted that some people see stress as a good thing, because they experience it as an energetic stimulation of the body and the mind. I agree that this kind of experience can be beneficial, and is sometimes even needed, depending on the situation.
For example, some people have come to love the feeling of the adrenaline flowing in their blood before an important presentation. It revs them up, makes them feel alive, and helps them perform better.
This is fantastic! But it is not the kind of stress I’m talking about today.
The stress I’m going over here is a different experience. It’s the bad kind of stress, coming from that feeling of being out of control. Instead of serving as a motivator or as mental stimulation, it weighs you down and prevents you from performing well or enjoying your life.
My most stressful experience
Let me give you an illustration of that bad kind of stress. I moved myself and my entire family to Germany for a role that looked like a great opportunity at the time. I was hired by a positive, smart, and ambitious guy — who lost his job 3 months after he hired me.
With my original boss out of the picture, I ended up working for a different man who instilled fear in me. I had a strong impression that he did not like me or the mission I was brought in to spearhead.
Essentially, the company was trying to drastically cut costs, and my boss was highly influential. To make matters worse, my family was trying to settle into a very foreign environment, having previously lived in Singapore and London.
My journey in this company seemed to be coming to an end, and I did not like what I was doing anymore. I had no idea what I wanted to do next. This was a situation I had never experienced before, and I had absolutely no idea how to handle it.
My fear-induced response certainly did not help. Instead of engaging with my boss to clarify his intentions and what that could mean for my position in the company, I got defensive and dug in my heels. I also pushed hard on a highly ambitious project even though there were signs it may not work. Essentially, I was in survival mode. I ended up near burnout, and it took me a long time to bounce back.
As a side note, this is an example of why businesses with high levels of psychological safety are far more innovative: they allow people to take risks, fail fast, and move on to more promising opportunities, rather than struggling through burnout.
Granted, I do believe that I am wired for higher stressability than the average adult. I have been able to significantly reduce it since then, but at the time I was not prepared. Without the tools that I have now, it was a perfect storm of high stressability and many powerful stressors!
If I knew then what I know now, I might have been able to handle the situation better and avoid burnout.
To learn more about this experience and what it taught me, read the full story: 2 lessons I learned from losing my job.
You have control over most of your stressors
Good news: you have more control over the external factors causing you stress than you initially thought!
For example, I made a list below of the major stressors that I have come across through my own and others’ experiences.
While this list is non-exhaustive, the stressors included can become very powerful and weigh us down when we feel powerless against them. Despair not! It turns out that you actually do have some level of control over most of them.
Take a look, and consider the different potential solutions that you can try in order to alleviate the 6 stressors listed below.
There are three types of stressors: those that are in your direct control (reading negative news), those that are in your zone of influence (a conflict with a colleague), and those that are out of your control (the death of a loved one). You can see more examples of these in the table, under the column “Level of control.”
It can be hard to accept that you have control over some of these stressors. To do so, you have to get into the player mindset (“I am going to do my best to make a change”).
Unfortunately, when under stress, we often get stuck in the victim mindset (“I am so unlucky”). Noticing it and deciding to change your mindset is the first step to take more control over your stressors. I’ve included suggestions in the final column that can help you lock into the player mindset and work on those stressors, rather than getting paralyzed in the victim mindset.
The next step for you is to identify your stressors and examine how to limit their influence over you, as well as how to lower your overall stressability. This is something that I will go over in greater detail in my next article: Nourish yourself, the fundamentals.
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