Positive Stress 😳
Is there a good stress and a bad one? Can stress really stress our brains?
Now that we have discussed depression and even strategies to combat the same, it must be easy to talk about yet another common mental disorder of our times. It is so common that 1 in 5 teens and adults have it. It is called anxiety.
In our everyday language we use stress and anxiety interchangeably when they are not the same. So to make things clearer let us understand stress first before we dig into anxiety.
Stress
Stress is our body’s reaction to a trigger. It is generally a short-term experience. Stress can be positive or negative. When stress kicks in and helps us pull off that deadline, it’s positive. When stress results in sleeplessness, eating disorders, poor focus, and impaired ability to do the things we normally do, it’s negative. Stress is a response to a threat in any given situation. It is characterised by the term arousal (of the central nervous system) in the physiology world.
So let us get this positive (eustress) and negative (distress) aspects of stress cleared.
Eustress 🤔
I have a confession to make.
I like stress. I perform better under stress. I think stress has been positive to me so far. My best work gets done under stress. I believe everyone is like me. My prof gave me a nickname as “dopamine junkie” and she assigned work to me in the last minute only. That is when i realised not everyone goes through these episodes like me.
All my work is 13th hour mostly. For example: even these articles that you are reading, I start at 8:15 am and sometimes I finish at 8:45 and sometimes i race against the clock till 9 am and hit send at 9 whatsoever. That deadline keeps me going. I feel the thrill and I love the ticking clock.
I have done this in many part of my life. I have tampered with my keynote file till my name was called out in the conference. I have accepted unrealistic deadlines from clients just to see how much I can push it. I accept projects knowing that we don’t have much time. I enjoy the creativity that comes within constraints. Slowly I am understanding that working with me can cause stress and anxiety to others as well because not everyone performs under stress and stress can be very stressful.
On a hindsight I have noticed that I have taken up much larger projects than my capacity (and time) and I have gone faster using stress as my accelerator. This has wrecked my body completely.
I have aged more than i should have. Dark circles under my eyes tell a stressful story. My struggle for sleep (insomnia for 5 months) these days are having a domino effect on my other bodily functions like weight gain, digestion and more. So I did not know that the narrative in my head that stress is good is not so good after-all in reality.
As someone who is high on self-care now did not take care so well then. This reality hit me hard an year ago. It could be environmental factors, it could be work, it could be relationships, it could be ticking clock, it could be aspirations & ambitions it could be anything that affects our central nervous system. It is our duty to spot it and eliminate it. The good and rosy stress I am talking about is also a wreck on my physiology.
I don’t know if you are going through similar stressful success stories and believing stress is good for you. It is the definition of success that must change and not the positivity of stress. All stress is bad stress. period. There is nothing called as good stress. Don’t get addicted to constraints. It is also addiction nevertheless.
The obsession to find creativity within constraints can make you oblivious to the other side effects caused by stress especially if you are in a leadership position. No one will speak up to you and you will wreck their bodies and yours in the name of positive stress. Don’t do it please.
The confusion is real. People beat themselves up for not being able to handle stress like you (especially if you are in leadership role or mentorship role). They will feel they are not upto mark in managing their stress. There is nothing to manage there. It is the leader who needs a lesson and not the other way around.
When I understood this I made changes to my organisation immensely and it helped me and others. The skeleton in the closet must be pulled out and talked about. Here is the first step.
Now that the positive BS is out, let us go talk about all things stress and anxiety next.
🥂to nostress (no eustress or distress)!
Yo! Thanks for reading. Means a lot to me as attention is the hardest currency 🙏
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