HOW TO STEP UP, NOT FADE AWAY, IN THE FACE OF WORKPLACE STRESS

Here’s a nice little finding about stress from our friend the juvenile rainbow trout. Apparently in “juvenile rainbow trout of similar size and with no apparent differences in social history,” the ability to win fights for social dominance is greater in fish that shrug off the effects of stress, according to a study published in Hormones and Behavior in 2003. For your average juvenile rainbow trout with no especially distressing social issues, think of kicking ass as a job. And your average trout does its job better when it’s not stressed.

You can probably see where this is going. But wait! If you are not a stressed trout but a stressed male ant, the effect of stress is flipped! In a lovely article titled “Mating with Stressed Males Increases the Fitness of Ant Queens,” researchers show that mating with winged males—who tend to be totally stressed out compared with wingless ants—“positively affects life span and fecundity of young queens,” which you have to admit is a bonus any way you look at it.

So here is the question: are you a trout or are you an ant? When the stress hits the fan at work, do you respond positively or negatively? When you are under pressure, do you fail to kick ass like a trout, or do you increase the life span and fecundity of the queen?

Actually, you probably do both, depending on the level of stress you’re feeling. Most humans have an inverted U-shaped response to stress in which they perform crappily with no stress or with too much stress, but are at their best at the Goldilocks level of stress, where it’s neither too much nor too little. That makes sense: stress puts some pep in your step, but too much can bury you. The thing is, you can manage your experience of stress to make a bigger Goldilocks zone. Here’s how.

First, chronic stress is bad. You can only hum along at a high baseline level of stress for so long before it catches up with you. The Mayo Clinic notes that chronic stress puts you at higher risk for anxiety, depression, digestive problems, heart disease, sleep problems, weight gain, and memory and concentration impairment. There’s even some evidence that stress may account for some of the health effects of living with a lower socioeconomic status. A paper from the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute points out that people with lower socioeconomic status tend to live in conditions that contribute to chronic stress, including “crowding, crime, noise pollution, discrimination and other hazards,” and that this higher baseline stress that comes with being poor contributes to the health problems that tend to go along with poverty. No matter how you slice it, chronic stress is neither motivating nor productive, and eventually it leaves you feeling like a quivering little petri dish of E. coli bacteria. Really, if you’re trying to be productive, healthy, or both, you gotta chill out the chronic stress.

But what about the thing that researchers call “acute” stress—a project or unexpected challenge that takes you from a stress level of zero to sixty, but then allows you to go back down again? For example, researchers have studied this acute stress reaction by throwing rats in a pool of cold water. A classic study of the human response to stress comes from a surprisingly similar circumstance—Pennsylvania small-business owners thrown into the cold waters of a flood. Researchers interviewed 102 small-business owners after Hurricane Agnes swept through central Pennsylvania in 1972, and they found that on the Subjective Stress Scale, which runs from 0 to 100, a level of perceived stress between 40 and 48 predicted the highest performance—business owners in this range got the most done. But here’s another interesting point: business owners’ perceived level of stress had nothing to do with how much they lost in the storm. The level of stress they felt was completely independent of whether they had lost 5 percent or 100 percent in the flood. What this means is that stress, and the ability to keep stress in the productive Goldilocks zone, may not necessarily depend on what is done to you, but on how you evaluate and transform it. When it comes to predicting how well you will perform, what happens to you isn’t as important as how you perceive it.

One secret of people who perform under pressure is the ability to manage the pressure. Can you reframe meaningless situations to be at least moderately stressful so that you can harvest the motivation that comes with a little stress? On the other hand, can you dial back your experience of mind-crushing stress until you perceive it as motivating but manageable? If so, you can learn to perform under pressure.

This study also shows that no matter how much stress you’re under, how you cope with stress matters. Specifically, the study finds three general styles of coping with stress: people who deal with the stressful situation, people who deal with the emotional experience of stress, and people who use both coping strategies. First, the obvious: people who deal with both the situation and with their emotional response to stress perform the best under pressure. But check this out: people who cope with the emotional experience of stress do awfully until the going gets really tough, and people who deal with the situation are strong until stress gets high and the situation finally overwhelms them. As a stressful situation grows past the point where you can reasonably control the situation itself, it becomes more and more important to control your emotional experience of the stressful situation.

Coping with Stress Done Two Ways

Next time you’re supremely bored or ultimately stressed, try to keep the “inverted U” shape of stress and performance in mind: a little is good, but a lot is bad. Then if you can’t help but exist at that point on the curve where stress threatens to overwhelm you, try to round out your natural coping tendency with strategies from the other side of stress management. If you’re a doer, try managing your emotions; if you’re a de-stresser, try resolving the situation that creates stress. By chipping away at stress from both the situational and emotional sides, you can give yourself the best chance at managing it effectively.