Stress is not the enemy 

Stress is an in-built survival mechanism that humans experience on a daily basis that helps to keep us alive. 

Even though it is a regular part of our everyday experience, stress is often given a bad name. Yet, without a certain level of stress, we would have zero motivation to even get out of bed in the morning. 

Stress is a necessary part of life and removing it completely from your day is not an option, therefore, the key to stress management must come down to learning how we can live better with stress.

A good place to start is identifying the multitude of misconceptions about what stress is, the sources and its effects. 

Today, to start this conversation, we are going to take a quick look into four stress myths, with a little inspiration from Andrew Bernstein (author of ‘The Myth of Stress: Where Stress Really Comes From and How to Live a Happier and Healthier Life’), so that you and stress can start to form a happier, healthier relationship. 

Let’s take a look…

Myth 1: Stress is caused by your circumstances and environment

Contrary to what many people believe, stress comes from the thoughts and opinions we have about a particular situation, and not the situation itself. This is not undermining the severity of the stressful event we may be exposed to, but it’s acknowledging that there are multiple factors involved in our experience.

One of my favourite quotes from Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’ summarises this brilliantly:

“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

This beautiful quote highlights that it’s not the event that causes us distress, but it’s our thoughts, beliefs and opinions we hold about that event.

This is why different people react so differently to the same situation; our experience of stressful events is all based on how we perceive the situation and then respond.

Myth 2: Exercising, breathing, and relaxation techniques are the best ways to deal with stress

While these are so valuable and excellent coping methods, which I often recommend, they do not remove the stressor itself. Even though they may help to alleviate its symptoms and increase our resilience levels (which we absolutely want), we also need to look at how we perceive stress.

We obviously want to do everything we can to remove unnecessary stress, but looking at how we could reframe challenging situations or conditions that cause us stress is essential in those situations where we have very little control over the stress inducing event itself.

Myth 3: Stress is always motivating

Hans Selye introduced the idea of two types of stress: distress and eustress. Distress is stress that negatively affects you and eustress is stress that has a positive effect on you.

Deadlines, creating objectives, and pushing yourself to perform can be stimulating when within moderation, but each person has their own personal response to pressure.

Andrew Bernstein suggests that people get things done despite their stress, not because of it. Yet, I believe that everyone has a different relationship with stress, and our responses will differ on a daily basis, depending on what else we have on our plates.

Myth 4: Stress is a choice

As we highlighted earlier, stress is a necessary part of life and removing it completely from your day is not an option.

Because it is an in-built survival mechanism to help to keep us alive, we cannot always control if that response is triggered. Therefore, the skill of stress management comes down to being able to identify when your stress response has been triggered, taking a moment to pause and assess the situation and then adjusting your response appropriately.

Much easier said than done, but very possible with the right training and practice. 

Your stress management challenge today

Take a moment to review your relationship with stress. 

When you think about stress, do you view it as a necessary part of life or something that you desperately want gone?

What might be a healthier way to think about stress that could serve you better when you’re next facing a challenging situation? 

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To help you support staff wellbeing, we offer ‘Mental Health Awareness’ workshops that can be tailored to your organisations’ needs. 

These workshops not only help to reframe and manage stress, but they also help learners to understand how best to support themselves and others in the workplace, and at home.