Stress-is-Enhancing Mindset

Pop quiz: Is stress good or bad for you?

Turns out, the answer could lie in how you respond to that question.

In other words, whether or not stress has a positive or negative impact on you and your well-being could depend (in large part) on how you view stress itself. If you see stress as beneficial, you’ll likely be able to respond to it better. 

This effect, according to researchers, is called a Stress-is-Enhancing Mindset. I first heard it referred to in this way from Stanford’s Dr. Alia Crum on the Think Fast, Talk Smart podcast’s episode “How to Embrace the Benefits of Stress” and it seemed so intuitive to me, yet it goes against a lot of things we’ve been taught. It also goes against a fair amount of how I’ve thought about and framed stress in my life and on my path to Olympic gold.

I don’t know about you, but the message I’ve received is that stress = bad. Physically, it can be damaging. Chronic stress levels increase cortisol, decrease testosterone, negatively impact your recovery from workouts, impair your sleep, and so on. And chronic stress can also strip away our mental health and make it harder to function, let alone be happy.

All of this is true. But there are a couple of differentiators which are less often talked about.

The first is that chronic stress is different from acute stress. While chronic, long-term stress is harmful - smaller, limited doses of stress can be useful. Acute stress gets us going. It makes us perform. Sure, we don’t want to be over-stimulated and stressed out to the point where we can’t function. But if we aren’t slightly stressed and properly stimulated, we won’t be able to listen attentively, think appropriately, and respond to the task at hand. 

My Whoop does a solid job of both tracking and displaying this concept. They actually partnered with Stanford’s Dr. Andrew Huberman to track stress by looking real-time heart rate and real-time Heart Rate Variability (HRV). Below is about an ideal day for me where stress was uber-low during sleep (<1, except when I woke up to use the washroom), high for morning training (>2, a 10km run), the majority of the day for work and meetings was in the middle zone (1-2) so alertness was just right, and then evening yoga with low stress following as I headed to bed.

Secondly - and this point is even more under-reported - how we respond to stress can influence its impact on us. (Both our bodies and our minds.) There are swaths of research on this, but for now I’ll focus on this key point:

A stress-is-enhancing mindset is the belief that stressful things are inherently good for you and make you better. That an acute, or relatively acute (hours long or in some cases days long), stressful thing will make you stronger. 

When we believe that, we are more likely to respond to and recover from stressful situations better.

The Harvard Business Review piece, Stress Can Be a Good Thing If You Know How to Use It, does a great job of providing a step-by-step approach to getting your mind right on this. A fantastic example:

“Researcher Jeremy Jamieson demonstrated that students asked to reframe pre-test anxiety as beneficial perform better on the exams. Harvard Business School professor Alison Wood Brooks has shown how reframing anxiety as excitement can improve performance on tasks such as negotiating and giving an important speech.”

My takeaway from this is that it’s time for all of us to stop hiding from acute stress, and it’s time to start welcoming it. 

I’ve been deliberately leveraging this mindset shift for the past six months to test it out for us all, and the gains in both my physical performance and well-being along with my cognitive performance are overwhelmingly positive.

If you exercise, you may already understand this at least a little bit. Looking at the above Whoop data shows the high stress that exercise causes. You know that if you push yourself to go a little heavier in the squat rack you get stronger. If you push yourself on the track you will get faster. And so on. 

You also know that doing these things first thing in the morning quite often sets your day up for success.

That’s because the stress-is-enhancing mindset goes beyond physical stress; it relates to other kinds of stressors too. For example, in the workplace, it means you might be more willing to embrace and roll with difficult challenges or tense conversations because you believe those situations will help you learn, grow, and get better.

Ultimately, this mindset means that you see stress as an enhancing experience for you as a human, not some terrible thing. You may also allow yourself to view it as inevitable and thus not something to, well, stress about.

As I’ve started paying more attention to this mindset, I notice that some people fear stress and shy away from it. For many folks, the focus is: How can I make today less stressful? How can I avoid that stressful thing/event/person?

But I want to propose something different: that we consider the above information and view stress as a good thing. Sure, we don’t want it to get out of control. But let’s figure out the best way to handle it and use it to our advantage. Let’s have the difficult conversation or tackle the unpleasant challenge, with the recognition that we will learn from it and things will get better from here.

The trick is to then allow yourself to de-stress after that tough thing. If you have a problem ramping yourself down, meditation or yin yoga is a great way to accomplish that. 

I can definitely say that stress has made my life better. In fact, all the good things in my life came out of periods of intense stress.

The stress of having Tommy John surgery on my elbow and failing as a decathlete led me to bobsled. Without that stress, I would never have gotten to fulfill my potential as an athlete.

The stress of coming in seventh place in the Olympic games in 2006 was essential for my future bobsled team. It took that loss to rethink strategy. Only then did I fully realize it wasn't just about the weight room, the sprint track, and the bobsled track. It was actually about a team that could work together and support each other no matter what. We needed the experience of failing at stress to eventually thrive under it. 

And the stress of being at the very bottom in my own life, going through depression, was essential to living with the overwhelming appreciation I have today. Now I can experience life in a deeper way. I don’t fear emotion or hide away from vulnerability the way I used to. I can show up and give life more of myself. 

So I say, let’s stop fearing stress. And focus on building a stress-is-enhancing mindset to conquer our fears and reach our goals.

- Steve