Written by Aggie Warren

Rethinking the stress mindset: how to make stress your friend

13th August, 2024   •  

You might recognise this feeling…

Too much going on, busy week – busy life, wrinkles on the forehead…

It’s the feeling of being stressed and… stress is bad. It’s unhelpful. In fact, that’s an understatement…  

Stress is dangerous.

Stress is linked to all six leading causes of death: heart disease, accidents, cancer, liver disease, lung ailments, and suicide.

We are in an era of ‘stress about stress’.

But is it possible that stress has got a bit of an undeserved bad rep?

Research has found that it’s not stress itself that is unhelpful, it’s the way we think about it, and this all comes down to our stress mindset. 

Having a ‘stress is enhancing’ mindset can, the research shows, positively impact how we respond to stress. 

But wait a minute…

Can our mindset really have that much of an impact on real-life outcomes?

YES

And there are countless studies to prove this.

One of the most fundamental proofs of the power of mindset is the placebo effect, which is the phenomenon where a person’s health improves having taken a ‘placebo’ treatment i.e. one that should have no therapeutic benefit. Importantly, the individual in question would not be aware that it is a placebo treatment but because they have the mindset that the treatment will improve their health, their health improves.

And in fact, a review of clinical trials suggests up to 90% of all diseases benefit from the placebo effect – from anxiety and depression to arthritis and even cancer. 

Placebo effects can be physical and one study even found that individuals who came in contact with fake poison ivy, believing it to be real, came out with real rashes. Having the mindset that something could positively or negatively affect one’s health actually affected their health. 

But what about the stress mindset? Surely there are better ways to deal with stress than changing our mindset?

There are various coping mechanisms for stress that are very effective, for example spending time outdoors, and limiting time spent on technology. But some of these mechanisms are problematic. 

For example, if your coping mechanism is to avoid the situations that make you feel stressed this may work perfectly well if concerts stress you out, because you can avoid concerts. But if paying bills stresses you out, avoiding paying your bills is not a good coping mechanism.

So what if we did focus on mindset, how do we actually change the mindset that we have around stress?

Here is a three step approach:

The first step is to acknowledge that we are stressed. 

This means being aware of our typical responses to stress – frustration, racing heart, eating a mountain of ice cream. This is what we call our stress signature and it often manifests itself in physical, psychological or behavioural change.

These changes could be:

Physical

• Raised heart rate
• Changes in breathing
• Adrenalin

Psychological

• Poor concentration
• Mood changes
• Being emotionally reactive 

Behavioural 

• Aggression
• Withdrawal
• Change in eating habits 

It is good to be aware of how you respond to stress because it means you can take more appropriate action. For example, if your stress signature is to experience mood changes around people close to you, you won’t blame these mood changes on the relationship itself but on experiencing higher levels of stress than usual. 

Whenever you next become aware of these changes in yourself, take a minute to pause and acknowledge:  “Ah, I am stressed right now”.

The next step is to welcome your stress.

Stress is an indication that you care a lot about something – it’s an indication of your goals and values. 

For example, when we are stressed at work it is often because we care a lot about our career and playing our part within the team, or when a fight with a friend is causing us stress, it is because we really care about that relationship.

This comes down to building good habits around practising gratitude, so that when those feelings of stress do crop up we feel grateful and can welcome the fact that there is something important enough in our lives to feel stressed about. 

Of course, this depends on whether that stress is good stress, otherwise known as eustress, which means it has the potential to invigorate, or if it is bad stress, otherwise known as distress, which has the potential to debilitate. 

Stress can also be necessary if it is something that we cannot avoid, like deadlines, or unnecessary, for example not being able to decide where to go on holiday. 

A useful matrix I like to use is:

You can use this matrix to decide how to respond and deal with your stress until it becomes habitual enough that you don’t need to think about it.

A very simple example could be a flooded inbox. Every morning, you get into work and your inbox is already full. This leaves you feeling overwhelmed and helpless; you start the day on a bad foot and are unable to think or concentrate on other tasks. 

This is bad stress – it is detracting from your ability to do your job well.

Is it necessary or unnecessary?

After scrolling through your inbox, you find it is not important emails from clients that need urgent responses (in this case this stress may be necessary and you should ask for help), it is the countless newsletters and email subscriptions that you receive and never open, cluttering your inbox and distracting you from emails that are actually important. This stress is unnecessary. 

By identifying the cause and then removing it – taking 5 minutes out of your day to unsubscribe to all those unnecessary emails will save you huge amounts of time in the long run – you have limited the stress that your inbox was causing you.

Finally, utilise the stress.

If we think about a time in our lives when we performed at our highest level, or experienced personal growth, we often find these moments were fuelled by stress.

Stress gives us a lot of energy; it is a natural occurrence in the body originating from the evolutionary need to respond quickly and effectively to stressful, i.e. dangerous situations.

We can use this energy to aggravate the situation, for example by getting angry and frustrated with the people around us, or we can use it to alleviate the situation – by improving our focus or helping us to reprioritise.

Part of being able to utilise stress is being aware of its full potential. 

Stress has been commonly found to bring about

• Mental toughness
• Heightened awareness
• New perspectives
• Strengthened priorities
• Deeper relationships and 
• Greater appreciation for life. 

This will be dependent on the person, but is something you can come to learn about yourself, and it ties back into knowing your stress signature. 

If your stress signature involves a behavioural change towards being more withdrawn, this may mean this is a great opportunity to use that boost of energy to get some deep focus on independent tasks. 

If your stress signature involves a physical change of higher adrenaline, this may mean you could add even more value in group tasks, presenting, or ideation, re-energising those around you. 

Once you have taken some time to identify your stress signature, you will also be more aware of how you can utilise that stress to your advantage.

So if we bring this all together:

It’s important to note here that not all stress is good – if your work or the relationships you have with people are constantly causing you stress, there are probably some necessary actions you can and should take to alleviate that. Nor are we suggesting that you should seek out stress. 

The point is that if we shift our mindset, and acknowledge, welcome, and utilise the good stress, we can use it to reach our full potential.

At Higson we help individuals, teams, and organisations deal with stress and burnout by building resilience and improving mindset; if this is something you are interested in, please get in touch.