How To Use Stress To Your Advantage

Is there a way to use work/life stress to my advantage? originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.

Answer by Andrew Cohen, CEO, Brainscape, on Quora:

The body’s physiological response to certain stressors can be pretty silly in the grand scheme of things. A missed deadline, a masochistic boss, baying clients, and skyscraping stacks of work release the same cocktail of stress hormones as a stalking predator would have in the Miocene Epoch, when we were running around in loincloths.

But there are ways you can flip the script on stress so that you can (1) defuse it before it detonates, destroying your organs and (2) use it to your advantage.

How can you do this short of quitting your job and joining a nudist colony to go live in a yurt?

I’m glad you asked…

Step 1: Stare your stress in the eyes

To really understand WHAT’S stressing you out, take a little time to introspect. Instead of blindly reacting or just blundering on against the headwinds of life, identify your stress and its root causes. (You can even write them down in a journal or talk to a friend, family member, or professional about them.)

Importantly: try to do this in an objective fashion, as though you are an outsider to your problems. That’ll help to prevent you from being whipped up in the maelstrom of their accompanying feelings.

Step 2: Zoom out on your stress

Once you’ve identified a stressor, zoom out. All the way out. Pretend your life is Google Maps and you’re hitting that ‘minus’ sign over and over again. Things typically look quite different 30,000 feet up in the air. Even the Grand Canyon looks like a butt crack. Similarly, your gripes may look equally benign … but that’s not why you’re doing this.

Zooming out reveals whether or not your interpretation of a situation is accurate and appropriate. For example, if you find your job overwhelming, the reasons you’ve internalized for this could be:

1. I’m inadequate and I suck at it
2. My boss hates me and just wants to torture me
3. It’s clearly not my purpose; why else would I be so miserable?

But now that we’ve zoomed out, it may be revealed to you that you:

• Haven’t established a suitable system or process for managing your tasks more efficiently;
• Could be delegating a lot of the stuff you currently take responsibility for;
• Demand perfection from yourself when, really, you could be achieving exactly the same wonderful results by spending half the time agonizing over your work;
• Actually ARE doing an excellent job and people do appreciate and respect you.

Sure, this zooming out won’t CURE your stress but it will put things in perspective and even reveal a pathway to improvement for you.

Step 3: Solve the problems you can

Now that you’ve revealed the thing/s or stressors that are crushing your soul, it’s time to do something about them. And that’s identify the root cause, analyze the problem, and come up with a plan of action that gets you through the thing that’s stressing you out.

Write down everything you need to do—every person you need to respond to, every report you need to write, every goal you need to accomplish—and consider (1) how you might systematize your life based on priority, (2) delegate tasks to others, and (3) spread everything out over the course of many days (or however long it takes), making sure you get the HARDEST things done first.

Similar to the art of making to-do lists, simply having a tangible path towards your goal or away from your stress is enough to make you feel better, since often the biggest root cause of anxiety is uncertainty. (How the f— am I going to get through this?)

Step 4: Get psyched!

Now for the cool part: transforming your anxiety into excitement!

I’ll let you in on a little secret: your brain has the same response to fear as it does to excitement. Think about it: why do you freak out when the power goes out, thinking every shadow is the cloaked killer from the Scream franchise, when you’ll pay good money to WATCH that crap in the cinema?

It’s because, when you feel excitement, the hypothalamus triggers the same physiological reaction as when you’re scared, stressed, or anxious. In other words: there is very little physiological difference between fear and excitement. That’s why when your friend jumps out to scare you, your initial fear response quickly evolves into laughing. It’s also why “adrenalin junkies” are a thing.

So, get psyched! Huff at yourself in the mirror, hype yourself up, and REMEMBER: the pressure you’re feeling is likely because you’ve earned—through hard work—the responsibilities and trust that pressure comes hand-in-hand with.

Excitement is often the best weapon against stress … and far more effective than relaxation.

This question originally appeared on Quora – the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.