The Tipping Point

'Stressed' and ‘stressful’ is all too often the answer when friends ask how we are and how our work is. It’s a word that has no place in the polished versions of ourselves that we project online. We post our awards, public-speaking engagements, thriving social life and holiday snaps, but the physical and emotional burden that comes with maintaining this ‘best self’ is kept out of shot. ‘Stressed’ has a negative visual, rarely said with a smile by someone who feels they are thriving at work and that everything is going well. Those people are undoubtedly also experiencing stress - just the positive effects of it. So how do we transition from a negatively stressed person to a positively stressed one, without undergoing a personality transplant or some sort of transcendental therapy at a retreat in Peru?

Stress is the body’s natural response to stimulus requiring our attention or action. Positive stress is sometimes referred to as ‘eustress’ from the Greek ‘eu’, meaning good. When it’s working for us, stress helps us rise to the challenge, makes us feel excited and focused, leading to a sense of satisfaction when the task is completed. When it’s working against us, we feel exhausted, overwhelmed, irritable, perhaps a bit ill from sleeping problems, headaches or feeling our stomach is tied in knots. To counter these symptoms, we might drink more, go out for a cigarette, and cancel exercise classes or social plans because they seem like a waste of precious time. In psychology, negative stress is sometimes referred to as ‘distress’ - “when a person faces continuous challenges without relief or relaxation” (Cleveland Clinic). This is when the red flags go up and burnout can occur.

“Stressed” was my usual response to “how are you?” and “how is work?”. “It feels like I’m running on a treadmill and someone keeps putting the speed up”, was another. As the editorial director of the fastest growing digital media company for women - with a feisty team of journalists, art directors and creatives reporting to me, and a ‘sky is the limit’ C-suite above me - overwhelmed became my default state. My growth target was 20% month on month. Until when? I thought to myself, suspecting the answer was: until I crashed. Have you ever taken a big job knowing in the back of your mind that you’ll probably be able to handle it for two years, but that’s ok, because by then you’ll have figured out your next move? Only to become so caught up in achieving company targets you forget to plan your next move and end up feeling like there’s no way out and you’ll just have to be this stressed forever? At the ‘peak’ of my career, in my highest status position, I was sleeping for just two hours a night, struggling to find a solution to persistent IBS, and feeling very lost.

Part of my burnout, I now realise, was how I perceived stress at the time. In her TED talk, How to Make Stress Your Friend, health psychologist and Stanford lecturer Kelly McGonigal says she spent years telling stressedout people that stress was bad for their health. She then discovered a shocking truth - that it’s only the people who believe stress is bad for their health that actually suffer significant health problems due to stress. She cites a study of 30,000 people in the US who were asked how much stress they had experienced in the past year over a period of eight years, and whether they thought stress was harmful to their health. From correlating death records, the study found that people who reported high stress had a 43% increased risk of dying - but that that risk only applied to the people who also believed that stress was harmful to their health. Those who reported high stress, but didn’t think that stress was harmful to their health, actually had the lowest risk of death, even compared to those who reported low stress.

So with the right perspective, a highly stressful job can contribute to a healthy lifestyle. McGonigal went on to observe that “chasing meaning is better for your health than trying to avoid discomfort”. In other words, a degree of stress is inevitable, but if you’re working towards a goal that has meaning for you, it’s likely to feel positive.

Not 100% positive 100% of the time, of course - that’s getting into mania territory. Even on a professional path that holds ultimate meaning for you, there will be periods of low energy and lost vision. But rather than using what little energy you have to berate yourself for being unproductive, these periods can be reframed as creative rest. As part of the senior management team, in my editorial job, I was offered business coaching. Of all the advice the softly spoken Canadian woman in her 50s at the other end of the phone gave me, the necessity of downtime was the piece I found myself regurgitating most often. My coach explained that the graph of success is very up and down and that nobody can be at peak performance 100% of the time. We require downtime in order to re-energise, gather our learnings and create some headspace before we can shoot back up to peak performance. Your ‘best self’ has to include periods producing work that is ‘good enough’ rather than perfect.

In the Harvard Business Review, psychiatrist and leadership development specialist Dr David Brendel writes: “I help clients reach peak performance by actually doing less work at key times - and by engaging in downtime activities that cutting-edge research shows to be effective in boosting productivity.” Just think: how many times have you stepped away from your desk and gone for a run or to meet up with friends, only to find the answer pops into your head once you’ve stopped consciously looking for it? As Audre Lorde said: “Self-care is warfare. Rest is fundamental to productivity.”

For me, the transition from negative stress into positive stress required a more radical step away from my desk. With hindsight, I had started to perceive the stresses of my job as negative because I had lost passion for what I was doing. What I really wanted was to work for myself, not manage a big team, and to retrain as a psychotherapist. A year on, I’m doing both, and to my great surprise, I’m earning more than ever. I experience stress often enough, working with luxury fashion clients as a consultant alongside studying for my Masters, but I find the stress motivating rather than debilitating because the work is funding my studies and my studies mean a lot to me. The stress feels like it’s working for me, not happening to me, and with that as the foundation, everything seems more enjoyable. Now that I’m viewing my career as a marathon with highs and lows, rather than a sprint on a treadmill, the ascent back up to peak performance feels worth it again.

As any therapist will tell you, the first step is awareness. If you’re feeling downbeat and unproductive, remember that productivity is cyclical and that taking your foot off the pedal and concentrating on other areas of your life during those times can ultimately help you achieve more. If the low period and stress starts to feels like prolonged distress, it might be time to reassess whether the work you’re losing sleep over still feels meaningful to you, or whether your goals have actually shifted and it’s time to make a change. If the satisfaction you get from the job feels worth the stress it takes, you’re likely in the positive stress zone. You’re also very lucky.