“We are not passive recipients of stress,” Jamison explains. “We are active agents in our own stress response.”
The stress we feel during difficult situations can provide us with fuel to meet the demands we face, says Jamison. For example, as the heart rate increases, it can help deliver more oxygen to the brain and muscles.
“Oxygen is very useful for helping us process information quickly,” Jamieson explains. It can also help people perform.
Humans have long faced threats from predators, and our fight-or-flight response evolved to help us survive these dangers. But the types of stressors we face today have changed. In the modern age, some of the stress we face comes from challenges, which Jamison says can be viewed as “opportunities for growth.” Job interview, presentation, TV appearance.
“In order to innovate and do difficult things, your stress response is there to improve your performance,” he says.
When it comes to stress, “context matters,” says researcher Wendy Perry Mendez, a psychology professor at Yale University. There are different types of stress responses and different types of stress.
She points to studies from Scandinavia, dating back decades, that found that stress hormones were linked to better performance in students taking tests.
“A greater increase in catecholamines, (including) epinephrine and norepinephrine, on the morning of the test was associated with better performance on that test,” she says.
But here’s the challenge: not everyone responds to stressors the same way. Test anxiety is real for some people and can affect their performance. Part of the equation is how well they know the material, or how prepared they are to take the test. Another part is how they perceive stress.
Jamison points to evidence that people can be taught how to “reappraise” stress. He and his colleagues studied community college students who were preparing for a math test. When students were provided with information about the “functional benefits” of stress before a test, they performed better.
“By letting people know about the benefits of stress responses in these environments, they hold on to the idea that I can lean into my stress,” says Jamison, and use it to help do important things.
Students who were taught to “reevaluate their stress as a resource” not only performed better, they had less text anxiety.
When good stress turns bad
So, when stress arises from a challenge or opportunity, it can be helpful in that moment. However, when your stress response remains active at times you don’t need it, this becomes a problem.
Let’s say you have a big presentation, and you still have three days to go. You’ve finished your preparations, but the anticipatory jitters are starting to set in. Just imagining yourself giving a presentation makes you nervous. You can feel the stress response.
Your breathing is shallow, or you feel angry or irritable. If you use a wearable device, such as an Oura ring or Apple Watch, it may show a lower level of heart rate variability, which indicates spending more time in a stressful mode.
“Your body will rev up before you need it,” says Mendez. This can exhaust your physiological system. “Imagine if you were sprinting across the savannah, trying to escape from a lion,” says Mendez, “but the lion didn’t appear for three days!” This is not sustainable.
It’s also not helpful to worry about performance after it’s over. “Your body no longer needs to be in overdrive,” says Mendez, but anxiety keeps the stress response active.
This can lead to fatigue, mood swings and exhaustion. Chronic stress can make you feel as if you are under constant attack. It’s linked to everything from an increased risk of heart disease to depression, headaches and sleep problems.
All of this suggests that stress management strategies are key. We cannot avoid the difficult situations that life throws at us, but we can learn skills that enhance our ability to manage and even recover and thrive.
Stress Less editors are Carmel Wroth and Jane Greenhalgh