The Stress of Having a Chance

"Oh to have a chance. It is a lot more stressful than to not have a chance."
(from my tweets, 2015)

I tweeted about stress a lot in those years, and not always as something to avoid. "Being stressed out means you are moving," I wrote. "If you are not moving, you have no reason to be stressed out." And a few weeks earlier: "Oh to be stress free... that means probably you've got nothing going on important."

The tweet above captures something many people feel but rarely say. When you finally have a real shot at something you care about, it often feels worse, not better. Hopelessness can be oddly calm. A real chance comes with pressure.

Psychologists have found that how we think about that pressure can change what it does to us.

Stress isn't only harmful

Most of us have learned that stress is bad for us, and chronic, overwhelming stress certainly can be. But psychologist Alia Crum and her colleagues wondered whether people's beliefs about stress also matter.

In a 2013 study, they worked with employees at a large financial company during a stressful period. Some employees watched short videos explaining how stress can sharpen focus, deepen relationships and help people grow. Others watched videos about how stress is debilitating. A third group watched nothing.

A few weeks later, employees who had watched the "stress can be enhancing" videos reported fewer health symptoms and better work performance than the other groups. The stress was the same. What changed was how people understood it.

Turning nerves into fuel

Other studies have found the same thing in high-pressure moments.

In 2010, Jeremy Jamieson and colleagues worked with students preparing for the GRE, the graduate school admissions test. Before a practice exam, some students were told that feeling anxious during a test doesn't hurt performance and might even help it. Those students scored higher on the math section than students who got no such message. The effect showed up again months later on the real exam.

Alison Wood Brooks at Harvard tested something even simpler in 2014. Before stressful tasks like singing karaoke, giving a speech or solving math problems, she had people say one sentence out loud. Some said "I am calm." Others said "I am excited."

The "excited" group performed better on all of them. Brooks explained that anxiety and excitement feel physically similar: a racing heart, alert senses, energy. Trying to calm down fights against that state. Calling it excitement works with it.

So when having a chance makes your heart pound, you don't need to make the feeling go away. You can reinterpret it as your body getting ready.

What the philosophers said

The Austrian psychiatrist and philosopher Viktor Frankl survived Nazi concentration camps and wrote about it in Man's Search for Meaning (1946). One of his central ideas was that people don't need a life without tension.

"What man actually needs," Frankl wrote, "is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him."

For Frankl, the stress of pursuing something meaningful wasn't a problem to be eliminated. It was part of what made life worth living. That's close to what I was trying to say about having a chance. The pressure comes from the fact that something important is possible.

Some honest caveats

This research doesn't mean all stress is good. Chronic stress that never lets up can damage health, relationships and sleep. A 2012 study by Abiola Keller and colleagues, using U.S. survey data, found that people who reported high stress and believed stress was harming their health had a higher risk of dying during the study period. But the study was observational, and it doesn't mean that changing a belief will protect you from stress that is truly too much.

Mindset studies have also had mixed results when other researchers tried to repeat them. And reinterpreting stress is not a substitute for rest, support or changing a situation that is genuinely harmful. As I've written on this blog before, rest is part of the work.

How to handle the stress of having a chance

• Notice what the stress means. Pressure often shows up because something you care about is possible.
• Say "I'm excited." Before a big moment, try reframing the racing heart as energy, not danger.
• Remind yourself that nerves can help. Like the GRE students, tell yourself that arousal can sharpen performance.
• Connect it to meaning. Ask, as Frankl might, what goal makes this tension worth it.
• Know when it's too much. If stress never lets up, rest, get support and consider whether something needs to change.

Today's reflection

Where in your life do you have a real chance right now? Can you see the stress that comes with it as a sign of how much it matters?

Sources

• Brooks, A. W. (2014). Get excited: Reappraising pre-performance anxiety as excitement. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(3), 1144–1158.
• Crum, A. J., Salovey, P., & Achor, S. (2013). Rethinking stress: The role of mindsets in determining the stress response. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 104(4), 716–733.
• Frankl, V. E. (1946/2006). Man's Search for Meaning. Beacon Press.
• Jamieson, J. P., Mendes, W. B., Blackstock, E., & Schmader, T. (2010). Turning the knots in your stomach into bows: Reappraising arousal improves performance on the GRE. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 46(1), 208–212.
• Keller, A., Litzelman, K., Wisk, L. E., Maddox, T., Cheng, E. R., Creswell, P. D., & Witt, W. P. (2012). Does the perception that stress affects health matter? The association with health and mortality. Health Psychology, 31(5), 677–684.