When is Stress Good for You? How to Manage Stress for High Performance Living

Stress is a natural part of everyone’s life for a reason – it conveys important information about our environment, our relationships and our individual emotional world. When there is too much stress or not enough stress there are often negative outcomes associated with performance and wellness. When harnessed and managed well, stress can significantly contribute to peak performance in many areas of life, including academics, athletics, or work. By learning how to effectively engage with stress and the emotions that often come with a stressful experience, we can develop skills and practices that strengthen resilience and positively contribute to our overall health and well-being.

Here are 3 ways to manage stress for high performance living:

Develop an Emotional Fitness Mindset

Similar to physical fitness, emotional fitness requires stress to create an opportunity to challenge our mind, body and spirit to become stronger, healthier, and wiser.

As muscles in the body need stress to build and strengthen, our emotional body needs moments of stress to challenge us to focus, enhance our emotional awareness and motivate us to explore, develop, implement, and hone new skills. An emotional fitness mindset reminds us that not all stress is bad. In fact, some types and levels of stress are beneficial to thriving and excelling in life.

An emotional fitness mindset, similar to a physical fitness mindset, views stress as an opportunity:

• To strive towards the next level at work, in relationships, in life.
• To hone the ability to sense and distinguish “good” stress that supports high performance experiences in life (e.g. work, personal relationships, personal goals, health and happiness) and the type of stress that does not.
• To learn and practice new skills and techniques for managing stress (e.g. quality sleep, mindfulness, meditation, breathing techniques) and modify as needed.
• To recognize the value and importance of implementing regularly scheduled recovery time (e.g. vacation time, mental health days).
• To seek advice and guidance from experts (e.g. licensed psychologists, counselor, or cultural-spiritual practitioners).
• To seek support from family and friends.

Cultivate a Voice of Compassion

We all have many roles and responsibilities in our lives that motivate us to “do well” over taking care of our individual needs. Whether it’s as a supervisor or team member at work, or as a parent, sibling, or friend, there is always a draw on your time and energy.

One way of creating balance with the motivation to “do well” in your various roles in life is cultivating a voice of compassion. Imagine, if your best friend or loved one were going through the same experience as you and they felt stressed, what would you say to be supportive of them? What advice, perspective or words of wisdom might you share with them? Observe how it feels to say these things to yourself in a stressful moment.

Without compassion, it becomes easy to fall into the trap of placing achievement and performance outcome above personal well-being.

This is a great way to begin identifying the level of stress that seems reasonable or unreasonable to maintain or manage.

Take recovery time

Most often, the first step of managing stress is recognizing when we have too much of it. Thus, an important practice of compassion is knowing when to take a break and valuing the importance of taking breaks.

Consider the analogy of an elite athlete. While they stress their physical body to the limits, they follow a highly structured training program that incorporates appropriate recovery time, some less intense training days, and often work in collaboration with a number of experts. The goal is not just high performance in the moment, but high performance and longevity – the ability to compete again in the years to come.

Recovery time for the emotional body and mind is often a mental and emotional break, shifting focus from thoughts that cause and perpetuate stress to activities that encourage play, relaxation, joy, and complete breaths.

Some examples of such activities are:

• High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT).
• Hot Yoga.
• Rollercoasters.
• Cold showers.
• A good movie or book.
• Anything new (e.g. a new travel destination, class – art, dance, or cooking, a new restaurant, etc.).

Whether a break is a few minutes throughout your workday or a week-long vacation, recovery time is an essential and necessary component for health, well-being and high performance over sustained periods of time.

Please Note: This article is intended as a starting point for each person to become more aware of stress in their lives and offer different ways to help you manage stress more effectively. Your health and well-being are important, thus, we encourage you to seek more information, resources and help from trained and licensed professionals such as a therapist or psychologist.