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Peak Performance: Why Stress And Anxiety Are Your Best Friends
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If you have butterflies in your stomach, invite them into your heart.–Children’s author Cooper Edens
One of the most important research findings of recent years is that stress doesn’t necessarily damage your health and your ability to get things done. Often it’s the natural energy booster that allows you to achieve peak performance.
Richard Shelton, a noted psychiatrist at the University of AlabamaBirmingham, has noted that stress can fire up neurons in the brain and focus the mind on the task at hand; they can also improve immunity and teach resilience, as he told Health magazine in 2014.
Kelly McGonigal, a Stanford researcher and author of the newly published The Upside of Stress: Why Stress Is Good for You, and How to Get Good at It, has admitted to doing a recent u-turn on stress, from writing and speaking on its dangers to evangelizing about its benefits. Her change of heart began when she noticed data in 2011 that suggested that stress only damages your health and happiness if you believe it’s going to damage your health and happiness. “Viewing stress as harmful interferes with people’s ability to use stress as the resource that it actually is,” she would go on to argue in her new book, which builds on a popular TED talk she gave in 2013.
She found that oxytocin, the much-discussed “cuddle hormone” that warms your heart when you hug someone, actually is produced in stressful situations. It helps you turn a freeze-or-flee mindset into a productive one. It puts you in a social state of mind and opens you to getting assistance from other people. It’s a Mama Grizzly inspiration to remember the loved ones or the values that you’ll fight for, no matter the cost. And it even protects your cardiovascular system while you take on the challenge.
Many experienced athletes or performers intentionally use pre-performance anxiety as rocket fuel to motivate themselves, to kick into what
McGonigal calls “challenge response” mode. Magic Johnson used to call the NBA playoffs “Winning Time.” Other athletes fully understood it was win-or-go-home time too, but they tried not to think about it, lest they choke. But by embracing the stakes playfully and passionately, Johnson propelled himself to higher levels of performance than those who tried to treat championship Game 7s as “oh, just another game.”
I’ve been absolutely terrified every moment of my life – and I’ve never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do.–Artist Georgia O’Keeffe
Anxiety is an inevitable part of life, and success typically requires embracing it (or at least tolerating it) rather than avoiding it. McGonigal writes of how a fear of flying robbed her of many experiences she coveted, until she decided she’d fly even though she was afraid. She doesn’t now love flying, but she manages. (I think about how I needlessly narrowed my career options because of anxiety in high school about doing math; if I’d accepted the fear and survived the math, I may not be a math whiz today, but I’d have many career paths open to me that aren’t now open.)
McGonigal notes in her book that she saw many athletes harness stress to “get jacked” for their games, yet those same people would be spooked by an exam in English class. In one case, the stress helped them perform, and in the other case it now corroded clear and confident thinking. But the stress hadn’t changed—only their relationship with it had.
The research by McGonigal and others confirms some ancient wisdom from my favorite leadership and life guru, Lao Tzu:
The best athlete wants his opponent at his best. The best general enters the mind of his enemy. The best businessman serves the communal good. The best leader follows the will of the people. All of them embody the virtue of non-competition. Not that they don’t love to compete, but they do it in the spirit of play.–Tao te Ching [Steven Mitchell’s paraphrased translation]
It’s not easy, and it’s certainly not automatic, to see a threat that terrifies and paralyzes you and to see it instead as as a fun or meaningful challenge than. But consider Nietzsche’s observation that “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” Indeed, McGonical suggests that the most powerful way to embrace stress is to focus yourself on the “whys” of your own life. In other words, be ever-mindful of the people and the causes that bring your life meaning, the people and causes that you’d defend with your very life.
“Chasing meaning is better for your health than trying to avoid discomfort,” McGonical observed in 2013. “Go after what it is that creates meaning in your life and then trust yourself to handle the stress that comes with it.”
Rob AsgharContributor
I write about what success looks like today.full bio →
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