#39 - Are “Eustress?”
Yesterday we covered how to manage “bad” stress and for the most part avoided anything about “good” stress, or Eustress. At times stress is unavoidable and necessary to prepare your body for successfully accomplishing a task. It can build motivation and encourage focus. In many ways Eustress is a difficult concept to understand, but today we’re going to talk about how you can use positive stress to prepare and perform at your best.
This graph shows an inverted U correlation between performance level and stress. All this means is that if you want to do your best, you want to be a little stressed but not too much. If you have no stress at all, you really don’t care about the results, the chemicals in your body aren’t giving you an extra boost for a difficult task, and you probably aren’t going to do your best. If you were to slowly add stress, your performance would slowly improve to a point. At a certain point though, the butterflies get distracting, your mind is racing, your heart rate is too high, maybe you feel sick. These common symptoms of excess stress will also prevent you from doing your best. Finding that optimum amount of stress is difficult and takes practice. One of the key ways to increase stress is to think about the importance of doing well. A good way to reduce stress is to breathe deeply while thinking about how the good stress will help you do your best. Think, “it’s good that I feel a little stressed, it means I care about the results and my body is preparing to perform at its best.” For public speaking, the best way I know to reduce stress before a presentation is to pick out specific people in the audience and just look at them for a few seconds—just observing them and realizing that they’re just people makes me feel relaxed and ready to connect with my audience. In athletics it often helps to pick one specific “que” to focus on. For a runner it may be knee drive, for a skier powerful pole plant—whatever your sport is, it’s one thing you can focus on that will help you perform technically well.
This next graph shows the relationship between stress level and time. I’ve found that an important part of preparing for something important is to manage the stress during the lead-up to the performance. For an example, I’m going to use an important exam.
Prep – The Prep phase is the time way in advance of the exam. This is the class periods starting after the previous exam—the information will be tested, but the exam is still a ways down the road. During this time, stress would not be helpful—your body doesn’t need to be full of stress hormones. In fact, it would be unhealthy to have stress over this long period of time. That doesn’t mean you aren’t preparing. You are paying attention, taking notes, asking questions, etc. It’s just not frantic studying.
Motivation Building – If you’re like most people, at a certain point you should start studying but you really “don’t feel like it” yet. This is a great time to use a little stress to get yourself motivated and focused. A good way to build some stress here is to talk to people who have already began preparing. Ask about what they thought was most difficult, how hard the exam will be, etc. Usually this will build your stress because they’ll talk about how hard the exam was, how they’ve already studied a ton of hours, etc. Another good person to talk to is the person who doesn’t like exams; they will always have something to freak out about. Listen to them freak out and think about how unprepared you are right now and you’ll build the necessary stress to buckle down and focus.
“Study” Phase – Now that you are a little stressed out, use that stress to start studying. As you continue to study, your stress will begin to decline. Hopefully it’s because you’re feeling prepared, not because you no longer care (if it’s the latter, go talk to one of the freaking out people). We’ll talk more later about how to study effectively, but keep in mind that this is an important prep phase where you’re really getting ready to perform.
Performance Time – Your stress has largely subsided as you’ve studied but now it is almost exam time. When you finish studying (either because you’re ready or you ran out of time), reduce your stress as much as possible. More stress won’t help you perform better now on the exam, so there are two things to do. First, be positive to reduce stress—think, “I’ve got this in the bag. I’m so ready. I’m going to dominate.” Second, you want to feel and be confident. We’re going to talk a lot more about this tomorrow but for now, fake it till you make it. If anyone asks, always say you’re definitely ready (even if you’re not completely convinced yourself). Smile, relax, look like you already got back the score you wanted.
The example that I used is a great way to use stress to your advantage but it applies to many other situations as well. The length of time for each of these phases can vary quite a lot depending on the situation. For an exam, the last couple stages could last only a couple days. For a job interview it could last a few weeks. Almost any upcoming challenge you face will have these distinct phases, and you can perform at your best with slight variations on the example above. For your sport, how do these phases apply? Do you need to be a little more stressed or less?