3 Ways to Turn Stress Into Action

I once asked a Navy fighter pilot whether he felt stressed when he was landing his little airplane in the middle of the night, in the middle of a storm, onto a tiny aircraft carrier tossing around in the ocean way below.

Jet fighter leaving aircraft carrier.

Source: noraismail/Shutterstock

We were sitting on an airplane—a 727, I believe, heading from Washington D.C. to Detroit, and I was looking for the air sickness bag when he kindly handed me his and said: “Don’t worry, I’m a pilot.” When I took the bag with relief, he added, “But I couldn’t do anything if something happened to this plane—I fly F14s off of aircraft carriers.”

That’s when I asked him the question about stress. His answer: “We feel all those things—our heart beating fast, sweaty, feeling like running to the bathroom, but we’re taught to make our stress response work for us.”

In fact, he was right. The brain’s stress response is a very sensitive indicator that something is amiss and that you need to change course. The stress center is the same part of the brain that gives you the energy to do that—to fight or flee and feel exhilarated when you succeed.

Whether you feel stressed or exhilarated depends on two things: the demands placed on you and the amount of control you have over the situation.

If you are in a high-demand situation, when everything happening in the world around you is out of your control, you feel helpless and stressed. When you are in a low-demand, low-control situation, you feel bored. When you are in a high-demand, high-control situation, you feel exhilarated. This is the principle behind many video games.

In fact, research using single-neuron recording devices has shown that in a relaxed state, nerve cells in the brain’s adrenalin stress centers hardly fire at all; at peak performance, only a few selective nerve cells in that region fire. During extreme stress, nerve cells in that region fire out of control across the board, crowding out those that are needed to perform. More recent studies show that a drug that increases noradrenalin and dopamine at synaptic nerve endings increased arousal and affected decision-making performance in a similar dose-dependent manner.

So, if you’re feeling overwhelmed by the things happening around you that you can’t control, try fooling your brain into thinking you’re in control of the situation and that will reduce your stress response.

Rainbow at sunset.

Source: Esther M. Sternberg M.D.

Think of the relationship between stress and your performance like a rainbow. At the far left of the rainbow, your stress response is very low, you are relaxed and half asleep, maybe even bored. Your performance is low too. In order to perform at peak, you need to get your stress response up to the middle of the rainbow. But if your stress response gets too high, you fall over the edge of the rainbow and your performance fails. That’s when you feel your stress response—your heart beating fast, feeling anxious, and sweaty. It is telling you that you need to do something to throttle back to the middle of the rainbow.

How do you do that? Parse, prioritize, and act—and better still, make the action one that helps others.

• Parse: Break the situation down into its smallest controllable parts.
• Prioritize: Decide which of the parts is easier to control and which is harder to change.
• Act: Pick the one that’s easiest to control—preferably something you like and are good at doing. Then take action. It can be as simple as cooking dinner for your family, bringing groceries to a home-bound person, or volunteering at a local shelter. That will help you gain a tiny bit of control, reducing your stress in the process.

And that brings me to a bonus way to take control of your stress response: Do good. Research has shown that altruistic behaviors—lovingkindness and helping others, reduce stress and trigger the brain’s dopamine reward and endorphin anti-pain regions that enhance positive emotions. This hearkens back to the Dalai Lama and Buddhist monks' compassion meditation, and indeed to the core of virtually every one of the world’s religions, captured in the adage “love thy neighbor.” On top of that, doing so gives you a sense of purpose—another important way to reduce stress, and turn bad stress into good.

All this points to another way to get through tough times that are out of your control: find meaning. Viktor Frankl, an Austrian psychiatrist who survived a Nazi concentration camp during WWII, attributed his resilience and strength to finding meaning. Millions of copies of his book Man’s Search For Meaning have been sold worldwide since he first published it in 1946.

Perhaps, then, if each of us finds meaning in our own lives and does good through it by helping others in our own small world, together we will make the larger world a better place and balance out the negative with the positive, the bad with the good.