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👋A Note to New Subscribers👋
A bunch of you are new folks who are getting their first ever edition of the newsletter. Hey there! Welcome!
If you’re unsure why you’re getting this, you probably opted in when you subscribed to a partnering newsletter that recommends me. Allow me a moment to introduce myself and the newsletter:
I’m Justin. I’m a Conscious Leadership & Executive coach. This is my newsletter, the Leadership Lab. It was originally created to be a resource for my executive coaching clients and has since grown to be for anyone who is interested and invested in personal transformation. If that’s you, you’re in the right place!
The newsletter is a combination of long-form pieces and summaries of my podcast No Clear Answers, in which I explore common personal transformation topics with my fellow coaches Corey Wilks, PsyD, and Rikki Goldenberg.
If you’d like to say hello, drop a comment on this article or hop on over to the subscriber chat!
Onto today’s newsletter!
Listen on Apple, Spotify, or YouTube.
Chapters
0:00 Cold Open
1:15 Show Intro
1:33 Today’s Topic: Stress
1:57 What is Stress?
5:38 Managing the Two Types of Stress: Eustress & Distress
13:31 Are you stressed or are you pushing an edge?
17:12 Stress & the Optimal Level of Arousal
26:25 What are the main sources of distress?
44:12 What are the most common symptoms of stress?
54:03 How do people try to deal with stress that doesn’t work?
1:05:40 What are effective stress management strategies?
1:23:34 Final perspectives on stress
What do you mean when you say you’re stressed? What’s happening in your inner and outer world?
Stress can mean a lot of different things. At it’s most scientific, stress is anything that activates a system. It’s not good or bad nor is it inherently detrimental. It’s simply an input to your system that activates it in some way.
While helpful, this definition doesn’t capture the human experience of being stressed. When people say they’re stressed, what they usually mean is that they’re feeling stretched, overwhelmed, or near some personal limit of theirs. It means you’re experiencing so much activation that you’re not sure you’ll be able to handle it all.
Stress is part of being human. Try as you may, you can’t remove it from your life altogether. Given that, how can you metabolize stress to your benefit? How can you manage stress to maximize your growth and impact instead of collapsing to the demands of life?
In this week’s episode of No Clear Answers, we talk everything stress, including:
The important distinction between eustress, distress, and trauma
How to empower yourself around stress by owning the edge that you’re choosing to push
Common signs of stress that you might not realize
What to do about our tendency to drop the stuff that most helps us recover from stress when we need it most
How to use the 3 C’s — Connection, Contemplation, and Creativity—to recover during periods of stress
Creating an Empowered Relationship with Stress
If we’re going to talk about having a conscious and empowered relationship with stress, we need to talk about two things:
First, we need to talk about the distinction between distress and eustress.
And second, we need to talk about athletes.
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Professional athletes have a unique challenge. They train for a living. Their goal: be in optimal condition on the date of their competition.
To do this, they intentionally and consciously stress themselves in a way that drives positive adaptation, all without burning themselves out before the competition.
In other words, their entire game is inducing and managing stress for growth.
To do that, they create as much eustress as possible.
If you’re unfamiliar, eustress is stress that has a net beneficial impact on health and wellbeing. It’s stress that results in growth. This stands in contrast to distress, which is stress that in a net detriment to our health and wellbeing and generates breakdown.
What makes something eustressful or distressful? It’s all about context—
Are you adequately resourced to meet the dose of stress that’s coming at you, physically, emotionally, and psychologically?
Do you have adequate recovery systems in place to grow from it and come back the next day?
In the episode, Corey shared the Theory of Optimal Arousal. The theory says that each of us has an optimal level of arousal or activation. Too little activation and we’re not motivated to do anything. Too much and we’re overwhelmed and fall apart.
So step one to making something eustressful: calibrate the dose.
A good rule of thumb is called the 80% rule: give 80% of your energy to the task so that you end the day with 20% left.
While some days will call you to give more or and others to give less, giving 80% usually indicates that you’ve stressed yourself enough to stimulate growth while leaving enough resources to recover and show up again tomorrow. Any less and you’re not growing. Any more and you risk overwhelming yourself.
Assuming the dose is right, there’s one more essential area of focus to make a stressor eustressful: recovery.
You can’t positively adapt to stress if you don’t have the proper conditions for recovery. Stress alone doesn’t cause growth. It’s the body and nervous system’s response to stress — the physiological and neurological adaptations — that creates growth. While you need stress, stress is nothing without recovery.
In the episode, Corey pointed to the big three conditions that are foundational to recovery:
Sleep
Diet
Exercise
Surprised? I didn’t think so. You know it, I know it, we all know it. In times of stress these are the more important than ever, and so frequently they’re the first thing we sacrifice. Don’t.
Instead, be like an athlete. Peak training (aka peak stress) is when athletes are most dialed in around sleep, diet, and exercise.
While the big three create the optimal conditions for recovery, recovery itself has two components: Disconnecting and Recharging.
Most of us are familiar with disconnection. It’s all too common that we reach for the “junk food” of disconnection — TV, Video Games, Booze, Isolation. These activities disconnect us from the stressor, at least partially, but mostly numb us out and don’t actually facilitate recovery.
To become a master of recovery, you need to reach for activities that actively recharge you. Activities in community, that facilitate creativity, that bring you alive in ways that your work never could.
These will change from person-to-person, and you probably have an intuitive sense of what those are versus the activities that just numb you out. In times of stress, reach for those instead of the numbing agents.
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In summary: The key to having stress be a eustressor, or growth-inducing, is to get the right dose of stress and have proper systems to recover from the stressor and integrate learnings.
This all sums up to what’s called The Growth Equation: (The proper dose of) Stress + (Adequate) Recovery = Growth.
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Want to dive deeper? Then listen on Apple, Spotify, or YouTube.
And for those of you in the northern hemisphere, happy spring!
-Justin
If you enjoy reading the Leadership Lab, consider clicking the ❤️ or 🔄 button above so more people can discover it on Substack 🙏