Stress Revisited

January 25, 2012 – One all too common challenge faced by everyone is stress. Stress is an integral part of life. Stress motivates us to accomplish our goals. As such, stress is desirable. Left unchecked, however, stress has the power to overwhelm thereby blocking accomplishments and often leads to adverse health conditions by causing elevated adrenaline and cortisol levels for prolonged periods of time.  

If all this sounds familiar, it is. I previously wrote several pieces on harnessing stress to achieve success. See Res Ipsa Moments Blog dated May 7, 2010 and newsletter articles from May and June 2010 (www.resipsa.net/newletter.htm). In those writings I delineated several approaches to dealing with stress and suggested that an interactive approach to stress was the most effective way to harness stress and successfully achieve goals.

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal published a relevant article (“When Stress Is Good For You” http://on.wsj.com/xI6kee) describing the science behind stress management, the benefits conferred by reasonable stress levels, and the harmful effects of prolonged high stress levels. One of the more interesting studies discussed dealt with college students who were coached to believe that feeling stress before taking an exam was natural and could improve performance on the exam. The control group was not coached. The coached group of students posted higher levels of salivary amylase, a protein maker for adrenaline that is linked to episodes of beneficial stress. More importantly for our purposes, the coached students scored higher on the both the practice exam in the lab and in the real exam a few months later.  

It is gratifying to see how scientific research lends credence to coaching modalities.  

There is truly nothing new under the sun. Every day brings new challenges and so every day is different. Yet, each day’s unique challenges offer us pathways to realize opportunities. Our goal is to adopt the mindset which will provide us with the resilience and broad-minded thinking to turn daily challenges into opportunities which will then propel us to success.  

Consider the possibilities.

Adam J. Krim

www.resipsa.net

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