For several years now, I’ve heard my friends and family speak of how stressed they are due to work and how they badly want to be stress-free, so as to lead a healthy life. Somehow, I hardly ever feel stressed due to work. Simon Sinek’s ‘Leaders Eat Last’ told me why.
Under pressure, it is difficult to work – very true. But it is also true that a certain amount of stress makes us work better. Here are certain reasons why.
We’re Biologically Tuned To Handle Stress
The feeling of adrenaline is very important in flight or fight responses of a human being, and that comes due to stressors in the environment around us.
That may be a fierce dog glaring at us, someone trying to attack us with a weapon or just a simple reflex action of pulling back your hand when your skin feels extreme heat demonstrates that we are biologically tuned to handle stress.
Stress Is Crucial To Survival
Yes, some amount of stress is crucial to survival. In the book ‘Leaders Eat Last’, Simon Sinek describes how, as early humans, we were always alert and on the lookout for wild animals.
Sometimes we’d be on the lookout to avoid being eaten and sometimes to hunt for dinner.
This alertness comes from the natural stressful situations early humans were in all the time which helped them survive. When a stressful situation is presented to humans, our blood pressure rises and our senses become twice as an alert.
Psychologists call this “eustress”. “Eu” is a prefix that means “good” – good stress – that aids in survival as well as in recalling experiences learned through past stress trauma, helping us in avoiding mistakes we already once made in the same situation.
Also Read: Boss’s Complaint That A Woman Isn’t Working 24×7 Like Her Male Colleagues Leads To People Sharing Toxic Boss Stories
Stress In Workplace
A lot of companies have started very fancy mental health seminars which should be about the employees speaking, but is usually about a facilitator speaking to them about how they can manage their mental health better.
Stress is good at the workplace too. That being said, it is absolutely not good for any employee to be overburdened with work and not be paid enough for it. But stress drives performance.
A lot of you may relate to this. If you’re a student, and you have a lot of assignments to do within one day, don’t you feel that extra push of energy and finish them all? (Of course, not counting good students like me who don’t do the assignments and choose to sleep instead.)
If you’re in an office and there’s a deadline coming up with very little time left, isn’t your productivity the highest then? And right now, I, as a freelancer, am frequently told to complete more than a week’s work in 2 days. I do it, and eustress is to be thankful for.
It also helps to step out of our comfort zones and take on some challenges to push our boundaries and limitations. We become better with every difficult situation we face.
History has been proof that stress is good for our health starting from the very early humans and the idea of positive stress is still relevant. It is all about the way in which an individual perceives a situation.
So, the next time you’re feeling too stressed, use positive reinforcements like thinking of the satisfaction that you’d achieve after you complete all the work, or eyeing the long break you’d take if you finish your tasks on time!
Image Source: Google Images
Sources: Forbes, Psychology Today, The Guardian
Connect With The Blogger: @som_beingme
This post is tagged under: Adrenaline rush, leaders eat last, mental health, workplace stress, best workplace practices, motor neuron capabilities, cost of mental health care in india
