13. I'm not stressed, you're stressed!

It's currently, as I post this blog, a Monday.

Which, let’s be honest, isn’t one of the better days of the week, is it?

No. It can often be every bit as painful as our minds, and pits of anxiety in our stomachs, like to warn us about from approximately 5pm on a Sunday.

In addition to it signalling the end of our glorious weekends, it can often mean that the following are upon us:

• Coming across like a total weirdo on a Zoom call.

• Deadlines. Lots of deadlines.

• 1000s of emails.

• Including a “As previously discussed…” from passive-aggressive Carol.

• Life admin, that we've been avoiding for months.

• Trying to understand what on earth NFTs are.

• And, as lockdown eases, trying to remember how to get dressed.

For the calm, composed, and level-headed out there, I salute you.

For the rest of us, the above can range from mildly anxiety-inducing, to prompting a full-on meltdown.

Now, I don’t know the detailed physiological effects that excessive stress has on the body, but it’s pretty safe to say that it isn’t great.

I mean, we need look no further than how we feel after a long day at work for evidence of that. We’re basically left with just about enough energy to grab the Tony’s Chocolonely from the cupboard, crawl into a ball on the sofa, and weep a solitary tear.

And unless Carol’s passive aggression has literally driven us to the brink of insanity, we don’t often hear people yelp with excitement “wooooo, I’m stressed!”

So, stress doesn’t have the best of reputations. However, is it always a bad thing?

Considering we’re not even halfway through this post yet (sorry about that), you can probably guess that the answer isn’t: Yes, full stop, end of blog.

Nope, as much of a pain in the arse as it can be, there can also be times where stress can be a pretty useful thing.

By way of example, let's look at something that 98% of Instagram did last year.

No, not start a blog, I mean run a 5km.

How was the first one we ever did? Yep, awful.

And how was the second one we ever did? Yep, also pretty awful. But also slightly quicker.

On said runs, clearly our body was under a fair amount of stress... our 192 BPM heart rate, lactic acid-filled legs, and bruised ego would be able to testify to that.

Though despite it being fairly brutal at the time, the end result was us being a little quicker, a little more resilient, and generally a little bit better.

And isn’t that a bit of a metaphor for life!?

As we very well know, getting better at anything is basically impossible without some degree of tension and stress… and a slight bruising to the ego. We see that across any area of life, whether it be work, play, some sort of goal, a hobby, or just the general demands of a Monday to Friday.

So, although our natural reaction to feeling stressed may be to want to put Carol in a rear-naked chokehold, then jet off to some remote island to live a life of scroting about on the beach and smashing back Espresso Martinis, a certain level of tension can serve us well.

Without it, then regardless of the number of coffee liqueur-based cocktails on tap, we’d probably just get bored after a while. Naturally, that wouldn't good. To quote American author Tim Ferriss, “the opposite of happiness isn’t sadness, it’s boredom”. Fair.

Of course, finding this balance, or ‘a certain level of tension’ is much easier said than done.

As someone who’s relatively ambitious, but also prone to feeling like an anxious wreck, I feel like I spend my life trying to navigate that rickety bridge between boredom and stress, trying desperately not to fall off into the waters below.

As my expertly crafted Google Doc/Emoji-based artwork depicts:

(Yes, I had a lot of fun drawing that).

This fairly unstable bridge seems to appear across a whole host of areas in life. To name a few:

• Work:

  • Too busy: Regularly feeling like we’re on the verge of a mental breakdown.

  • Too quiet: Unstimulated, and don’t feel like our careers are going anywhere.

• Social plans:

  • Too many: Constantly shattered, and broke.

  • Too few: We’re boring, and don’t feel like we have a life…. Or any friends.

• Exercise:

  • Too much: We get injured and depressed.

  • Too little: We get unfit and depressed.

The list goes on, but the point remains the same: life's good on that bridge.

It feels like the optimal zone where we’re challenging ourselves, but doing so without either 1) having a pit of anxiety in our stomachs, or 2) feeling that we’re about to have a heart attack.

We often hear people refer to this as “good busy”... and less often as “Eustress”. Which basically means good stress. And by basically, I mean literally - it’s derived from the Greek prefix ‘eu’ which means good.

Of course, the relevant levels of stress we feel are often dependent on what we’re actually doing. As author Simon Sinek says, “When we work hard on something we believe in, it's called passion. When we work hard on something we don't believe in, it's called stress”.

And I suppose, if we feel the short-term stress is worth the long-term pay-off, then we may be happy to get in the water. As the following suggests:

(Yes, that was just an excuse for me to draw another picture).

Stress often gets a bad rap. Understandable really, we’ve all been stressed, and it’s horrid.

However, without it, we’d probably just be bored and our minds left free to wander... which, certainly in my case, is more often than not a recipe for disaster. So, a certain degree of stress can be a good thing.

And when faced with the joys of deadlines, unnecessarily passive-aggressive emails, and the general day-to-day grind of life, I can sometimes find that a useful thing to remember.