use stress as a strength

Summary

we’re all stressed. the question isn’t how to get rid of it, it’s how to use it. quick story first. Biosphere 2 grew trees inside a sealed dome. no wind. the trees grew tall and fast and then fell over because they never developed the stress wood that real trees use to stay upright. zero stress is not the goal. the right kind of stress is the goal.

1. eustress vs distress. eustress is the wind. it pushes you, you grow stress wood, you stand taller. distress is the storm that breaks you. the same situation can be either, depending on how you process it.

2. mindset shift. ask “what can I learn from this” instead of “why is this happening to me.” reframes a stressful moment into a growth moment without changing the moment itself.

3. complete work on a longer timeline. self-induced deadlines create most of our distress. give yourself more runway than you think you need, then the work feels generative instead of crushing.

4. the ease overwhelm continuum. too much ease and you stagnate. too much overwhelm and you collapse. the sweet spot is just past comfortable, where you stretch. live there as often as you can.

5. focus on what you control. distress comes from spinning on the uncontrollable. eustress comes from acting on the controllable. write down both lists in real time, only work the second one.

stress doesn’t break you. avoiding it does. develop the stress wood. try harder.

Transcript

introduction to the topic of stress

The most impactful business is the business that genuinely improves another human, a better human business. And to grow a business like this, you have to continually improve yourself. This podcast is a documentation of that thesis, scaling businesses and also personal growth. My goal is for you to shortcut this journey.

So if you’re ready to try hard, subscribe. If you like what you’re hearing, please share and enjoy. Let’s talk about stress today. You’re stressed. I’m stressed. We’re all stressed at some point in our lives, in our careers, with family. But how can we use that stress as a strength? I’m Jerred Moon.

This is the Better Human Business Podcast. And I do want to talk about stress today. Before I get into it, make sure you go sign up for the newsletter. Make this one quick. A lot of you already have. And I appreciate it, but I just want to keep that reminder out there for all the new listeners that are coming in.

reminder to sign up for the newsletter

You go to jerred.com, J-E-R-R-E-D.com. Sign up for the Try Harder newsletter. Would love to have you. Now you may have heard this story before, maybe not. But in the 1980s, in the Arizona desert, they built what was called the Biosphere 2. And it was a massive glass enclosure. And it aimed to be like this world, miniature, self-sustaining ecosystem where life could flourish at its highest level.

So scientists controlled everything inside the environment. They purified the air, filtered the light, purified the water. And they were trying to build what could be like a blueprint for humanity. But what ended up happening over time, they planted all these trees and plants and everything. But the trees would get to a certain height.

And when they would start to grow, they would falter. They would topple over. And the scientists didn’t really know what was happening at first until they looked into it a little bit more and they realized that there was no wind. There was no wind inside the biodome. And what wind does to a tree is it blows, as it’s growing, it blows the tree, right?

the story of the biosphere 2 project and its lessons on stress

It blows the tree. It blows through the branches. And a tree has to react to this. So when it’s getting pushed around by the wind, trees don’t just fall over, right? Even in some pretty extreme winds, trees don’t just fall over. What they do is they become more resilient. Their roots go deeper and their roots become stronger, the trees become stronger.

But without this stress pushing up against them, without this wind, their roots were not strong enough to sustain the height of the tree as it would grow. Now when I first heard this story, I researched it to see if that was, was this legit? Or is this just a fun story people tell about killing comfort, going against stress?

And the story is very much true. Now there are a lot of other environmental factors in a biosphere, trying to control a perfect environment, trying to do things, trying to make your own nature and not nature let be nature. But in the end, it’s a true story and I think it’s a great way to illustrate the stress in our lives that a lot of people don’t want any stress, they don’t want any stress in their life at all.

the distinction between eustress and distress

That’s a major goal for people, reduce stress, eliminate stress, avoid stress, and that’s fine. You can go down that path. But ultimately is that really what is good for you? Because the more you grow, the more you try to advance in this world, the harder things will get. And will you have a root system deep enough?

Will you have been through enough of the small stressors to be able to handle the bigger stressors that may come later on? When I was in pilot training, one of the things they did, it was like the first week, they set us all in a room and they bring in like this performance psychologist. And one thing that he briefed on the first day was the difference between eustress and distress.

So that’s eustress, E-U-S-T-R-E-S-S, and distress. And they’re both types of stress that can impact the body and the mind differently. So eustress is a positive type of stress that can motivate you, energize you, and it can help you focus more. Just think about an athlete in a game, there’s a lot of anxiety, there’s a lot of stress around the start of a game or when you’re in a game, you’re playing a game.

mindset shift: viewing stress as an opportunity

But they’re not distressed, they’re not falling apart and unraveling, right? A true athlete, a true competitor, they feel that stress but they’re channeling that stress to become better, to focus more, to get motivated. But distress is a negative type of stress. This is the stress that we are actually trying to avoid.

It can cause anxiety, worry, self-doubt, it can increase your blood pressure, it can force you to produce too much cortisol, there are a lot of bad things with distress. And we’re sitting there, he’s talking about these two different types of stress and he’s basically lets us know the next year or two years of your life are going to be incredibly stressful.

There’s nothing you can do about it. 12 hours a day, 12 hours a day mandatory being in the office when you start pilot training, that’s mandatory. They eventually ease up on that but it’s mandatory if you show up at 5 a.m., you’re not allowed to leave till 5 p.m. then when you get home you need to study.

completing work on a longer timeline to reduce pressure

It’s just very stressful and then people yelling at you, instructor pilots yelling at you while you’re flying an aircraft, just a lot of stuff, it’s a very stressful environment. But you have to learn how to take that and not let it turn into distress. You have to somehow turn it into eustress and that’s the same with most anything that’s happening in our lives right now.

So how can we do that? How can we, we’re going to face the problems, we’re going to face stress but how can we actually apply a framework to turn it into eustress, make our best attempt? Well I have four ways. The first, this one’s easier said than done but it is just a mindset shift. When you identify stress, you have to start asking yourself some simple questions.

When a problem comes up and you’re stressed out about it, maybe ask yourself what can I learn from this? How can I grow? Even in the moment, the moment it’s happening, if you can have that level of clarity, what can I learn from what’s going on right now, how can I grow? That’s the first thing. It’s a lot harder to just be in a situation where you’re stressed and you have a problem and just be like, hey shift your mindset.

the ease and overwhelm continuum: finding balance

That’s a very hard thing to do but what are other ways we can do it? Well the second thing is complete work on a longer timeline. Sometimes the stress that we have is self-induced. We’re trying to get too much done every single damn day. Complete your work on a longer timeline. Instead of trying to get 16 things done today, maybe only get three things done and know that everything else is going to have to be pushed to the next day.

Just complete your work on a longer timeline. I recently talked about quarterly planning in one of the podcast episodes. If you follow the full quarterly planning process that I have laid out for entrepreneurs, there’s only nine things that you’re even allowed to achieve in a quarter. Nine things. Now they need to be nine things that are big enough to move your business forward, move you forward as a human being but there are only nine things.

Some people are like, well I can get way more done than nine things in a quarter but there’s all the other factors in life. Yeah, if we had a perfect schedule with no interruptions and life never interrupted us or interjected, then yeah, we could get a lot more done but it takes some of the pressure off.

focusing on what you can control to minimize distress

Okay, I only need to do nine things this quarter to really move my business forward and then I’ll do nine things next quarter. Don’t stress out about trying to do every single thing. Just complete your work on a longer timeline. Stretch things out over a couple of weeks instead of a couple of days.

Just give it a try with your current to-do list. See if it helps you out. The next two is I have continuums. The first one is the ease and overwhelm continuum. So we’re looking at kind of like a continuum, like a timeline. On one hand we have ease, we have easy. On the other side we have overwhelm.

Okay, so you have to decide where you want to be in this continuum because once you get to overwhelm, that’s where stress starts to come in and this goes in line with completing your work on a longer timeline. But if you’re getting overwhelmed, you should start to recognize that you have too much. You need to sit down, write things out, plan it out, put things on a calendar, move things around.

Hey, too much is going on. Something needs to get off my plate. I need to delegate something. I need to tell somebody no. I need to move things around. I need to reschedule something. Whatever it is, if you feel like you’re getting to the overwhelm category, you need to take action. On the flip side, if you’re in the ease category, things are too easy, you might need to start adding some things.

Like hey, I’m just not challenged right now. It doesn’t mean you need to fill your calendar up. It just means maybe it’s time to take on a new challenge. Maybe it’s time to do something else. Things are a little too easy. You need that stress. You don’t want to be in the easy, comfortable phase of life.

Now the last thing is another continuum, and on the one side we have being completely powerless, and on the other side we have complete control. So of these two, you want to make sure you’re somewhere in this continuum. You don’t want to be completely powerless. Now it’s nearly impossible to be completely in control on the other side, but you want to be somewhere in there, especially when you’re dealing with a problem.

You have to recognize, hey, for me to be less stress, for this to be you stress instead of distress, I can’t be powerless. I have to be more in control. So what can you control? It’s focusing on what you can control. I was just talking about this with my wife recently. We’re going through kind of an overwhelming, somewhat stressful phase of life, and this is not anything like hardcore.

We just have a lot going on, like everyone does. We’re trying to finish some construction projects in real estate, currently trying to sell our house. Our kids have crazy schedules. We have business. There’s just a lot going on, a lot more than we are accustomed to, and when we were talking about all this that we had going on, we just went back to, hey, what can we control?

I can’t actually control the construction timeline. We’re waiting on things to be done. I can’t actually control whether or not someone buys my house. What I can control is keeping it clean, keeping it ready to show. These are just basic things, like, okay, our kids have crazy schedules. That’s not going to change.

What can we control? How can I prep more the night before to have a better day the next day? They’re just little things. It’s focusing on the control variables that you actually can control, because you can’t actually control every single thing. I wish that we could. I’m a control freak. I wish I could control every single element, and to be honest, I do the best of my ability to control as much as I can, but I know that I can’t control it all, but when I get to that powerless side, where I feel like I can’t make a decision, I can’t control, I can’t do anything, that’s when the stress levels are getting really high.

When I’m in the powerless mode, when I cannot do anything, I feel like other people are in control. Someone else is driving, and I’m just in the backseat. I don’t like that. That causes a lot of distress for me, so to move that more to you stress, focus on what we can control, and that’s everything.

Those are the four steps. You can shift your mindset to, hey, this is a stressful moment. What can I learn? How can I grow? If you are trying to get a little bit less done, you’re completing your work on a longer timeline. You won’t be stressed when you get to the end of the day, when in reality, let’s say you accomplished four things today that are pretty awesome things to accomplish in any given day, but your expectation was to accomplish eight, so you think you suck.

You’re stressed. You’re being hard on yourself mentally. Now you’re in the distress category, but in reality, you did great today. You finished some things, so if you complete your work on a longer timeline, that can lower a lot of distress. Make sure you’re somewhere in between this easy and overwhelmed with whatever you have going on in life.

If you’re in that overwhelmed category, how can we back it down? What can we do? How can we utilize our friends, our family, our team? And then lastly, the powerless versus control. Don’t put me in that powerless category. How can I control? What can I control? Even if a lot of variables are outside of my control, what are the things that I can control right now to make me feel like I have some power in the situation?

If you can do those things, you’re getting away from distress. Distress is the stress we don’t want, right? It’s going to ruin our health. It’s going to ruin our mindset. It will lead to depression. It will lead to anxiety. A lot of problems come from distress. But eustress, if we can look at how we are actually handling the stress, how we know we’re going to grow from it, and hey, know that everything, every problem you tackle, every uncomfortable thing that you go through is building you into a better human being that is such a better mindset.

You’re in the eustress category. You’re getting the motivation. You’re getting energized and you’re becoming more focused and you’re building yourself into a better version of who you need to be later on in life. But this takes a whole lot of you having to try harder.