Stress may kill, but stressful situations can bring out the absolute best in us. If we can identify our heightened sense of focus in emotionally elevated situations while staying below our personal redlines, we can use our stress like a powerful drug. From artofmanliness.com:

If you’re like many people, you likely experienced small cognitive and physical breakdowns due to fear and stress. Whenever we encounter stressful situations, our body is flooded with hormones that elevate our heart rate to prime us to fight or flee. Our bodies become aroused and ready for action – a good thing. But if we get too amped up, our physical and cognitive skills fall apart – a very bad, potentially dangerous thing.

For a baseball player, the ultimate goal is to be just amped up enough that we are mentally aroused, but not so much so that we chase pitches at our shoe tops or become tight in our deliveries. Of course, we’ve all heard the antiquated, unscientific crap that sports psychologists tout. “Find the zone” and other generic mantras aren’t what we do around here.

Several sports performance researchers during the 1970s and 1980s found that athletes experienced increases and decreases in different motor skills at different stress-induced heart rates. For example, when heart rates reach above 115 beats per minute (BPM), fine motor skills, like writing, begin to deteriorate. However, when heart rates are between 115 and 145 BPM, complex motor skills, like throwing a football or aiming a gun, are at their peak. Cognitive functioning is also at its peak in this range. After 145 BPM, performance for complex motor skills begins to diminish, but gross motor skills like running and lifting remain at optimal levels. When heart rates go above 175 BPM, capacity for all skilled tasks disintegrates and individuals begin to experience catastrophic cognitive and physical breakdown.

The ability to use stress to our advantage is in no way unique to sports or training. How about an altercation with a loved one? What’s wrong with using an argument, with its subsequent elevated heartbeat, and putting it to good use?

Imagine you’re 22 years old and engaged in a shouting match with your brother over something trivial. You both say some things you don’t mean and walk away furious, hearts beating fast. If cognitive function is peaking in this moment, we may want to take some time and immediately write down some solution-based thoughts. Cognitive functions encompass reasoning, memory, attention and language. They point directly to the acquisition of information and, ultimately, knowledge. It’s possible that you’re at your peak capacity to solve whatever problem was causing friction. If you’re near a computer in that moment and decide to research the topic, you probably got smarter.

In order to use stress to our advantage, we first need to re-conceptualize how we think of it. From Shawn Achor, in The Happiness Advantage:

if we could get someone to change their mindset around stress to see it as a challenge instead of as a threat, they had 23% fewer stress-related symptoms like headaches, backaches and fatigue. The stress was still there but the effect upon the body was completely changed. So stress is inevitable but its effects on us are not.

Once we begin thinking of stress as something that can be used to our advantage, we can begin assessing our own individual responses. Just like with anger, we want to use our stress, not let it send us into an out-of-control tailspin. When the adrenaline begins to flood your body, acknowledge the reaction, harness it and use it to fuel positive, productive outcomes.

We’ve long known how to use our minds to push ourselves physically. We can also use the physiological reactions in our bodies to grow our intellectual muscles.

Stress is a prehistoric gift to us all. Let’s unwrap it.

Kap