Wanna hack your stress response?
Show me a startup founder that doesn’t get stressed and I will show you the real father Christmas!
Everyone gets stressed from time to time, it’s actually an evolutionary response, so cut yourself some slack if getting stressed is well, getting you stressed!
Read on if you want to discover how to hack your stress response.
I am true believer in examining the context of the things we encounter in order to reveal deeper insights, so with twenty plus years in sales I am no stranger to stress, be it in me or those around me. It was never more evident in some members of the team than when the quarter end was fast approaching and much of that confidence expressed at the sales meeting would start to dissolve in the face of a week quarter.
Well, it’s years later and instead of managing sales people I am coaching startup founders but the same rules apply in many aspects of entrepreneurism and professional salesmanship, especially the stress that comes with the territory. Not everyone is wired to manage stress well, and for good reason, enduring stress on an on-going basis is not good for ones health, and yet we put ourselves in stressful situations. The obvious answer is to stop putting ourselves in those situations. There’s a problem with that illuminating logic however; the startup environment breeds stress, uncertainty and anxiety and they are inseparable, right? Well, not exactly.
So what is stress?
As entrepreneurs we occasionally feel stress when managing all that it means to be a founder. It’s brought on when stuff doesn’t go according to plan, life it would seem is a consummate expert at pitching curve balls at us. However, that feeling of stress is actually an interpretation of, or better yet, a misinterpretation of our workloads and experiences. Let’s call that workload strain for ease of language.
In translating what strain is (the workload of day to day experience, whether its tasks or situations) we can describe it as a balance between the applied available resources, such as acumen, energy, time and ability possessed by you the individual and the successful management of the tasks and challenges being engaged with or experiences encountered. This situation, consciously or unconsciously experienced, is underpinned by the reality that the situation places you, the individual at the fulcrum of the two opposing forces, our resources and what we are dealing with.
When we lose that balance, the strain we carry remains the same, but what changes is our perception of it. It shifts from strain to stress. That perception shift might be triggered by the idea or the reality that we have had a change in available resources.
The moment you feel you do not have sufficient resources, whether it be time, ability, opportunity or something else, you are potentially susceptible to the transformation of strain into stress. So when we view stress and strain in these terms it is not a question of “how one manages stress within the business”; we can see this is simply just a change in perception of the event and functions of the job. If our experiencing of events is influenced by how we see things, and how we see things is affected or influenced by our energetic state, which is to say our inner sense of wellbeing, it rather becomes a question of “how one can maintain a higher state” in order to better manage the strain rather than deal with stress.
How to manage your energetic state
Today it seems we cannot go more than a few clicks on social media without experts extolling the many benefits to be gained from exercise. Because of the extensive research that has been carried out we know much about the beneficial effects of exercise on the body. We know that other than conditioning the muscular and vascular systems aerobic exercise triggers change and beneficial mood-enhancing chemical production in our brains. To the brain that vigorous exercise is interpreted as a stressful event, which is likely a residual evolutionary reaction from our early ancestry, that fight or flight response you are probably aware of.
As your heart rate increases, the brain thinks you are either fighting the enemy or fleeing from it. Anyone who has ever worked out knows if we push beyond the boundaries of our comfort zone we experience discomfort and pain. When that happens, in the brains of those who exercise regularly the body counters the pain by producing and releasing endorphins into their system, a chemical that counters the feeling of stress. In fact our endorphins’ main purpose is to minimise the discomfort of the fight or flight, or in our case the exercise, blocking the feeling of pain. There are numerous cases, especially amongst runners, but accounts have been given by many other sportspeople, of a feeling, ranging from pleasant in some to euphoric in others, that can be experienced after running a certain distance.
The endorphins created within the brain to counteract the feelings of physical pain can effect a change in the mood and perception of the individual, with many reporting a feeling of invincibility and superior performance going beyond normal states of being, allowing them to produce extraordinary results when ordinarily the body would appear to have exceeded its ability.
Things don’t stop there:
The body being the wonderfully complex organism that it is protects you further from the effects of stress by your brain releasing other neurochemicals at the same time as endorphins. One particular protein called BDNF (Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor) is particularly useful in keeping the brain healthy. This particular protein has a protective and reparative function towards your memory neurons and acts as an internal automatic reset switch. The role played by BDNF is not just limited to state; research has revealed that it is crucial for memory function together with staving off neurological diseases including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. We can see that regular exercise, apart from producing healthy bodies through the release of neurochemicals, can also influence the long-term health of the mind.
So could we say the more exercise we do the better we function all round? Now here is where it gets interesting. An experiment conducted by researchers at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire shed further light on the subject with interesting results. It was found that to be more productive and happier on a given work day, it didn’t matter so much if you hadn’t worked out on that particular day, as long as you worked out regularly:
“Those who had exercised during the preceding month but not on the day of testing generally did better on the memory test than those who had been sedentary, but did not perform nearly as well as those who had worked out that morning. ”
“The first 20 minutes of moving around, if someone has been really sedentary, provide most of the health benefits. You get prolonged life, reduced disease risk — all of those things come in in the first 20 minutes of being active.”
Science has revealed to us the principles of why exercising can make us happy, and what happens inside our brain cells during exercise. Further light is shed in research from the University of Bristol. Their research explains that they observed that on exercise days, people’s mood significantly improved after exercising. Their mood or state stayed about the same on days they did not, with the exception of their sense of calm, which deteriorated. So we do not even have to exercise for long periods: as little as 20 minutes’ regular aerobic exercise can afford us benefits consistent with a happier and healthier life.
The most important part to understand now is of course how you can reach this balance point, to attain your raised state in an optimal and longer lasting way. The intention here is to encourage you to incorporate into your daily practice an approach that enables you to access and remain in a higher energetic state for the day ahead. It is not about becoming a Zen monk, disconnected from the world around you. It’s recognising that state-raising techniques like exercise can, when practised regularly, essentially condition your sense of wellbeing, and that conditioning equips you better to deal with the events and circumstances that invariably happen and might otherwise create internal stress, resentment and conflict, thus interfering with your ability to calmly and rationally deal with whatever happens. If you have any internal conflicts about what is happening around you some part of your awareness and corresponding available psychic mental energy is going to be diverted to manage or at least contain that conflict.
So get some exercise, get moving around, energise your body and the mind will follow. Choose to make exercise a part of your state maintenance programme, but you will need to practise it for it to pay off.
If you want to find out more then I recommend adding The Conscious Sale to your reading list, it’s a deeper dive into this and the wider topic of success and success based mindsets for sales people and entrepreneurs.
