A Letter from Chris Suarez

WE ALL NEED A LITTLE MORE STRESS

At times when the universe has different plans for you than you have for yourself, it’s important to stop and listen…or at the very least learn the lesson about to be delivered.

This week on Monday afternoon  I was ready to rush out the door of the office after a long day of back to back appointments.  Of course I had just one more appointment to get to before making the hour-long drive to meet my family for dinner later that evening.  However, I couldn’t find my keys.  I looked in my office, in the conference room, in the kitchen, the bathroom, back to my office, even opened the refrigerator thinking somehow I put them in there absentmindedly.  Now I don’t often lose my keys, so this was a bit out of character.  Fast forward, and I did find them.  I had left them in the ignition of my unlocked car, on a busy street, in downtown Portland, parked in front of my office, which I had fallen asleep at the evening before after working thru the night on a project (which is a story for a completely different letter).  Fortunately, the story continues because there-in lies the valuable lesson that was in store for me.  Leaving the keys in the ignition caused the battery to completely drain, which led to me being unable to start the vehicle or get to my appointment.

I went back into the office where a team member was kind enough to pause what he was working on and come out to help me jump my car.  I called my next appointment, moved it to the following day, and hit pause on the rest of the day.  While jumping the car,  Andrew asked if I had ever come across the world “eustress”.  I admitted I had not, so we had a brief conversation about the etymology of the word and he shared his perspective on it.  About 15 minutes later the car was running and I decided to take a drive out to the vineyard to do a little work before heading home.  While working on the vines I couldn’t stop thinking about this new word that I had been taught…and that began a research project that I spent an embarrassing number of hours this week. 

Lesson number one:  we can learn valuable lessons from EVERYONE around us if we stop and listen.

That research led me to some incredible studies done by Hans Selye, a Hungarian-Canadian endocrinologist in the early 1900s.  He is most widely known for his work at John Hopkins University and the University of Montreal.  Interestingly the man was nominated 17 times for a Nobel Prize yet died in 1982 at the age of 75 and has never taken home the Nobel Prize.  After my research, however, in my book, he won.

That leads me to lesson number two: we all need a little more…stress in our lives.  The catch here is that we need the right kind of stress and the right way to handle it.

We oftentimes associate stress with a negative connotation.  For decades humans have connected the word stress with the negative psychological effects it has on us.  There-in lies the issue of why we run away from it or attempt to prevent it.

By definition “stress” is simply a “physical, mental, or emotional factor that causes bodily or mental tension”.  It can also be defined as “importance attached to a thing.”  You see, we can experience stress both from internal and external forces.  External forces could be environmental, psychological, or even social situations.  We are probably all experiencing external stress right now.  And I am happy that we are. 

In his book “The Stress of Life”, Hans Selye defined stress as “the non-specific response of the body to any demand for change.”  It is only through stress that we will achieve any change!

All of us have something we’d like to change. Perhaps it is our environment, our habits, our schedule, our business results, our financial situation, the depth of our current relationship, perhaps even a personality trait we have that we have accepted from “birth”.

I often tell each of my business partners that we never would have partnered if there wasn’t something that both of us were looking to change.  There isn’t a point to a partnership without the collective desire and commitment to change.

Selye is the father of the concept that “stress is the response to the stressor”.

He developed a Theory of Stress that he called General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS).  He went on to publish some 33 books and over 1,600 scientific articles around the topic during his lifetime (thus the countless hours or research this week).  Part of that response is automatic and chemical.  Without too long of a science lesson, Selye identified our internal stress processing mechanism called the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal system (he was a scientist after all).  This internal system monitors at what level our body actually reacts to the “stressor”.   Over time, we can learn to monitor this, even control it.  The hypothalamus acts as a tunnel or bridge between our brain and endocrine systems…which sends a message to produce a hormone (adrenocorticotropic) in our pituitary gland and release it into our bloodstream.   Our body in turn produces corticoids, another hormone, and disperses them to parts of our body that need them.  We then use this hormone to fight the “stressor”.  Put simply, stress can immediately turn your body into a chemical plant. 

These chemicals push the internal Fight or Flight button.  They allow us to either stand and deal with the stressor or react and run from the stressor.  Our body produces that Cortisol and Norepinephrine immediately.  Here is where our control comes in. 

Most medical journals will define stress as our “Adaptive response to an external situation that results in physical, psychological, and or behavioral deviation”.  The key here is “adaptive”.  It need not be automatic.  And it leads to controlled changes in our physical actions, our emotional reactions, and our behavior”.  On our path to behavioral change, eustress will become our competitive advantage. 

Remember Selye defined stress as the response to the stressor.  We at times may not be able to control the stressor, whether that be external or internal.  We can however always control our response…which is the stress.  And we get to choose whether or not we respond with distress or eustress.

Left unchecked, we may naturally develop the habit of allowing stressors to lead to distress.  Distress is “extreme anxiety, sorrow, or pain”.  Over an extended period that will lead to fatigue, exhaustion, and burnout.  We can gauge if we are headed towards distress if we are beginning to experience feelings of irritability, frustration, and poor concentration.  Sound familiar? 

We can choose to respond with a different kind of stress.  That is our new word for this week, EUSTRESS.  The Greek “EU” literally means good.  Eustress is a “form of stress having a beneficial effect on health, motivation, performance, and well-being.”  Wow. We all could use a little more eustress.  This positive response to all internal and external stressors leads to energy, motivation, increased confidence in our coping abilities, increased focus, and increased performance.

In contrast, when our response trends toward distress, we have increased anxiety, unpleasant feelings, decreased focus, and often physical and mental problems.

Here is the catch.  Stress is necessary for our life.  We actively need to welcome it, accept it, even seek it.  Stress leads to change.  We all need a little more stress.

Without stress, we will actually experience boredom, which leads to confusion and apathy – as detrimental to our emotional and mental health as distress.

In Chinese, the word “stress” is the combination of two characters meaning ‘danger’ and ‘opportunity’.  Opportunity is never easy.  In fact, it lives just on the other side of danger.  That danger will force us to choose which stress we will respond with – distress or eustress.  Let’s remember that this week, this month, for the remainder of the year.  We all need stressors in our lives. Those stressors give us the opportunity to choose a higher level of motivation, focus, confidence, and energy.  It is the only thing that will produce meaningful change.   And we have all signed up for, committed to, and need….change.

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A Letter from Chris Suarez

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