Recently, I’ve written about why managing your energy, not your time [1], is the key to productivity. Making a schedule is easy, but doing the work is hard. So we need to find ways to make the work easier, not just invent ever-more-elaborate timetables to try to keep up with.
But even if we recognize that our energy is a major part of getting the work done, the concept of energy isn’t quite so simple. Last week, I made a deep dive into one facet of this problem, the twists and turns in the saga of ego depletion research [2].
The conclusion I came to was that while hard work can certainly be draining, this effect is moderated by many factors. Thus, managing our energy is more than just safeguarding a simple resource—we must also grapple with questions of motivation, context and beliefs.
Continuing this series, today I’d like to focus on a different angle of the psychology of energy management: how does stress impact your energy levels?
This is an interesting question because stress has seemingly paradoxical effects on our energy. In the right amounts, at the right times, stress is actually an energizer—it allows us to quickly deploy resources to face a challenge. However, our stress responses are often inappropriate, both in timing and intensity, and the result is burnout and exhaustion.
So let’s take a quick look at what stress is actually good for, what amount is ideal, and how we can take steps to optimize (not eliminate) the stress in our lives so we can truly thrive.
The Origins of Stress
While stress as a feeling has been known for ages, the exact mechanisms through which it functions in the body weren’t understood until relatively recently.
Hans Selye [3], a Hungarian endocrinologist, was studying the effect of injecting “extracts” of various organs into rats. Soon, the rats began to show a strange set of symptoms: enlargement of the adrenal cortex, shrinking of the thymus and gastric ulcers.
At first he was elated: he thought he had discovered a new hormone in the ground-up organs! But then he checked the control group and saw they were suffering the same way. It seems that it was the injections themselves driving the response, not any mysterious substance in his preparations.
This caused Selye to reflect on an earlier observation he’d made: people suffering from diverse diseases, such as cancer or tuberculosis, generally displayed many of the same symptoms despite having wildly different pathologies.
Selye proposed that animals in general exhibited what he later termed a “stress response,” a kind of universal coping mechanism to disturbances from their environment.
Stress: What Is It Good For?
But why would animals have a mechanism that gives them stomach ulcers in response to repeated injections? Isn’t stress a bad thing?
The answer depends on the intensity and the timescale.
Stress begins when the brain senses a threat. That could be external (e.g., a lion is chasing you), it could be internal (e.g., you’re losing a lot of blood) or it could even be purely psychological (e.g., you have an exam in two weeks that you haven’t studied for). This causes a cascade of hormones to be released that mobilize your body into action. Energy is diverted away from long-term processes like growth and repair, and poured into muscles to enable you to quickly move away from that threat. Your immune system is diverted to the front lines to deal with immediate infections at the site of injury (spending less on the antibodies that might tackle longer-term illnesses like colds, flus or cancers). Your attention narrows and your memory is temporarily enhanced.
In short, the stress response acts to mobilize energy quickly, marshaling resources to take action in the present moment while putting long-term projects on hold.
This is all well and good if you’re being chased by a lion on the savannah. The stress response may make the difference between escaping with your life and being some predator’s lunch. But stress has two major drawbacks in our largely lion-free lives:
1. Too much stress can impair our work.
Nearly everyone can recall a situation where they did much worse on a test because, in that state of high-tension stress, they couldn’t remember the answers to questions they knew they studied.
This isn’t just a post hoc rationalization; it corresponds to one of the earliest documented psychological laws, which showed that the relationship between the level of stress (or general arousal) and performance on a range of tasks is generally an inverted U-shaped curve.
Robert Yerkes and John Dillingham Dodson’s eponymous law [4] noted that for relatively simple tasks, such as running away from a lion, higher stress improves performance. However, for complicated tasks, like remembering the quadratic equation in the middle of an exam, lower stress is generally better.
This doesn’t mean stress is always negative. Certainly, firefighters and emergency paramedics benefit from some elevated stress levels toward the end of a 24-hour shift. But for students, programmers, artists and academics, the work we do usually deteriorates when stress is above the optimal intensity.
2. Ongoing stress can impair your energy.
The second problem with the stress response is what happens when it goes on for too long.
Many of the chronic diseases we associate with stress are a result of the stress response lasting too long: high blood pressure helps move energy to your muscles in an emergency, but chronic high blood pressure leads to heart disease and stroke.
Other chronic diseases come not from the stress response itself, but how the body turns off the stress response. Stress temporarily upregulates some parts of the immune system—this is useful if you anticipate receiving an injury that might be the source of an infection—but too much immunity can also be bad (think: autoimmune diseases). As a result, built into the stress response is a lagging downregulation. The result is that long-term stress ends up suppressing the immune system, making you more likely to get sick.1 [5]
Keep activating the stress response, through stressors real or imagined, and the result isn’t a consistently energized state, but burnout, depression and exhaustion.
Optimal Stress
The optimal stress for productivity is mild-to-moderate in intensity and persists only as long as is needed to energize the work.
A good example of an optimized stress response comes from Robert Sapolsky’s book, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers [6], where he describes a team of Norwegian paratroopers who were practicing skydiving. In the beginning of their training, stress levels were high before and after the jumps. But after many repeated attempts, the stress response became elevated only during the jump itself.
If you think about it, this is exactly what you’d want. A racing heart and sweaty palms for hours before or after your jump aren’t helpful. But the boost in alertness and energy that accompanies the stress response is probably beneficial when you need to remember to pull your ripcord as you’re hurtling towards the ground in free fall.
Following the Yerkes-Dodson Law, most of us need a far smaller bump in stress response to energize our work than a paratrooper might, ranging from the moderate intensity needed to give a killer speech to a large crowd, to the mild alertness needed to maintain vigilance while we’re poring over financial statements.
More importantly than optimizing the intensity, however, is the duration of the elevated stress. Ideally, stress should energize us to take action when needed, then recede when we’re no longer working on the problem. Like the skilled paratroopers, the ideal would be to have enough stress to focus us during our task, but to remain calm both before and after.
Improving Your Stress Response
Selye’s discovery was that stress was a general response to many different kinds of stressors. Since the causes of stress are diverse, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. The right way to deal with excessive fear of public speaking, for instance, isn’t necessarily the same way to cope with excess stress caused by a toxic boss or unpredictable work demands.
I can’t do a full treatment of all possible stress management approaches in this essay, but I do want to leave some pointers for additional reading in case you or someone you know is struggling with managing stress.
Broadly, the research I’ve encountered breaks down stress management into four types: health, support, mindset and elimination of the underlying stressors.
1. Health: Exercise, Eat Well and Get Enough Sleep
While we often think about stress in the psychological terms of thoughts and feelings, it’s important to recognize that the process is fundamentally biological. Stress involves a cascade of hormones with resulting physiological changes. Therefore, how you cope with stress and the overall functioning of your body are not independent.
Exercise has a well-documented protective effect [7] against stress. Some of this is because exercise improves our underlying physiological system so stress can turn on and off more effectively, but some of it is also probably due to the release of endorphins and other hormones associated with exercise that can counter some of the stress response.
Insufficient sleep can cause chronic stress, and stress can make it harder to get enough sleep, potentially creating a vicious cycle. If you’re not prioritizing sleep already, making it a goal to unwind before bed can help you sleep enough. If you are prioritizing sleep but can’t seem to make it happen, there are treatment options that work better than sleeping pills.
Speaking informally, diet is often the biggest factor people associate with energy levels, but the evidence I’ve encountered has been fairly mixed. That doesn’t mean eating healthy is unimportant, however, as a characteristic feature of the stress response is elevating insulin levels to shuttle energy to your muscles—something that worsens other metabolic problems that can stem from a poor diet.
Some further reading on improving stress through health and lifestyle changes:
- Spark [8] by John Ratey — Showing how exercise has many mental well-being benefits, including stress reduction.
- Hello Sleep [9] by Jade Wu — A book on overcoming insomnia, with sections focusing on breaking the stress-insomnia cycle.
2. Support: Find Friends Who Care About You
Loneliness kills. Research finds [10] social isolation has negative health impacts on the same level as smoking cigarettes or failing to exercise. This is because social isolation is incredibly stressful.
This isn’t to say simply being around people will eliminate stress. Indeed, other people can often be the cause of our stresses. Toxic relationships or sitting alone in a room full of strangers can make us feel worse, rather than better.
However, there are strong associations between social capital, friends, family and spousal support and how you cope with life’s stressors. Contrary to popular wisdom [11], this applies to introverts as well, with even introverts benefiting from social contact rather than staying home alone.
Some further reading on improving stress through social support:
- Bowling Alone [12] by Robert Putnam — A great introduction to the science of how social networks foster health and well-being in both individuals and societies.
- Friendship [13] by Lydia Denworth — A review of the science of socializing, including its impacts on stress and health.
- Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation [10] — A 2023 report by the U.S. Surgeon General on the the stress of social isolation and its consequences for health and stress.
3. Mindset: Reframe Your Stress
Stress may be in the body, but what counts as a stressor is in our head. In order to have a stress response, we need to perceive and interpret a situation as threatening.
This can occur through mechanisms mostly outside of our conscious awareness, such as if we suffered a catastrophic injury. However, many of the stressors we face in life are psychological, meaning they are mediated through layers of beliefs and attitudes we hold about the world.
Different approaches we can use to change our mind to change our stress have been developed and validated:
- Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) works by challenging automatic thoughts and the beliefs they represent, especially working to get rid of irrational thinking patterns that make situations more stressful than they ought to be.
- Instead of challenging beliefs, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) works to try to accept them and avoid getting “hooked” by thoughts and feelings. This can be useful to deal with uncontrollable stressors that can cause unwanted rumination and worrying.
- Mindfulness and meditation can also help, in this case by shifting attention away from imagined worries and onto our present sensations and feelings.
In addition to psychological approaches to stress management, there’s also a world of advice offered by religion and philosophy as well. Stoicism [14] and Buddhism [15], to me, seem in part designed to deal with humanity’s collective problem of overactive psychological stress.
Some further reading for reducing stress by altering how you think:
- Cognitive Behavior Therapy [16] by Judith Beck — A great CBT primer.
- ACT Made Simple [17] by Russ Harris — An introduction to Acceptance and Commitment Therapy.
- Altered Traits [18] by Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson — Reviews on the science of meditation to alter long-term traits, including those related to stress.
4. Eliminate Stressors: Stop Doing Work You Hate
Finally, there’s an obvious way to de-stress: stop doing the things that stress you out. Leave a toxic workplace. Escape your abusive spouse. Get out of the frustrating one-sided friendship. Quit the project that is making you miserable.
I previously reviewed Christina Maslach’s research on burnout [19]. She takes the view that we have made a mistake in medicalizing burnout. This is an understandable reaction in a world of insurance providers and pricy therapy. But when burnout is treated as a medical disorder, the assumption is that the person, not the environment, is sick.
Instead, Maslach argues that we should treat burnout cases as canaries in the coal mines of our workplaces. They show us that toxicity is building up, and the proper treatment is clean air, not more resilient workers who manage to get by while breathing noxious fumes.
“Just say no” to stress is not always an option. Life is full of unasked-for stressors that can’t simply be walked away from. But, to the extent that we can make choices about what sorts of jobs, relationships and environments we live in, we can also choose healthier situations that will be better for our mental well-being and stress response.
For further reading, I suggest The Burnout Challenge [20] by Christina Maslach and Michael P. Leiter.
Concluding Thoughts
A recurring feature of energy-management is the importance of working within humane cycles of effort and recovery. The research on stress helps put that into perspective by showing how a modest amount of stress response can be beneficial, but that stress can become disastrous when it is too much for too long.
I’m curious about your own thoughts on stress: how much stress do you feel in your own life? When do you find it energizing and helpful for your work? Or do you typically find it excessive and exhausting? What do you do to manage your own stress? Share your thoughts in the comments.
For the next installment of the series, I’d like to shift to focus on effort and motivation: what makes work harder, and how can we make the work we need to do easier.
Footnotes
- For more information, see Robert Sapolsky’s excellent book on the complicated, time-dependent effects of stress response on various organ systems, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers [6].