These days, we blame stress for most everything. Can’t sleep? Stress. Lost weight? Stress. Gained weight? Stress. Got sick? Stress.
But at the sidelines of the TED Countdown Summit in Nairobi, Kenya last June, David Astorino, an executive coach and senior partner at US leadership consulting firm RHR with a doctorate in clinical psychology argued “at certain times, stress is good.”
“You know, ‘I need to challenge myself.’ Or if I’m the boss of someone, ‘I need to challenge my employees to grow.’ And growth is stressful.” he tells GMA News Online.
At his leadership workshop, Astorino talked of the three different kinds of stress in the workplace:
- Normal stress, which is regular, expected, predictable, and manageable. Think: the inconveniences and little hassles you need to deal with on a regular work day.
- Training stress, which comes from an intentional challenge. It’s when you add more to your plate so you can increase capacity, become better at what you do, or demonstrate growth. It requires more energy from you.
- Excessive stress is when you exceed your current capacity. It’s unplanned and unintentional and deviates from normal stress.
Excessive stress can be chronic, which is when you don’t get recovery time from even normal stress. Or acute, which is an episodic stress that can have life-altering impact — think getting fired from your job, or your company closing down.
He also introduced the four kinds of energy, where they come from, and how to build them:
- Physical (capacity), or the amount of energy that you have. Did you get enough sleep? Are you hungry? Are you thirsty? Are you physically able to do the job?
- Emotional (quality), or the quality of your energy. Are you able to recognize your emotions? Discern and regulate them? Are you constantly in a fight or flight mode or are you burning out?
- Mental (focus), or the focus of your energy. This is your analytical abilities, your creativity and self-esteem. This is what drives your strategic thinking and decision-making.
- Spiritual (force). This is your beliefs and values systems, your higher purpose in life. This is where your character comes in.
Below is a quick interview with Astorino. It’s been edited for length and clarity.
What are we getting wrong about stress?
We don’t appreciate the experience of different generations [within the work place] and how they each interpret the world. It has become, we’ve become very, very disconnected.
it used to be, we all lived the same life, roughly. We had three sources of information, maybe three newspapers, maybe three TV stations and news channels and that was it, right?
And now we have, Gen Z and Millennials having a completely different experience. And so when you have a Gen X or a boomer trying to communicate and understand or experience, they’re like, you know, ‘just suck it up. It’s called work. It’s not supposed to be fulfilling in every way. You’re supposed to work hard, prove yourself, you move up, right?’
Um, whereas Gen Z is like, ‘I don’t think I like what you do as a company, so I’m gonna be very skeptical. I gotta believe in your purpose.’ The environment is a very big deal to them.
They’re also looking up and saying, ‘you know, you’ve created kind of a mess.’ And we’ve got these existential things like AI and climate change. They’re exposed to so much.
So I think the stress is coming from too much information, over stimulation. And it’s true for everyone. I think it’s true for everyone, which is why leaders need to create as much clarity as possible about what I what the job is, what they need you to do, because the more ambiguity you leave in that, the more it adds to the other amounts of stress, which is mostly around where is the world going, or what’s my network doing, or FOMO or whatever. So I think that’s a big part of the stress today.
Technology has truly blurred the boundaries, so now we get messages from work even after the work day.
It’s the pace of change. I know that sounds like a cliché, but when you look at change around an exponential curve, we’re hitting the exponential curve now. That’s what technology is driving at. It’s no longer on a human scale. And we’ve really outstripped our ability — you know, how we process information is very slow and very limited.
This is why we love computers. They process faster, and then you now have AI, which not only processes information but can, you know, almost think like us and think faster.
So I think a lot of the stress is looking out and seeing a lot of things today, all those kinds of surveys that are going on and people are very worried. Am I still gonna have a job? Is it gonna be replaced by AI, you have these other things around the workplace or are starting to infiltrate in, and so um you seeing that impact the workplace, too.
Can stress be managed?
I think there is a big misconception about how to manage stress. Companies need to be much more enlightened about it. How are [companies] creating a healthy place? Are you modeling it? I joke about doing squats in front of people, but it’s true. If the CEO was doing that, do you imagine? Does the CEO move or does she sit at her desk all day? Do organizations provide healthy snacks for their people?
You have to have more flexibility, depending on where employees are in their life. You know, we’re seeing that happen more. If I want to retain people who have young kids, hybrid work is great for them. If I have someone new to the organization, they will want mentoring. They will want to actually come to the office.
So trying to customize more what the employee experience is really a much more, that’s what’s happening now, if you wanna attract the best talent.
Oh so even office designs can help manage stress?
There’s a lot of learning about what’s an optimal workspace for people, but it’s not happening as fast as I think it should. I think we can do better, like bringing nature into the offices and plants and color so the visual experience is healthy.
Open work spaces were a big experiment [but it’s proving to be] not too good for focused work because it’s really distracting. Most companies are really kind of doing away with open spaces these days. They’ll instead have collaborative spaces, and then we’ll have like little telephone booth-types that look like we can close the door and literally have quiet and and it’s sending a message I need time. And then there’s still, you know, cubicles, but not as much.
Is stress something we can solve? Or is it something we just have to live with?
We definitely need to manage it as best we can. Manage, but not really solve. We have to understand that at certain times, stress is good. You know, ‘I need to challenge myself.’ And if I’m the boss of someone, I need to challenge my employees to grow.
Growth is stressful, but again, we’re not trying to create excessive stress. We’re trying to create training stress and then also support the person to be able to manage that.
Organizations, I think, need to think more about that. A lot of times, they throw people into big things, like survival of the fittest. For most of corporate evolution, it was like sink or swim and that’s silly. It’s really silly.
You gotta think much more about it and and not be overly protective and let people experiment and lean into it. But I think we’re not as thoughtful as we could be, particularly when you put an employee in a training stress kind of situation. What is that gonna take?
OK, so how do we manage stress?
Living into your purpose and showing up as your best self require us to manage the four energy domains — physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual.
You have to understand these four domains build on each other. So, if you’re physically exhausted, and you’re not doing the basics around keeping this up — remember your brain sits on your body. It’s all connected, and you’ve gotta keep that in place.
So, knowing what the signs are of physical stress is [important]. And then emotional stress is really is the other critical thing is. What’s moving off of my center? What frustrates me? What really triggers me? And is that real or not? Is that an old pattern, you know, and like, really on figuring out um that kind of stress. That frees you up to be sort of more leaning into your purpose and mentally more mentally clear and able to focus.
So they do build on each other.
But going back to overstimulation — for many people, stress enters because they struggle with boundaries. They struggle with these devices. They struggle with setting boundaries with others, you know, and so they let too much in. And it’s not their fault. It’s the way society has sort of programmed and takes control of us through algorithms and things like that,
So it’s much harder than it ever was to create the boundaries. Whereas before societies, we were the healthiest we used used to be. I wake up and I’m living in a healthy boundary environment. I don’t have to work it so hard, you know.
But now we’ve created a lot more complexity, and with that comes a lot more choices. When I have more choices, I use more energy, you know, from the part of the brain that has to think.
So limiting that, limiting the inputs could be very helpful. um if if we can. — GMA Integrated News
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