Let’s face it, we all know what it’s like to live and work in a sea of stress. And, did you know that stress is not necessarily a bad thing, and can actually be a good thing – if treated correctly? Stress is how our body responds to a threat, real or perceived says as Dr. Tal Ben-Shahar in Happier, No Matter What: Cultivating Hope, Resilience & Purpose in Hard Times (2021). Dr. Ben-Shahar explains that when we have the sensation of the “fight, flight or freeze” response, it is our brain releasing hormones that elevate our heart rate and sharpen our senses. We get the feeling of wanting to run away, challenge an aggressor and/or protect ourselves. Sound familiar?

At times, in my role as a professional coach, clients come to our conversations expressing an over abundant amount of stress. Typically, the stress is related to a work challenge, though at times it can be related to a personal challenge. Certainly, I want to sit with the client and give them the space to express the stress and the emotions connected to it, with the intent of supporting them in best ways to deal with it, so that they are able to move forward in a productive manner. And, what might that manner be? To answer this question, let’s first look at some pointers about good and bad stress.

To begin, a reminder that stress can be a good thing. Dr. Ben-Shahar compares it to going to the gym and lifting weights to strengthen our body. Lifting weights causes a stress on our muscles, and yes, we feel soreness and some discomfort. And yet, when done in a systematic manner, working hard, over a period of time, we can actually grow stronger and healthier, all thanks to stress.

However, if we over-do it and work out too hard with little rest in between, Dr. Ben-Shahar says, “You become weaker rather than stronger, depleted rather than energized. Your muscles are broken down, but they haven’t had a chance to rebuild themselves. The problem, therefore, is not the stress. The problem, rather, is lack of recovery.”

This is the important message I’m offering to our readers. You are in a very stressful role, “lifting weights,” (though different from the gym) constantly, and at times ending your day with great exhaustion with little or no rest during the day between one stressful event over another. Sound familiar?

So, what to do? We build our body’s antifragile system, a term introduced by Dr. Ben-Shahar, meaning we grow stronger after enduring stress or pressure rather than returning to where we were before the stress happened. This is taking us to what he refers to as Resilience 2.0. And, an interesting fact – the song with the phrase, “What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Stronger”, may very well have been based off of research from Friedrich Nietzsche, a nineteenth-century German philosopher, who wrote, “Whatever does not kill me makes me stronger.” How about that?

Stay tuned for the next article that gets into why you want to know more about being antifragile to lessen bad stress and lead you toward a state of being happier no matter what.