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Ways to improve productivity
Strategies for reducing stress
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Your body is smart enough to distinguish between a lunging lioness and a looming deadline. When you face a nonlethal threat, the body can initiate the challenge response, a mix of hormones that boosts confidence, focus and motivation. You come out of these stress experiences feeling more assured and self-reliant.
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MORE IDEAS ON THIS
Stress arises only in situations that involve something that is important to you. By pursuing your values, you inevitably encounter stress. Don’t interpret stress as a sign that something is wrong. You wouldn’t expect to reach a big goal, like climbing Mt. Everest, without encountering stress. Yo...
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This response stimulates the release of oxytocin, a hormone that promotes emotional connections to others. It suppresses the flight instinct, giving you the courage to face the source of your stress. You become more likely to seek others’ support and to offer your support to them. Oxytocin is hea...
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Research suggests that trying to avoid stress may be more harmful to your health and emotional well-being than stress itself. In a Japanese study, students who tried to dodge stress experienced a diminished sense of community.
In Zurich, those students who tried hardest to avoid pressure r...
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The latest science indicates that, far from being a toxic goad, stress can become a valuable resource in difficult moments. The stress response enhances performance. Under stress, businesspeople hold more successful negotiations, students do better on tests, athletes become more competitive, surg...
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The best way to deal with stress is to embrace it and deploy it to support your effort to reach your goals. To do so, you must change your mind-set about stress. A mind-set is a “core belief,” a part of your fundamental understanding of how the world works. As in the placebo effect – in which a s...
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Most health experts preach that stress is dangerous. Learn to manage your stress, they say, or invite such consequences as heart disease, depression and addiction. These experts say that managing stress means reducing it, either through relaxation techniques or by reorganizing your life to lessen...
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To manage stress, learn to trigger an appropriate or beneficial stress response. For instance, if you have to give a speech, you may feel so nervous that you trigger the fight-or-flight response. But fleeing or throwing punches isn’t the most practical way to handle this stress. People tend to tr...
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Humanity’s primitive ancestors evolved the stress response in an environment far more dangerous than today’s civilized workplaces. Humans’ evolutionary responses no longer match their daily reality.
The ancient fight-or-flight response – wherein stress provokes an accelerated heartbeat, ti...
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Imagine you are about to give a speech. If you’re like most people, you experience the physical symptoms of nervousness: dry mouth, sweaty palms and an accelerated heartbeat.
Conventional wisdom says you won’t perform well unless you find a way to calm down and tame that anxiety. But if y...
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Even small acts of kindness stimulate the release of chemicals that support confidence, focus and empathy. Purposefully do a good deed to trigger the tend-and-befriend response, and then transfer the benefits to another challenge.
By learning to manage and leverage your stress response, yo...
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Present the new mind-set in a short lecture, video or reading. For instance, psychologist Greg Walton conducted an intervention to help Ivy League freshmen feel that they belonged in the student community. Walton had the students read comments from juniors and seniors about how they struggled wit...
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Those who try to avoid stress concentrate on dulling the discomfort rather than dealing with its source. They might use unhealthy means of escape, like alcohol. They also may isolate themselves from relationships or withdraw from their careers to avoid the pressure. Such avoidant behavior increas...
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The stress of daily hassles – such as long lines at the supermarket – can have the most negative impact because these stressors feel random and meaningless. Instead of appearing as challenges, they feel more like “intrusions” – stumbling blocks that prevent life from running smoothly.
When ...
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Three decades of research suggest that stress offers rarely recognized benefits. These findings show stress can make you smarter, more confident and more empathetic. Stress can even improve your health. The best way to manage stress is not to fight it, but to embrace it.
Stress is what aris...
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CURATED FROM
IDEAS CURATED BY
According to conventional wisdom, stress is a killer – a Pandora’s box of threats to the mind and body. Stanford University psychologist Kelly McGonigal offers a rare contrarian look at stress based on new research that changed her mind about its impact.
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Other curated ideas on this topic:
In response to acute stress, the body's sympathetic nervous system is activated by the sudden release of hormones.
Physical signs...
A stressful situation — whether something environmental, or psychological, can trigger a cascade of stress hormones that produce well-orchestrated physiological changes.
This combination of reactions to stress is also known as the "fight-or-flight" response because it evol...
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