Changing Your Mindset About Stress

Source: Stanford University

All of us have found ourselves overwhelmed at times by high levels of stress and anxiety. For some, these feelings and emotions can become debilitating. Our performance in a challenging situation suffers greatly. However, the consequences do not always have to be so dire. I recently listened to a fascinating podcast featuring Stanford psychology professor Alia Crum. She's the principal investigator in Stanford's Mind and Body Lab.

Crum has been examining how and why many of us have come to assume that stress should and will be debilitating. In fact, she argues that well-intentioned public health communications tend to reinforce this negative perception about stress. However, her work has explored how our mindset matters. Looking at stress with a different perspective can help us persevere through adversity and actually elevate our performance in very challenging situations. Here's an excerpt from the podcast:

The nature of a challenging situation or a demand in our life. That’s what we been focused on. And what we’ve found is that, if you kinda go back into those core assumptions, what you realize is that, most people have the mindset that stressful situations are inherently debilitating. They’re going to ultimately make us sick, make us struggle, make us crumble under pressure. And when you look at the truth about stress which is like most things very complicated, you realise that that is a simplified assumption. It’s not necessarily wrong, but it’s only one way of viewing stress and you start to realize that the true nature of stress is more complex.

And in fact, there’s a whole other side of stress that reveals to us that the body’s stress response, the mind stress response, was not designed to be debilitating, but instead designed to help us elevate our performance and behavior to meet the demands we’re facing. There’s a whole side of stress that shows that it can have enhancing qualities on our cognitive functioning, our physical health and on how we behave and interact with others. And so, our work is not necessarily to find out the truth of stress, what it is or what isn’t. But to look at how our mindsets, the core assumptions we make about it shape how we respond in stressful situations. And what we’ve shown is that if we can get people to open their minds to this notion that stress can be enhancing. That stress can help you rise to a new level of understanding, can deepen your connection with others, can make us even physiologically grow tougher and stronger. Having that focus shifts our attention and behaviors in ways that make that mindset more true.

The Impact of Conflicting Goals

With the new year upon us, many people will be setting goals for themselves and their organizations.  Of course, we would hope that these goals would be aligned, i.e. that they would reinforce and complement one another.  Sometimes, however, we find ourselves trying to juggle conflicting goals.  Stanford's Jennifer Aaker has conducted research, along with Duke's Jordan Etkin and Rotterdam's Ioannis Evangelidis, on the impact of competing objectives.   What did they find?

1. Not surprisingly, people tend to experience more stress when they have competing goals that they are trying to juggle. 
2. People tend to feel more pressed for time when they experience conflicting goals, even when the goals do not compete for their time. 
3. When people have conflicting goals, they tend to become much less patient.  In other words, they are less willing to wait in line, or on the phone.  They are also less willing to wait for a package to be delivered.  
4. Because they have less patience, people are willing to pay more to save time.  The researchers found that, "Goal-conflicted subjects who felt short on time were willing to pay 30 percent more for expedited shipping of a DVD from Amazon. Such results confirm the hypothesis that feeling pressed for time shortens patience and increases willingness to pay."  

 What's the lesson for all of us as we set goals for 2015?   First, if we are leading an organization, we should be mindful of the pressures we create for others if we establish too many goals that are competing with one another.  We can never align objectives completely, but we can try to minimize conflicts.  Second, we can become more aware of how competing objectives may distort our behavior.  Before we expend resources, we might think about how stress and anxiety may be causing us to spend a bit less responsibly.    Finally, we might think about streamlining our list of goals and objectives for 2015.  If we set too many goals, we may not accomplish anything.  We have to be able to set priorities.  In so doing, we will also reduce the likelihood of stress from competing objectives. 

Anxiety and Advice

Wharton Professor Maurice Schweitzer, PhD student Alison Wood Brooks, and Harvard Business School professor Francesca Gino have examined the impact that anxiety has on a person's receptiveness to advice from others.    The scholars explain that, ""In almost every domain, individuals discount the advice they receive. In contrast to this finding, we identify an important aspect of a decision-maker's internal state that causes individuals to be very receptive to advice: anxiety."    Ok, now here comes the really bad news.  Brooks explains that, "People in an anxious state were really bad at differentiating between good and bad advice."  

Why might that be the case?   They argue that people who exhibit high anxiety may be feeling a lack of confidence at that time.  Therefore, they look to others to help them figure out what to do in a particular situation.  The desire to resolve the anxiety may make it difficult for individuals to distinguish between helpful and harmful advice.  Individuals may move hastily to resolve the anxiety by making a decision and moving forward, even if they are basing that decision on advice that may not be very good.  

The scholars recommend that people step back and reflect a bit before making decisions in an anxious state.  I think that I would go a bit further though. I would argue that we could all benefit by taking more care in discerning what advice to take, from whom, and in what situations.   Getting advice from multiple parties, hopefully with diverse perspectives, can be very helpful.  Building a trusting relationship with an "experienced confidante" can be beneficial as well.   Thinking carefully about whether someone's expertise actually applies to your situation can be very important.  We sometimes rely on others for advice because they are very smart and successful.  However, that can get us in trouble if that person's experience is not very applicable to our situation. 

Anxious Negotiators Lose Big Time!

Wharton Professor Maurice Schweitzer and graduate student Alison Wood Brooks have published an interesting paper titled, "Can Nervous Nelly Negotiate? How Anxiety Causes Negotiators to Make Low First Offers, Exit Early, and Earn Less Profit."  The scholars examine the effects of anxiety on business negotiations.   Not surprisingly, they find that anxiety can be very harmful in a negotiation. The study goes one step further though.  It shows precisely how anxiety harms negotiators.   Specifically, the researchers found that more anxious negotiators made lower initial offers, and they responded to others' offers more quickly.   Those behaviors contributed to the fact that anxious negotiators ultimately achieved worse outcomes. 

Why do anxious negotiators behave in this manner?  Schweitzer and Brooks explain that anxiety seems to induce conflict avoidance.  Anxiety often brings with it a desire to minimize the likelihood of confrontation with the other party.   However, the desire to avoid confrontation often drives a negotiator to compromise prematurely or advocate for their own interests less forcefully.   The lesson is clear:  If you are feeling anxious, step back for a moment and collect yourself before beginning a negotiation.  Your anxiety may not just make you feel sick to your stomach; it may lighten your wallet too!