How to Become Stress Tolerant

Can stress actually energize us? Make us work better, or keep us healthier? Is there such a thing as good stress? And if so, is it possible to transform bad stress into good stress? The answer to all these questions is a resounding yes!

The stress response is basically the same in all of us. But the degree to which it affects us depends entirely on how we handle stress to begin with. That’s determined by age, intelligence, education, income, religion, previous experiences, and personality type. As important as these factors are, conditioning, attitude, behavior, and habit formation have an equal effect on how the mind perceives and the body responds. Thus, experiences and life events can be either good or bad depending on how well we become “stress tolerant,” i.e. how well we can alter our attitudes and behaviors in order to condition our brain to look at stress in a new and different way.

The same conditioning process used in triggering stress reactions can be used to change our response to stress from one that’s negative and harmful to one that’s positive and beneficial. By using certain mental images, exercises, and self-instructions, we can recondition ourselves to view stress as constructive rather than destructive. Stress tolerant individuals, rather than trying to avoid stress, actually feed on it. They overcome obstacles, meet challenges head on, and enhance the quality of their lives by using stress as a positive force that energizes and makes them more productive. Those who’ve succeeded in becoming stress tolerant have done so by conditioning themselves to take negative situations and turn them into positive events.

Becoming stress tolerant is basically a conditioned or learned behavior. In order to transform bad stress into good, we must first condition ourselves to perceive things differently than we have in the past. Since the mind controls the body, how we think has a direct effect on physiological reactions. Without exception, stress tolerant individuals possess certain attitudes toward life that include having control over events and situations, being committed and having a sense of purpose, being open to change, and viewing change as a challenge rather than a threat.

To illustrate how the same stress is perceived differently yet causes different reactions, studies were done on three groups of people. One study done with nurses showed that non-intensive care nurses experienced much higher levels of anxiety, reported more physical ailments, and had greater workload dissatisfaction than intensive care nurses did. It was later found that the intensive care nurses wanted more challenge and felt more adventurous than their counterparts. Because the intensive care nurses perceived stress differently, they were able to minimize anxiety and stress.

In a study of business executives, it was discovered that the executives who remained healthiest and disease-free during their careers were the ones who had a sense of commitment, felt in control of their lives, and sought novelty and change rather than familiarity. They viewed change as an opportunity and a challenge; and when stress occurred, they became enthusiastic and energized instead of worried and depressed.

Finally, when a group of lawyers was studied, it was found that those who were seen as least stressed were often the ones who became physically sick the most often—exactly the opposite of what was expected. After looking more closely at how these lawyers were trained during law school, it became clear why this happened. Lawyers are conditioned to believe that they perform best under pressure. Thus, their perception of stress allows them to deal with it in a non-threatening and even beneficial way. In this case, their conditioning made them believe that stress brought out the best in them and, therefore, they responded differently than most of us would.

Becoming Stress Tolerant

To become more stress-tolerant, we need to develop a different mindset. A good way to do that is to use mental suggestions and the power of the mind to instill in ourselves a more stress tolerant attitude. After all, stress tolerance begins in the brain at the very moment we pick up a stress signal and re-spond to it in a specific way.

Using mind-body suggestions as a normal daily routine accomplishes an important goal: they condition our brain to think differently about stress. Once we change our negative mindset and perceive stress as a challenge, we begin to take charge of situations rather than allowing them to take charge of us. This is the basic principle behind stress tolerance. Learning to eliminate negative thoughts will subconsciously turn bad stress into the catalyst that enables us to become more positive and constructive in the way we ap-proach whatever we do. It’s no more complicated than that.

The mind-body suggestions I teach in my seminars should be used in the same way you would use the tech-nique of autohypnosis. By reading or saying them out loud each day for a few weeks, the conditioning process becomes more powerful. Before you know it, these suggestions will automatically be ingrained as part of your day-to-day sub-conscious and become incorporated into normal thought processes. Once they’re wired into your brain, they’ll become a spontaneous and natural response to any kind of stress event. Here are my favorites:

Mind-Body Suggestion: When I commit to something and get involved, I have a feeling of accomplishment and strength. By committing to something, whatever it is, we feel a sense of worth and purpose. Most of us tend to be passive rather than active by nature. Being actively involved and committed gives direction and meaning to our lives, and we begin to lose our negative attitudes. By telling ourselves that our ac-tivity and involvement is a positive experience, we’ll have a better outlook on life, feel better about ourselves in general, and begin to experience fewer negative stress reactions.

Mind-Body Suggestion: Change is exciting and rewarding. Most of us view change in our lives as something negative. More often than not, we allow change to occur without making an effort to transform it into a positive experience. Sometimes we just get complacent about change, and that only causes us to have little if any feeling of excitement. To counter this, get into the habit of viewing any kind of change as positive, challenging, exciting, and rewarding.

Mind-Body Suggestion: Whenever I take charge, I get a feeling of power that energizes me. Having a sense of control is one of the key factors in our ability to transform negative stress into a positive situation. Negative stress isn’t caused by job pressures and negative events but rather by the feelings we have that what we do is not worthwhile and that most things are beyond our control. The result is often burnout, which then leads to illness and disease. Having a sense of control over a situation actually energizes us and helps channel that energy into constructive activities. By involving ourselves and being committed to what we’re doing, we automatically develop a sense of con-trol that conditions the brain to think in a new way. In turn, this causes us to behave differently and to change our attitudes and perceptions. In no time at all, we realize that we’d rather control than be controlled.

Mind-Body Suggestion: Stress makes me productive and worthwhile. Rather than allowing stress to beat you, visualize it energizing you instead. Stress can actually boost your performance and make you reach your full potential. Just as champion athletes like Tiger Woods perform best when they’re under pressure, and world records are typically broken when the best athletes are competing against each other, most people rise to a higher level when they’re challenged. Your body will respond to what your brain is conditioned to perceive; so if you get into the habit of thinking like an athlete, stress, rather than causing grief and fatigue, will actually bring out the best in us.

From: Stress, Disease & the Mind-Body Connection: Using the Power of the Brain for Health and Self-Healing by Dr. Andrew Goliszek