Stress outcome = External (Environment) * Internal ( Experience + Tolerance + Resilience)
/By Duncan Anderson. To see all blogs click here.
Reading time: 5 mins
One Sentence Summary: It’s human nature that when we’re faced with a stressful situation we change the situation, but this only moderately increases the amount of stress we can handle. Instead, if we focus on improving our internal capabilities of resilience and tolerance, there’s no telling how tolerant of trying times we can try to be!
Stress outcome = 1. External (environment) * 2. Internal (2.1 Experience + 2.2 Tolerance * 2.2 Resilience)
I used to think stress management was all about having the right external environment, IE if things are too stressful then work to change the environment by e.g. lowering time pressure, e.g. reducing financial stress etc.
While this is clearly very important, I now think that it’s only part of the picture.
Our ability to change our external environment can be limited; our ability to change our internal environment is almost limitless.
1. External environment - “If your environment is not to your liking, change it.”
It makes sense that if you’re in a stressful situation/environment, you should try to get out of it!
Sometimes, however, there are situations that we cannot completely avoid - there are limitations to how much we can alter our external environment (e.g. there are some factors about your work environment that you can change, but there are unfortunately some things you don’t have control over)
In these situations, the best way to deal with stressful situations is to try and minimise your external sources of stress, and then try to improve your internal qualities of tolerance and resilience.
2.1 Internal - Experience: “Life doesn’t get easier, you get better at it.”
Slowly one can increase experience / wisdom. One example of increased experience is that what was once a ‘large’ stress eventually turns into a ‘medium’ stress and then a ‘small’ stress.
As an example, I remember when I was new to people management and had to performance manage someone (ie performance wasn’t good). At the time it was a ‘large’, I was stressed about it. I’ve now done this 10+ times and it's a ‘small’ or even a non event. Performance management is part of management, expect it, try to get good at it and try to do it in a caring fashion looking out for the common good.
Life example: the first romantic break up you go through can be pretty horrific, but you get through. Then it likely happens again, and while it’s still bad, you are probably not as thrown by it the second time.
2.2 Internal - Tolerance: don’t be intolerant of tolerance, being tolerant to tolerance is a path to increasing tolerance
How much stress you are under = 1. Number of ‘hits’ * 2. Size of each hit (large, medium, small)
In the previous point I talked about the “2. Size of each hit (large, medium, small)”, for this point I’m just going to refer to “1. Number of ‘hits’”.
At what number of hits does your tolerance response change?
As an example - Duncan 5 years ago
0-2 hits = dampen (able to effectively have no stress outcome. Take a medium and make it a nothing.)
3-4 hits = neutral (can feel the stress. A medium = a medium)
5+ hits = inflame (starting to get frazzled. A medium => a large)
I hope my tolerance has increased - Duncan today
0-4 hits = dampen
5-8 hits = neutral
9+ hits = inflame
Comment
I think one can slowly build one’s tolerance levels and shoulder more and more.
But I also think that your Tolerance levels are affected by how Resilient you are on a given day...
2.3 Internal - Resilience: it’s not all just willpower
I’m defining Resilience as a ‘micro’ self management that can vary from day to day vs Tolerance which hopefully increases year on year.
Some examples of things that affect my resilience:
If I haven't slept well then my resilience to a stimulus is much worse.
If I don’t have enough relax time my resilience is down.
If I don’t exercise then 1. My productivity goes down and 2. My resilience to stressor events decreases.
Meditation I find really good for building self awareness of my headspace and also being able to get to calm.
Eating healthy happy nutritious meals.
Managing your energy correctly during work:
“Eat your frogs in the morning.” Ie do the hardest thing first.
Switch between high and low cognitive load tasks to manage your energy (working with your environment, not against it).
The use of Mental Chocolate to manage your energy / Resilience.
Tolerance Vs Resilience
On average the amount of ‘hits’ you can take hopefully goes up each year. So let’s say that it takes me 5 hits until I’m at ‘neutral’ currently.
But if I’ve had a horrible sleep and not relaxed at all then today I might actually be at 2 hits till I reach ‘neutral’.
So Resilience is how much volatility you have around your average Tolerance.
While your environment can only be changed to a limited degree, your tolerance and resilience can be improved massively (not infinitely - there is a cap to how much stress a person can handle) = increasing resilience and tolerance can increase the amount of stress you can tolerate more than changing your environment
I also like this model which in some respects is a rearticulation of Resilience.
If you only take away one thing
One path for meaning in life is to take on responsibility to change the world in some way. This can be raising a child, trying to upgrade the education system, etc etc.
Taking on responsibility => caring… and caring often means you can ‘stress’ about things.
So often the more you care about something the more possible it is stress.
The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. It’s hard to hate something you don’t care about, it’s hard to stress about something you don’t care about.
I find the trick is to try to change the world, to care, to take on as much responsibility as you can while staying within acceptable stress levels. And that hopefully, slowly one can handle more and more with less and less stress! So having your cake and eating it too!
Jingle: I used to think the path to a better life was to have a better external environment, now I think one key path to a better life is just to be better at life!