Mastering the “Stress Paradox” – Part I

IT Managers have one of the most stressful jobs.  As an IT Manager, learning to recognize, manage, mitigate and eliminate stress can make an immediate and significant difference in the quality of your life and on your ability to accomplish better and bigger things.

The goal of this post is to help IT managers master their “Stress Paradox”.   The process I recommend to help you accomplish this goal requires four steps:

• Understand the “Paradox” and its related dynamics.
• Identify your “Vital Few” bad stressors.
• Validate each of the bad stressors.
• Devise strategies to handle the validated stressors.

Step 1:  Understand the Paradox and its Dynamics

All good understanding begins with a good definition.  Thus, let me start this post with my definition for stress.  From my perspective, stress is a physiological response that is triggered by our interpretation of various stimuli (what we think, see, feel, hear, taste, etc.).

I consider stress as a paradox because it can be both good and bad.  Stress is essential to our survival and helps us thrive as human beings!  In small doses, it can help you perform under pressure and motivate you to do your best. Yet, it can also make you languish and cause lots of harm if not managed properly.

Let me give you a little more of a scientific perspective.  The process of homeostasis (internal equilibrium) is at the essence of human survival.  According to Maslow’s theory of human needs, survival is our number one priority!  When equilibrium is threatened by our interpretation of certain stimuli (“Stressors”), our body’s natural defense mechanisms kick-in with a “Stress Response” to compensate the imbalance and keep us in equilibrium.

As part of this dynamic, any perception of “a threat” triggers the release of hormones (i.e., Adrenaline).  These hormones can help us in the short term, but can also hurt us if and when they persist in our system.   Thus, stress helps us survive, but it can also hurt us.  That is why it is a paradox.

The Meaning-Making Process

Humans are meaning-makers.  Our “reality” (the way we see things and what they mean to us) is based on our interpretations, and our interpretations (perceptions or meanings) are based on our past experiences and the values and beliefs those experiences have produced over time.

Our meaning-making process is informed by three natural human mental processes.  These processes are designed to help us cope with billions of bits of “data” bombarding all our senses every moment as we attend to life’s many inputs.  So in order to make sense of all the information we perceive through all our “sensors” (our eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and skin) we tend to delete, distort, and generalize.

That is why we all have unique perspectives and personalities, even if we are twins and live under the same roof (with the same parents, teachers, etc.) for the critical formative years of our life.  It is amazing!

My Theory of Stress Triggers

Because our mind and body are inextricably connected, the thoughts produced by the meaning we make trigger a physiological response (as illustrated by the figure below).  That response can be either positive or negative or stress-producing.  Furthermore, the intensity and duration of a response is directly associated with the meaning you assign to the stimulus.

This means that our leverage point to manage stress is our meaning-making process.  The better we can manage our meaning-making process, the better we can manage the “Stress Paradox™”!

Keep in mind that some stress is good.  What we need to manage is the intensity and duration of “bad stress”.  The following  figure shows “stress zones” that need to be managed by our meaning-making process.

Continue to Mastering the “Stress Paradox” – Part 2

The BEST is Yet to Come!

Epi Torres, CEO