Stressed? Great!

Learn to Utilize Stress to Accomplish your Goals!

Did you know that with no stress in your life, your accomplishments would likely amount to absolutely nothing? You see, stress has gotten a bad rap because people are only aware of the negative impacts of too much stress. There is a constant effort in the U.S. to try to reduce stress. There are no efforts to help us become accustomed to or understand how stress can help us work and perform at a higher level than where we currently operate? This is the reason for my book. There is an inherent relationship between stress and productivity. The general relationship can be explained in general by the following diagram of the Bristol Stress Curve.

Of course, each person’s stress curve is going to be a little different. The bottom line is that stress drives us to be productive. We are all driven by both external and internal stressors. External stress is easier to identify because it’s easy to see and understand. Things like the stress due to the lack of food in the fridge mixed with the inevitable physiological stress hunger of will ultimately drive you go to the grocery store or restaurant for food. Similarly in our jobs, we must meet some clear objectives or we could face losing that job (i.e. getting to work on time, performing our duties at some minimally expected level, etc.). It is easy to see positive and negative reinforcement at work with external stressors in our lives. Lack of things that we want will lead to stress and the related performance or productivity and the introduction of negative reinforcement will also lead us to higher productivity if introduced right.

The down side here is that when too much stress enters our lives, our productivity can decrease down to little or no productivity. An example of this would be the end of a relationship with a significant other or other extreme stress circumstances.