Hey everyone, it’s been over a month since my last post and I am making a personal commitment to post weekly again — there just isn’t an excuse for not writing. On an exciting note, I’ve joined an inspirational group that has been motivating me to improve on my writing goals — shout outs to On Deck Writing Fellowship, a super cool community of writers in their pursuit of mastering this craft.
If you found this online via social media or friend and are interested in hearing more, why not subscribe?
I’m stressed. It feels like a few months ago I was trying to figure a side hustle, find new skills to learn, and smart people to meet after joining a new company, Amazon. My last six months have been a whirlwind of work, ambiguity, and learning a role different from my prior experiences. I tried to start side projects with friends, but that got cut short. I enrolled in an Online Course Intro to Computer Science (CS50), but haven’t found the time to begin. I started this newsletter but struggled to consistently write. From final Alexa Mobile App releases of the year and trying to stay afloat as the new kid on the block in this corporate environment, I believe all these aspirations make me better and enable me to perform at my best, even if it means eating some serious, humble pie. I’ve been exploring more about the concept of stress and whether we can use it to improve rather than impede our performance. Is stress good? Is there a right amount of stress? How can we optimize it? My finding is that to perform at our best, stress is important in moderation. In this post, I’m exploring how we can optimize where we are on the ‘spectrum’ to deliver results consistently.
Background
Stress is a part of life, there is no way around this. Every successful person has endured some degree of stress that has helped them succeed. Outstanding examples of these are Olympic athletes, CEOs of large corporations, or top performing students. Intense willpower, an unrivaled work ethic, and the desire to be great are traits they all share — of course with a ton of pressure too. With such stress, competition, and a high bar to succeed, people feel external pressure to navigate through the intensity to perform at their best. They train harder, hire coaches, study smarter, use fancy software, have accountability buddies and make tremendous progress along the way. As a previous start-up founder, business graduate, and now a Program Manager at Amazon, I always thought if I had no stress, life would be more productive and happier. Ironically, it’s not that simple. Research suggests that controlled stress can positively affect our performance.
Enhance or Hinder
If stress is so great, it makes perfect sense to load our tasks to the brim, right? Not so fast. Too much stress can cause us to lose focus and be overwhelmed, and too little stress can demotivate. This is very analogous to one of my previously written concepts, Flow, where one of the key principles is to maintain a balance between skill and challenge. This other phenomenon, Yerkes-Dodson Law, is the empirical relationship between stress and performance, where studies showed that performance increases with mental arousal only to a certain point, while performance decreases when it becomes too high. Based on this diagram, if we can reach our individual peaks for optimal performance, we can perform at our best.
How do we optimize our stress
Looking at some studies listed here and articles on controlling our stressors, I put together some pointers that had a major effect for me in balancing myself on this spectrum. I’m not a subject expert, nor have I mastered these — I’m still trying to apply these in my day to day.
Control the intensity - While we have an 8-hour workday, we are not necessarily the most productive with an 8 hour straight work session and this leads to tiredness, burnout, and increased stress. It is much more productive to work in sprints. Like a student who might have many ‘study sessions’ before an exam, or a professional athlete with intensity and rest days, or the CEO who rallies the team to ship a product for an app release. We can control our own sprinting periods whether that is 30-minutes or 2-hours and it allows us to dial our stress in either direction.
Identify the stressors - Take time at the beginning to map out the game plan of the things that need to take place and then work around that. If it is to deliver an important document, this might include outlining the sections required, people included that need alignment, pending discussions to take place, etc. This ensures nothing is a surprise or not accounted for, and we can prioritize accordingly. An uncontrollable event has much more impact on our stress levels than something we recognize or have a system of confronting. Personally, unforeseeable work skyrockets my stress levels, and although it is inevitable, I create the plan and buffers to account for it.
Stagger the work - I love this post by Sam Altman on how to be successful. He talks about the mindset of compounding effects, such that consistent effort and hard work will add up in non-linear ways. Nothing finishes overnight, mastery is hard work and will take time. If ten projects push you too far to the right side of the curve, make incremental progress by prioritizing a few in order to avoid burnout, while ensuring the consistency in the day-to-day work.
That’s it for this post! Thanks to my writing crew Abha, Gigi, Grant, Anna, Kyla, Mason, Natalie, Rishi, Sasha, Simon, Rhishi, and Sarup for sharing ideas, editing, and reviewing drafts of this post. On to the next!