Photo by diongillard

When you’re under pressure and your mouth goes dry and your stomach knots, how do you feel?  What if you could feel great?  You can turn this around in an instant.  The key is to distinguish between stress and anxiety.  Stress is your body’s response.  Anxiety is your cognitive response.  Anxiety is the enemy, not stress.  When you were younger, you linked your poor performance and anxiety to stress.  You didn’t know you weren’t skilled.  All you knew was that when you felt stressed, you didn’t perform well.  With that in mind, you can turn your high-stress scenarios into your best performances.  You can defeat anxiety and use stress to unleash your best. 

In Overachievement: The New Science of Working Less to Accomplish More, John Eliot, Ph. D. writes about using stress to improve your performance.

Key Take Aways
Here’s my key take aways:

• It’s your perception that matters.  It’s the meaning you make.  It’s not what happens to you, it’s what you make of it.
• Distinguish stress from anxiety.   Stress is not the same as anxiety.
• Stress is your body, anxiety is your mind.  Stress is your body’s response.  Anxiety is your mind’s response.
• Turn stress into an ally.  Perceive stress as a good thing.   Use “nerves” to perform better.
• Choose the job or make the time.  Choose something to spend more time doing every day or carve out time for what you want to practice.

I found the key is to distinguish between thinking, feeling and doing.  It also helps to know that your thoughts create your feelings.  It also helps to know that how you interpret your feelings, influences your thoughts.

I have a lot of high-stress, high-stakes scenarios, from running large projects on time and on budget, to pleasing stakeholders, to dealing with conflict on a regular basis.   There was a point where I got too good at dealing with stress.  I didn’t have the distinction between stress and anxiety.  Instead, I assumed that fight-or-flight feeling was bad and I used techniques to make it go away.  I lost my edge.  Stress was my friend in disguise and I didn’t recognize it.  Now I turn stress into results.  Instead, the enemy is anxiety.  Anxiety can wear you down.  Letting your own mind work against you is a bad thing.  The good news, it really was as simple as knowing the difference between stress and anxiety.  When I feel the stress now, I simply ask, “How can I use it?”  I turn it into action.  I use it as a boost of energy and motivation to make things happen.

Relaxation is Not the Answer
The most common assumption is that if you feel stressed, you need to learn how relax.  The counterintuitive point is that it’s the anxiety that’s throwing you off your game.

Relaxation teaches your muscles to lose tone, your brain to be passive.  You cannot win gold medals without muscle tone, nor can you perform at your utmost with other parts of your sympathetic system switched to “slow.”  Most people experience fight-or-flight symptoms and bam! – their performance is overwhelmed by feelings of anxiety.  But arousal and anxiety are not the same thing.  You simply have been conditioned or taught to treat them as equals.  They’re not.

Stress is Not the Same as Anxiety
According to Eliot, stress is your body’s response and anxiety is your cognitive response:

• The physical symptoms of fight-or-flight are what the human body has learned over thousands of years to operate more efficiently and at the highest level.
• Anxiety is a cognitive interpretation of that physical response.

Stress Dot Not Need to Produce Anxiety
Your thoughts create your feelings.   It’s how you think about stress that determines whether you experience anxiety.   Stress doesn’t create anxiety.  You do.  Eliot writes:

Most people have come to believe that anxiety and stress go hand in hand.  That assumption, however, is dead wrong.  Stress need not produce anxiety.  Once Bill Russell figured out the connection between his body’s physiological preparation and his performance, he actually was relieved to be throwing up before the big game because he recognized it as evidence that he was ready to play his best.  Butterflies, cotton mouth, and a pounding heart make the finest performers smile – the smile of a person with an ace up their sleeve.  Fight-or-flight symptoms compromise the extra juice they’ll need to go up against the best, so they welcome it.  Many CEO’s have confided to me that what they love most about their jobs are the aspects that make them the most nervous.  They definitely would agree with Tiger Woods, who has often said, “The day I’m not nervous stepping onto the first tee – that’s the day I quit.”

Why We Link Stress to Anxiety and Fear of Failure
When we were kids, we didn’t know any better.  It goes back to childhood.  Whenever you got stressed, you didn’t perform well.  You then associated the feeling to poor performance.  Your anticipation of poor performance created anxiety.  The cycle continued.  Eliot writes about how your younger years are the basis for your anxiety:

All the great athletes, musicians, actors, doctors, and business executives I’ve talked to seem to think the same way.  So why does everyone else identify the body’s sympathetic response to high-stakes situations with fear of failure?  The confusion tends to stem from childhood, almost as an accident.  Here’s what happens: It is the first time you have to deliver in public.  You are eight years old, playing in your first Little League game, giving your first recital, appearing in your first play, or delivering that debut book report from memory before the class.  Your body goes nuts, registering all the classic fight-or-flight symptoms.  On some level (and it’s usually not a higher cerebral level because, hey, you’re eight and you don’t’ process things that way yet) you are wondering, “What is happening to me?”  Then you proceed to perform poorly.  You strike out three times and let the ball roll right between your legs, you blow your lines, you forget the next note, you blank on what the book was about.  The next time you are called upon to perform in public, your body still reacts to the pressure, but you think, “The last time I felt this way, I was so awful that the other kids laughed at me.”  Before you know it, you have attributed poor performance to the body’s natural response under pressure.

You Weren’t Skilled
It wasn’t your stress.  You just weren’t skilled yet.  Eliot writes:

You essentially instructed yourself that the root of the problem was your body’s effort to help you perform to your utmost.  Trouble was, you didn’t really have an “utmost.”  You were only eight years old!  Your teacher probably didn’t teach you how to prepare your speech; you hadn’t practiced enough with your instrument.

The Vicious Cycle Between Physical Reactions to Pressure and High Anxiety
It’s a cycle.  You feel stressed.  You fill your head with negative thoughts.  You feel anxious.  It’s a downward spiral.  Break the cycle.  Eliot writes:

Thus begins of a vicious cycle between physical reactions to pressure and high anxiety.  For the rest of your school days and then on the job, whenever you are asked to perform in public and the symptoms of arousal appear, you will fill your head with negative thoughts.  That is why amateur golfers with decades of experience still dread standing on the first tee, or why fifty-year-old executives, live in terror of every presentation or big meeting with the board.  Performing poorly becomes identified with the body’s natural invigoration mechanisms.  The anxiety gets worse until you finally tell yourself, “I have to learn how to relax.”

Stress Gets Blamed for Everything
Stress is your friend, but it gets a bad rap.  It’s anxiety that needs the leash.  Eliot writes:

No wonder in our culture few words carry a more negative connotation than “pressure” and “stress.”  Stress gets blamed for everything that doesn’t have an otherwise clear diagnosis.  Going gray or losing your hair?  Must be stress.  Unidentified pains or headaches?  You guessed it.  But stress is not the cause; it’s how you interpret stress that causes psychosomatic illness.

Don’t “Self-Intimidate” Yourself
Self-intimidation is one of the worst performance limiters.  Don’t be your own worst enemy.  If you change your thoughts, you change your feelings.  Eliot writes: 

In performance arenas, psychologists call this “self-initimdation.”  You feed our mind with thoughts and instructions that your body is doing something wrong.  You tell yourself that you’re not going to perform well because of your own natural instincts.  You use emotionally exaggerated language such as “my heart is jumping clear out of my chest; my stomach’s so twisted upside down, the knots will never come out.”  Often you say, “If  only I could just relax, I’d do so much better.”  You undermine your confidence by creating an irrational fear of yourself.

Feed Off Your Stress and View Nervousness as a Welcome Friend
Stress is your friends.  Your butterflies are a good thing.  Eliot writes: 

To get Jamie’s career back on track, I taught him the same things I’ve often taught salespeople, attorneys, and executives whose very success is bound to increase the pressure they’re under: to view nervousness not as an obstacle but as a welcome friend, and to practice the fight-or-flight responds in order to learn how to feed off the added emotion.

Unlink Arousal from Anxiety
Sometimes it’s as simple as just knowing that how you think about your stress, is what causes anxiety.  You can instantly unlink them, simply by knowing this.

The remedy I prescribe for self-intimidation is to unlink arousal from anxiety.  When your body is in a charged state, you must first recognize that anxiety is the result of a psychological misinterpretation of that arousal and then practice choosing the correct interpretation.  Sometimes just explaining the distinction does the trick.

Use Your Nerves to Help You Perform Better
Learn to love the pressure.  It can help you perform your best.  Eliot writes:

If you know what you’re doing, if you’re good at your job, the “nerves” actually can make you perform better.  You have educated yourself or worked for countless hours perfecting the skills that make for good performance in your field.  You now have to start training yourself to accept that arousal is a good thing.  How?  You learn to love pressure by performing under pressure.  You must put yourself into pressure situations in which you get nervous and then practice assessing what the pressure can do for you, as an asset, a welcome friend.   Pressure often signals an opportunity to excel.  You must practice understanding that by making a conscious association between the “nerves” and the potential to perform, as the Olympic Creed says, “Higher, faster, stronger.”

Crank It Up a Notch
Performing well without distractions isn’t realistic.  Learn to own your focus.  Don’t let others knock you off your horse.  Eliot writes:

And once you start enjoying that kind of pressure, I advise you to ratchet things up a notch.  Incorporate some distractions in your rehearsal.  Encourage audience members to heckle you or ask the toughest questions they can think of.  It’s rarely “smooth sailing” in the simulators at NASA.  The flight directors intentionally cause the computers to fail and the shuttle to start spinning out of control.  Similarly, Earl Woods often has told the story of how he used to try to distract young Tiger during their rounds on the course.  When his son was in the middle of a swing.  Earl would yell at him, insert his shadow into the kid’s line of vision, peg golf balls at him, do anything to throw off his game.  He said his tricks annoyed the hell out of Tiger and often affected his swing or shot.  But then one day when he tried to distract his son, Tiger looked at him, smiled, and then proceeded to hit the ball a mile.  Earl Woods knew that his game of distractions was over.  Tiger knew that nothing his opponents, the fans, or the press fired at him on the course could be worse than what his father had done to him.

Additional Resources
I found these pages helpful for more information on stress and anxiety:

• Anxiety (Wikipedia)
• Stress (Wikipedia)

My Related Posts

• Melt Away Stress
• Your Thoughts Create Your Feelings
• Yerkes-Dodson Human Performance Curve
• Test Your Cant’s