The objective is not to completely eliminate stress or anxiety. This is something we need to make clear right from the very start. Believe it or not, stress and anxiety are actually useful emotions. Both put the body into a physiological state of heightened arousal, attention and awareness and can even increase physical strength and power. When you’re stressed, you’re essentially ‘amped up’ and this makes you better at completing physical tasks or reacting on the spot. Psychologists have also shown that stress can be a positive motivating force in the right circumstances. Stress is what compels us to study for exams and what motivates us to save money as a contingency fund. Specifically, this type of stress is known as ‘eustress’ and is a very useful phenomenon. The problem is that many of us have no control over when we become stressed or when we get anxiety. This then in turn leads to us feeling those emotions in maladaptive situations.
Being chased by a lion? Then yes, the fight or flight response as it is known is exactly what you need. About to give a big speech to a large audience? Then the same response is going to make you look nervous and unconfident. Likewise, it’s important that the stress response be appropriate to the situa-tion that we’re in. Being a little stressed in a crowd is normal – but 5 having such a powerful response that you end up having a panic attack and faint-ing is a problem. So our objective here is not to remove stress entirely but simply to learn to control it, to hone it and to use it to our advantage.
