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    Wisconsin Lawyer
    July 01, 2015

    On Balance
    Rethinking Stress: The Upside That Gets Ignored

    Spend less time avoiding stress and more learning what it’s telling you and putting it to work in your favor.

    Paula M. Davis-Laack

    puddle jumping girl“The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.” – William James

    I first began to rethink the way I thought about stress when I saw Dr. Kelly McGonigal’s wonderful TED talk on the topic.1 As a stress management and burnout prevention coach, and as someone who has experienced a great deal of stress in my life, I am well aware that chronic stress can wreak havoc on your health and happiness. I experienced frequent panic attacks both during law school and when I was burning out.       

    Panic attacks and chronic stress in general can zap your energy in lots of ways, so choosing how to respond to stress gives you control when you need it the most and can make a world of difference to your health and well-being.

    While it’s no secret that sustained levels of stress are not good for your health, there is more to the stress story than “stress is bad.” As it turns out, how you perceive stress is just as important as the amount of stress you’re experiencing. Specifically, individuals who both perceived that stress affects their health and who also reported a large amount of stress had a 43 percent increased risk of premature death.2

    Paula Davis-LaackPaula Davis-Laack, Marquette 2002, MAPP, is the founder and CEO of the Davis Laack Stress and ResilienceInstitute, an organization that educates attorneys and professionals about how to better manage stress, prevent burnout, and build resilience. She is the author of the e-book, 10 Things Happy People Do Differently.

    When people think that they have the resources sufficient to deal with a stressor, they experience a challenge response. Challenge responses are typically associated with positive psychological and physiological outcomes. In fact, participants in one study who were instructed to rethink stress as functional were able to recall more available resources and had improved cardiovascular functioning.

    Conversely, when people perceive their resources to be lacking under stress, they experience a threat response. Threat responses have been shown to impair decision-making in the short term and are associated with brain aging, cognitive decline, and cardiovascular disease in the long term.3

    The goal is not to decrease the level of stress or to eliminate stress completely, both of which feel impossible in the moment; rather, the goal is to reshape how you interpret stress (for example, thinking first that a stressor is here to help you in some way).

    Adopting these strategies will help you be better able to see the upside of stress and reframe your response to it.

    Develop a “Stress Helps” Mindset

    Your stress mindset is your belief about whether stress has enhancing or debilitating consequences. The type of mindset you adopt about stress – either “stress helps” or “stress hurts” – highly influences psychological, physiological, and behavioral outcomes. While chronic stress is not good for your health, some stress can affect your health in positive ways and aid physical recovery and immunity. Research shows that people who adopted a stress-helps mindset were more likely to seek out feedback and therefore grow as a result of experiencing stress and had more adaptive cortisol profiles when undergoing acute stress.4

    Help Others

    When I’m anxious about giving a presentation, the last thing I want to do is reach out to someone, especially a stranger, and tell him or her that I’m feeling butterflies. My preference is to hole up by myself and try and “deal” with the emotions. As it turns out, your stress response is actually pushing you to tell someone that you’re feeling stressed. Helping behavior actually serves as a stress buffer and help given to others is a better predictor of health and well-being than indicators of social engagement or received social support. In fact, experiencing stressful events significantly predicts increased mortality among individuals who had not helped other people in the past year, but among individuals who had provided help to others, there was no association between stress and mortality.5

    Create a Mindful Communication Group

    While lawyers are required to be zealous advocates for clients, we are also trained to be objective and somewhat detached from our clients’ pain and suffering. As we inoculate ourselves against that pain and suffering, the meaning of our work can get lost.

    Choosing how to respond to stress gives you control when you need it the most and can make a world of difference to your health and well-being.

    Two physicians, in an effort to help reduce burnout in the medical profession and increase resilience, created a small community composed of doctors who met regularly to discuss the tough aspects of their practices and support each other. At each meeting, the doctors spent time writing about an incident from their practice that they wanted to tell the group and then they shared it. The doctors practiced active listening and helped the storyteller find meaning in the experience. The results from the first pilot group of doctors revealed that they were less emotionally drained from their work, had higher satisfaction with their medical practices, and were less likely to dread going into work. In addition, empathy increased and burnout levels decreased.6

    Write About Your Values

    People often forget that stress and meaning are linked. The stress response occurs because it is associated with something important to us – going to court for the first time; closing a large real estate deal; taking a law school exam; going on a date. Studies reveal that simply writing about your most important values creates a whole host of benefits. People who wrote about their values were less defensive in group interactions, got better grades, had more trust and found it easier to compromise, and were able to de-stress more quickly in stressful situations.7

    How does a simple exercise do all these things? It changes your mindset about stress by transforming it from “it’s an adversity and I can’t deal with it” to “it’s an adversity and I can cope with it.” The mindset builds on itself because you start to see stressors more as temporary and less as a reflection about who you are as a person, and your story becomes one of resilience and coping.8

    Conclusion

    How do you interpret the stressors associated with your law practice? Are they there to help you learn something, grow in a new direction, wake you up to life, or do they exist to take a toll on your health and well-being? The choice is up to you.

    Endnotes

    1 Dr. McGonigal’s TED talk is here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcGyVTAoXEU.

    2 Abiola Keller et al., Does the Perception That Stress Affects Health Matter? The Association with Health and Mortality, 31 Health Psychol. 677-84 (2012).

    3 Jeremy P. Jamieson, Matthew K. Nock & Wendy Berry Mendes, Mind Over Matter: Reappraising Arousal Improves Cardiovascular and Cognitive Responses to Stress, 141 J. Experimental Psychol. 417-22 (2012).

    4 Alia J. Crum, Peter Salovey & Shawn Achor, Rethinking Stress: The Role of Mindsets in Determining the Stress Response, 104 J. Pers. & Soc. Psychol. (2013).

    5 Michael J. Poulin, Stephanie L. Brown, Amanda J. Dillard & Dylan M. Smith, Giving to Others and the Association Between Stress and Mortality, 103 Am. J. Pub. Health 1649-55 (2013).

    6 To read more about this technique, see Kelly McGonigal, The Upside of Stress 76-78 (New York, NY: Avery 2015); see also Michael S. Krasner et al., Association of an Educational Program in Mindful Communication with Burnout, Empathy, and Attitudes Among Primary Care Physicians, 302 J. Am. Med. Ass’n. 1284-93 (2009).

    7 Geoffrey L. Cohen & David K. Sherman, The Psychology of Change: Self-Affirmation and Social Psychological Intervention, 65 Ann. Rev. Psychol. 333-71 (2014).

    8 McGonigal, supra note 6, at 71.


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