Hi! Welcome. You being here means more than you know. Knowing it resonates with you keeps me going. I'm Lavena Xu-Johnson. I write about psychology for founders. Why? Because scaling a business means knowing ourselves first.
Happy Monday, founders.
Once in a while, I notice I tend to write about how to regulate our bodies' physiological states during stressful events.
Although I’ve learned a thing or two from researching and constructing my previous articles on this topic (like how to calm your body fast during a crisis, the 5-minute technique that beats a month of meditation and what rats know about surviving a crisis), I still can’t help occasionally beating myself up: why isn’t my stress tolerance as high as I need it to be?
And the more I demand that I tolerate it better, the worse my physiological reactions get.
So I wondered: are our perceptions of stress and our actual stress separate? How much does our perception of stress matter? Does it change how stressed we are and how we react and handle the event?
If you’re like me, on the eternal journey of balancing the art of shaming yourself for feeling stressed and then shaming yourself for the shaming,
Then you should read along.
The experiment I break down at the end might just change how you see stress, for good.
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Stress starts with a judgment
In a 1984 book, Stress, Appraisal, and Coping, psychologists Richard Lazarus and Susan Folkman argued that stress comes from how we assess, interpret, and evaluate it, rather than from an automatic physical response.
When an unexpected event occurs, we quickly assess it, often without deliberate thought; psychologists call this cognitive appraisal.
In primary appraisal, we judge whether the event is relevant to us and whether we feel threatened by it; in secondary appraisal, we evaluate the resources we have to deal with it.
In their model, we feel stressed (or experience a physiological response to the stressor) when we believe the demand exceeds our resources.
Later researchers, led by psychologist Jim Blascovich, found that the body follows these judgments and described this in the biopsychosocial (BPS) model of challenge and threat.
As Jamieson and colleagues explain, when we believe our resources are enough, the body enters what researchers call a challenge state: the heart pumps blood more efficiently, and blood vessels widen.
When the demand seems bigger than our resources, the body enters a threat state, with a less efficient heart and narrower blood vessels, as if bracing for damage.
What happens when we are in a constant threat state
When threat judgments repeat week after week, the body pays a price. Researchers use the word "psychosomatic" for real physical illnesses in which psychological factors play a measurable part.
One of the clearest tests came in 1991, when Sheldon Cohen and colleagues gave 394 healthy volunteers nasal drops containing a cold virus and quarantined them.
Beforehand, each person answered questions about recent major life events, how stressed they felt, and their negative mood. They found that the higher their combined stress score, the more likely they were to catch the virus and develop a cold, rising from about 27% among the least stressed to 47% among the most stressed.
The threat state also changes what we notice. Psychologists call this attentional bias: when we're in threat mode, our attention is drawn toward anything that looks dangerous. It works like a filter set to danger, so we notice threatening information first, while neutral or reassuring information gets less of our attention.
For a founder under pressure, this bias can make a short reply from a client or an off-tone team meeting worse than it is. Jamieson and colleagues note that attentional bias keeps anxiety going.
Our judgment of stress may even be linked to how long we live. A team led by Abiola Keller followed 28,753 US adults until 2006 after asking them in 1998 how much stress they had and how much they thought it had affected their health. People who reported a lot of stress and believed it had harmed their health a lot had a 43% higher risk of dying early, while a lot of stress on its own did not predict an early death.
Would changing our judgment change our body’s response?
A 2012 experiment at Harvard tested whether changing judgment could directly change the physiological state. Jamieson and colleagues brought 50 adults into the lab for the Trier Social Stress Test, a procedure designed to be unpleasant.
Before the test, participants were given different instructions:
Group 1: spent 10 to 15 minutes reading that the body's stress responses evolved to help us deal with stressors, and that the arousal we notice under pressure is not harmful and actually aids performance. They weren't told the task would be any easier.
Group 2: were told that the best way to reduce nervousness was to ignore the source of stress by looking at an X placed to the left of the evaluators.
Group 3: received no instructions.
Then, each person was instructed to give a five-minute videotaped speech to two evaluators. The evaluators frowned, crossed their arms, and gave negative feedback throughout. Next, with no time to prepare, they spent five minutes counting backwards from 996 in steps of seven (996, 989, 982, and so on) while the evaluators kept giving negative feedback.
Can you guess the results?
Group 1, who were instructed to reinterpret their arousal, were more relaxed than the other two groups. On a test of attentional bias afterwards, they were less drawn to negative words, particularly compared with the group told to ignore the stress. They also rated themselves as having more resources.
In Lazarus's terms, the instructions changed their secondary appraisal: the task was as demanding as before, but they judged themselves better equipped to handle it.
What this means for a hard week
Stressors exist in an entrepreneur's daily life; we can't predict what will go wrong, but we can control how we interpret it.
Here are three takeaways to reframe stress:
1. How we read our own body
Next time we notice a racing heart, we can read it the way Jamieson's participants were taught to: as the body getting ready, instead of as a sign that something is wrong.
2. Resources vs. demand
Under pressure, a sudden demand can feel more severe than it is, and we tend to overlook the resources we have.
3. The belief that stress is harming us
This is the biggest contradiction: believing stress is wrecking our health may make it worse. So when we tell ourselves, "This is killing me," the pressure builds and may add a burden of its own on top of the stress.
Sometimes all it takes is to stop telling ourselves to ‘not feel stressed' and reframe that bodily tension as readiness and excitement for building something we strive for. And of course, redirecting our attention to celebrate the small wins.
How's the depth of today's edition?
As always, hit reply if something in here hits home.
Until next week,
Lavena
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