CASE STUDY

The other day I was on an amazing three-day business course. The event was a lot of fun. I had a blast. We were put through some stressful situations and it brought out my driven competitive nature. On the last day I was inspired and wired. I went home ready to put it all into practice. I did some work that night and for the next few days I felt happy, inspired, creative and charged up.

I couldn’t sit still. I had to keep working and getting the new ideas out. Yes this was fantastic, but I noticed after the second day I felt constantly ‘wired’. My heart rate was faster than normal, as was my pulse; my body felt a bit tense and I could not calm down even when I was doing nothing. I didn’t sleep much and didn’t feel the need for much sleep.

After a while I became a bit concerned as I could see the danger of being ‘wired’ is exactly the same as that of being stressed a lot, so I took time out to calm down my body.

It actually took a long time to calm my body down. Taking long deep breaths, which usually calm the body, didn’t work. So I had to try something new.

So-called positive stress, eustress, can be a great thing. You feel good, you’re in action and it feels a lot better than negative stress. There is a feeling of excitement. While it feels great, unfortunately, just like negative stress, too much eustress can be bad for your health. In the primitive man this would be the fight response instead of the flight response. He would probably have been hunting a wild animal and been close to making a kill. He would have been excited at the possibility of succeeding and needed that extra push, the extra alertness, more power to the legs, quicker reaction time, and his body would give it to him by going into the stress state. Back in the modern world the success is usually further off and more abstract but it feels like you need to chase after it, hence the fight response becomes useful. Even though you feel good you are still triggering the same mechanism for negative stress and you will still have a faster heart rate, higher blood pressure, reduced digestion, etc. So after a prolonged period of eustress (any more than a day) it is a good idea to calm the body down.