The Positive Power of Stress
Not all stress is equal, and what we believe about it shapes what it does to us.
Scroll through any leader’s feed and two messages are running at once. One tells you to work harder, produce faster, push through. The other warns about burnout, anxiety, and the long-term cost of carrying too much. Both are delivered with confidence. Both claim to have the research on their side. And both leave the reader, particularly the reader who takes their responsibilities seriously, wondering which one to believe.
I feel the tension myself. I run an organization that demands real focus and output. I am working towards long-term professional goals. I am training for an endurance event that demands its own kind of effort. I serve a cause I believe in. And I have a family whose needs matter more than any of the rest. All of that generates pressure. All of it is worth it. I cannot remove the pressure without removing the pursuits, and I have no interest in removing the pursuits. What I want, and what I suspect most serious people want, is a clearer way to think about the pressure itself.
A note before going further. I am writing about stress and pressure, not about anxiety or clinical mental health challenges. Those are serious and deserve real support. If you are struggling, please talk to a professional. The rest of this piece is about the ordinary stress of a full life, and what to do with it.
Stress is not new. The causes shift with the generation. Our ancestors worried about food and survival; we worry about performance, finances, relationships, and time. The American Psychological Association catalogs real effects of unmanaged stress on sleep, appetite, cardiovascular health, and mental functioning. Those effects are real. They are not the whole story.
Not all stress is equal. Some stress is excessive. Some has unhealthy sources. Some deserves real support, and the efforts people make to offer that support are often genuine and important. Those distinctions matter. But most of the stress in a meaningful life is not of that kind. It is the stress of things we actually care about: the presentation that matters, the hard conversation we have been avoiding, the goal we have never tried before, the child who is struggling, the team counting on us. That stress is a signal, not a problem. How we think about it, and what we do with it, shapes what follows.
The default message in most workplaces and schools is that stress is bad and the goal is to reduce it. The intent is good. But when the only message we deliver is “stress is bad,” we lose the distinction. We teach, often without meaning to, that the presence of stress is evidence that something is wrong. For young people especially, that message can be disorienting. They feel the normal, healthy tension of trying to do something that matters, and they interpret it as a sign that they are not okay. They look for the exit instead of the engagement.
The research tells a more useful story.
Alia Crum, then at Yale and now at Stanford’s Mind and Body Lab, and Shawn Achor, author of The Happiness Advantage, studied managers at UBS during the 2008 financial crisis. They showed one group a three-minute video explaining that stress can enhance performance. They showed a second group a video on the dangers of stress. A third group saw nothing. A week later, the group taught to see stress as enhancing reported better engagement and fewer physical symptoms than before. The other two groups showed no change. Simply changing how people thought about stress changed how stress affected them. A 2024 meta-analysis of forty-four studies confirmed the pattern: stress mindset and reappraisal interventions produce measurable improvements in performance under stress.
Jeremy Jamieson at the University of Rochester ran a parallel experiment with students preparing for the GRE. One group received a brief talk on the performance benefits of stress. Another received no intervention. All the students experienced high stress on test day, confirmed by saliva tests. The students taught to see stress as a resource scored higher on the exam.
A second, complementary line of research from Mark Seery at the University at Buffalo looks at something different. Instead of studying mindset, Seery studied exposure. Tracking people over several years, he found that those who had faced some adversity reported better psychological well-being, higher life satisfaction, fewer physical and mental symptoms, and greater resilience in the face of new stressors than people who had been sheltered from hardship. Too much adversity still broke people down. Too little left them fragile. A moderate amount, encountered and moved through, built something durable.
Put the two findings together and a clearer picture emerges.
How we think about stress shapes how it affects us. And stress itself, when met rather than avoided, builds the capacity for the next one.
This matters more than the research makes it sound. How a leader responds to pressure is picked up by the team. How a parent responds to pressure is absorbed by the child. How a mentor responds to pressure is watched by the young people around them. Our reactions carry even when we say nothing. When we treat every stressor as a threat, the people who watch us learn to do the same. When we meet meaningful stress with steady engagement, they learn that too.
The better model is a steady, honest posture. It refuses the pretense that stress does not exist. It refuses the performance of invincibility. It tells the truth. Yes, this is hard. Yes, it matters. Yes, you will feel it. And yes, that feeling is part of how you grow into the work. Not all stress is equal, and the most durable people I have worked with did not learn to avoid stress. They learned to recognize it, put it in context, and work with it.