What You Need to Know about Stress (Before it Hurts You)

Dominant global culture says stress is a virtue. It's a sign that we're achieving, striving for a success that we don't know how to enjoy when it comes.

We idolize our overwork, and it kills us. As humans around the world, once we stop dying from communicable diseases, we start to die of stress.

Emotional stress is associated with the leading causes of death in the US: cancer, coronary heart disease, accidental injuries, respiratory disorders, cirrhosis of the liver and suicide.

The US Centre for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that stress is the reason for three out of four doctors’ visits, which points to the personal and systemic burden it creates.

Stress may not be optional, but how we respond to it is. People exposed to the same stressors have different stress hormone levels, depending on how each individual responds.

We may not be able to control the stress we’re exposed to, but how we chose to respond to it is everything.

This is pivotal for us as changemakers, because it means we don't have to quit our jobs to be proactive about stress and improve our health.

All we need to do is focus our intention and effort on stress, more particularly the unique ways that we individually respond to it: in our body, mind, heart and spirit.

Stress can be the access point through which we explore inner experience. Stress can be a powerful transformational tool, if it’s used right.

When I moved to Liberia, in West Africa, after the civil war, I was shaken by the level of need I saw around me.

It felt physically impossible for me not to help more. Everywhere I looked, there was suffering. I was raised in East Africa and the Middle East, but the nature of this post-conflict destruction was different and I was unprepared.

With time and experience, I learned to better regulate my emotional response, but I still overworked myself headfirst into massive burnout.

And when I burned out, I burned out hard.  I raged at the aid industry, the way things were, the injustice of it all and my place in it, and no one could make anything right except me. It took a solid reset to create a more centered and resilient foundation for my wellbeing.

I learned how to nourish myself and listen to my needs in a new way, one that offered an alternative to the militaristic paradigm of aid work and “field deployments” that sees poor mental health as a cost of duty.

Instead of ignoring my stress or treating it like a problem, I started to see stress as a tool.

The four stress responses (fight, flight, freeze, fawn) became a map I used to navigate strong reactions in myself and others. In doing so, I was able to help resource myself to become more present, creative and strong. And I started teaching others to do the same for themselves and their teams.

Because of neuroplasticity, we know that it’s possible to rewire your stress response. You can change how you respond, at the deepest level, to what confronts you. You can learn to become more empowered in the moment instead of reacting mechanically with a habitual stress response.

You probably knew how bad stress is for you. But you might not have known that the harm of chronic, long-term stress can be mostly optional.

Since how we chose to respond to stress is up to us, this offers us a tremendous advantage as leaders. We can learn how to resource ourselves to be more present.

Whether or not you chose to prioritize your own resilience and learn how to navigate stress, the world around you is in transition. All around us, we can identify different challenges: extreme poverty, global warning, biodiversity loss, and the list goes on.

As humans, we find change inherently stressful. We learn who we are as leaders by how we respond to these circumstances. My hope for you is that you feel supported and empowered to leverage the latest research and available modalities to give yourself what you, personally, need.

I look forward to the journey together.

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