My Stress Portfolio

What's your stress tolerance? (Credit: Mike Richey)

I'm no investor.  Far from it.  I've bought maybe 10 stocks in my lifetime and I recall the best performer losing half it's value.  I'm also no sucker, so I learned from my mistakes and quickly outsourced my meager investment portfolio to the professionals and haven't looked back.

Now, when I talk about "investment professionals", I should clarify.  I really don't trust the stock-picking ability of anyone since the financial markets are complicated and I doubt that anyone can predict how anything that complicated will behave.  Fortunately, I'm not alone in this opinion and a subset of the investment community relies on the principle of diversification of risk as a bedrock strategy for coping with the uncertainty of the markets.  Through diversification, an investor can rely on historical information about the best performing investment types without putting all her eggs in a single proverbial basket.

Now let's shift gears to stress.  Life activities and events are like investments.  We are investing our time and attention in activities that may bring us happiness, pleasure, grief, or stress.  The payouts or losses may be on the timescales of days, to weeks, to years.  As an investor of our time and attention, we must weigh the probabilities of gains with the risks of losses: driving hard at work could bring promotions at the cost of personal relationships, for example.

I propose the concept of a Stress Portfolio as a strategy to balance our activities to allow both personal growth while managing the risks that come with stress, like poor health or burnout.  My Stress Portfolio is a introspective sense of the balance of five components of my reaction to daily life: distress, eustress, flow, relaxation, and boredom.  I think of each of these as representing a decreasing level of stress one might experience.  As events happen in life both within or outside my control, I can reevaluate the distribution of my stress portfolio and "rebalance" my intensity to compensate.

What is the right distribution of stress?  I think the answer to that question will vary by the individual. For example, some people are more resilient than others and may benefit from a greater allocation of activities in the distress or eustress categories.  This is an interesting area for research as proper allocation of stress will determine the degree of success an individual can achieve.  To much stress and a person may crumble and give up.  Too little stress and a person is not challenged and may not rise to their full potential.

As a general rule, I think most of our time should be spent in a state of relaxation or flow with a decent amount of time in a state of eustress (exciting or exhilarating situations). I also don't advocate total avoidance of stressful situations or boredom (the extremes).  These act as high and low intensity activities that can permit personal growth and recovery, respectively.

Until more research is done to determine the right allocation, all we can do is look within and ask ourselves what our portfolio should look like.  Just like an investor must evaluate her risk tolerance, an individual must evaluate her stress tolerance to find the right allocation and maximize performance over time.

Stay happy!

On the Superiority of Thanksgiving

And a search for "monkey eating turkey" results in....

While I'm moments away from solving a number of the great mysteries of consciousness, I feel it is timely that a thorough analysis of holiday strengths and weaknesses was performed. 

Via this process (which was thorough indeed, but I won't bore you with the details) I have concluded that Thanksgiving is unquestionably the superior holiday, especially as it relates to brain function.  This conclusion stems from the characteristics of the Thanksgiving holiday that I refer to as the three F's: frugality, football, and food.  Each F significantly reduces cognitive load.  In this way, Thanksgiving has the unique ability to literally rebuild the brain (that's my professional opinion).

Frugality: Oh, presents.  Christmas and similar holidays have a central element of gift-giving.  But this activity is too emotionally demanding.  How much money? Who got what? To regift or not to regift?  When one is in a state of leisure, these stressful decisions are to be eschewed.  In this regard, Thanksgiving takes the lead over all gift-focused holidays.

Football:  Oh, mindless aggression.  Football has a direct hotline to the primal, "reptilian" regions of the brain.  In this way, it spares the higher cognitive brain regions, like my favorite the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, from excessive effort.  By doing so, football provides the brain with the vacation it deserves.

Food: The brain is an organ.  It is made of protein, fat, PUFAs, MUFAs, cholesterol, etc.  Also, it is a hungry hunk of meat, consuming a reported ~20% of the body's energy (although, I haven't confirmed the calculations...).  Thus, Thanksgiving scratches the brain right where it itches.  Turkey? Boom.  Tubers? Pow.  The brain needs fuel and raw materials.  Thanksgiving gets er' done.

QED.  I think the case is closed, don't you think?  When it comes to brain happiness, and my happiness, Thanksgiving wins the ribbon.  So, I send out a thanks for Thanksgiving... A meta-thanks, if you will? Thank you, Thanksgiving.  Thank you for making my brain happy.

Unschedule

Time to get this Week of Productivity, Level 2 back on track.  Previously, we played around with some Daily Mind Games that were designed to get our motivation up, get us in the zone, and make getting things done fun. Today, we're switching from overt productivity to a psychological trick to make ourselves work harder with less pain.  It's time to put ourselves first!

All work and no play...

When it comes to productivity, often the problem is that we're too hard on ourselves: we push ourselves too hard.  I do this all the time.  I think the answer to getting more out of myself is to keep pushing the pace.  Unfortunately, all that drive for more, more, more creates feelings of self-resentment, burn-out, and even fear.

Instead, when I schedule times for recovery, relaxation and reward, I am much more likely to work without resentment and burn-out.  Paradoxically, by putting pleasure first our work sessions will be more effective, because we can see a light at the end of the tunnel and can pick a more appropriate pace.

Play Date

Time to have some fun!

How's your homunculus doing?  My homunculus is being a whiny, little brat after all of the self-control I've been sportin' this week.  He doesn't want to be controlled any more, and has taken to groaning louder and louder in a really annoying way.  But, today, our self-control challenge is one that even the most spoiled homunculi will enjoy: forced fun!

If you're like most people, you work too hard.  Most of us want to be responsible; and really pushing ourselves at work and home can be an amazing source of fulfillment.  But, as we discussed last week, making time for fun is important for both our mental and physical health.  Thus, today we're gon' have some fun!

Play Date

Task: Schedule a time with someone else and do something fun.

Info: What you consider fun is up to you, but you have to schedule the time and it has to be something you do with someone else.  Why another person?  Because scheduling something with someone else makes it a lot harder to change plans.  This way, we're more likely to actually do something fun.  Final rule: the something fun must last at least one hour.

Goal: Spend 1 hour or more having fun with someone else.

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Playing

All work and no play may
make your homunculus cranky.

Man, isn't The Happy Homunculus turning into one downer of a blog?  Seriously! I revealed that I'm basically a lazy, do-nothing and earlier we focused on the most onerous of subjects: our eating habits.  Hissss! My homunculus is ready to disown me.  But, please don't go, fearless reader!  Today, we're going to focus on having fun.

I don't have any awesome studies or new articles to reference for today's challenge. Instead, I'm operating on my own little hypothesis: having fun is good for your brain.  Now, there is evidence that vacations are beneficial to general health, probably because of the stress-reduction.  However, I'm not personally up-to-date on the literature regarding daily leisure and mental health, but there has to be a connection!  If you know of some solid studies that examine this, please post some links in the comments.

In any case, as part of this Week of Self-Awareness, we're going to use today's Daily Mind Game to get a sense of how much time we spend having fun each day.  For me, since I waste so much time planning to work instead of working, I have less fun time than I would like.  On the bright side, when I made a conscious effort to track my leisure-time, I realized that I spend a decent amount of time doing fun stuff every day.  That mental shift immediately made my homunculus less irritable. Score!   

Playing

Task: Track your leisure time.

Info: Fun is in the eye of the beholder, so I'll let you decide what you consider fun.  No matter your definition, how much of your day is spent having fun?  Are there ways you might increase the amount of leisure time in your day?  Don't have much time for fun?  No worries, this challenge is just about observing our behavior, not passing judgement.  By enhancing self-awareness you'll be better able to add more fun to your life when you have the chance.

Goal: Have fun getting a general sense of your leisure time and brainstorm three strategies for adding even more fun to your day.

Personally, just engaging in esoteric metacognitive exercises is pretty fun...  Perhaps you could include this Daily Mind Game in your fun tally, too :)  Rock on!