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!

Resilience commercialized

While watching the Winter Olympics, I was pleasantly surprised by this commercial from Proctor and Gamble.  You can view it in-line below too:

Although I don't know how successful the commercial will be for P&G (I couldn't name a P&G product and the commercial doesn't describe any), I think the commercial is an incredible public service announcement.   By promoting resilience, grit, determination, P&G may be really helping people, as is summarized in this excellent New York Times piece on resilience by the appropriately named Paul Tough.

The Mental Reboot Script

Time to reboot.

There's no way around it - the grind has been grinding you down.  You're tired, you're stressed, your motivation is low.  Sometimes life can be really tough and, lately, life has been really tough.

But bad times ebb and flow, come and go.  Sometimes things are tough, other times things are great.  Perhaps the tough times seem to happen more than the good times, but it's hard to know for sure.  When you're stressed it's difficult to keep perspective.

Situations can change though, and situations change faster if you make an effort to move forward, to make progress.  Who cares if you only make a little change today for the better?  At least it's a step in the right direction.  One small change to make life better is all you need to feel some hope.  Who knows?  Maybe this is the beginning of a period of incredible success.  Until you get started, you'll never know.

So get focused.  Don't let all the nagging stressors creep into your mind all at once.  You can only do one thing at a time.  Just pick something to do that would make a difference in your life and start working on it.  Pick something small, manageable and doable and just get it done.  No more worrying about picking the perfect thing to do, just trust your instincts and make progress.  Block out all other intruding worries and attack that one thing that will make you feel the most accomplished.

Oh, and please? Give yourself a break when you're done?  In order to make real, lasting progress you're going to want to stick to your goals.  Most things that need to be done take some time to happen, so let's not burn out.  After a full day of focused effort, you deserve to relax, rest and recover.  Your brain is an organ and a day of hard work is like a mental workout: you need some recovery time to be ready for the next day.

And while we're on the topic, don't lose sight of all the good stuff you have going on.  There are things that bring you joy even if they are little, simple things like McDonald's breakfast sandwiches.  Look around and remind yourself about a few things that make life fun and enjoyable.

Feeling better?  Good.  But, don't beat yourself up about getting down in the dumps from time to time.  It happens to everyone.  The important thing is to keep an eye on those nasty thoughts and be sure to reboot when things get out of hand.

Pessimism now, optimism later

Optimism and pessimism aren't
exclusive: it's all about timing.

My homunculus admitted to me that I've been confusing him.

On the one hand, I've been saying that optimism is critical for performance: if we get all pessimistic, we give up prematurely and don't invest the time to achieve our goals.

On the other hand, it's also critical to acknowledge our failures.  If we don't embrace our weak points and bury our head in the sand, we won't get any better at life.

Vexing isn't it?  The optimism thing was particularly hard for the rational part of my brain to embrace: I didn't like the idea of externalizing too many of the bad things that happened to me.  That felt like I was avoiding responsibility for my actions.  Also, as a total control freak, it didn't sit well to think that I couldn't influence most things in my life for the better.

But, luckily, I had a real a-ha moment.  Accepting our failures and being optimistic are not mutually exclusive.  Instead, it's all about timing.

Specifically, it is a fact that no one is perfect.  Life isn't perfect.  Actually, sometimes life can really suck.  Furthermore, none of us and none of our lives will ever be perfect. Debby-downer.

However, this doesn't mean that we can't get better and that our lives can't get better.  Just because we have aspects of our lives that are imperfect doesn't mean that, with time, we can't improve.

This is the way to reconcile our weak points with the need to remain optimistic.  Right now, in the present, we should be realistic about where we stand and acknowledge what sucks.  At the same time, we can remember that the bad doesn't have to last forever.  In the future, things can get better.  Combining these two attitudes - pessimism for now, optimism for later - is the formula for lasting, long-term progress.

S.M.A.R.T. Goals Are Dumb

Dream small.

If you've ever been exposed to any goal-setting advice of any kind, you've probably heard of S.M.A.R.T. goals, an acronym which stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Timely.  I'd like to add one more adjective: overwhelming.

Who has the time and energy to craft a series of SMART goals and then track progress in great detail? I'm a nerd, but there are only so many excel spreadsheets I can create before I feel ashamed.

Also, what happens if you think you've created a SMART goal, but realize it's not "attainable" or too "timely"?  I know what happens to me: I feel like monkey poo.

SMART goals are also dumb because when they are too "big picture", they cause anxiety.  For example, when I think about some Big Goal, even when it may fit into the SMART paradigm, I get overwhelmed. I get discouraged. I get pessimistic.

What's the solution?  Actually, I think it's a combination of Big, but Vague, goals and small SMART micro-goals that are designed to bring us one step closer to that Big Vague Goal.  This concept of micro-goals is shown to be effective in everything from making tough changes, to procrastination, to extreme physical challenges like training for the Navy Seals.

Why does this work?  Because you can design the micro-goals to be so stupid easy, you are guaranteed to succeed. So, we shouldn't make some huge-ass SMART goal that seems impossible (even if it's not). Instead, we do something so tiny that it seems ridiculously easy (run for 5 minutes).  Then, we do it and feel awesome.  This creates a positive-feedback loop: set more tiny goals, kick ass, repeat.  As long as these tiny, micro-goals are pointed in the general direction of the Big Vague Goal, we're basically guaranteed to come close to our Big Vague Goal over time.

To be fair SMART isn't all bad, setting specific, measureable, attainable, realistic, and timely goals is essentially what I suggest we do: easy goals are all of those things.  But I would add one more essential criteria: small. The smallness takes the overwhelming scale out of the equation. So, SMARTS goal-setting is the way to go for me, but that's an awkward acronym and it's easier to just say SMART goals are dumb.

Comfortable with the Uncomfortable

Uncomfortable? Yes.  Smart? No.

When I'm bad at something, I feel like 10 pounds of shit in a 5 pound bag.  In other words, making mistakes makes me really uncomfortable.

Unfortunately for my feelings though, becoming comfortable with the uncomfortable may be the single most important thing I can do to become a better person.  Researchers and educators are beginning to appreciate that embracing failure and learning from our mistakes is a critical skill if we want to be our best.  And that appreciation is beginning to catch on in the popular press.

For example, when the New York Times Magazine published "What if the Secret to Success is Failure?", the piece quickly became one of the most emailed articles.  But it didn't stop there.  A month later, Kathleen Parker of the Washington Post reminded us "How we succeed by failing" and Jonah Lehrer pointed out that mistakes explain "Why [...] Some People Learn Faster".

Soon bloggers picked up the scent: Zen Habits suggested we face our failings (and in public) and LifeHacker showed geeks like me "How to Identify and Learn from Your Mistakes".  The punchline: coming face-to-face with our failings is essential to improve on them.  By putting our heads in the sand, we may feel better in the short term, but in the long term nothing changes.  If we're lucky, the ostrich strategy will allow us to feel all warm and fuzzy about ourselves.  If we're unlucky, our failings will come up and bite us.

Intellectually, I think we all appreciate that we need to work on our weak points to get better.  But all this great advice misses a critical reality: it sucks to suck.  Being bad at things is emotionally painful.

So what do we do?  My vote: train our brain to like the pain.  Not all uncomfortable things are bad, and we have the ability to re-label feelings consciously so that our feelings of pain become badges of honor.  So, instead of reacting to discomfort with "this sucks", we can tag on an addendum: "this sucks but look how tough I am".

Put simply: discomfort is proof we're willing to become better.  Being willing to withstand some pain shows that we're ready to change.  From now on, every time I make a mistake and feel like an idiot, I'm going to embrace the feeling: if I weren't pushing myself then I wouldn't be making mistakes.

Embrace the Suck

Shit happens.

Having just been to the funeral of a loved-one, I am reminded of a cruel fact of life: shit happens.  Bad shit happens all the time and, often, there is nothing we can do about it.

Actually, that's not quite right.  We can always do one thing when shit happens: react to it.  When bad shit goes down, the one thing we have control over is how we react to the bad stuff.  In fact, that is the thesis of Viktor Frankl's classic Man's Search for Meaning: how we react to adversity defines us.

But, of course, this fact brings up a philosophical and practical question: how should we react when bad things happen? Is there a "best" cognitive strategy for coping with bad shit?

The answer to that question is important for many reasons.  From a performance perspective, how we react (internally and externally) to hardship will impact our ability to "get the job done", whatever that might be. For example, if we let our suffering bubble up as anger, we might alienate our boss or an important client.  Internally, if our suffering distracts us, our quality of work may suffer too.

From a health perspective, how we react to difficulty will influence our well-being.  For example, an extremely negative emotional reaction may trigger a stress response.  Unchecked, such a response turns chronic, and brings with it all the documented health nastiness that we hear about.

So, what should we do, metacognitively speaking, when the shit hits the fan?  One method, which is somewhat intuitive, might be to try to ignore the bad stuff: put it out of your mind.  However, this approach may be counterproductive.

An alternative strategy is to actually face suffering head-on.  In fact, this strategy has been adopted by three very different schools-of-thought that each know a lot about dealing with hardship, and is the approach I like most for dealing with my own shit.

The first example comes from the military and is the source of this post's title.  The military phrase "Embrace the Suck" is a crude way of saying "Face the Music".  The lives of military personnel rival almost any endeavor in a nefarious combination of physical and mental hardship: physical exertion, discomfort, sleep deprivation, isolation, fear, injury.  In other words, war sucks.

But, how do top war-fighters react to the suckiness?  Try to ignore it?  No, instead this common phrase is a reminder to not sugar coat a bad situation but, rather, to look suffering in the eye and embrace it as a part of life and as a part of getting the job done. In fact, it appears that some soldiers actually come to revel in suffering as part of the challenge. For example, this guy.

The second take on this cognitive strategy is from a very different source: Buddhism.  Interestingly, Buddhism, which is a philosophy that strives to maximize joy, identifies suffering a fact of life: it's unavoidable.  Moreover, Buddhist teachings actually suggest that we "touch our suffering" and mindfully explore both the cause and feeling of suffering.  The Buddhist practitioner is often encouraged to "smile at suffering", acknowledging suffering as part of life and recognizing suffering as a complex experience that makes happy moments better by contrast. For more on the details of the Buddhist philosophy, you can check out Thich Nhat Hanh's The Heart of the Buddha's Teachings (FYI: this is a philosophy book, not a book about science).

Finally, in performance psychology, the "mindfulness, acceptance, commitment" approach, which I've discussed before, and is described in detail by Frank Gardner in The Psychology of Enhancing Human Performance, offers a scientific perspective on the "embrace the suck" philosophy.  Proponents of this school-of-thought suggest that top athletes recognize pain and suffering (mindful), accept it as part of athletics (embrace it/accept it), and finally move on and get the job done (commitment) in the face of adversity.  The mindful awareness and acceptance of suffering, though, are the essential first steps. The best athletes embrace the suck.

Why might this approach work? The opposite strategy - ignoring bad things - may be counterproductive because it nearly guarantees that bad shit is going to catch us off guard. Then, all the negative emotion can rush forward uncontrolled, like some homunculus back-hand to our amygdala.

Alternatively, embracing pain and bringing it into awareness may act as a pressure release, while also giving us time to craft strategies for coping. In addition, consciously evaluating emotionally charged thoughts and feelings seems to make emotions and sensations less visceral and more intellectual, further reducing their power over us.

The examples I've provided may seem extreme: soldiers, athletes, monks.  However, we all have our own shit to deal with and it never hurts to be a tougher person or to become better at coping with bad shit. Anecdotal and observational evidence suggests that an "embrace the suck" mentally is a decent metacognitive strategy for enhancing our toughness.

Three Principles of Greatness

Three principles, not three monkeys.

Some people are successful and just seem to rise to the top.  Others achieve more modest goals.  Still more live without purpose, or enjoyment, or passion.  Many harm themselves, or others, through ignorance or impulse.  This is the spectrum of human performance, and the age-old questions spring to mind: is it destiny, strength of will, or chance that propels some people to greatness while others remain mediocre, or fail?

A modern take on this issue is the Nature vs. Nurture debate.  Originally, the question was posed as either-or: are we a product of our genes, or a product of our environment?  For things as complex as human biology, health, and performance, either-or just doesn't cut it, so the goalposts moved.  The question became: how much do genes and environment each contribute to who we are?

My response: who cares?  To improve our quality of life, even considering things that are out of our control - our biology, the environment - wastes precious time and energy.  Instead, why not focus on what we can control and work hard to influence those things?  Really, we must focus on the one thing that we can control: ourselves.

At the end of the day, we are defined by what we do - how we behave - and humans are really good at learning tricks from other people about how to do stuff.  This is culture, and we are built to communicate and acquire culture.  Because of this, we can watch and learn from those people who achieve greatness and change ourselves by adopting the behaviors and thinking strategies that foster peak performance.  If we want to achieve greatness, we must think, and behave, like great people.

The science is always evolving, but three thinking approaches are clearly necessary for incredible performance.  Apply these to your own thinking to be your best, and don't let your genes or environment define who you are:

1. Mindfulness - Great performers are focused, completely, on the task at hand.  To be great, we must live in reality, attending to the challenges of the here and now.   Only with our attention focused on the present can we do things well.  If our mind wanders to distraction, or if we fixate on our own worry, anxiety, or frustrations, then we are not thinking about what we should be doing, right now, to achieve our goals.

2. Acceptance - Bad things happen.  That's life.  There is nothing we can do about it, so we should accept it and move on.  Peak performers don't try to avoid bad things, or change the past, they continue to work despite the bad things that happen.  This principle doesn't just apply to external stuff out of our control, it also applies to uncomfortable things we must go through to be great.  Want to get in shape?  You will have to accept some amount of discomfort.  Want to be the best at your job?  You're going to have to push yourself into new intellectual territory.  Being amazing requires a willingness to endure discomfort and frustration.  We must accept the sacrifices needed to achieve our goals.

3. Commitment - The final characteristic of peak performers is commitment.  For people to become great at something, they must commit to that something, and continue to pursue greatness again and again.  By "buying in" to an endeavor - athletic, professional, or personal - the peak performer will keep going, doggedly pursuing greatness no matter what obstacles emerge.  

When most people think about peak performance, they think of athletics, but these three principles are not exclusive to sports.  Whether your goal is to be the best in your career, improve your health, or maintain a strong relationship, these concepts are critical for maximizing your potential.  Of course, actually practicing these thinking strategies isn't always easy.  I know this first-hand.  All of us succumb to periods of self-doubt, low motivation, or frustration,  but these principles can apply to our own failings.  By being mindful of our emotions, accepting negative emotions as a part of life, and maintaining commitment to self-improvement, we will continue to grow stronger.

If you enjoyed this article, please take some time to promote The Happy Homunculus.  Also, you can learn more about the above topics by reading The Psychology of Enhancing Human Performance. Thanks, and Stay happy!