How I learned to stop

worrying and love the stress

I can’t walk downtown without passing a hole in the wall
that’s being converted into a yoga studio.

Every time I visit the app store on my phone, yet another new

meditation app is vying for a featured spot.

Everywhere you look, the world seems to be telling you how

important it is to de-stress.

It’s not hard to understand why this is happening. We’re now

capable of being on the grid and online in even the
most intimate settings.

We can no longer leave it at the office — stress is a part of our

everyday lives.

And here is what I have to say about that:

I welcome stress.
You might be thinking that a guy like me — one who likes
to dispel productivity hacks left and right — must have finally
lost his marbles with all this talk about welcoming stress.

The truth is, stress is a reality in modern life.

As a founder who has spent over 12 years growing JotForm to
almost 4 million users, I can’t deny that stress is indeed
something I deal with daily.

But how can we take advantage of an inescapable fact of life

and control it to work for us instead of the other way around?

Here’s we go.

(Some) stress is actually good

for you
According to McGill University physician and scientist Hans
Selye, not allstress is detrimental.

In fact, some stress can actually be good for you — as

long as you have the right response.

Positive stress, or “eustress,” is felt when you recognize a

stressful situation as an opportunity that will result
in a good outcome. A eustress response motivates you to
overcome a challenge or accomplish a task.
“In the end, eustress can lead you to
feelings of satisfaction and
accomplishment, well-being, and
wholeness.”
Negative stress, or “distress,” is when you perceive a
stressor as a threat that is sure to result in a negative
outcome. Distress can lead to fear, anxiety, and despair.
“[Distress] can result in chronic stress,
anxiety, depression, and physical
illnesses.”

Your perception of stress matters.

If positive stress isn’t already your default reaction

and you’d like it to be, here are some mindset practices to
might help you train your brain to have a positive reaction in
the face of stressful situations:

 Invest in developing a default belief system that is

positive, hopeful, and expects the best outcome
 Learn to build a growth mindset that can help you
perceive challenges as learning opportunities
 Practice mindfulness

Of course, I have to stress (pun intended!) that we remember

the adage “Everything in moderation” when it comes to
stress.

Negative or positive, high levels of stress, especially over a

long period of time, have been proven to be unhealthy.

I like Psychology Today’s comparison of stress to a vaccine.

Just like the tiny amount of disease in a
vaccination, exposure to some stress is likely to make
you more resilient and teach you how to respond
successfully to future stressors.
“People with a history of some lifetime
adversity reported better mental health
and well-being outcomes than not only
people with a high history of adversity but
also than people with no history of
adversity.” — Whatever does not kill us:
cumulative lifetime adversity,
vulnerability, and resilience.

But too much stress? It can go beyond just unhealthy and

harmful to downright deadly.

Changing your perception of stress

can literally save your life
Perhaps the most important distinction of positive stress is
just being able to deal with it at all.

When you experience negative stress, feelings of fear and

dread often linger. And when your body stays on high alert
like that for long stretches of time, illnesses like anxiety and
depression are more likely to develop.
According to health psychologist Kelly McGonigal, your
perception of stress doesn’t just affect your health — it can
have a very real impact on your lifespan.

In a 2013 TED Talk, McGonigal explains the findings from a

University of Wisconsin-Madison study that followed nearly
29,000 participants over eight years to understand the
importance of how we think about stress.
People who reported high levels of stress
and also believed that stress had a major
negative impact on their health had a 43
percent increased risk of death.
Those who reported high stress but didn’t
correlate it to negative health effects were
among the least likely to die in the
whole study.

Aside from that astounding link between stress perception

and longevity in humans, McGonigal also explained that a
correlation had been established between moderate stress
and improved neural function, learning, and helpful hormone
responses in rats.
How to control stress instead of
letting it control you
“Stress is an inevitable part of work and
life, but the effect of stress upon us is far
from inevitable … Stress can be good or
bad depending on how you use it.”

Shawn Achor, a positive psychology expert and the founder of

Good Think, Inc., and Justin Menkes, the author of Better
Under Pressure: How Great Leaders Bring Out the Best in
Themselves and Others, understand that we face a world full
of change, uncertainty, and pressure that often causes stress.

But just because stress is inevitable doesn’t mean a negative

reaction has to be.

Here are five habits that help me ditch the negative

mindset and take control of stress instead of letting it control
me:

1. Reframe stress as an indicator

that you care
Racing heart. Tense shoulders. Fear. Panic.
Stop right there.

When I start feeling the physical effects of stress setting in, I

try to be mindful that it’s not because something is going
wrong with my brain or my body.

Instead, I reframe these feelings as my body telling me that

I care about something. Your perception of stress matters.

Whether it’s the second before launching a new JotForm

feature we’ve been working on for an entire year or stepping
onto a stage to deliver a speech in front of way too many
people — I actually welcome stress indicators as they help
keep my senses sharp for the activity at hand.

2. Take action to prevent

paralyzing fear
Negative stress triggers your body’s “fight or flight”
response whereas positive stress spurs you to start imagining
creative scenarios and alternative solutions.

The first is a paralyzing response; the second a response that

propels you to take action.

Whenever stress over a big decision threatens to stop me in

my tracks, I find that keeping up momentum — no matter
how slight at times — keeps negative feelings from becoming
an automatic response and allows me to keep
making progress toward my goals.
3. Focus on what you can change;
forget what you can’t

Spending any of your precious mental energy on things that

are out of your control is a complete waste.

However, in the midst of a stressful moment, it’s not always

easy to hone in on what you should be focusing on.

What I recommend doing is just creating a simple list. One

column is things you can change. This column you focus on.
The other column is things you can’t change. These you
ignore.

I can’t force people to like every single one of JotForm’s

features nor can I predict when new competitors will enter
the market.

What I can do is make sure we stay laser-focused on building

the best productwe can base on the awesome user feedback
we are fortunate enough to get.

That right there is a much better use of my mental energy.

4. Surround yourself with
positive people
I believe culture is hugely important to the way a company
and its workers react to stressful situations.

At JotForm, we’ve done our best to build a team we love by

seeking out hard-working, upbeat people who gel with our
current staff.

In such a cohesive, positive environment — negative

personalities tend to weed themselves out. And that’s the
natural way we like it.

And by having such a positive network to fall back on, even in

the most stressful situations it’s hard to mope around for too
long before the positive stress reaction takes over and we all
start working together to find ways to deal with the issue and
move on.

As I recently wrote in The Power of Doing Nothing at All:

We’ve grown to subconsciously measure a
person’s worth based off how many hours
they work, how much is on their plate and
put simply — whether or not they are
running around like a chicken with their
head cut off.

Unfortunately, the around-the-clock culture in which most of

us live often values being busy and talking about how
stressed we are instead of actually doing something about it.

Stress is simply your body’s reaction to an outside force.

One that, when managed correctly, might even make your

physical, mental, and emotional state more healthy.