As we launch into a brand new year, we can often find ourselves setting intentions and goals for the months ahead. For many of us, these intentions and goals are centred on the desire to do more than ‘just get by’ or ‘survive’.

Stress can be defined as “the perceived inability to cope with one’s current stressors”. The important word to emphasise in this definition is perceived. The way we perceive our ability to cope with stress and how we perceive stress to impact on our wellbeing, will determine how stress effects not only our physical and mental wellbeing, but also our professional lives and relationships.

This has been the focus of numerous research studies over the last few years. Scientists have sought to explain how and why stress has certain implications for our performance and overall wellbeing.

One such study conducted by Abiola Keller and colleagues at the University of Wisconsin, looked at a sample of more than 28,000 adults. They examined each of these 28,000 participants’ experience of and attitudes towards stress, by asking them to report on the number of stressful life events they’d experienced and if they believed stress had a harmful effect on their health. Over the next eight years, the study tracked the mortality rates of the participants and found something surprising. The results indicated that a greater number of stressful life events was associated with a higher mortality rate. However, this is where things got interesting. They also found this result was only true for those who believed stress was bad for their health – these people had a 43% higher mortality rate than the others. For those who did not perceive stress as harmful toward their health (i.e., those who perceived stress as beneficial), the number of stressful events they experienced did not increase their mortality rate.

What does this tell us? Well, this research demonstrates that the experience of stress can be perceived in more than one way, and the way we think about stress determines the impact it will have on our health and wellbeing. We can either see stress as a tool to energise us, or we can view it has a factor which inhibits us.

So, if we want to engage effectively with stress, the first step is changing the way we think about it. Stress is an emotion, which means it is energy in motion. It will have a peak and then it will gradually subside as we work through the situation that is causing us stress or use management tools to get back to a state of focus. It can be helpful to remind ourselves that we actually need stress to perform at our best. Scientists have long known that there is an ‘optimal’ level of stress required for us to perform well. If we have too little stress, we become bored, disengaged, and unproductive, in other words, flat. If we have too much unmanaged stress, we become overwhelmed, distressed, or flustered. When we have the optimal level of stress, we are likely to be present, in the moment and focused (or fabulous, whichever works best for you!).

The second step is recognising what stress looks like for us and in particular, what it looks like when it is entering the flustered zone. It could be sensations like tight shoulders, an increased heart rate, racing thoughts, sweating, shallow breathing, clenched jaw, tunnel vision etc.

The last step is knowing what to do when we feel stress creeping up to get back to a point of focus. It is at this point that we engage stress-management techniques such as Box Breathing. This technique stimulates the vagus nerve which activates our autonomic nervous system (our state of rest and digest). It is used widely throughout combat teams and in professions where people are exposed to high-stress situations but need to remain focused and clear headed. Better yet it is something you can do at your desk or in a meeting and no one will be any the wiser.

How do you Box Breathe? You simply breathe in for four seconds, hold this breath for four seconds, breathe out for four seconds, and then hold (wait) for four seconds before breathing in again for four seconds. You repeat this process four times, or for about a minute to a minute and a half.

While there are many factors that contribute to stress, and to the health and wellbeing of people within an organisation, building our personal resilience and ability to manage stress is an important part of the puzzle. Sadly, across Australia we are seeing high levels of burnout, for employees and leaders, with reported rates for both groups above 60%. It is estimated that unmanaged stress costs the Australian economy billions of dollars each year in lost productivity and time. This represents an important opportunity for those in leadership roles to consider their own abilities for managing stress, as well as considering how they can support their teams to move from frazzled to flourishing.