I came across a great post in the Harvard Business Review by Peter Bregman about stress. Specifically, how stress is caused by unfulfilled expectations of certain outcomes. Think about it: how many times during the day do you get “stressed out” over something like your cell phone’s 3G network not showing full bars? (I am a culprit of this; the article I link is a bit different in that it discusses how O2’s network failure caused a huge uproar from consumers, and understandably so since they rely on that service). Or, the food you got for lunch wasn’t as tasty as you had hoped it would be. The list can go on and on, unfortunately for all of us. Bregman goes on to state that expectations cause that stress: you are expecting your cell phone to always have full bars (which it may or may not have). You are expecting your lunch to taste great (and when it doesn’t, it makes you that much more irritated, stressed out, and/or upset).
In other words, get used to not getting what you want. I know this isn’t consistent with the kind of go-get-‘em attitude most of us have been taught to embrace. But most of the time, fighting reality is not worth the effort. Either you can’t change what’s around you, or the fight is more stressful than the reward. – Peter Bregman, HBR.org, “The Best Strategy for Reducing Stress”
One thing that I started to worry about (ironically enough) when reading the article was getting into a potential trap where you just “settle” for outcomes. Bregman’s point is almost a “don’t worry, be happy attitude”, but he does point out that this approach should be taken for the vast majority of little things during our day that stress us out, and yet, in the scheme of things, are really not that significant whatsoever.
Imagine a scale from 1-10 with 10 being the worst reality you can imagine. Like living in a war zone or being in the World Trade Center on 9/11. Maybe 9 is a serious illness that most probably will result in death. Perhaps 8 is something that will forever alter your life, like going to jail or an accident that puts you in a wheelchair. Let’s say 7 is something that temporarily alters your life like losing your job or having to move out of a home you can no longer afford…Almost everything we freak out about is somewhere in the 1-2 range of dashed expectations. In other words, our moods and our stress levels are determined by events that actually matter remarkably little. – Peter Bregman, HBR.org, “The Best Strategy for Reducing Stress”
I think the vast majority of people would do well to just “settle” in the sense that recognizing there are things that are out of your control can and will reduce your stress. There is a key distinction here: recognizing when external factors are affecting your environment to the extent that you cannot control them, and recognizing when you are settling on something simply for the sake of not having ANY stress whatsoever. The former would help us all move away from the perfectionist mentality that we all see everyday amongst our friends and coworkers (a key point that I think Bregman is articulating), but the latter could actually harm you in the long run, simply in your development as a human being.
Perhaps the idea of managing expectations to reduce stress can also be used by individuals to reduce anxiety. While I am no expert by any means, I do know more than a few friends who have and suffer from generalized anxieties, and I can see the toll that it takes on them. Anxiety may be a bit different in that it is brought upon because an event may have an infinite number of outcomes, and the thought of not knowing what will happen, or perhaps even trying to iterate through all of those possible outcomes, then brings about this general sense of anxiety. The expectation on the individual’s part here is that they can actually iterate through each and every one of those possible outcomes, out of infinity, which we all know is impossible. Perhaps managing one’s expectation by recognizing that outside forces can control outcomes, that we don’t have control over all outcomes, and that expecting any sort of outcome to happen, will not only reduce stress but also anxiety as well. Just some food for thought.
