You know stress is bad for you and your people. It raises your personal risk of a host of ailments, which includes heart disease and cancer. One of the main problems is that the stress hormones can suppress the cells of your immune system, therefore leaving you more susceptible to infection.
In the workplace it also raises the probability of mistakes, conflict, absenteeism, delays, and turnover. Therefore, you know the message is simple: avoid stress!
Only that it’s not that simple.
New research evidence by Stanford Professor Firdaus Dhabhar, seems to show benefits of stress. Tracking the trajectories of key immune cells in response to short-term stress, he shows how hormones triggered by short term stress enhance immune readiness. It seems that short-term stress — the fight-or-flight response, a mobilization of bodily resources lasting minutes or hours in response to immediate threats — stimulates immune activity.
And that’s a good thing.
The immune system is crucial for wound healing and preventing or fighting infection, and both wounds and infections are common risks during chases, escapes and combat. “Mother Nature gave us the fight-or-flight stress response to help us, not to kill us,” said Dhabhar.
Stress and your brain
The findings paint a clearer picture of exactly how the mind influences immune activity. In a simplified way. Dhabhar said that the hormone norepinephrine is released early and is primarily involved in mobilizing all major immune-cell types — monocytes, neutrophils and lymphocytes — into the blood. Epinephrine, also released early, mobilized monocytes and neutrophils into the blood, while nudging lymphocytes out into “battlefield” destinations such as skin. And corticosterone, released somewhat later, caused virtually all immune cell types to head out of circulation to the “battlefields.”
In other words, the overall effect is to bolster immune readiness.
But here is the challenge:
This is only true if the stress if present over a short period of time. If the stress period is too long, all the bad things you have read or hear about stress are true and therefore stress would be very bad for you and your people. It can kill you!
Stress and leadership
How does this applies to your leadership?
A short time period of the right kind of stress (like an exciting deadline) can bring you and your people to attention, help you have clearer minds, and be more alert and healthy.
Constant stress (like making an emergency of every deadline) brings all the negative issues chronic stress can produce.
Remember. . .
It’s up to you. You can literally kill yourself and those around you with constant stress. Or you can judiciously use short-term stress to enhance performance, while making sure the period of high stress is followed by a more relaxed way of working.
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Photo by: robennals