Embrace Eustress, Reject Distress
Some of us have been through a long and stressful period in our lives and have decided to walk away from stress for a while. This is a completely normal and healthy reaction.
However, in our desire to reduce stress, we often paint with too broad a brush, mixing together two kinds of stress, eustress and distress.
Eustress is good stress: it helps you learn and grow. You’ll be a better person after than before. An example is learning UX design: it feels uncomfortable that month. You feel helpless and stupid, and you don’t want to feel that way; you want to feel in control and capable. But after the stress is over, you’ve developed new skills and grown as a person, able to do more than you could earlier.
Distress is bad stress: it chips away at you. It has no redeeming quality. It doesn’t make you better as a person; if anything it leaves you in a worse place emotionally. An example is working with uninformed but overconfident people, or having what you bring to the table dismissed.
Many of us don’t understand the difference between eustress and distress. We shy away from all stress. While shying away from distress is good, and we should learn from our experiences and say no to such situations, when you eliminate eustress, you also eliminate the learning and growth that comes from it. And in today’s competitive, globalized world, if you don’t keep learning and growing, you’ll be replaced sooner or later by someone younger and hungrier, who can do the job better, faster or cheaper. To prevent that from happening, you need to keep improving, which requires eustress.
Stress provides the motivation needed to get moving and get anything done. As a leader I know puts it, stress is the potential difference that causes current to flow. No potential difference, no current. A complete lack of stress causes stagnation, boredom and loss of interest in your work. So you don’t want to eliminate eustress.
To illustrate eustress and distress, I wanted to list some examples:
Not stress
These were not stressful in the first place, so the question of whether they were eustress or distress doesn’t apply:
- Research
- Working as an engineer.
- Working as an architect.
- Maintaining an open-source command-line tax calculator
- Conducting a hackathon to port the command-line tax calculator to iOS and Mac.
- Advising startups
Eustress
- Working as an independent app developer
With reference to my startup Futurecam:
- Working as a tech lead
- People management
- UX design
- Product management
- Project management
- Building the Futurecam website
- Photography
- Building an Android app.
Working as a consultant was eustress, including:
- Creating my Youtube channel
- Creating my website
- Getting testimonials (I had to overcome my fear of being criticized).
- Creating spreadsheets: calculators and checklists.
- Wasting a lot of time with leads who don’t convert. This is eustress because it made me think of ways to fail fast.
Distress
- Hiring was eustress initially but it rapidly became distress, since most candidates are bad (which is dispiriting), and because of the desperation underscoring hiring (because development is being delayed).
- Working with people with an incompatible personality.
- Compromising your ethics
- Firing non-performers.
- Working with anyone who isn’t full-time. This includes part-timers and agencies, with the exception of one excellent graphic designer.
- Working with multiple people over the years who are non-co-operative, say “yes, yes” but don’t follow what they agreed to, naysayers, or otherwise toxic.
- Talking to investors, creating a pitch deck, etc
- Marketing
- Legal, contracts, tax filing and other CA work
- Facilities like getting a coworking space, dealing with their spotty Internet, buying laptops, etc.
- Dealing with the Apple app store
- Keeping up with new iPhones coming out every year and obsolescing some of our features and making us run to stay where we were.
- Having bad work/life balance: it didn’t produce a million-dollar outcome that would have made it all worthwhile.
- Running a services company: I was getting third-rate leads, and had to pay salaries every month.
- Losing more money than I can afford, since Futurecam was a bootstrapped startup
- Being forced to do things with insufficient money, manpower and time. It’s like trying to drive to the other end of the country with 1 liter of fuel. No matter how much you try, you won’t achieve an impossible goal like this, only frustrate yourself.
- Being the founder of a startup, where everything that goes wrong goes wrong at my expense, as opposed to an employee, consultant or advisor.
- Working with a company with a bad culture (this is in a full-time job I took up after I shut down my startup).
Make a similar list for yourself. You may get greater clarity into what kind of job is right for you.
We have limited tolerance for stress, only some amount of pain we can take. Use that budget carefully to take on eustress, not distress. If you do the latter, you’ll exhaust your capacity and not take on eustress, and consequently not grow in your career.