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When we experience events in our lives, we interpret them. And there are an infinite number of ways that we can interpret our experiences that have direct implications for how we think, feel, and behave. One really great example of how this interpretation process works and how it can impact you has to do with how we evaluate social stress.
Two Stress Responses
When you find yourself in a stressful experience, there are typically two questions you ask yourself, and this often happens subconsciously. The first thing you do is you take stock of the situation and you think, what’s required of me? Then you ask yourself, do I have the personal resources to cope with this situation? If you ask yourself those two questions and you think to yourself, nope, can’t handle it, that elicits what we call a threat response. This is a negative response that has a deleterious effect on your body, on your stress reaction. It perpetuates a harmful physical stress reaction, and it also makes you feel worse in ways that undermine your ability to perform in social situations. When you appraise a situation as a threat, at the physical level, what happens is, your heart starts pumping out blood to the rest of your body, and your vasculature, the tangle of arteries and veins that carries that blood throughout, it starts constricting. When you have a lot of blood traveling into a progressively smaller space, this is not a good thing. That’s how you get experiences like burst blood vessels and arteries.
If, on the other hand, you ask yourself the same two questions and you think to yourself, I can do this, that elicits what we call a challenge response, which is associated with the opposite outcome of results, a more adaptive way of responding to the situation physiologically, more adaptive ways of thinking about the problems in front of you, the task ahead, and better performance, in turn. What happens when you’re experiencing challenge, your heart is still ejecting blood really fast, but your vasculature restricts. It allows that blood to flow effortlessly through your body, which makes it easier for you to manage the situation that you’re dealing with.
Transforming Threats into Challenges
Here’s what’s really cool. We are not destined to appraise a situation as a threat or a challenge. There’s lots of research, which demonstrates that you have the ability to change the way you think about the circumstances you find yourself in. This is one of the most important lessons that we’ve learned in the science surrounding how to manage chatter and the human mind. And it’s one of the things that I tell my daughters. It’s one of the tools that I try to impress upon them over and over again. Our reflexive ways of making sense of what we’re experiencing are not the only ways that we can make sense of those situations. One tool that’s effective for activating these challenge cognitions is distanced self-talk, trying to give yourself advice, using your own name, like you would coach your best friend through adversity that they’re dealing with.
There’s a great example of this from Fred Rogers, the classic Mr. Rogers. An entry from Fred Rogers’ journal was released several years ago, and what he revealed in this entry was that when he was contemplating returning to show business after taking a brief hiatus, he was filled with self-doubt, he was filled with feelings of impostorism that you and me and so many other people have likely experienced at times. How am I gonna do this? How am I gonna return? It’s gonna be awful, I can’t do it. It’s all threat. Then at a certain point, he pauses, and he starts referring to himself using his name and says, “All right, Fred, the time has come, get to it.” And he gives himself that motivating message, that message that says, he can do it. And the proof is, so they say, in the pudding, because he then went back on air and kept on producing remarkable footage that has educated children and adults for generations. It’s a perfect example of how you can take a threatening situation and transform it in your mind into a challenge, which then allows you to persevere.
So let’s say you have a big presentation coming up at work, and you find yourself in threat mode. Oh my God, I can’t do it. How am I gonna deal with the situation? Make the conscious attempt to reframe that experience as a challenge, and use language to help you do it. Use distanced self-talk. So try to give yourself the same pep talk, if you will, that you would give to your best friend if they were struggling in this situation and came to you for advice. What would you say to them? Say that to yourself.