Stress, Anxiety and Performance
Understanding stress and anxiety
Fear + uncertainty = anxiety
Fear is one of the most powerful emotions, produced by our brains outside of our conscious control. Generated in the brain's limbic structures, which regulate fundamental human emotions, fear can be adaptive in the face of a real, present threat.
Imagine the jolt of fear you experience if you stepped off a curb just as a bus was hurtling past. In this scenario, your fear would trigger an instinctive response to that real danger, and you would leap back, protecting yourself from harm.
When thinking about the future and its inherent uncertainties, your brain might respond with the emotion of fear. This coupling of fear with uncertainty about the future creates anxiety .
Now, imagine prepping for an important speech at an upcoming conference. Next week's speech is not an immediate threat. However, thinking about it makes your palms sweat, your stomach churn, and your performance suffer. That is anxiety , a response to a perceived future threat, not a real and immediate danger.
Whereas fear can protect you, anxiety can hold you back, preventing you from feeling well and performing at your best.
When you learn to understand anxiety and how it shows up in your mind and body, you can use it as a resource rather than a roadblock, improving both performance and well-being. You begin to see anxiety not as a flaw, but as a signal . Anxiety, however uncomfortable, is natural and expected. Learn to tell helpful, “adaptive” anxiety apart from the unhelpful kind. The key to mastering it isn't eliminating it, but learning to recognize and respond to it.
Stress is a mismatch between the demands you're facing and the resources you have to meet them. By that definition, stress is inevitable whenever you're fully engaged in your life and pursuing what matters. As the saying goes, stress is the price we pay for a life that matters.
Avoiding stress, then, isn't the goal. A life with no stress might sound appealing, but it likely means avoiding or missing the engaging, meaningful challenges that make life rich. Recent research on stress mindset shows that how you think about stress significantly shapes how you experience it, both physically and emotionally. Stress can be both enhancing and debilitating, depending on how you approach it. Stress mindset can shift and evolve; you can learn to develop a stress mindset that helps you feel well and perform better.
Key elements of anxiety
When we're anxious, we tend to:
Overestimate the threat.
We overestimate both the likelihood and the severity of a negative outcome.
Underestimate our capacity to cope.
We assume we can't handle difficult situations, and that we'll "fall apart" in the face of adversity. We also assume we shouldn't have to experience negative emotions at all, whether anxiety, sadness, frustration, or disappointment.
Worry.
It often feels as though worrying means we're "working on" a problem or solving it. But worry is rarely productive, and it tends to erode well-being. It's bound up with distressing emotions like dread, and it shows up in the body as muscle tension, fatigue, headaches, and stomach distress.
The role of avoidance
We tend to steer clear of the situations and emotions that trigger anxiety. The impulse to avoid or suppress discomfort is natural and understandable, but avoidance doesn't cure anxiety. It perpetuates and intensifies it. Learning to face anxiety-provoking situations and tolerate the anxiety, rather than avoiding or "controlling" it, is the key to mastering it.
We can't avoid or fully extinguish anxiety, and in fact, avoidance tends to make it worse. Instead, we work to recognize and respond to anxiety. This approach can transform our relationship to anxiety.
A concept that runs through all of this work is distress tolerance , the capacity to sit with uncomfortable emotions rather than fight or escape them. To thrive personally and professionally, we need to learn to tolerate difficult feelings. The belief that we're supposed to be free of stress and anxiety is not only mistaken but counterproductive: when we treat anxiety as something to control or avoid, we set ourselves up to feel more anxious, not less.
The cognitive-behavioral model of anxiety
We can understand anxiety as a cycle linking four elements: physical sensations, emotions, thoughts, and behaviors. Each one feeds the others.
Physical symptoms
Anxiety often speaks through the body, showing up as muscle tension, shallow breathing, a racing heart, stomach distress, and dizziness. Every form of anxiety, from panic attacks to worry, can carry physical sensations with it.
We think of these symptoms as signals . The body is alerting the mind that something feels amiss. The catch is that the more we focus on the sensations, the worse they feel, and the longer they persist.
To break the cycle, we learn to recognize these symptoms for what they are: anxiety signals that may be uncomfortable but are time-limited and not harmful. With awareness and practice, we learn to "ride the wave" of the sensations and let them pass. Over time, their frequency and severity tend to diminish, and often they fade altogether.
Thoughts and cognitive patterns
When we're in the grip of anxiety, stress, or any strong emotion, we tend to treat our thoughts as facts.
Imagine that a fleeting thought surfaces before an important interview: "What if I bomb this?" Fused with anxiety or dread, the mind automatically (outside of our conscious control) converts that hypothesis into a certainty: "I'm going to bomb this interview." From there, one thought triggers a cascade of others.
Once we learn to recognize our own most common patterns, we can begin to balance our thinking using straightforward, evidence-based strategies.
Behaviors
What behaviors tend to accompany stress and anxiety? Above all, avoidance intensifies and prolongs these emotions. Many everyday behaviors are forms of avoidance in disguise, including procrastination and difficulty making decisions. Once we identify these patterns, we can begin shifting toward ones that quiet unhelpful anxiety and let us move toward our goals and values with more clarity, energy, and focus.
Avoidance is one of the most well-established drivers of anxiety.
The encouraging news is that the reverse is also true. Decades of research, including the work of Dr. David Barlow, with whom I trained, show that when we learn to approach what we fear and sit with difficult emotions rather than fleeing them, those emotions lose their charge and diminish on their own. This is the heart of evidence-based work with stress and anxiety.
Research also points to a handful of behaviors that help us feel and perform better, alongside addressing avoidance:
- Authentic connection with other people
- Purpose and engagement in our work, interests, and relationships
- Essentialism: Identifying and pursuing what actually matters, and returning to the question, "What matters most to me?"
References
The strategies and concepts on this site are grounded in peer-reviewed research. Selected references are provided below, organized by topic.
Understanding Anxiety and Avoidance
Akbari, M., Seydavi, M., Hosseini, Z. S., Krafft, J., & Levin, M. E. (2022). Experiential avoidance in depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive related, and posttraumatic stress disorders: A comprehensive systematic review and meta-analysis.
Journal of Contextual Behavioral Science, 24, 65-78. View Full Reference > (opens in a new tab)
Barlow, D. H., Farchione, T. J., Bullis, J. R., Gallagher, M. W., Murray-Latin, H., Sauer-Zavala, S., Bentley, K. H., Thompson-Hollands, J., Conklin, L. R., Boswell, J. F., Ametaj, A., Carl, J. R., Boettcher, H. T., & Cassiello-Robbins, C. (2017). The Unified Protocol for transdiagnostic treatment of emotional disorders compared with diagnosis-specific protocols for anxiety disorders: A randomized clinical trial.
JAMA Psychiatry, 74(9), 875-884. View Full Reference > (opens in a new tab)
Barlow, D. H., Farchione, T. J., Sauer-Zavala, S., Latin, H. M., Ellard, K. K., Bullis, J. R., Bentley, K. H., Boettcher, H. T., & Cassiello-Robbins, C. (2018). Unified Protocol for transdiagnostic treatment of emotional disorders: Therapist guide (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press.
Mineka, S., & Zinbarg, R. (2006). A contemporary learning theory perspective on the etiology of anxiety disorders: It's not what you thought it was.
American Psychologist, 61(1), 10-26. View Full Reference > (opens in a new tab)
Stress and Stress Mindset
Barrett, L. F. (2020). Seven and a half lessons about the brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Crum, A. J., Salovey, P., & Achor, S. (2013). Rethinking stress: The role of mindsets in determining the stress response.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 104(4), 716-733. View Full Reference > (opens in a new tab)
Breathing Practice
Balban, M. Y., Neri, E., Kogon, M. M., Weed, L., Nouriani, B., Jo, B., Holl, G., Zeitzer, J. M., Spiegel, D., & Huberman, A. D. (2023). Brief structured respiration practices enhance mood and reduce physiological arousal.
Cell Reports Medicine, 4(1), 100895. View Full Reference > (opens in a new tab)
Bentley, T. G. K., D'Andrea-Penna, G., Rakic, M., Arce, N., LaFaille, M., Berman, R., Cooley, K., & Sprimont, P. (2023). Breathing practices for stress and anxiety reduction: Conceptual framework of implementation guidelines based on a systematic review of the published literature.
Brain Sciences, 13(12), 1612. View Full Reference > (opens in a new tab)
Progressive Muscle Relaxation
Muhammad Khir, S., Wan Mohd Yunus, W. M. A., Mahmud, N., Wang, R., Panatik, S. A., Mohd Sukor, M. S., & Nordin, N. A. (2024). Efficacy of progressive muscle relaxation in adults for stress, anxiety, and depression: A systematic review.
Psychology Research and Behavior Management, 17, 345-365. View Full Reference > (opens in a new tab)
Tan, L., Fang, P., Cui, J., Yu, H., & Yu, L. (2022). Effects of progressive muscle relaxation on health-related outcomes in cancer patients: A systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials.
Complementary Therapies in Clinical Practice, 49, 101676. View Full Reference > (opens in a new tab)
Mindfulness
Hoge, E. A., Bui, E., Marques, L., Metcalf, C. A., Morris, L. K., Robinaugh, D. J., Worthington, J. J., Pollack, M. H., & Simon, N. M. (2013). Randomized controlled trial of mindfulness meditation for generalized anxiety disorder: Effects on stress and anxiety reactivity.
Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, 74(8), 786-792. View Full Reference > (opens in a new tab)