This year’s IPL has started and almost all the matches in the last 10 days have been very close ones. While normally I don’t watch matches in full during the first half of the tournament but only keep a tab on who’s winning and losing …these close finishes have pushed me to watch almost all of the matches this time. Most of the friends with whom I have spoken to have also shared the same feeling. So, we love watching close matches and finishes and enjoy the uncertainty that is built during such situations…While we are enjoying it made me also question how players coming under stress or pressure during these close contests.
What happens to us when we have multiple assignments with tough deadlines thrown at us at the office? Do we come under stress or pressure? How is the stress or pressure in that situation different when someone close runs into a medical emergency or when we have a tough performance appraisal.
Stress and Pressure are two words which we very comfortably interchange and use as per our requirement. Let’s understand a bit about what really happens to break this down a bit further.
There are lot of experiments which have been done to understand what happens to our bodies when there is stress or pressure. These were evolutionary traits which were built into our bodies to ensure survival particularly against predators. While we do not face such predatory situations our bodies still react in the same manner as we did during the evolutionary period.
Several studies to understand the creation of cortisol in the body. During a couple of such experiments done with mice by giving electric shocks and in people staying in and around London during the Second World War it was concluded that the more random the shocks or uncertainty the more cortisol which was produced. The cortisol produced by such random uncertainties were more than those produced by higher dosage of shocks.
Cortisol is an important hormone which effects our ability to think and retrieve memory. Along with another chemical called corticotropin releasing hormone which is produced by amygdala, cortisol incites anxiety and suppress the production of testosterone. In the absence of testosterone approach-based behavior diminishes and our attention becomes more focused on the negative aspects of the situation. This leads to attentional bias leading to us considering our environment as threatening. While this was essential for early man to counter the various threats in the environment this becomes a disadvantage in most of today’s situations as it creates a mental frame of “Don’t do anything wrong!”
The continuous exposure to Cortisol also creates long term damage to two structures of the brain the amygdala and hippocampus. The amygdala is where the emotional content of memories is stored, and it records how you felt as you faced a pressure point in the past. The hippocampus stores the factual memory of an event, what happened, who was involved, how was it resolved and what was learned. Due to continuous exposure to cortisol the receptors of the hippocampus shrink the receptors of amygdala grow and branch out as they get more and more exposed to the cortisol.
This is why if we continue to work under high stress and pressure, we tend to start taking more emotional that factual decisions. This is in addition to risk aversion and an irrational focus on negative information in the environment.
Higher cortisol levels are also found to reduce or deplete the stomachs mucosal lining which in turn leads to a higher number of ulcers.
Coming back to our original question of how we differentiate between stress and pressure so that we can productively use this chemical combination which is created in our body to our advantage as it was envisaged.
Pressures basically have the following characteristics.
- The outcome is very important for you and maybe several others working with you or whose lives you influence and since you feel the result is important there is also an indirect pressure on you to avoid failure.
- The outcome is uncertain. Like I said in the beginning we all love to watch a very close IPL match but if we were in such a situation, we wouldn’t cherish it much. There was this interesting study, which was done on stockbrokers who traded, and it was found that they became more risk averse in a bear market than in a bull market and hence missed good buying opportunities.
- You feel you are responsible for and are being judged on the outcome. This creates a social pain and studies have shown that all mammals are profusely influenced by their social environment which is why we feel responsible to take up a task because your favorite boss has told you or not to say no to his. What is also interesting is that our brains are wired to respond in the same way to social pain as it responds to physical pain. So, when you break your arm, you feel the same pain neurologically as you feel when you lose a loved one.
So, while stress refers to a situation of too many demands and too less resources time, energy and money to meet them pressure is a situation in which you perceive that something very long term is at stake, and it is dependent on the outcome of your performance. While in a stress situation there are multiple ways in which the stress can be managed in a pressure there is only one way of you getting it right. In a penalty shootout the only way out for the goalkeeper is to ensure that he blocks the ball.
In a stressful situation, reduction is the goal while in a pressure situation success is the goal. So, in a stressful situation very often if we evaluate the situation, we will realize it’s not life threatening and by maybe using some relaxation techniques we can help ourselves from being overwhelmed and help us regain our perspective. In a pressure situation while relaxation might help, we can only advance if we successfully deliver what is expected.
99% of the situations that we run into in our daily lives are stress and can be overcome and managed if we are able to use this differentiation to separate stress and pressure.
To continue understanding more about the differences between stress and pressure and how better we can differentiate them and hence manage the same better, do subscribe to my new LinkedIn newsletter Rejo’s Biz Bytes and visit my website www.rejofrancis.com.
