Turn stress into an ally

Many people struggle with stress, and organisations feel the effects. “Stress isn’t always bad,” you sometimes hear. But what do you do when a team starts cracking because people keep dropping out one after another?

In this blog post, we offer some handles for using stress to your advantage. First, we describe how our stress system works. Then we outline the pitfalls, and finally we give some tips for dealing with stress in organisations as well as possible.

Want to know how connecting communication helps make stress something you can talk about and tackle together? Want to learn how you, as a manager or HR professional, can make a difference when it comes to resilience in your team or organisation? Then have a look at our three-day expert training in connecting communication for managers and HR professionals at the end of March. And if you want to read more about stress in the workplace, ask us your question.

The purpose and the problem of stress in a nutshell

Stress signals that something is at stake. It puts our body in a state of readiness. Feelings of hunger, pain and fatigue decrease while focus and productivity increase. Your energy reserves are tapped into. Stress is therefore your ally in survival situations and when you temporarily want to perform at the top of your game.

Stress only becomes a problem when stressful moments occur frequently and last a long time. Only when the built-up tension in our body remains and stressful moments aren’t alternated with recovery time do complaints arise. The load becomes greater than the capacity, and this comes at the cost of your physical, mental and emotional health.

Your window of tolerance and your autopilot

Our body is built to handle stressful events and challenges within certain limits. In the literature, these limits are referred to as ‘the window of optimal stress’[1]. If stress is lower or higher than the optimal level, you go on autopilot, coordinated by the autonomic nervous system, ‘outside your window’. Just as you can’t consciously control your digestion or heartbeat, you have no direct control over your stress level.

Within your window, you have control over what you do with your emotions and impulses. You can focus, collaborate, find solutions and maintain oversight. You can grow and learn. Your body is relaxed and your sleep is restorative.

That said, it’s not always sunshine and roses inside your window, but you can fall back on a foundation of safety.

Three steering mechanisms of your autopilot (autonomic nervous system)

As long as we feel safe, you move up and down within your window, and your autopilot ensures that activation and recovery alternate. The three steering mechanisms at work here are what we call the connecting brake, the accelerator and the primal brake.

• The connecting brake: The ventral vagus nerve ensures you can connect with others and care for each other. When we feel safe with others, our heart rate and breathing adjust and we come to rest and recovery. In this way, this nerve helps us stay within our window.

• The accelerator: The sympathetic nervous system takes on the function of accelerator, giving you energy to exert yourself and stay alert. When the accelerator is pressed, you rise in your window.

• The primal brake: The dorsal vagus nerve functions as a brake and provides rest, recovery and basic functions such as breathing, digestion, reproduction and sleep. This nerve makes us drop in our window.

When stress is no longer optimal, the system still offers three routes to safety.

• The autopilot first checks whether the connecting brake can be engaged. Not by running away, fighting or fleeing, but by connecting with others. The connection provides an extra buffer against stressful events. This way, we can trust others, ask for help and look for solutions together. Our brain stays active, we can maintain oversight, learn and be open to new ideas. But if the challenges are too great, the connecting brake falls away and we’re left with the (evolutionarily older systems of) accelerator or primal brake.
• As long as we stay within the window, the accelerator gets us into action. But once you go above your window, connection with others is no longer possible and your autopilot ensures you act from instinct and emotion rather than from logic. You then instinctively defend yourself or run away.
• Or we fall back on an (evolutionarily even older) defence system where you withdraw like a tortoise. When you drop below your window, you shoot into the primal brake and end up in a kind of standby mode. You become cut off from everything and everyone. There’s no more room to look for solutions, to feel or to hope.

To be ready whenever danger threatens, your autopilot continuously scans signals of safety and danger in your environment, in others, in your own body and from your history. In this way, our stress system is influenced, for better or worse, by ourselves and our environment. It’s therefore important to be aware of this and to steer (make choices) where you have impact.

A case for falling

A healthy stress system means you can deal with more and less stress, you get to know your own system better and better, and you listen to your body in time. Going outside your window now and then is part of it. It’s about falling and getting back up again. Making room, for yourself and others, to be allowed to fall is a prerequisite for developing resilience.

In that sense, we need to make room for negativity, pain and discomfort. Everyone ends up outside their window from time to time. You can’t be authentic without ever being negative. And that authenticity is needed to experience connection and, with the help of the connecting brake, find the way back to a manageable stress level.

What you’re not built for

Your body isn’t built to spend long periods outside the safe zone. Then the autopilot loses the way back to safety. After periods of excessive stress, rest and recovery are needed. If that recovery doesn’t follow, you’ll notice your window getting smaller. You’ve been in elevated stress for too long, your autopilot becomes ever more vigilant and active. If you keep going regardless, there’s a chance your body eventually gives up and ‘the lights go out’. That’s what we call burnout. The further you get into that trajectory, the more it takes to recover.

Yet there are people who keep plodding on without ending up in burnout. They continue in survival mode but no longer enjoy anything. With a dysregulated autopilot that sees danger everywhere, that keeps going into defence mode or keeps breaking the connection with people around them. Just enough recovery is built in to keep going, but that’s about it. That’s what we call burn-on.

And then there’s bore-out. The cause of bore-out is boredom and underload, but the consequences are similar to burnout: you no longer have energy for anything. Getting into action and seeking new challenges is what matters here.

Stress is also a group process

When the environment is safe and others respond to you from a place of calm and positivity, chances are you’ll go along with it and when challenges arise, you’ll tend to seek connection with others. The reverse is also true: when people around you go outside their window, chances are you’ll be pulled out too.

In that sense, it’s important to take stress seriously, both out of care for the individual and out of care for the team and the organisation. As an organisation, you can’t remove all stress, and you don’t need to. Often you also have no influence on the stressors from employees’ private lives. But making stress recognisable and discussable at team and organisation level does ensure that employees can deal more appropriately with their own stress and that of colleagues who go outside their window.

Approaches for tackling stress in difficult times

You don’t replace a roof when it’s raining. Yet even in difficult times, there are things you as a manager or HR professional can work with.

We’re thinking primarily of giving recognition and organising support.

Giving recognition restores connection and activates the connecting brake. Negativity lingers when there’s no space for it. So create an outlet for negativity and make sure that afterwards, there’s room to look for solutions and possibilities.

Organising support first requires a good understanding of the causes of conflict and stress. Then it’s a matter of tackling those causes as concretely as possible, making clear agreements about desired behaviour, and following up. And creating space for our innate systems to deal with stress, taking into account the diversity of employees.

Approaches for resilience in calm periods

In calm periods, you can lay the foundation for more challenging times by expanding the organisational window.

Invest in connectedness. If you want to boost employee resilience, the key is to work on connectedness at all levels, so that people can rely on each other when things get tough.

• Ensure a good balance between efficient formal contacts and relationship-oriented informal moments, and above all a clear distinction between both forms of contact.
• Build connectedness at organisation level by involving people in the mission and vision. Framing decisions, communicating openly and asking employees for input deserves attention. A clear mission and vision provides clarity and predictability, which in turn brings safety.
• Have a clear and well-considered policy on remote work.

Invest in mental wellbeing. When teams develop a shared language around stress, team members are better able to support each other and be supported.

• Make agreements about disconnecting.
• Make sure people are seen and heard in difficult moments.
• Designate quiet workspaces and spaces for conversation.

Invest in physical health and vitality. Stress resilience also has a physical component, and where people are encouraged and supported to make healthy choices, the employer shares in the gains. Dare to involve employees when it comes to concrete ideas! Who hasn’t experienced the power of a team challenge?

And last but not least: lead by example.

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[1] Recommended reading: Riet breekt niet. Anders omgaan met stress en negativiteit. (Daisy Buttiens & Kirsten O, 2023)