What Is Eustress? Yes, Positive Stress Is A Thing

Here's a word that becomes a favorite with my clients as soon as they learn it: eustress.

If you haven't heard this word before, welcome to a whole new perspective on stress. I am going to assume that you've heard the word stress. It can come in the form of anxiety or nervousness, a feeling that the walls are closing in or that you're treading water.

Uplifting, eh? Stay with me, because the first part of the word is key. Eu is a Greek root that means "good" or "well." You see the same root in the words euphoria, euphemism, and euphony. So if you put the two parts of the word together, you get a positive type of stress.

It's that feeling of nervousness before an interview or before you ask someone out on a date—or before the prom, or your first day of school, or traveling to a new country.

Eustress is actually good for you. It's the heightened sense of awareness that primes you to be alert, preparing you to perform at your best.

So when you experience that feeling of stress before doing something big, the question is: How do you meet and greet it? How do you shift stress into eustress? How do you become the football coach who uses halftime nervousness to power up his team?

As a career and life coach, I work with my clients to achieve this very shift—to turn their anxiety into momentum for positive action. This worked beautifully with one client who had deep anxiety over her brother's wedding. She was in the middle of a career transition and dreaded the questions she anticipated from her relatives. We worked together to turn that energy into something useful, to ask for help from relatives who may have had connections in her industry or had completed career shifts themselves. She took the nervousness she had about her anticipated inquisition, took the lead in the conversation, and redirected the energy of those inquiring (with the assumption that her relatives wanted to help). We turned their worry and questions into work and actions. Voilà—the wedding turned potentially anxiety-triggering relatives into a curated job search team.

When I was pregnant with my daughter, I actively worked to turn my stress over the impending birth into positive energy. The delivery of her older twin brothers had involved more complications than I expected, and this time I actively prepared for a different experience. I studied the writings of leading midwife Ina May Gaskin. I prepared my mind to think of this as a thrilling experience, to observe what my body could accomplish. I thought that if I labored mindfully through her birth, I would be well-prepared for the rest of parenthood. And as it happened, she came so fast my doctor told me to stop pushing!

Feeling anxiety related to a specific event is a good tip that it's important to you. But instead of letting this anxiety get the better of you, you can learn to flip it to eustress—you at your best, primed to deliver, using that extra awareness to enhance your talent.

Here are a few steps to identifying and shifting that emotion when it comes your way:

You've got this.