Could Anxiety Be Your Secret Weapon?

Stress is the malaise of modern life. But what if one of the worst things in your life became one of the best? Lizzie Pook explores the idea of positive anxiety.

- Lizzie Pook

AT LEAST ONCE A week, I’ll find myself battling a sudden, shocking breathlessness. It comes on swiftly, out of nowhere, with a fizzling undercurrent of nervous energy that seems to crackle from my fingers and toes like small jolts of electricity. It keeps me up at night. It leaves me distracted in meetings. It makes me unsettled, under-confident and wary of new situations. It is anxiety, and it has been part of my life for well over a decade now.

I’ve always thought of my susceptibility to stress and anxiety as one of my biggest flaws. It’s the albatross around my neck; the thing that has made me weak, unhinged, unappealing to new employers and undesirable to prospective partners. But what if this was all wrong? What if, this year, I decided to reframe how I see my anxiety and transform it into one of my best assets instead? Because, as it turns out, stress and anxiety are not all bad. In fact, evidence is beginning to stack up that there is such a thing as positive stress and, believe it or not, it can be a key factor for living well.

Stress is a word many of us use on an almost-daily basis: ‘Work is just SO stressful at the moment’; ‘My boss is totally stressing me out right now’. But the fact is, these stressors are mostly manageable, and it’s in these instances that stress can actually be a positive thing. A recent study from the Indiana University Kelley School of Business found that a stressful job can actually be good for your health – when combined with a high level of control in decision making. Researchers studied thousands of workers in their sixties over seven years and found that those in high-stress roles, in which they also felt they had ‘freedom and control’, were 34% less likely to die than those in less stressful jobs.