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Sunday MBA

When stress can work in your favor

Sunday MBA provides ideas on running better businesses and succeeding in the modern workplace, this week from Harvard Business Review and Francesca Gino, professor at Harvard Business School and author of “Are You Too Stressed to Be Productive? Or Not Stressed Enough?”

If you’re like me, you often ask yourself how you can get more work done in a day. How can you best boost your productivity? I always assumed that if I could just reduce any stress I was facing, my productivity would rise. But my intuition was wrong. It’s true that stress can be a health risk, and that we’re often encouraged to avoid it if we want to live happy, productive, and long lives. But research suggests that some stress can actually be beneficial to performance.

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According to what is known as “The Yerkes-Dodson law,” performance increases with physiological or mental arousal (stress) but only up to a point. When the level of stress becomes too high, performance decreases.

There’s more: The shape of the curve varies based on the complexity and familiarity of the task. Different tasks require different levels of arousal for optimal performance, research has found. For example, difficult or unfamiliar tasks require lower levels of arousal to facilitate concentration; by contrast, you might better perform tasks demanding stamina or persistence with higher levels of arousal to induce and increase motivation.

Here are some strategies that might help you reduce stress to a more productive level:

Increase your control. One simple solution to lowering stress is to find more ways to increase your control over the work you do. People tend to believe that high-level positions bring a lot of stress, but research suggests just the opposite: Leaders with higher levels of responsibility experience lower stress levels than those with less on their shoulders. This is because leaders have more control over their activities. Independent of where you sit in the organizational hierarchy, you might have ways to increase your sense of control — namely, by focusing on aspects of your work where you can make choices (for example, choosing one project over another or simply choosing the order in which you answer e-mails).

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Find more opportunities to be authentic. Evidence suggests that people often experience feelings of inauthenticity at work. That is, they conform to the opinions of colleagues rather than voicing their own, and they go with others’ flow rather than setting their own agenda. This, my research suggests, has important implications for your stress level and performance. When people behave in inauthentic ways, they experience higher levels of anxiety than when they are simply themselves. So, try to find ways to express who you are at work, such as offering to share your unique talents or decorating your office to reflect who you are.

Use rituals. Basketball superstar Michael Jordan wore his North Carolina shorts underneath his Chicago Bulls shorts at every game; Curtis Martin of the New York Jets reads Psalm 91 before every game; and Wade Boggs, as third baseman for the Boston Red Sox, ate chicken before each game and took batting practice at exactly 5:17 p.m., fielded exactly 117 ground balls, and ran sprints at precisely 7:17 p.m. These rituals might sound strange, but they can actually improve performance.

A moderate amount of stress might put you in the right mindset to tackle your work. But if you are feeling overwhelmed, I hope you’ll try out some of these strategies to not only improve your productivity but also to increase your happiness.

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Francesca Gino is a professor at Harvard Business School professor and author of “Sidetracked: Why Our Decisions Get Derailed, and How We Can Stick to the Plan” (Harvard Business Review Press, 2013). Reprinted with permission of Harvard Business Review.