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Hi guys. Welcome to the podcast. Thanks for tuning in again today. One of the themes that we have talked about over and over again on this podcast is that there is more than one kind of stress. There is a bad kind of stress. Everybody knows about bad stress, but there's also a good kind of stress. But this isn't actually a totally accurate description because we have talked about how your emotional response doesn't depend on your situation. It's not your situation that produces your stress. It is your brain's relationship with the situation that organizes your emotional experience in the situation. And again, we know this because two different people can be in the exact same situation and have two very different types of emotional experiences. So anyway, going back to stress, it's not that there's two types of stress, but rather there are two types of relationships with stress that will affect your emotional experience, all the way from your motivations to your behavior, to your physiology, to the way that you feel. It all has to do with how your brain evaluates the demands in proportion to your resources. So we've talked about this lots before, but there's the threat response to stress, which is where you feel like your brain feels like the, the demands in this situation are way too much for my resources. So then you end up with this threat response, which is where we get anxiety and debilitated cognitive performance and all of these detrimental health effects if you extend it over the long term. But the good stress on the other hand is what we call the challenge response, and that's where your brain has a different relationship to stress. So it can be the exact same situation, but your brain is evaluating in a different way. So stress, a stressful situation is something where there's gonna be a demand for change. It's going to tax your resources at least. It's going to tax or exceed your resources. It's gonna demand some kind of change. But if your brain decides that it's going to exceed your resources, that it's too much for your resources, that's where you get the threat response. If your brain decides that it's just gonna tax your resources, but your resources can stretch to make it. With an extra expenditure of energy that you can rise to meet these demands. That's where we get the challenge response. And the challenge response is where you get facilitated cognitive performance, you get helpful hormones that help you to learn and to grow. The stress hormones that you experience in the challenge response, they return to baseline quickly after the stressor is passed. It doesn't end up harming your health long term in the way that a threat response does. So it's all about trying to change your brain's relationship to the same stressful situation that you're in. Or in other words, to change the way that your brain views your own resources in relation to the demands that you come up against. Another word for this that psychologists use is self-efficacy. Self-efficacy is the ability to view your resources as up to the demands or as in other words, self-efficacy is the belief that you can succeed in this stressful situation. Self self-efficacy is something that has been studied for more than the past 50 years. Psychologists have been studying strategies that help people to practice and increase their self-efficacy because actually it is something that you can develop. If you're someone that tends to have low self-efficacy, meaning you tend to believe your resources are usually not up or often not up to the, to the demands in the stressful situations that you face, you can actually change your brain's default setting in that regard, you can actually change your brain's belief setting about your ability to succeed. There are ways to practice it. There are ways to train it.
So I'm gonna talk about three cool ways that you can use to increase your self-efficacy, to increase your brain's belief that you can rise to the occasion, whatever stressful, stressful situation it is. So these three different ways we've talked about, we've touched on in other episodes, and I'll link those other episodes in the show notes. But the first one that I wanna talk to talk about is actually a way to learn to see the demands in your situation itself as resources. It's a way to stop seeing the demands as demands and see them instead as resources. You're taking stuff from the demand side of the equation and actually sticking it on the resource side of the equation, weighting everything towards your resources so that your resources look more strong and the demands look less strong. This is a cool technique. We've talked about it before. It's being curious about the learning in every opportunity. So every time we encounter an obstacle in life, a difficulty, a challenge, we have a choice. We can either see it as a situation in which we can grow, learn, and develop, or else we can fight it and struggle against it and try and avoid it. So a stressful job, an illness, a failed relationship. All of these are opportunities to grow as a person, to develop new and better skills for dealing with life's problems. So the book, the Happiness Trap, which we've been talking about off and on for the past several episodes, has some great examples. There's a quote by Winston Churchill that says, A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity. And an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty. Another example from this book is Thomas Edison, the famous inventor, per, perhaps, maybe even in some ways, the greatest inventor of all time. He patented over a thousand different in inventions, including the first phonograph, the first commercial power station, and of course the electric light bulb, which we all know about. There's a story about him in this process of trying to invent the electric light bulb. One of his assistants, after many failed attempts, was complaining about all these failures, and Thomas Edison said, nonsense. We, we know more now about how not to make a light bulb than anybody else in the world, and that brings us closer and closer to making one that works. So we've had other episodes where we've dived into this in more detail. Like I said, I'll link those in the show notes, but this is a really great technique to start to see every difficulty and every obstacle as a source for something that you can learn from, that you can grow from. And I talked another episodes at length about the various benefits that come from this, but I just want to make sure that you realize that one of the great benefits that come from this is that when you encounter stressful situations, or in other words, situations that demand change from you, it helps you to see the demands in the situation, not as demands, but as resources, and that can increase your self-efficacy, or in other words, your belief that you can succeed.
A second technique is one that we've talked about recently in several podcast episodes, and this technique works to help make the demands in the situation look less scary, so it'll actually make your resources look better equipped to meet the demands, because it makes the demands look like they're not so bad. This technique has to do with remembering something that we've talked about a lot lately, and that is that success in life comes not from reaching one particular goal that you have in mind, but it comes from moving in your valued direction. So we talked about the difference between values and goals and how values are like going on a certain journey in a certain direction, like moving west, and a goal is like getting to certain obstacles on that journey, like a mountain or a river. Life can be compared to being on a boat in the ocean. Defining or discovering, or choosing your values is like choosing the direction that you want to go and making choices and taking action according to your values is like moving in that direction that you have chosen. It's like rowing the boat in the direction that you've chosen. If you don't choose your values, then you end up letting all kinds of outside sources determine your direction, like the waves and the winds, and you don't get to choose which direction your life goes. If you choose your values, you choose your direction, and then you make choices that move you in that direction, then you succeed. How can I make that claim? Well, it's because research shows, and as we talked about several times in past episodes, is that there are all kinds of mental and physical benefits that come just from living your life or making choices according to your values. You don't have to reach a certain goal in order to have these benefits. You only have to be moving in the direction of your values, so. Some of these benefits that we've mentioned are greater life satisfaction, lower bad stress levels, longer life expectancy, better mental and physical health. All of these things become part of what you can access as soon as you start moving in your chosen direction.
So what does this have to do with self-efficacy? Well, it means that you don't have to reach some destination, some goal. You don't have to achieve a particular thing in order to succeed. You just have to try. You just have to start moving in the value direction that you have chosen, and then you can already access all of these benefits. So the demands seem less scary because success is always within your reach. It's just a matter of doing something today in accordance with your values.
The third thing that can really help you to increase your sense of self-efficacy is a technique that will help to view the demands in the situation as within your resources, as something that you can actually reach. So again, it's gonna bring those, the view of those demands down to the exact size of your resources if you can practice this. And this has to do with setting the right kind of goals in your stressful situation. The goals need to have two characteristics. They need to be attainable and they need to be measurable. What do I mean by attainable? They need to be small steps. They need to be something that can fit within your stride, not more than what you can step. So they need to be small steps that are within your control. And that includes focusing on the process and on your learning rather than on the outcome and on your performance. And we had other episodes in the past, which I'll link in the show notes where we talked about the difference between process oriented goals and outcome oriented goals. And how to set goals that have to do with, with, with the parts of the process that you have control over rather than on the outcome, right? Because an outcome oriented goal, or a performance orient oriented goal would be something like having a goal to get a perfect score on this exam that you're taking. The problem with that goal is that the demands there are way above your resources. 'cause you don't have control over those demands. You don't have control over what questions are gonna be on that test. You don't have control over the test environment. You don't even have control over how well you're gonna sleep the night before. All kinds of things that you can't control. And so the demands are gonna be way up here above your resources. You need to bring those demands down to your resources. So you need to focus instead of on your performance, you need to focus on the process, aspects of the process that you have control over. Like setting a goal to study a certain amount of time every day, or setting a goal during the test to only spend a certain amount of time, a predetermined amount of time on each question, go with your first instinct and move on to the next question. This type of thing focuses on the process of taking the test rather than on the outcome. So that's what I mean by attainable goals. Again, there's lots of other episodes that talk about this in more detail and I'll link those. Another aspect of your goal setting that needs to happen in order to make it feel accessible is that these, your goals need to be measurable. And why do goals need to be measurable in order for you to increase your sense of self-efficacy? Well, if you have a goal to cut down 30 trees today, then you have no way to know if you're on target, if you don't know how many trees you've cut. But if you know and you know that you're below target, then you know that you need to increase your effort or maybe try a new strategy to reach your goal. And so you'll feel a lot more motivated to keep working for that goal when you know exactly how far you are from it, and if you need to expend extra energy to reach your goal, or if you're on target. So this is a big one. This is one that has really been shown to, to influence people's belief in their ability to succeed is whether or not they have goals that are measurable. So when you are facing a stressor, the demands that you perceive in that situation will be linked really closely to the goals that you have in that situation. So if you can focus on goals that are attainable, meaning they're small steps, they're focused on learning, not performance, and that are measurable, that you have immediate feedback so that you know whether or not you're succeeding, then that can really help you to believe that you can succeed if you can measure where you are in relation to your goal. These types of goals help bring the demands down to your size, down to your resources, down to something that you can actually measure and reach.
So remember, self-efficacy is the key to being able to live your life dealing with stressors in a challenge response rather than any threat response. So learning and growing and being excited to meet the different challenges that you come across and having your body work to create the hormones and give you the blood flow and everything that you need to be able to, to actually facilitate your performance, to help you to perform better than you would if you weren't even stressed. If you wanna live your life in challenge, you need to increase your sense of self-efficacy, which is the belief, your brain's default belief, the way that it views whether or not you can succeed in the situation. You can do this by, first of all, seeing the demands in the situation as resources or in other words, being curious about the learning contained in every difficulty. So it's not a difficulty, it's a learning opportunity. And second, remembering that you've succeeded as soon as you have moved in the direction that you value. As soon as you have made some kind of action according to your values, you have succeeded. That's enough. That helps bring the demands down to your size. It's within your reach. It's something that you can do today with a small action. So that helps your brain also to believe that you've got the resources to meet this. When you see that one step is success. And the third thing is to remember to set attainable and measurable goals because that helps your brain to view the demands in the situation, focus on those things that are actually within your control, that are small steps, that are attainable and that are measurable. This really helps with self-efficacy and it helps you also to access peak performance and flow in what you do.
So if you wanna read more about this stuff, the book the Happiness Trap by Russ Harris and Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. There's some other articles I can reference in the show notes as well as past episodes that you can look at. In any case, remember that self-efficacy is something that you can practice and you can develop. Even if your brain doesn't default to high self-efficacy, you can learn how to do that. So try some of these things today. Thanks for listening and see you next week.