Stress And Performance

Your stress level (or ‘physiological arousal’) and ability to perform a task, are linked.

If you are not sufficiently engaged, it can be hard to focus or motivate yourself. If you get too stressed or anxious, you get the problems of too much sympathetic input. Physically you may feel tense, have a tremor or get very tired at the end of the day; emotionally, you may feel fearful or frustrated and, cognitively, you may struggle to access balanced executive judgement and facts.[1]

Multiple factors feed into our stress levels and consequent arousal: what happens to or around us (which I will refer to as ‘environmental' factors); how we interpret what happens to or around us (which I will refer to as ‘psychological' factors), and physiological considerations, such as fatigue or hunger.

We are always somewhere on a spectrum from relaxed to stressed, and we can alter our position on that spectrum through tweaking these factors. If we want to get more focussed from point a) we can increase stressors, and if we want to get less stressed from point b) we can decrease stressors or increase relaxing signals.[2]