Most adults with jobs accept the stress caused by work as part of life. We believe that constant pressure and long working hours are responsible for that lump in our throats. Let’s be honest, how many times have we said to ourselves (or to a colleague), “I’m stressed because I’m working too much”? While many of us take stress for granted as an inevitable part of our lives, Jeff Bezos attributes it to something much more subtle and avoidable.
From Mr. Bezos’ perspective, stress “comes mainly from not taking action on something you can control.” This is not something he said relatively recently, but in an interview almost 25 years ago, shortly after Amazon’s successful IPO. This interview, conducted by the Academy of Achievement Summit, is available on YouTube.
According to the entrepreneur, the cause of your stress is not the mountain of work, but rather inaction in the face of problems that you have already identified but have not yet lifted a finger to solve. Although this concept sounds like a cheap motivational phrase, behind it lies a business philosophy firmly backed by psychology.
Stress as a warning sign
Jeff Bezos insists that we should not confuse productive effort with paralyzing anxiety. “You can be working incredibly hard and loving it,” he points out. “And, likewise, you can be unemployed and totally stressed out about it.”
For him, the number of hours invested in something, or the level of activity, are not real mediators of stress. Focused, productive hard work tends to generate deep satisfaction and a sense of purpose in life. Stress, on the other hand, is a warning sign. Bezos does not consider it an inevitable fate, but rather a message. In his words, “there is something on my conscious-unconscious radar that I know needs to be addressed, and I am putting it off.” This anxiety arises because there is a gap between what we know we should do and our failure to act.
This is simply the effect of burying our heads in the sand. We often put off writing a difficult email, checking our bank account, or making a dentist appointment. Deep down, we know we should reply to that email, pay the bills, and get that cavity fixed. However, we procrastinate when faced with uncomfortable situations… Which makes the situation worse if we avoid stepping outside our comfort zone.
While we put off dealing with these problems, our worries become a constant buzzing in our heads, consuming our mental energy without producing any results. All this wasted mental energy creates stress that may have nothing to do with work.
Immediate Relief
The good news is that, according to Bezos, this anxiety is easy to resolve. As soon as we identify the problem and take the first step, stress will be drastically reduced. It has to be a small step; it doesn’t have to be the entire task. The key is to replace passive paralysis by analysis with active execution of a task. This is not just advice from a successful entrepreneur, but is backed by decades of psychological research.
Experts call this strategy Problem-Focused Coping. It works because when we take action, our powerful sense of control or self-efficacy is immediately restored. Suddenly we are back in control of our lives, instead of feeling adrift in the current of fate.
The opposite strategy, on the other hand, would be avoidance coping (procrastination), which is exactly what Jeff Bezos warns us to avoid at all costs. Research shows that chronic procrastination is linked to increased stress, anxiety, and poorer mental health outcomes in people who avoid dealing with problems. By avoiding the problem, it becomes bigger and takes an increasingly heavy emotional toll. If we finally dare to take charge of the problem, we transform the anxiety of “knowing I have to do it” into the energy of “I’m doing it.”