Stress addiction isn’t something that everyone reading this will be familiar with but it’s certainly something a great deal of people struggle with. The reason that we raised this issue right at the start of this book though is that it can seriously hold you back from recovery. Being aware of your stress addiction is the first step to overcoming it – without meaning to sound too much like a cliché.

Stress addiction you see will make many of the things we describe seem rather unappealing. If you have a true stress addiction, then you might find yourself being resistant to many of the ideas we’ll discuss and put forward. What’s important is to recognize that this in itself is a symptom. You need to rise above that desire to do more and more if you want to stand a chance at overcoming stress once and for all.

Perhaps the easiest way to put you in the right mindset here then is to break down the risks and the dangers associated with allowing this behavior to continue.

First of all, recognize that stress addiction is ultimately bad for productivity. While you might think otherwise, the reality is that you’ll get more done in the long-run if you take time off in the short-term.

Do you know billions are lost globally a year to stress? That’s a serious amount of money lost unnecessarily and the same also applies on an individual basis. That’s because we need to find opportunities to rest and recover. The body works in cycles and in ‘seasons’ and if we don’t acknowledge that then we will eventually burn out. Remember adrenal fatigue? Remember that your immune system is compromised when you don’t give yourself a break? You can refer to our previous article. If you keep going at 100% then eventually you will collapse and in doing so you will lose days, weeks or even months of productivity.

A good analogy for this is working out. While exercising regularly is great for your health, your confidence and your happiness – working out too much without adequate rest will eventually lead to ‘overtraining’. This is again caused partly by adrenal fatigue as well as other factors and results in a person becoming weaker, tired and unable to workout at all. Alternatively it can leave them very susceptible to illness.

Either way, the smart bodybuilder or athlete knows the importance of ‘back off weeks’ where they give themselves a chance to recover. If you want to get the most out of yourself, then you need to be methodical.

There is a great Chinese saying which is ‘walk or run, don’t wobble’. What this means is that the most efficient way to travel the furthest distance is to walk until you run out of energy, rest and then go again. It’s a mistake to ‘wobble’ push yourself to the brink, as ultimately you won’t be travelling very fast or giving yourself a chance to recover.

And even if you didn’t eventually collapse from the strain of a stress addiction, you would find that you weren’t able to do your best work anyway. When you’re stressed, you become tired, you become more likely to make mistakes and you lose your passion for what you’re doing. What’s more, stress prevents creativity and countless studies have shown that when we’re ‘too’ motivated, we gain a kind of tunnel vision that prevents us from coming to creative solutions to problems.

A great example of this can be seen with something called the ‘candle problem’. Here you’re given a candle and a box of tacks and asked to attach that candle to the wall so that it can burn there and be used as a lamp.

If you motivate one group to find the answer quickly (applying a kind of stress) then they will spend longer attempting the ‘obvious’ solution of trying to attach the candle to the wall using the tacks. This is actually the incorrect solution however and the right approach is instead to attach the box itself to the wall and stand the candle in it. The solution requires the subject to overcome a ‘cognitive bias’ called ‘functional fixedness’ and the only way they can do this is by relaxing and taking their time to think about all the options.

So in other words, even if you could carry on working full steam ahead indefinitely, it still wouldn’t be the best overall choice for your business. It just seems that way now.

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How's stress an addiction? do you think we volunteer to get stressed? I believe it's not in our power to get stressed