Caution: Contents Under Pressure

Any kind of sweeping generalization, like kids will thrive or should be able to thrive under pressure and stress can be good for you and productive, is an oversimplification.

Here are the questions I think we need to ask.

to find that it's more complicated.

First, which people? I mean, there are substantial individual differences in how human beings react to any given situation.

So got to be real careful about claiming that X is likely to benefit everybody.

Second question, for how long...

Most of the lab studies about arousal and stress look only at the effect on short-term task performance.

So even if raising the stakes by making things more stressful can lead people to do better at that task right now, well, the accumulated stress over many days in the real world might well backfire.

Third question, how much pressure are we talking about? So for, I think it's about a century now, there's been a law in psychology floating around called the Yerkes-Dodson Law.

which claims that the ideal level of arousal for performing a given task is a moderate level.

There's what's called an inverted U relationship, letter U, because that's what it looks like on the graph, an upside-down U.

Medium levels are best, sort of like a Goldilocks conclusion.

It's best not to have tasks that are too simple because that's boring, nor too hard because that's anxiety-producing.

But even that turns out to be a simplification.

First of all, there are different ways that a task can be hard, right? It's challenging to keep doing something that's tedious, especially without making mistakes, but it's challenging in a different way if you lack the requisite knowledge or skills or information to do a task.

Something that's physically taxing isn't the same thing as mentally taxing and so on.

But the key point here is this law and the studies that support it are about arousal.

which means physiological activation.

That's not exactly the same thing as stress, which typically connotes distress.

So the Yerkes-Dodson law actually doesn't prove that stress in any degree is valuable.

And that's my experience, too.

I don't know about yours, but there's a difference, I think.

I've noticed it in my own life between arousal and anxiety.

Over my life, I have been up in front of people performing in various ways in many different respects, many, many times.

When I'm performing in front of an audience, I'm at my best when I'm focused and energized as opposed to, you know, relaxed to the point of lethargy.