the stress scale. Yes, you shed the responsibilities and deadlines, but you
also lose definition, purpose, a reason to get out of bed in the morning.
Selye coined the term “eustress” to signify the ideal compro-
mise—not too little, not too much, but just the right amount of
stress in your life. Your goal, then, should be to live in “eustress”
as much as possible and to take especially good care of yourself
during those inevitable times when you must exceed your safe
stress limits.
But you may not be able to engage in safe stress by “fighting back,”
as that U.S. News & World Report headline suggests you do.
Three Great Lies of Our Age
We’ve declared war on stress. Time management is one of the
weapons in our arsenal. Our battle cries include:
You can do more with less
Work smarter, not harder
A leaner workforce is a more efficient workforce
(thus the terms “downsizing” and “rightsizing”)You can put these bromides on the list of “Great Lies of Our
Time” (right alongside “The check is in the mail,” “I’ll still respect
you in the morning,” and “I’m not selling anything. This is an
educational survey”).
You can’t do more with less. You can only do more with more.
If you’re working more, you’re doing something else (like sleeping
and playing) less.
When someone advises you to “work smarter, not harder,”
they’re telling you to produce more. They don’t care if you have to
work smarter and harder to do it.
A leaner workforce means somebody has to take on the work
that somebody else was doing. If you’ve still got your job, that
somebody is you.
T H E WA R O N S T R E S S