#4. Does Anxiety Truly Lead To Success? (The Answer WILL Surprise You!)
Jan 23, 2024
Dr. Aly Wood
In Episode #4, we're unraveling the myth that stress equals success. Join me as we dive into the science behind the Yerkes-Dodson Law, exploring if recent studies challenge this age-old idea. We'll also dig into the real impact of stress on performance and health. Curious to challenge your assumptions? Tune in now and let's navigate the intriguing world of anxiety and achievement together! 💪🧠✨ Don't forget to leave a review if you find this episode valuable and share it with someone you know.
In Episode #4, we're unraveling the myth that stress equals success. Join me as we dive into the science behind the Yerkes-Dodson Law, exploring if recent studies challenge this age-old idea. We'll also dig into the real impact of stress on performance and health. Curious to challenge your assumptions? Tune in now and let's navigate the intriguing world of anxiety and achievement together! 💪🧠✨ Don't forget to leave a review if you find this episode valuable and share it with someone you know.
Welcome to the Crush Anxiety Podcast. If you're an anxious high achiever who's looking to reduce stress, manage your mind and achieve more with your time, you're in the right place. My friend, I'm Dr Ailey Wood, a psychiatrist and life coach, and I've spent years trying to science the shit out of my own anxiety and that of others, and I'm here to share with you the top strategies that I've learned along the way that will help you break free and become unstoppable. So let's crush it. Today, we're diving into not just one but two of my absolute favorite topics to talk about anxiety and achievement, and what really excites me is that we're actually going to be merging these topics together to answer one of the top questions that I'm constantly being asked distressedly to success. Okay, so we've all heard this story before right, the one of the person who credited their success to that inner anxiety that pushed them forward to achieve great things. And maybe you've been there too. You had that important project or that job interview and you tell yourself that the reason you did so well was because your nervousness motivated you to prepare ahead of time and put in that extra work. Or, hey, maybe you're even like me and you told yourself that your worrying is just a sign that you care. But here's my question for you Is there any truth to this? Are we just telling ourselves a comforting story that's actually nothing but bullshit? So when I was first diving into the research, the first question I had was where did this idea come from? Well, here's what I found.
Speaker 1:
Back in the day, when psychology was still in its infancy, two animal behavior researchers published a paper in 1908 titled the Relation of Strength of Stimulus to Repidity of Habit Formation. It's a mouthful right. So in this study they took Japanese dancing mice, which I didn't even know was a thing. But they took these mice and essentially put them into a maze. And in this maze there were two boxes or passageways that they could go into. There was a white one and a black one, and the goal was for the mouse to learn to go into the white box. If they went to the black box they would receive an electric shock, but if they went into the white one there was no shock. Their task was to discover one, whether the strength of the electric shock influenced how fast they learned to avoid the black box and go into the white one. And then two, they wanted to know what strength of electric shock was most favorable to figuring this out. So, in a nutshell, what they found was that the mice learned tasks more efficiently when given a moderate shock compared to a milder, severe shock, and essentially it was kind of like the Goldilocks scenario. Animals needed not too little, not too much, but just the right amount of stimulus for optimal learning, and this came to be known as the Yurkis Dodson Law.
Speaker 1:
So now let's fast forward a few decades later, to 1955. And during this time British psychologist Hans Isink wrote a paper suggesting that the Yurkis Dodson Law could hold true for anxiety in people and speculated that increased arousal might improve task performance. And this is where things get really interesting. Two years after that, his student, PL Broadhurst, conducted a study involving rats called Emotionality and the Yurkis Dodson Law, and essentially the goal of this was to test whether or not the Yurkis Dodson Law was valid. And so what he did was he held the rat's heads underwater, causing forced air deprivation, and he did this for increased amounts of time, and he described this as a measure of intensity of imposed motivation. He found that as you held their heads underwater, the rat's swimming speed increased and sped up to a point where it then slightly dropped off again and throughout the paper what we see is that he used the words anxiety, motivation and arousal interchangeably. So when he wrote and published this paper, he concluded that it is clear from these results that the Yurkis Dodson Law may be taken as confirmed.
Speaker 1:
And so the big result of these 50 plus years of research was the creation of that classic anxiety performance curve, and you might have seen this before. It's the curve where the vertical y-axis goes from poor performance to peak performance and then the horizontal x-axis goes from low arousal to high arousal, and high arousal essentially just refers to the stress and the anxiety that one experiences. What we see initially is that as arousal increases, the ability to perform a task increases as well. So it's thought to be motivating, but too much arousal leads to a drop in performance. And it's all about finding that sweet spot where the stress gives you a spark of motivation and a push in the right direction. But remember, all of this was concluded based on studies on mice and somehow this idea has been related to humans and is essentially transcended time.
Speaker 1:
Newer studies show that when looking at all the psychological literature that evaluates stress and work performance, that only 4% of them support this inverted, u-shaped curve and that 46% of them have found a negative linear relationship, Meaning that at any level of stress low, moderate or high this actually inhibits and worsens performance. So no, the current literature does not support the idea that stress equals success. Stress and anxiety actually hurt your chances of success. So the next question is why do we still believe that stress equals success, despite mostly all the evidence proving this idea to be wrong? And if I had to guess, I'd say it's likely due to a combination of things. I don't know if you've realized this or have found this to be true, but I feel like society sometimes romanticizes this idea that success needs to be paired with effort, sacrifice and hard work. There's this whole phrase of no pain, no gain. I think people also probably fall into the trap of confirmation bias, and this is where we selectively remember the times when stress coincided with success, and during these times, we also overlook cases where success maybe occurred without things being stressful, and even times where stress led to failure. Some of us probably also have an emotional attachment to the idea and we fear that letting this thought go will lead to us losing our motivational drive.
Speaker 1:
When we're talking about anxiety in particular, I think psychiatrist Dr David Burns hits the nail on the head. He describes anxiety as leading to magical thinking. So when we're anxious, we hold the self-defeating belief that if I worry enough, everything will turn out okay. And, as he puts it, it's the idea that even though your anxiety is painful, it's protecting or helping you in some way. What we see is that this occurs across all of the anxiety disorders, and so let me give you some examples of what I'm talking about.
Speaker 1:
So, with generalized anxiety disorder, we believe that our worrying protects our loved ones from danger. With specific phobias, we think that what we're avoiding really is dangerous. If we're shy, we believe that if we put ourselves out there, we'll do or say something dumb when interacting with other people. With test anxiety or performance anxiety, we tell ourselves that if we stop worrying, we're going to fail that test. With OCD, we tell ourselves that if we stop checking and rechecking, we're going to leave the curling iron plugged in and our whole house is going to burn down. You see what I'm talking about, right? It's this idea that something terrible will happen if I give up my anxiety.
Speaker 1:
And what we need to remember is that correlation does not equal causation, and this is an idea that gets burned into your head whenever you're learning how to read and dissect research papers. You can study a behavior and see a result, but you still have to prove that the specific behavior caused the result. So, for example, when I was playing softball, I would tap the plate three times. I'd go inside, outside and inside again before getting set to hit the ball, and this was my routine, my habit, my ritual, whatever you want to call it. If I didn't do it, I just fell off, and you know this to be true if you've ever played a sport when you're feeling off, you're off. But it's important to remember that just because two things happen together frequently doesn't mean that one thing is necessarily causing the other thing. Tapping the plate and my hitting success were connected, but that tapping wasn't the reason for me hitting the ball. It was a correlation, not a causation.
Speaker 1:
And so, with anxiety, you might believe that it's the stress, the worry, the overwhelm that is causing you to succeed. Right, it's what motivates you, it's what keeps pushing you forward, it's what allows you to reach higher and achieve your dreams. But the reality is this you can succeed despite the anxiety, not because of it, and recognizing this is crucial. There's an overwhelming amount of research that tells us that stress actually slows us down Right. It leads to perfectionism, procrastination, it causes us to get stuck in analysis, paralysis. And it doesn't only affect our performance. It also affects our bodies. According to the American Psychological Association, stress directly affects the musculoskeletal system, the cardiovascular system, the respiratory system, the endocrine system, the GI system, the nervous system and the reproductive system. What other system is out there that it doesn't affect? Right? And not only that. There's a sobering finding from studies conducted in England that have shown that even low levels of distress which is defined as a type of stress that results from being overwhelmed by demands, losses, perceived threats these low levels of distress are related to a 20% increased risk of mortality.
Speaker 1:
So the next time you find yourself attributing stress to success, I want you to ask yourself is it truly the stress that's driving my achievements, or could there be other factors at play? What patterns about stress and success am I holding onto and having difficulties letting go of? How might these beliefs be influencing my overall health and well-being? And, better yet, what results could I be getting if I were kicking anxiety's ass and crushing it? Now, that's all I have for you for today.
Speaker 1:
If you found value in this information, make sure to leave a review and share it with someone you know. Talk soon, my friend. Until then, keep kicking ass and crushing it. Just a quick reminder this podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes only. While I am a doctor, I am not your doctor, and listening to these episodes does not establish a doctor-patient relationship. This podcast is not a substitute for the advice of a doctor or other mental health professionals. It's also important to remember that the views expressed are my own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of any institutions or organizations I may be affiliated with. Got it.