Let’s get geeky about stress, distilled from a lecture at University or Arizona:

Picture an aircraft carrier in Top Gun and Maverick flying the plane to land talking with the Landing Signal Officer on the carrier. Would you be surprised if I told you that out of all the people in the picture Maverick is the LEAST stressed – in a classic sense of stress hormones.

The guy holding the cable on deck or talking the pilot through the landing has no control over how that airplane smacks on the jet way. Maverick may have higher demands of actually landing the aircraft but also he has all the control of that airplane to counter that situational demand. Fighter pilots train to control stress response and make it work FOR them by taking it as a signal to change his or her behavior/action – this evens out the ratio. In that sweet spot of balancing the situational demand vs control over the situation lies peak performance. This is where you can move mountains. Stress is actually good for us! If there was no stress we would all be lounging around half asleep with no situational demand placed on us. There are a lot of implications here for people who grab for control, what we are really reaching for is peak performance in trying to even out the ratio. This happens because the situational demand is too high. How can we navigate the demands of our life and find that sweet spot of peak performance? Wow, I had to let that sink in for a moment.