How you think about stress matters. One physiologist has the hack to make stress work for you in 2025.
Rebecca Heiss, PhD, believes there is a scientific answer to why we often self-sabotage our hopes, dreams and health. Our brains have been hardwired for it.
Robert Sapolsky, a famous stress physiologist, said that a person’s stress response is built for three minutes of screaming terror across the savanna, after which it’s over because the tiger ate them, or because they outran the tiger. But either way, it’s over. “It’s not our stress itself that’s the problem,” said Dr. Heiss. “It’s how we handle it.”
Our stress response was built for life-and-death situations, but humans are very special in that they’re the only animals that can create their own stress from their thoughts. A zebra’s cortisol drops the second it has outrun a predator, and then it’s right back to grazing. But humans are often left replaying stressful events, such as a near accident while driving or a bad conversation with one’s boss. “We actually facilitate more stress that way,” Dr. Heiss said.
For instance, a 2013 study examined how stress affects our health and our mortality rate. Looking at 20,000 Americans across eight years, researchers found that the people who had the highest level of stress, but who believed that stress was healthy or good for them, had the lowest mortality rate of the study – even lower than the people who had very little stress.
However, the people with the highest level of stress, who also believed that stress was bad for them, had the highest mortality rate.
“One of the biggest things I tell people is the stress mindset is more important than the amount of stress you have,” Dr. Heiss said. “How you think about stress matters.”
Dr. Heiss is a stress physiologist, author and keynote speaker. She bases her work around the foundational concept that stress isn’t going anywhere, and we shouldn’t kid ourselves that we can get rid of it. “We’ve spent way too much time and effort trying to get rid of stress through activities like meditation and yoga, through medication, etc.,” she said. “Listen, all those things are good. There’s plenty of research that backs up how meditation and medication can help, but the more we push and fight against stress, the more we’re spending energy enhancing our stress.”
Dr. Heiss has conducted thousands of hours of research on people with high levels of stress. She has discovered that about 73% of them end up getting more anxious and fearful just trying to get rid of their stress. “That tells me we’re focused on the wrong problem,” she said. “We must recognize that stress is always going to come into our lives, but we can recognize it and transform it. Stress is just energy. The second law of thermodynamics is you can’t get rid of energy, you can’t destroy it, but you can transform it. So, we can use our stress to help us rather than fight against it.”
What stress can point us toward
We don’t recognize it in the moment, but our stress is actually pointing us toward something. It’s a barometer for how much that item or event is meaningful and purposeful in our lives, Dr. Heiss said. When we reframe stress as an indication that we care about something, we can use it to push us forward rather than hold us back.
Dr. Heiss recommends you do three things when you feel a stress response activate. The first step is to ask the question: Is it a tiger? Is this an actual life-and-death situation? “Well, 99.999% of the time, it’s not actually going to kill you,” she said. “If it is a life-and-death situation, then your response is doing exactly what it’s supposed to do. But now that we’ve made it conscious, now that we’ve made it cognitive, we can realize this isn’t a tiger.”
The second step is the transfer. “This is not where we tell ourselves to calm down, because that doesn’t actually help,” Dr. Heiss said. “It just makes you more anxious. So rather than trying to get rid of that stress energy, this is the time to transform it, and that transformation piece is about recognizing how we can use that energy differently.”
The stress response has a very similar hormonal profile to excitement. The trick of the transfer is recognizing that this stress response can be enhancing. “We’re going to get curious about it,” Dr. Heiss said. “How does my heart pounding right now help me? Well, it’s pumping my blood faster, bringing nutrients to parts of my body that are going to be useful in thinking better and allowing me to move to take the action that I need to take. This curiosity piece allows us to transform that energy.”
Curiosity and fear cannot coexist. There’s no brain mechanism for it, Dr. Heiss said. “You’ve never had a tiger charging you and asked, ‘I wonder how fast it’s coming?’ So, if we can get curious in that moment, and ask how can this help? How can I use this? Where can I go with this? Now we’ve taken ourselves out of fear. We begin to transform that energy.”
The third step is building a trajectory. Where can we point our stress? “Often what I tell people is that the trajectory needs to involve something bigger than yourself. How does this create meaning and purpose for others? How is this bigger than just what I’m doing? And that trajectory can become really, really powerful.”
Sales reps and stress
Dr. Heiss has worked with many sales teams on reframing their response to day-to-day professional stressors. Indeed, sales involves a lot of rejection. To stay motivated, reps must recognize there is a standard stress response in simple acts such as picking up the phone to call a customer who might reject them.
It’s easy sometimes to take the path of inaction. We know the negative cost of our actions – we might fail, screw up, and look bad. “What we fail to measure, and what our brains are bad at measuring is the cost of our inaction,” Dr. Heiss said. “Well, what happens if I don’t go all in?”
Sales reps are usually people that have very high intrinsic motivation, Dr. Heiss said. That night, they’re going to ask, why didn’t I do that? Why didn’t I try? Why didn’t I pick up the phone one more time?
“I call these the silent sirens of regret,” Dr. Heiss said. “They’re going to cause you more stress than if you took the smallest action forward, especially in sales.”
Even the smallest of steps can build what’s often called the Winner’s Effect. To better understand what this looks like, Dr. Heiss said to imagine two stags fighting in the wild. One wins, one loses. Hormonally, the stag that wins has lower cortisol, higher testosterone, and higher dopamine, while the stag that loses has the exact opposite profile. The winning stag becomes sensitized to winning and hormonally ready to win more. Its brain has produced more receptors for those winning molecules, and so the next time the stag is more likely to win.
In sports, this is like having the hot hand in basketball. “In sales, it is when you close a deal, you’re more likely to close the next one,” she said.
So how do reps set this up? By creating situations that they absolutely will win, Dr. Heiss said. “What’s the easiest thing that you can sell, or a step in the sales process you can follow through with now? Do it. Now you’ve won. Good, go to the next, then the next, and the next,” she said. “You’re creating a habit of winning through small actions forward. That’s the trajectory.”
Once you get the cycle going, you can connect it to something bigger. “You sold a chip – what does that enable? What’s the bigger meaning behind it?” Dr. Heiss said to ask ourselves. “Well, without this chip, this person couldn’t help this patient, or your daughter doesn’t get to go to the best school. You’re selling so your community can recover. You’re selling so that your company gives back X number of dollars. It’s a different setup when we begin to harness stress to help not just ourselves, but the greater community.”
Focusing on the right things
There are a lot of reasons why people are more stressed than ever before. One is we’re focused on the wrong things, Dr. Heiss said. “We’re focused on trying to get rid of stress in our lives, but it’s impossible to control the stressors that come into our lives. You don’t get to control when your partner gets sick or when you get a diagnosis. You don’t have control over that.”
What you do have control over is the story you tell yourself about stress and how you can use it to your advantage in important situations. For example, Olympic athletes aren’t breaking world records in low pressure places like practice, Dr. Heiss said. They’re breaking records at the Olympics when the pressure is at its highest. “I think everybody can adopt that, if we put in the reps,” she said. “If we recognize this isn’t a tiger, we can transfer this energy, and use it to our advantage, then we start to get this springboard effect where stress becomes something that we can bounce off of and use rather than have to fight against.”
Dr. Heiss said there was a recent study that looked at 90 different stress interventions in companies. Researchers found that every single one of them didn’t work, or even made stress worse, except one thing – community service.
“This is key,” she said. “When you are serving others, you’re creating. You’re using those molecules of oxytocin. You realize you are not alone in your stress. You’re not isolated. There are other people that have it worse than you, and you can give something to them, and that gives back to you. It’s a little bit contradictory in people’s heads that when they are most stressed that they need to reach out and help others. But we see it all the time in natural disasters or events like 9/11. People really come together as a community, and that’s a major stress relieving activity.”
My story is your story, and your story is my story, and so we bear the burden together, Dr. Heiss said. Going through discomfort together actually makes people closer. And that’s something worth running toward. “When you reframe that discomfort as we’re doing this big thing together, that’s how you can use stress to help.”
The reframing timeline
How long does it take to reframe your stress response? It will be different for everyone, Dr. Heiss said. “Our brains are live wired. We’re different right now than we were 30 seconds before.”
Dr. Heiss put in a year’s worth of hard work reframing her stress response after a difficult season in life. “That year was really about figuring out where I wanted to run toward – run toward the roar. So often we run away from the things that are scary,” she said. “But when we realign our stress response to say, ‘OK, even if this doesn’t work out, I’m not going to die as a result,’ then we can start to run toward meaning and purpose. That feels really scary, because it is, so it took me a year to get there. But it’s going to be different for everyone.”