Both… And…
My allergies this spring have been the worst they have ever been. Utah had both the mildest winter and warmest days in March that we’ve ever had on record. This means our spring flowers woke up 3 weeks earlier than usual and I swear, the extra warmth concentrated and intensified the pollen.
The result for me has been a sinus infection, itchy skin, red eyes, and lots and lots of asthma treatments.
It would make sense that I would hate the things that have made me so miserable, right?
Here’s the thing, despite my suffering, I have loved seeing my garden wake up. I keep sneaking peeks and taking pictures of the spectacular colors that are starting to show. (As long as I did it in-between sneezes).
In a podcast I was on earlier this week, we talked about the duality of life – much like how I feel about spring right now. Sometimes the hardest things we face are also the most beautiful and can be full of moments of intense joy. On the flipside, sometimes the things we love doing can be pushed too far until they become harmful to us.
And there’s science to support this.
In 2000, 2 researchers, Folkman and Moskowitz, wanted to study the “other side” of stress. Many people had studied how detrimental stress can be, but no one seemed to be looking for the positive aspects of it. Here’s what they discovered:
- Good moods (especially humor) can show up when people are stressed-out.
- In fact, finding the good during those intense moments creates a resilience to the negative side-effects of stress.
- When we discover the good during the stress, we add meaning and significance to those moments– reappraising them to be useful to us.
(If you want to learn more about this study you can check out the article I wrote on it here.)
I think anyone who’s been coached through a tough time has probably seen the power of the reappraisal I’ve just mentioned. But what about the other side of things. What about when we take good things too far?
In 2011, Adam Grant and Barry Schwartz wanted to know if good things could go too far. They selected a bunch of virtues (things like persistence, courage, and optimism) and asked what happens when they are overdone? They found out that every single virtue would at best, gives you diminishing returns when overdone and most of them actually become harmful to you.
(If you want a deeper dive into this study, you can check out my article on it here.)
This duality - that bad things can have good side-effects, and good things can have negative side-effects - is the root of Even-Achieving.
Not all stress is bad. Not all aspects of achievement are good. It takes an even approach to both to create a balanced and sustainable way of high performance.
Thanks for reading with me. I’m glad you’re hear. I hope you take a moment this week to check in with both your “good” and “bad” experiences to see if they maybe have a little more duality than you originally thought.
Notes:
Folkman, S., & Moskowitz, J. T. (2000). Positive affect and the other side of coping. The American psychologist, 55(6), 647–654. https://doi.org/10.1037//0003-066x.55.6.647
Grant, A. M., & Schwartz, B. (2011). Too Much of a Good Thing: The Challenge and Opportunity of the Inverted U. Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, 6(1), 61–76. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691610393523
