At a time when workplace ‘burnout’ is rampant, conversations about stress management continue to dominate social media. While some suggestions to cope with work-related stress seem useful, most of them are not. As a result, many still struggle to find what actually works.
So when advice comes from someone who has built one of the world’s biggest companies of the 21st century, it tends to resonate. In a recently resurfaced clip that has gone viral online, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is seen sharing his personal approach to take on workplace stress, and it is a slightly counterintuitive take.
“Stress primarily comes from not taking action over something that you can have some control over,” Bezos had said in a speech from 2001. He further described stress as a warning signal rather than an inevitable byproduct of demanding work.
Bezos reportedly made these remarks at the Academy of Achievement Summit in San Antonio. This was a time in his life when he had become a freshly minted billionaire after taking Amazon public a few years prior.
“So if I find that some particular thing is causing me to have stress, that’s a warning flag for me. What it means is there’s something that I haven’t completely identified, perhaps in my conscious mind, that is bothering me, and I haven’t yet taken any action on it,” the tech billionaire said.
Bezos’ take on coping with work-related stress broadly align with a few psychological research studies that have found it is more effective to take direct action to address stressors and reduce stress, instead of taking emotion-focused approaches that simply manage feelings.
According to Bezos, stress levels can be dramatically reduced through minor actions like sending an email or making ‘that’ phone call. This could also help toward solving the underlying problem.
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“I find as soon as I identify it and make the first phone call, or send off the first email message, or whatever it is that we’re going to do to start to address that situation—even if it’s not solved—the mere fact that we’re addressing it dramatically reduces any stress that might come from it,” Bezos was quoted as saying by Fortune.
In his speech, he also highlights a common misconception that stress comes from hard work. “Stress doesn’t come from hard work. You can be working incredibly hard and loving it. And likewise, you can be out of work and incredibly stressed over that,” Bezos said.
Citing the example of someone who is looking for a job, Bezos said, “If you’re out of work, but you’re going through a disciplined approach—a series of job interviews, and so on—and working to remedy that situation, you’re going to be a lot less stressed than if you’re just worrying about it and doing nothing.”
More than two decades later, it would be interesting to know if Bezos still holds the same views on managing work-related stress.
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