My wife asked me the extremely perplexing question: “Is your stress just in your head?”

At the risk of sounding truly crazy, I will answer this question both yes and no.

No, I do not believe my stress is all in my head.  There are truly things I must get done!  There are people that depend upon me to be successful so that they may be successful.  This is true in both the micro and macro sense.  Leading a company I better be good at my job in order to meet or exceed expectations.  If I am not working hard enough or getting done the most important things, the company will not achieve the necessary results.  That is a real responsibility.  That demands certain things be done.  It also brings with it a certain amount of pressure, which can lead to stress.  In this macro sense its the not knowing if I am doing enough or the most important actions that introduce stress, real stress.  In the micro sense I have a backlog of actions that must be done to provide answers and information to others.  They are waiting on my communication.  They are waiting on my work in order to carry out the next step in their work.  If I don’t contribute my part timely they cannot do theirs.  This backlog creates real stress that only more work and efficiency gains can cure.

Yes, stress is just a mental construct of my own creation.  It is only because I put these pressures on myself to be successful to some arbitrary level that generates stress.  Any task at my level of the organization can be argued as important or unimportant.  Being so removed from actual production, the time pressure is essentially eliminated because there are not hard deadlines.  Sure, people may be waiting on me for certain things, but if it doesn’t get done, it just slows things down a little.  Ultimately I can influence the pace of the organization and it cannot outpace me.  So why put unnecessary stress on myself in order to increase some perceived speed of progress against an arbitrary progress measurement?  That progress expectation is my mental construct too.  No one else created that.  Who says certain organizational achievements must be reached at certain dates?  If I’ll just take a deep breath, organize my limited time around the best things and get done whatever I can inside that time, I should be stress free because its the best I can do.  Anything falling outside of that should not induce stress, just get reprioritized.  Hardly any finite piece of communication, coaching, or task can be directly linked to organizational success.  So why worry about it?  Everything that causes stress are expectations of progress or success that I made up in my mind, so the stress really is just all in my head.  It is not in fact real.

Obviously, I cannot decide if its all in my head or not.  Based on these arguments, I’ll let you be the judge.