It’s Raining Stress! — The Bezos Cure

It's raining stress! Hallelujah!
It's raining stress! Amen!
It's raining stress! Hallelujah!
It's raining stress! Amen!

For some reason, The Weather Girls' famous song It's Raining Men has been playing on a loop in my mind lately—but alas, the lyrics have mutated into It's Raining Stress.

I’ve been dealing with a heavy wave of stress recently. I tried exercise, I tried rest, and I tried every distraction I could think of, but none of it bore any fruit. I spent days racking my brain, trying in vain to fathom what more I could do to break through this stubborn fog and let the sun back in.

No Action Equals Stress

That’s when I decided to look up how highly successful people—the ones with dozens of spinning plates and massive amounts of responsibility—manage their own pressure. Serendipitously, I came across a quote from Jeff Bezos that stopped me in my tracks. Here it is in full:

"Stress primarily comes from not taking action over something that you can have some control over. 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. I find, as soon as I identify it, and make the first phone call or send up the first email message or whatever it is that we’re going to do to start to address the situation, even if it’s not solved, the mere fact that we’re addressing it dramatically reduces any stress that might come from it. So stress comes from ignoring things that you shouldn’t be ignoring, I think in large part."

I was immediately struck by how Bezos reframes stress as a positive signal—a "warning flag" highlighting something important that requires our attention, even if our conscious mind hasn't fully pinpointed it yet.

He explains that the first step is simply to identify the issue, and then take action. It doesn't matter how small that action is—sending a single email or making a quick phone call is enough to start addressing the situation. Even if the problem isn't completely resolved right then and there, the mere act of heading the warning flag and moving one step forward dramatically reduces the anxiety tied to it.

Overthinking Equals Stress

I decided to try this approach, and it worked wonders for me. I realised that thinking too much was causing total paralysis, and that I was actually using "overthinking" as a clever way to avoid taking action.

Moving forward, my goal is to set up a routine that helps me quickly decode the meaning behind the stress signals I get on a regular basis so I can act on them promptly. I’ll be keeping this new experiment under review, and I look forward to sharing the insights and tips that serve me well along the way.