Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has a counterintuitive tackle office stress: It doesn’t come from exhausting work itself, however from avoiding issues you understand you want to deal with. In a 2001 interview Bezos mentioned, “Stress primarily comes from not taking motion over one thing which you can have some management over.”
Bezos, then a freshly minted billionaire following Amazon’s 1997 IPO, was speaking on the Academy of Achievement Summit in San Antonio. He described stress as a warning sign relatively than an inevitable byproduct of demanding work. “So if I discover that some explicit factor is inflicting me to have stress, that’s a warning flag for me,” Bezos mentioned. “What it means is there’s one thing that I haven’t fully recognized, maybe in my aware thoughts, that’s bothering me, and I haven’t but taken any motion on it.”
Bezos mentioned simply taking a small first step—making a telephone name, or sending an electronic mail—can dramatically cut back stress ranges, even earlier than the underlying drawback is solved. “I discover as quickly as I establish it and make the primary telephone name, or ship off the primary electronic mail message, or no matter it’s that we’re going to do to begin to deal with that scenario—even when it’s not solved—the mere proven fact that we’re addressing it dramatically reduces any stress which may come from it.”
Bezos mentioned there’s a standard false impression that stress typically comes from exhausting work, and he fully disagrees with that sentiment. “Stress doesn’t come from exhausting work,” he mentioned. “You might be working extremely exhausting and loving it. And likewise, you might be out of labor and extremely pressured over that.”
The Amazon founder prolonged this logic to job-seeking, contrasting energetic and passive approaches to unemployment. “Should you’re out of labor, however you’re going via a disciplined strategy—a collection of job interviews, and so forth—and dealing to treatment that scenario, you’re going to be lots much less pressured than in the event you’re simply worrying about it and doing nothing.”
What analysis says about stress administration
Bezos’s observations align with established psychological analysis on coping methods. Research present that problem-focused coping—taking direct motion to handle stressors—is more effective at reducing stress than emotion-focused approaches that merely handle emotions. Research has found that individuals who use energetic problem-solving report decrease stress ranges and higher psychological well being outcomes. Conversely, procrastination—the avoidance Bezos warns against—has been linked to increased stress, anxiousness, and even bodily well being issues.
Many mental health professionals recommend problem-focused coping techniques for managing office stress. These embody figuring out particular stressors, breaking massive issues into manageable steps, and taking concrete motion relatively than ruminating on difficulties. The approach doesn’t mean ignoring emotions, but rather, like Bezos suggests, channeling them into productive action.
You can watch the full 2001 interview with Jeff Bezos below.
For this story, Fortune used generative AI to help with an initial draft. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.
