We tend to think of stress as a negative, as being stressed out. But there are all kinds of stress and they’re not all bad.
“Stress” as we know it is a cascade of hormones—including adrenaline, glutamate, dopamine, and the ‘stress hormone’ cortisol—that keys us up to get stuff done (also known as the fight or flight response).
As cyclists, we tap into this system all the time with rowdy group rides, interval sessions, racing, and training. It’s what heightens our senses, primes our pump, and gives us our GO when we want to GO. Life also forces us to fire up that system. New challenges on the job; hectic commutes; and general day-to-day demands can cause the hormonal cascade we perceive as stress.
Like a piano string, you can’t just keep winding and winding it up, however. You need to unwind a bit, let the cortisol release go down and enter a state of rest and digest. Otherwise, you’ll snap just like said string. Chronically elevated cortisol can make you a metabolic mess, disrupting your sleep, depressing your mood, impairing your ability to think clearly, suppressing your immunity, and even priming you to gain weight—none of which is good for performance on or off the bike.
If everything is overwhelming and the bike isn’t even fun anymore, you need to manage your stress.
Recreationally competitive cyclists who try to juggle training, working, and daily living run a high risk of overloading the stress system.
“When you’re very focused on training along with achieving your goals in other parts of your life, it’s easy for stress to spiral out and become disruptive rather than productive,” says Keim.
At that point, it’s important to identify what is causing your stress and identify if that stress is positive or negative. “There’s stress and there’s eustress,” says Keim. Eustress is the good stuff. To go back to the piano string analogy, it’s what puts enough tension on the string to make beautiful music. It’s what gets you jazzed to prepare and perform well whether it’s a work presentation or a race. As you might imagine, more eustress than you can handle tips the scales into negative stress or distress (really negative stress).
“What most people fail to see, however, is that it’s your perception that makes stress positive or negative,” says Keim. “Stress doesn’t happen to us. We create it and we frame it and we react to it. It’s all dependent on how we process what’s happening.”
Consider training. Group rides and hard interval workouts a few days a week can be eustress: They motivate you, make you happy, and ultimately de-stress you at work. But putting pressure on yourself to ride every day come hell or high water? Negative stress. Staring at your Garmin and expecting to hit certain power numbers every ride? Negative stress.
“You have control of that. Plan days off the bike—like when life is crazy—and ride by feel rather than numbers some days. Adjust your training to find that stress sweet spot,” says Keim.
Of course, you can’t control everything in your life. Babies still get up in the middle of the night and cry. Projects will catch fire. You’ll continue to stare down event-day nerves and battle inner demons.
That’s why you need to create a happiness toolkit. In it, you should put manageable objectives, mindfulness techniques, and planned fun.
“Be less outcome-oriented and focus more on being grounded where you are,” says Keim. Instead of being laser focused on the end goal—like a race outcome—stay present, assess what’s going on, and focus on taking small steps and meeting smaller objectives that build toward that goal.
“I work with teams who can go out and get their asses kicked in a race, but finish in a good headspace, because they accomplished their smaller objectives, like working together, reading the race correctly, and so forth,” says Keim. That’s how you eventually reach your bigger objectives: notching off all the little ones along the way.
And plan fun. “Plan a big fun bike trip that has nothing to do with performance. Go somewhere you love,” says Keim. “It’s important to have happiness watts in your plan.”
