Have you ever gotten a selfie from a dear friend taken on the set of a big budget Hollywood production featuring said friend with a major movie star? Well, maybe you have, but I certainly hadn’t until about a year ago when my incredible co-author Modupe Akinola texted me a snapshot of her palling around with Thor (aka Chris Hemsworth). While Modupe's selfie was not "studio approved," the photo below is.
Modupe is a psychologist and Professor at Columbia Business School. She was texting from Australia where National Geographic was filming the first episode of a new documentary called Limitless with Chris Hemsworth. Modupe is the featured expert in Episode 1, coaching Chris on how stress works and how to cope with it as he takes on limitless physical challenges like plunging into arctic waters and balancing on a plank at a jaw-dropping height. In honor of Modupe’s Hollywood debut (Limitless was released on Disney+ on November 16th), I’m featuring a Q&A with her about stress from the Choiceology archive this month.
This Month’s Recommended Listens and Reads
Get Mesmerized: This recent episode of Choiceology dives into the power of experiments to uncover hucksters and disentangle correlation from causation; it features an interview with University of Chicago economist John List.
A Different Take on the End of Daylight Savings Time: In the Atlantic, I offered musings on the horror of twice-yearly clock changes and what to do with the bonus hour you’re bestowed each fall when we set our clocks back.
Rethink What Patriotism Means: This CNN Q&A features two of my favorite behavioral scientists (Penn psychologist Angela Duckworth and NYU psychologist Dolly Chugh) discussing what it means to be a gritty patriot and other lessons from Dolly’s new book, A More Just Future.
Complicit: Max Bazerman’s terrific new book is out this month, offering guidance on how we can all fight the pervasive human tendency to enable wrongdoing in the workplace, politics and beyond.
Join Me
Consider joining me on Wednesday, November 23rd from 1:30-2:30 pm ET online at the fabulous How to Academy as I interview Annie Duke about her new book Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away.
Q&A: Stress
In this Q&A from Choiceology, Columbia Professor and TED Business podcast host Modupe Akinola explains the science of stress and how you can tap into its potential to enhance your performance.
Me: How did you get interested in studying stress?
Modupe: I came from a family of stressed-out people. Mom, I love you. You know, I do. But my parents came to the States as immigrants in the late sixties and there were lots of stressors of being a newcomer and those worries kind of persist. Growing up, I felt and experienced a lot of that.
I also went to a high school that was educationally challenging. Same thing with college. And then when I graduated from college, I was at a consulting firm with constant demands, lots of demanding clients. And I felt like every environment I was in seemed stressed. But I realized that some people would really thrive under that stress and other people would buckle under it. And so that's what got me interested in this topic.
Me: What are some of the ways stress affects our judgments and decisions?
Modupe: Ultimately, stress is a way of preparing us to act. Specifically, to run away from threatening things. It's an antiquated system. You see a scary thing that might be able to kill you and you want to have the energy to run away. But what happens is that you're so attentive to the threat, it can hijack your mind and reduce your ability to remember things and increase your desire to take risks to avoid that life-threatening situation. Nowadays it can feel life-threatening when you're not prepared for a presentation, when the stock market crashes, when you have a test that's coming up…. So, our stress system is not adapting the way it could.
Me: What goes wrong when we get stressed?
Modupe: Your stress system is based on your body preparing to act. And to act, your body needs energy, it needs cortisol, it needs adrenaline to course through your system. But the problem is that all other functions that aren’t necessary are turned off. Those heightened hormones can have an implication for our memories, cardiovascular reactivity, and other bodily functions. So many decisions that you have to make are based on recall of good information that could be helpful in the decision, but if your cortisol levels are super high and that is influencing your ability to think through things rationally, then your memory will not be what it needs to be to make the best decision.
Me: What are the kinds of decisions you might not want to make under stress?
Modupe: Decisions that relate to taking risk, because again, stress makes you have tunnel vision. I've done some work where I found that police officers were more attentive to threats when they were under stress. So you're going to be looking more intentionally towards negative versus positive things.
Me: Is stress ever useful?
Modupe: It's funny because the dominant message is that stress is bad for you, but my collaborators and I are trying to change that. We have all been in situations where we've risen to the occasion under stress.
So one of my favorite studies highlights that when people have a "stress is enhancing" mindset, relative to a "stress is debilitating" mindset, that can lead to positive outcomes, like greater creativity and productivity.
Rather than always thinking that stress is going to be a bad thing for me, remember that your mindset matters. It's not stress in-and-of itself that influences the extent to which you have a positive or negative outcome. One of the things I do is teach people how to have a stress-is-enhancing mindset.
Me: That’s really interesting. How can people adopt a stress-is-enhancing mindset?
Modupe: You do that by first acknowledging your stress. Often, we're like, “oh no, I'm not stressed.” And you're avoiding it. But stress is a reality in our lives, so acknowledge it, question it, and consider how you can use it. Can you answer for yourself: Why am I stressed? And what were situations in my past where I was stressed and a positive outcome ensued?
How can you use that tunnel vision and focus in a way that will get you the outcome you desire? It's not just about being in a Zen state and exercising and all that. Yes, there are ways to reduce your stress, but it's about saying, “in light of the stress I'm feeling, what resources do I have to overcome it and how can I channel those resources?”
Me: I love that. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me today, Modupe.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
To learn more about research on stress, listen to the episode of Choiceology where we dig into the topic or check out the episode of the new National Geographic series Limitless with Chris Hemsworth featuring Modupe.
That’s all for this month’s newsletter. See you in December!
Katy Milkman, PhD
Professor at Wharton, Host of Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab, and Bestselling Author of How to Change