Jeff Bezos on stress

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 off the first e-mail message, or whatever it is that we're going to do to start to address that 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. So, stress doesn't come -- people get stress wrong all the time in my opinion.

Stress doesn't come from hard work, for example. You know, you can be working incredibly hard and loving it, and, likewise, you can be out of work and incredibly stressed over that.

And, likewise, if you use that as an analogy for what I was just talking about, if you're out of work but you're going through a disciplined approach, a series of job interviews and so on, and working to remedy that situation, you are going to be a lot less stressed than if you're just worrying about it and doing nothing.

~ Jeff Bezos